The Three Faces of the Film : the Art, The Dream, The Cult.

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The Three Faces of the Film : the Art, The Dream, The Cult.

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the three faces of the film

Parker Tyler

the three faces

other books by Parker Tyler The Metaphor

in the

Jungle {verse)

The Hollywood Hallucination Yesterday’s Children (verse)

The Granite

Butterfly (verse)

Magic and Myth

of the

Movies

Chaplin: Last of the Clowns

THOMAS

y

OSELOFF

of the fil

NEW YORK



LONDON

Copyright

©

1960 by A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-10847

Thomas 11

Yoseloff, Publisher

East 36th Street

New York

Thomas 123

16,

N.Y.

Yoseloff Ltd.

New Bond

London W.

1,

Street

England

Lrinted in the United States of America

acknowledgments

For permission to reprint

all

but four of the following

articles,

which are hitherto

unpublished, thanks are due these magazines and publishers:

The American Quarterly, for “The Eyewitness Era in Film Fiction,” copyby The American Quarterly, and “Hollywood as a Universal Church,” copyright 1950 by The American Quarterly. Art News, for “The Artist Portrayed and Betrayed,” copyright 1954 by Art News. Arts Digest, for “The Film Sense and the Painting Sense,” copyright 1954 by Parker Tyler. Cinema 16, for “Rashomon as Modern Art,” copyright 1952 by Cinema 16.

right 1949

Film Culture,

for

“A

Preface to the Problems of the Experimental Film,”

copyright 1958 by Film Culture.

Forum,

for

“Movies and the

Horizon Press,

Inc., for

Human

Image,” copyright 1958 by Forum.

“American Film Trends

in the Fifties,”

from The

Arts at Mid-Century, copyright 1954 by Horizon Press, Inc.

The Kenyon Review, for “Film Form and Ritual as Reality,” copyright 1948 by The Kenyon Review; “Reality into Dream into Myth into Charade into by The Kenyon Review; and “On the Cult

Dollars,” copyright 1951

placed Laughter,” copyright 1958 by The

The New Republic, New Republic. Partisan Review, for

for

“The Dawn

of Dis-

Kenyon Review.

of the 3-D’s,” copyright 1953

by The

“The Movies as a Fine Art,” copyright 1958 by Partisan

Review.

The Sewanee Review,

for

“The Dream-Amerika

of

Kafka and Chaplin,”

copyright 1950 by The Sewanee Review.

The author

is

in special

debt to various avant-garde film makers

the trouble to supply exactly the

stills

also wishes to extend cordial thanks to

who took

required to illustrate their

work

Mr. Gideon Bachmann

making

for

here; he avail-

5

the three faces of the film

number of items from his extensive library of stills, and to all those instituand individuals who gave permission to reproduce art works from their collections as well as to all the film distributors who cooperated in the same way. For special courtesies, additional thanks are due Mr. Amos Vogel of Cinema 16 and Mr. Goro Uzaki of Toho International Films.

able a tions

6

contents

11

Introduction

The Art more or less fine The Movies as a Fine Art The Eyewitness Era in Film Fiction Rashomon as Modern Art The Film Sense and the Painting Sense The Artist Portrayed and Betrayed :

17

23 36 44

49

A Preface to the Problems of the Experimental Film

56

The Dream more or :

Dream

less mythical Structure The Basis of :

Experimental Film Film Form and Ritual as Reality The Myth of the Great Lovers Reality into

Dream

into

Myth

into

67 74 83

Charade 90

into Dollars

The Dream- Amerika of Kafka and Chaplin The Cult more or less refined Hollywood as a Universal Church A Modern Fable Miracle in Milan The Dawn of the 3-D’s American Film Trends in the Fifties On the Cult of Displaced Laughter The Atmosphere A New Culture Hero Movies and the Human Image

94

:

:

:

105 115 120 123 129 134

139

7

illustrations

THE ART The following illustrations appear as a group after page 32 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Early Italian Film Orpheus Narcissus Serenity

Dom Rashomon Time in the Sun Ivan the Terrible

On

the

Edge

Ivan the Terrible The Seventh Seal Wild Strawberries

Day

of

Wrath

Rembrandt: The

Toilet of

Bathsheba

THE DREAM appear as a group after page 96 Black on Reflections The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Meshes of the Afternoon Study in Choreography for Camera Visual Variations on Noguchi

The following

illustrations

9

the three faces of the film

Ivan the Terrible The Lead Shoes Hand Written Prehistoric

Hand

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino

The Mirage

THE CULT The following

illustrations

appear as a group after page 120

Crossfire I Live in Fear

Miracle in Milan I Live in Fear

Rodin Orpheus and Eurydice de Chirico Troubadour Brancusi Socrates :

:

:

Miro: Group of

Women

Duchamp: La Mariee mis a nu par

meme Leger Le Grand Dejeuner Tchelitchew Hide and Seek Marca-Relli: The Strategist Ivan the Terrible The Dybbuk Narcissus The Red and the Black :

