MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ISELDOM go to cinemas, but when I do so I prefer to be alone. I like to feel that if a moment comes when the illusion is broken, when I can no longer suspend my disbelief, when a sudden draught of dullness makes me gather my wits around me ; I like to feel that, if such a moment comes, I can scrabble for my hat under the seat and follow the lit word " exit " without any excuses or explanations being required. I prefer, if my emotions are aroused, to be able to sob silently and without shame. I am aware that the tremendous tragedies of life, the great works of genius, do not in me produce the tingling of the eye, the constriction of the throat, which create the facile tear: but the minor effects of man's unconquerable mind, such as virtue triumphant, injustice righted, or courage on the part of dogs and children, invariably lead to a tightening of the larynx and splashes from the eyes. Moreover, when it is all finished and I come out from the world of illusion into the streets and newspapers of actual life, I prefer that my adjustments to reality shall be private and gradual ; it amuses me to recover consciousness by stages, rather than to be jerked back suddenly to the escalator and the No. 14 bus: I enjoy floating for a moment longer in that liquid atmosphere where reason acid imagination melt together. I can confess to myself, in sweet silent confidence, that I do not, when I come to think of it, really like good films. By this I mean that, much as I appreciate good acting and fine photography, much as I have enjoyed some of the recent German, French and Italian films, I do not really believe that the camera is a suitable medium for the interpretation of masterpieces. Always at the back of my mind is the consciousness of the mechanical apparatus of the film studio. I see the serpent cables and flexes ; I see the men in shirtsleeves yelling through megaphones on mobile ladders ; I see the great false lights glaring down ; I catch a glimpse of Ophelia munching sand- wiches while preparing for her interment ; I know that every word and look has been studiously repeated and rehearsed. All this, I fear, destroys the suspension of disbelief.
* * * I have a feeling sometimes that the film magnates, stars and opera- tives have not as yet discovered their own formula. They have not concentrated upon those factors of suggestion and interpretation which the camera alone can supply, or can supply in a form more vivid, and to a more extensive degree, than any other medium. Two of the main assets which the camera possesses are mobility and actuality. Mobility, in the sense that the camera is not restricted by any of the three unities and can play the most ingenious tricks with space and time. Actuality, in the sense that it can bring to the screen a comparatively exact representation of personages and events. The pleasure I derive from nature films (as when one watches in the space of two minutes the week by week expansion of a nasturtium seed) is due, not only to the increased understanding which they give me, but to the fact that the camera is thereby fulfilling its specific function and producing a demonstration which no other medium can so well produce. The pleasure I derive from newsreels (as when in the space of a few minutes I can observe Mr. Molotov arriving at a railway station or pearl-fishers diving in Arabian seas) is also due to the fact that no other medium can give me similar information in so comfort- able a form. But when the camera in vaunting ambition seeks to emulate other forms of expression, then I have a disturbing sense that it is exceeding the area of its capacities, that it is doing cleverly something which other media can do, either better, or just as well.
* * * * The other day, in solitude, I went to see Sir Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. The element of actuality was absent. It might, I admit, have been difficult and even incongruous to have shot the film upon the ramparts of Helsingor ; yet after all the castle is still standing, and some approach to actuality might perhaps have been made. The romantic Leonardesque scenery which was indicated bears no re- semblance at all to the Solent site of Elsinore ; one might as well have placed Cowes Castle in the Dolomites. I well recall during the war standing upon the terrace at Helsingborg in Sweden and gazing across the channel to the misted outlines of Hamlet's fortress. It was the morning after Hitler had occupied the State of Denmark ; some officers of the Royal Guard had escaped the night before in a rowing-boat ; they stood beside me on the terrace, gazing across to their ravished homeland—ripae ulterioris amore. It was a moving moment, but there were no signs to right or left of the rocks and pinnacles of Sir Laurence's fantasy. The element of mobility appeared, moreover, to have been concentrated upon going upstairs. Again and again during the course of the film were we made to climb that stone staircase, beginning in the basement, --isiting the drawing-room floor, taking a quick peep at the bedrooms and ending upon the wind-swept roof. These movements seemed to me to have no meaning ; they shed no shaft of illumination upon the intricate problem with which the play is more or less concerned ; they seemed nothing more to me than the cameraman's otiose trick. Was it introduced merely to give motion to a sequence of stage scenes ? It failed for me to increase the illusion ; it merely emphasised the studio mechanics.
When I came out into the evening sunshine, out on to the pave- ments and among the buses and the cars, I asked myself as I walked away why it was that I was disappointed by Hamlet whereas I had so fervently enjoyed Henry V. Partly, I suppose, because, whereas the former is essentially (and apart from its wild events) a contem- plative play, the latter is a drama of action. In Henry V Sir Laurence had exploited with great skill the element of mobility ; in Hamlet the poetry is superb but the action puerile. Shakespeare was evidently not interested by the story of Hamlet ; I doubt even whether he was clear in his own mind what Hamlet was really like. At the beginning of the play Hamlet is a youth only just out of his teens ; by the end of the play he is an adult of over thirty. Was Hamlet ever anything much more vivid to Shakespeare than a depository for his own reflections ? Did he envisage him as a stripling or a man, as weak or strong, as mad or sane, as thin or fat, as bearded or clean-shaven ? Was Hamlet, as Taine contended, " une dme delicate" ? His treatment of Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes and his own college friends suggests no such sensitivity. Was he, as Senor Madariaga tells us, a typical Renaissance thug, interested only in the demonstration of his own virtu ? That would explain his murders, but not his soliloquies. Surely it is simpler to assume that Shakespeare wrote a play to please Burbage and the ground- lings ; that he took Hamlet as he found him, a stock blood-and- thunder character ; and that, being Shakespeare, he could not refrain from introducing his own pallid hesitations, thereby confusing his central figure and providing future scholars with much material for ingenuity and speculation.
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The play of Hamlet strikes me as a careless piece of work, and the character of the Prince of Denmark as lacking in identity. Shake- speare never made up his own mind whether Hamlet was to be treated as a young condottiere or as an adult intellectual. We can choose which of the two interpretations we prefer. Yet if we seek to combine the two opposites, then we fall into the same confusion by which Shakespeare was lazily entrapped. Had Sir Laurence chosen the first interpretation, and represented Hamlet as a young man of forceful cunning, then he might have produced a film as satisfactory as Henry V and as well attuned to his own special abilities. In emphasising Hamlet the soliloquist, he has destroyed such unity as the play may possess, and adopted an interpretation to which the camera is totally unsuited. Which amounts to saying that the screen is not a medium for thought ; it is a medium for motion.
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