150
PARTISAN REVIEW
tage of Eisenstein! His constructions are passionate and rich with
dream-symbolism to be sure, but like other artists he gives these
in effortful stabs to a
disturbing
depth, at which the audience
cannot rest.
It would be further still from a "film of political participa·
tion," whatever such a thing might be.
The hypnotic absorption, again, was immensely aided by the
continuous and not independently interesting musical accompani–
ment of the old films. This music neutralized the audience noises,
lulled the muscle-jitters, and restricted the only possible field of
sensuous interest to the eyes. Its continuity provided just the matrix
needed for the scene-space, to keep it one despite the often kaleido–
scopic cutting; when the music stopped, the mechanism at once
became apparent. But this subject, and the question of the various
possible relations of the speech and the music, is very intricate and
must be studied independently. It seems to me that the talk in the
American films is somewhat destructive of the illusion, it is too
loud and lifelike; contrast it with the whispering and mumbling
often affected by the French (originally because of imperfect
technique).
The fact that both the peep-hole stage and the movie-screen
imitate the total world in conditions of phantasy is a chief cause,
it seems to me, of the remarkable phenomenon of audience-interest
in the personalities of the actors themselves, a phenomenon not
apparent with respect to other arts and spectacles, even musical
performances or oratory. The conception of "Hollywood" is of
course pat for this .argument: here is a distant and paradisal world
inhabited completely by the beings of the world of phantasy, but
come to "life." And the machinery of Hollywood publicity is
designed precisely to controlling that life so as not to jar with the
properties of the other world.
Let me make still another sociological observation, a point
of the highest importance, but almost completely disregarded by
the critics of stage and screen. I have mentioned the "drama of
political participation." Now certainly the most determined essays
in both stage and cinema have been made towards direct rhetorical
appeal, for ends both high and low. By "direct rhetorical appeal"
I mean both the rousing of feeling and the presentation of argu·
ments, especally by dramatic example, for or against something
