Arnold Hauser
CAN MOVIES BE "PROFOUND"?
The novel is the only major art form that has come down
to us from the nineteenth century in a viable condition. No other
genre was capable of expressing modern man with his complexities,
contradictions, and approximations. Only the novel could do justice
to the multiplicity and atomization of his mind, his unfettered spirit
of experimentation, his ambivalent morality and divided emotions.
The drama by comparison seemed obsolete, having lost its social
function and moral significance. By the turn of the century, society
had ceased to create new dramatic conflicts and the old ones were
withering away. This, and not the competition of the movies, was
the danger facing the theater; actually the film owed its success to
the precarious situation of the theater, or, more accurately: the
decline of the theater and the rise of the
film
can both be attributed
to a new sense of solidarity with the objective world. The novel in
this respect only prepared the way for the film.
The dramatic form was too narrow for the labyrinthine ways of
modern psychology; within its limitations a character living in the
twilight between the white and the black of stage conceptions could
not be made credible. In the era of bourgeois tolerance, in which to
understand was to forgive, the drama which interpreted character in
terms of a single action and identified the whole man with his act,
could not be the representative art form, but inevitably gave way to
a genre capable of showing that the act, as often as not, is a mere
mask behind which the actor hides. The drama of this period dealt
with the hereditary themes either in the manner of a semi-serious,
playfully ironic puppet show, or else in the style of a philosophical
essay, closer to the modern intellectual novel than to traditional drama
which gathered all problems into a single conflict a,.nc;i
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