\!

Fotogm/ie 1111d Fi/111 189

Ben Brewster, Lea Jacobs: Theatre to Cinema.

Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film
Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, 244 S., ISBN 0-19-815950-1, DM
69,80
In order for film to attain the status of art, Carl Hauptmann argued in 1919, it would
have to make a radical break from theatre: .,So als bloße Kopie des Kunsttheaters
ist der Film von vornherein in eine enge Sackgasse gebracht"" (in: Anton Kaes [Ed.]:
Kino-Debatte. Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909-1929, München
1978, p.124). Yet Hauptmann also acknowledged the crucial role ofthe stage picture
in forming the nexus between theatre and cinema: .•In beiden handelt es sich[ ... ]
um aufeinanderfolgende Bühnenbilder'' (ebd„ p.127). Concentrating on issues of
stage pictorialism in both media, Theatre to Ci11e111a offers nuanced readings of
191 Os features that prove cinema · s relationship to theatre was anything but a dead
end. Recent examples of interdisciplinary film scholarship, such as Angela Dalle
Vacche's book. Cinema and Painting (1996), and the volume edited by Fran~ois
Penz and Maureen Thomas, Ci11e111a and Architecture ( 1997), have demonstrated
what film studies have to gain from expanding its archival base to include a wide
range of cultural productions. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs likewise make a
compelling case for interdisciplinarity and its potential to unsettle traditional
accounts of film history. Their book is important not only because it uncovers the
rich and mostly forgotten interconnections between theatre and cinema. but also
because it questions the self-evidence of many film-historical conventions. like the
practice of treating the shot as the grammatical unit of film. Brewster and Jacobs
contend that the 191 Os feature did not think of itself in terms of shots, but rather in
terms of pictures. organized around dramatic situations and articulated both within
the shot and in units !arger than the shot. Theatre to Ci11e111a thus contests the idea
that films from the 19 IOs are best characterized by the emergence of continuity
editing. lt analyzes the contlicting and often contradictory ways in which film's
emphasis on pictures and situations carried over. as it were. from the theatre.
In order to explain how film conceived of itself in a pictorial fashion. Brewster
and Jacobs have to deal with the tendency in film analysis to employ Aristotelian
concepts of dramaturgy. By historicizing the question of cinema's relationship to
theatre. the authors reconstruct an alternative dramaturgy that operated in 191 Os
features according to a logic of pictures and situations.
By picture Brewster and Jacobs understand an „anti-absorptive·· view or image
that openly solicited the audience·s attention and primarily fulfilled descriptive rat-
her than narrative functions (p.12). Here the authors take issue with Michael Fried's
important study. Abso171tio11 and Theatricality. engaging recent debates in painting
and theatre as weil as in film. They reconstruct the historical notion of the stage
picture through close readings of nineteenth century playbooks, acting manuals.
and theoretical treatises on dramaturgy. Brewster and Jacobs trace the ways in which
190 MEDIENwissensch11f1 2/99