:

10

ses celibataires,

introduction

A

certain level of sophisticates concludes, glibly, that

all

arguments about the

“art” of the movies are vain because, to begin with, they are not “art” but

“entertainment.” Is the unique thing about them, then, that they are the one

made

conceivable art whose exhibits are

to be forgotten in passing rather than

me

ultimately remembered? This horrible thought occurred to

my

reviewing

present book, recalling,

it

me

struck

and making

that readers might tend to find

crucial observations about, films

forgotten or let pass with

little notice.

because, in

dozen or so years to prepare

film criticism of the last

me

which they have entirely

of Night, a film which, for me, holds so important

devices

when

ing? At

all

is

for the

For instance: how well does the general

remember

public (or, for that matter, specific individuals aside from myself)

Dead

it

in the act of

and pervasive a

set of

interpreted in the light of the movies as a ritual of collective see-

events, I can say that

if

the critical significance of the present book

oriented to any one keynote, this keynote

Suddenly, however,

toward the movies

is

it

then struck

me

that the value of

lies in

my essay

on Dead of Night.

that the very basis of

any one

my own

attitude

film, considered as unique, is

signally less than its value as a “specimen,” something with its tentacles clearly

marked

in various moral,

film (whatever else

it

consciousness, dipping

connecting

itself

daily experience

mental and aesthetic strata

may

be)

is

waywardly it

for

me, that

is

to say, a

and just as waywardly mind and body as this life is part of

into the unconscious

with the unceasing

and as

;

predominantly the token of a stream of

life of

also enjoys other arts. I

that precisely this assumption, emerging in

am

my first

very well aware, of course, film book,

The Hollywood

Hallucination, and gaining ground with time, has shocked some devout admirers of the “art of the film”

and caused me

quarters) as an annoying upstart,

Why

should

my

if

to be taken (in such, fortunately limited,

not a downright

unusual emphasis, as a film

enemy

critic,

of the movies.

on dream, myth and

hallucination be considered so offensive, so irrelevant, to those with the artistic interests of the film at heart? In effect the answer, I fear, is that

articulate

—a

and mute, are sorely aware

little

my critics,

deeper in their hearts

both

— that the

11

the three faces of the film

movies desperately need every iota of prestige and gallant courtesy they can gather together to justify their claim to being one of “the fine arts.” There

is

an

alarmingly evident reason for such sore awareness: the ugly dominance of commercial standards which gives the movies so bad a

The

intellectual elite.

name among

the artistic

and

usual strategy adopted by those desiring to disregard or

name”

discount the movies’ all-too-conspicuous “bad

is

to point to the

grandeur



theorists who were also practiof such theorists as Eisenstein and Pudovkin movies throughout world film history the top-level tioners and to act as if to justify classing the movies as note in my opening essay, were sufficient, as I



a

“museum”

art:

an art inevitably,

a bit loosely, to be compared

if

all

at once

and the drama as their natural kin. course, the movies are to be compared to painting, literature and the Of drama, and for the best reasons! I think that, as some of the following essays attest, I am among the foremost to press upon this very fact; and just because it is a fact, any competent and conscientious observer should draw attention to what an embarrassing gulf exists in the movies between their possibilities and to painting, literature

and their applied theories, their actual practice, any critic, aware of his position in this respect, is that deficient, and thus culpable, painting, literature and the drama are in maintaining their own best standards. Many a Broadway play, surely, is no better than the movie based on it; partly because drama in the United States is its most overrated art, the filmic adaptation of a play partictheoretic premises, on one hand,

on the

The only danger he may overlook how

other.

ularly from

my

to

specialized viewpoint

— —may acquire a point quite lacking

to

the original stage production. Moreover, for complex reasons, the art of the

novel has backslid in the quarter of a century after Joyce’s Ulysses to a degree

where the average of popular

fiction is scarcely, if at all, better

than the average

of the movies.

One cause

that

may be

assigned to the slight leveling-up of latterday filmic

values, as comparatively considered,

is,

of course, economic prosperity, which

demands more provender and a wider range of it, thus stimulating activity between the arts as well as in any one art. Another cause, ambivalent in operation, is the growth of the documentary cult, which has developed what I term the eyewitness camera in film fiction; here, vision offers, literally as in painting,

many tempting

opportunities merely to coddle the senses with pretty images

and pretty colors, or level of

an

else to

evoke that bogeyman of the film

photography. This last aim posits

art: “reality” at the

vision as primarily a science, not

all

and as such, nothing could be more detrimental, obviously, to high in the film medium. certain pieces in this book, notably the one closing it, “Movies and the

art;

artistic If

Human

achievement

Image,” refer to the issue of photography,

cally an independent art, this issue in itself to

one which

is

the over-all aesthetic premise that the film

by which

I

is

regard as the most important of

still

or moving, as hypotheti-

subordinate, though

all to is

to exploit the total imaginative faculty,

still

basic,

a true artistic cinema. This

but one

and

medium among

this

others

premise remains valid

introduction

whether

assumed, as some

it is

porates

all

To be

is,

and can

Yet the truth

value.

