Carl Mayer's "Sylvester": The Screenplay as Literature

Carl Mayer's Sylvester (1923) is an example of a potential literary genre: the screenplay. A hybrid artform, the film script can be compared both to drama (as a text to be interpreted by performing artists) and to lyric poetry (in the rhythmical structure of its images). Mayer employs certain expressive techniques to solve aesthetic problems unique to the screenplay of silent films: characterization through gesture and metaphor, intellectual abstraction through montage. The screenplay can also be defined within a literary-historical framework: with its instinctual characters and oppressive milieu, Sylvester is typical of Naturalism, but its atmosphere of crisis and its exaggerated language are Expressionistic. It represents an intriguing fusion of these two opposed artistic movements and their manifestation in popular culture.