cinema adopted, modified, and refunctionalized theatrical techniques of

representation. Nineteenth century stage practices resurfäced in the 191 Os feature,
only the crossover from theatre to cinema was complex und never straightforward.
Theatre to Cinema deals with three particular aspects of this crossover: the
tableau, acting, und staging. Euch aspect is derived from theatre und reworked by
cinema. (One could have turned the axis around to ask how cinema challenged the
status or the repertoire of theatre at the time. But the authors are concerned with a
one-way transfer, as indicated by the title of their book.) Brewster and Jacobs
approach each aspect of the argument by first discussing the theatre and then
examining the feature.
s
The case study of Uncle Tom Cahin examines a two-step transfer, from novel
to theatre to film. However various the stage productions may be, they commonly
select from the novel a set of key moments to represent pictorially as tableaux.
Such instances of suspended action create problems especially for one-reel films
(namely, Edison's 1903 version) but also for multiple-reel features (like the
Vitagraph and World versions of 1910 and 1914, respectively). Brewster und Jacobs
maintain that, even though cinema handled the novel differently than theatre, cinema
preserved the pictorial integrity of the stage tableau without resorting to stasis. The
chapter on „The Fate of the Tableau in Cinema" elaborates the point for a wider
range of features (overall, the book deals with more than one hundred films ). lt
demonstrates how in the 191 Os a specifically cinematic language developed (namely,
editing and framing techniques) that did not serve to propel or streamline the
narrative, but rather to achieve the effects of the tableau. The case of the tableau
establishes the paradigm of appropriation and modification that runs throughout
the book.
Pictorialism also governed conventions of acting, from posing and gesturing to
striking attitudes on the stage. This section of the book deals with the slippery
notion of realism; it demonstrates that pictorial acting could indeed survive in plays
and films that thought of themselves as 'real'. The chapters on pictorial acting in
cinema distinguish between stylistic alternatives in American and European films
according to their different editing practices. Highly-edited American films (such
as Griffith's) more or less dissolved the stage picture into the edited sequence.
European films, in contrast, gave actors more ample opportunities to display their
talents. The authors are cognizant ofthe limits ofthis model, as evidenced by their
discussion of lngmarssönema ( 1919); Sjöström 's film represents a third alternati-
ve, the elimination of expressive gesture for psychological effect. Theatre to Cine-
ma attempts to redress the bias of editing-based accounts, which privilege early
American movies (for their innovative uses of cutting und alternating) at the expense
of European cinema.
The section on staging is perhaps the most impressive part of this study, with
its detailed analyses of stage diagrams and studio sets, curtain devices and lens
optics. Brewster and Jacobs examine theatre and cinema as „optical machines"
V Fotografie 1111d Fi/111 191

(p.143 ), ernphasizing the ways in which technology placed restrictions on each

medium. They show how theatre and cinema organized and rendered space for
performers as weil as for spectators in opposite ways. For instance, the fän-shaped
performance space of theatre. which pushed the action to the foreground in order
to deliver a picture to the entire audience, gets inverted by the camera's monocular
field of view. While lens optics required a greater measure of distance between the
camera and the performers (relative to the distance between stage actor and
audience), they also created new possibilities for magnification and deep staging,
which cinema alone could exploit. Thus film turned to theatre for a „storehouse of
devices" (p.214) whenever those devices were appropriate. and abandoned it as
soon as they proved inflexible; in either case, theatre provided cinema with a point
of reference. Studies keyed to editing typically overlook this remarkable continuity.
For this reason. the chapter on „Staging and Editing" challenges the argument that
editing in the 191 Os primarily established a cinematic approach to narration. On
the contrary, the authors propose that editing enabled cinema to explore the stage
picture in ways that were unique to that medium. Theatre to Cinema argues that,
insofar as the early feature enlisted new means to fulfill the function of the stage
picture, it continued to pursue the goals of nineteenth century theatre. As Brewster
and Jacobs suggest. this argument reveals the limits of film's modernity in the 191 Os.
The authors could have paid more attention to the cultural debates about the
status of film as art, like the „Kino-Debatte" that raged in Gerrnany at the time.
Here, liberal and conservative critics alike sometimes feit threatened by what they
saw as cinema's modernity; for them. film's persistent relationship to theatre
provided little if any consolation. When these debates inforrn Theatre to Cinema,
they do so mainly as 'anthropological' evidence of the troubles that historical
audiences had with understanding the differences between film and theatre. Yet
Brewster and Jacobs engage a number of major discussions in film studies today.
and seek to ask new questions, rather than merely recapitulate old ones. ,,If [ ... ]
editing does not play such apart in the films of the 191 Os, are the filrns of the next
decades essentially different?" (p.216 ). Brewster and Jacobs open the debate, and
the stakes are potentially high. Theatre to Cinema provides a model of stage
pictorialism that must also be reckoned with by scholars concerned with national
cinemas. In the case of Germany. for instance. to what extent did early (internatio-
nal) features create a laboratory for Expressionist cinema? If pictorial acting and
staging were crucial to films in Europe and America during the 191 Os, our notions
of theatricality in Expressionist cinema may have to be expanded and
recontextualized.
Eric Ames (Berkeley)