Contemporary Arts
The Macroscopic Eye
The Ten Commandments. (Plaza.) THE film epic (the word has now a wholly cinematic, as well as liter- ary, meaning) is a definite genre with its own conventions, like the
Western, the musical, or the a Donald Duck cartoon. It is an
historical film placed in the very remote past (preferably BC) and made with the latest, grandest and noisiest techniques; it has at east half-a-dozen major stars, twenty or thirty minor ones, and several thousand extras; it in- cludes at least one battle, one orgy and one (You can choose which) plague/fire/shipwreck / tYphoon /earthquake / tidal wave. As if all this were not enough, it takes itself very seriously. For months before it arrives its wary critics are deluged with propaganda telling them how hard its re- searchers have pegged away, how many millions they have spent, making sure (as if, compared to so much else, it mattered) that every slave's shoe- lace is authentic and the palm trees are con- temporary to the last date. Occasionally you get intelligent treatment more or less within the epic • framework (Robert Rossen's Alexander the Great Was an example last year); but not often. The dead hand of the earnest hack lies too heavily on it. The ghost of Mr. deMille has its proprietary haunts. For Cecil B. deMille (a suitable name, when You come to think of it, for a man who thinks only in thousands) is the father, grandfather, god- father, founder-member, or what you will, of the epic. He owns it, he circumscribes it (as far as something so limitless can be circumscribed), above all he believes in it. And the one thing about him is quantity. In outlook he is like a housewife who genuinely believes a cake made with a thousand eggs must be better than one made with two. In practice he is like a painter with a canvas fifty miles square and enough paint to cover it; given time, brushes and 90,000 assis- tants he may well do so, but the result may have no more artistic point than a Mabel Lucie Atwell postcard. He is that pitiful thing, the man who lays out his almost incredible assets for us to admire, then shows us the pathetic nonsense he has made of them.
Poor old Ten Commandments, the latest, hugest, most ambitious and so most ridiculous of his efforts to reach us! It took ten years, thirteen mil- lion dollars and who knows how many million man-hours to make; it takes four hours, if you count the interval, to sit through. And what, in the end, does it add up to? For all its luxury the garishness of a cheap picture-book and for all its size the essential littleness of the strip cartoon. It Is not even joyously, exuberantly bad, like The Story of Mankind last week (except when God turns up as a graveyard voice from an outsize Catherine wheel that seems to be the Burning Bush; or shoots through the air like an iridescent zombie, to cut commandments, with a lot of sparks and crackle, on the side of the rock). It provokes yawns more than laughter. The acting is dull, the photography mediocre, the whole con- cept and direction are clearly those of a small mind to whom chance has given dazzling, indeed Inebriating, opportunities.
It seems a pity that Mr. deMille has got himself such a corner in epics as to make them appear
ridiculous, for they are one of the things that only the cinema can do. In no other way can we see the pyramids being built or get a real vulture's- eye view of the way a great battle was fought at any period of history. Size, spectacle, crowds, mass movements, the large-scale reconstruction of the past : why should all these be more suspect than the other end of the cinema's range? The cinema has increased immeasurably the scope of our sensuous experience, but in a microcosmic rather than a macrocosmic way. 'Why has not man a microscopic eye?' said Pope. 'For this plain reason, man is not a fly.' Today there is no need for us to turn into flies to get the fly's vision : the cinema has not only given us an almost infinite variety of microscopic, telescopic and X-ray eyes, but can quicken or slow down movement till we see its pattern, and so pull time around for us like a piece of elastic. But it has concentrated more successfully than it has expanded our vision, the fly's eye has done better than the vulture's, Alice the size of a toadstool better than Alice grown gigantic. Today, thanks largely to Mr. deMille and those he has influenced or antagonised, size in the cinema is something that tends to raise eyebrows, something which a serious director must explain rather than boast about. The super- colossal has been a bad joke for so long that no one can quite believe it could ever make a good film. If someone of, say, Griffith's stature had continued to use what are now the stock epic props, we might feel differently today about Moses.
But large-scale direction presents military prob- lems and takes something of a strategist's mentality. To film a battle is not unlike commanding a battle. It takes an unusual mixture of farsightedness and intimacy not to lose the shape of events in pre- occupation with detail, not to lose the personality of people in the mathematical excitement of the patterns they present in numbers. But as Mr. deMille so clearly shows and—as all his publicity shows—so clearly fails to grasp, numbers are not in themselves impressive; nor is mere movement even vivacious, as anyone could tell you on a rush-hour escalator. Have a look at the orgy in The Ten Commandments. Round and round the Golden Calf they prance, ever, noisier and more frenzied, legs and arms flailing with complete rhythmic pointlessness. Why are they prancing? What makes them prance? Would you, if you were an Israelite in the desert and not an extra on the set, set about an orgy like that? Even orgies BC must have some connection with human behaviour AD, or they fail dismally to make the smallest impression on the two-and- nines. The, Ten Commandments may be a huge box-office success, who knows, in which case this last sentence will look foolish : but if it is, it will be a triumph, I think, of advertising and nothing
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