in

is

a purely visual art (without

any form) or a synthetic

art that incor-

other arts.

assumption that the film has no limits as a theatrical

sure, the large

spectacle

that film

insist,

need of music or dialogue or words

be, infinitely is,

harmful

to

as Eisenstein above

pure vision as a distinct aesthetic

all

has demonstrated in theory and

a satisfying formal synthesis of music,

fact, the film is perfectly susceptible to

moving pictures. That Eisenstein enthusiastically embraced every and at his death was preparing to exploit even the 3-D’s and the “cineramic” screen, should not be insignificant to arguments over this point. After all, if theatrical spectacle combines music, dialogue and dancing dialogue, and

technical innovation,

with their necessary component, the visible actor, without arousing serious opposition from aesthetic purists, spectacle,

why

can’t the film, as a differing theatrical

do the same? As a rhetorical question,

on the other hand, in view of practical

results,

seems persuasive enough; most experts are agreed that

this

sound-dialogue radically impeded the movies’ artistic growth. Still, it

would be a poor function

any book merely to argue that the movies and not so good as they pretend

for

are no better than they should be, circa 1960, to be

—that

lies in

is,

as their flatterers say they are.

much more,

What

disturbs this particular

in fact, is the exiguous state of film criticism itself,

which

a doldrums of passivity toward automatic professional affectations.

Many

writer

—more numerous than one might hazard and other scrutiny —have themselves the task of

honest, hard-working writers

than the daily reviewers

on

all

their virtues

and

and

chaff. This,

fixing their

set

manage

the movies they can

to see in order conscientiously to determine

them as though they were wheat doomsday and nothing be done to

faults, carefully separating

however, might go on

till

induce higher standards in that “best” which taste

and

is still

not good enough. If genuine

be exerted upon the total output of any one movie

critical severity

year, the dazzling merits to be accumulated in one universal pile

small artistic pickings, indeed. This, it

may

be to those

who

use, not

I

am

convinced,

is

would make

a truth, as repulsive as

merely Technicolored glasses, but also special

magnifying, 3-D, lenses to gauge that universal pile of “dazzling merits.” I

do not pose as a great aesthete in relation to these matters; primarily,

mean

to regard

them as a

realist.

On

the other hand, as I have implied,

it

I

would

be paltry and self-indulgent of any critic to adopt, on this basis, a faintly sarcastic air of superiority

a good part of

my

and so “talk down”

literary activity of the past

to the movies.

Having devoted

two decades to writing about

the films, I did not do so merely to satirize them, although, I admit, that motive

has entered into the fun.

The more

serious part of

my

fun,

on the contrary,

has been to recognize and define an innate power of theirs: to show

how

this

power contrives to express itself despite all the deadly limits placed on it by the huge industrial practice. A little part of the true power peeps out from the face of the Experimental or avant-garde film;

and

of filmic endeavor which has absorbed part of

my

in later years,

it is

this field

attention and toward which,

13

)

the three faces of the film I believe,

any “gallant courtesy” deserved by the

film should be offered

by

true

devotees.

This book,

finally, is

a testament to

my

belief that criticism,

no matter

of

which art or what phase of human works, should be a creative occupation, not merely a “useful profession.” To this end, I have consistently sought to show what profound links exist between the mere Hollywood charade and those movements of dream and subconscious mental life which define the existence of

human

our basic

all

seemingly perennial

on which, and by which, man’s

feelings: those feelings life is lived.

My essay on

the three “great lovers,” Garbo,

Valentino and Barrymore, could be mistaken by the incautious for another

memoir; actually,

nostalgic movie timeless,

human

it is

human and

about some of the

and

am

I trust

deluded

aesthetic values in which I place such implicit

think candidly, that

faith. If so, I

the assertion of an important,

value: the independent power of love. Perhaps I

is all

the worse for the world. If culture

lacks the vitality to sustain

and transform

time to revive culture unless

we wish

its

most important

to resign ourselves to a

traditions,

new age

it is

of barbar-

ism. I

should

still

like to evoke, in this light,

in film criticism

aggressively,

another aspect of the issue of culture

—an aspect that follows from

it is

poetry as a motif of

writing can be creative.

An

all

it

degree. Thus,

modern painting

if

the art of

is closely allied

have said

indispensable function of poetry

creative feature wherever

Rashomon

all I

here.

Nudely and

writing to the degree that, essentially,

registers itself:

no matter

is

to discern the

what form or what show in my essay on

in

(as I seek to

to the moral viewpoint as well as the technical

procedure of a given movie, the principle remains extensible to the survey of filmic activity as a whole.

of is

The same is true of my essay on the “Dream-Amerika”

Kafka and Chaplin; the

cross-referencing between film artist

and

novelist

not casual or fragmentary, but an assertion of a world cultural complex as

part of dynamic reality.

In short, what

I

have referred to throughout

andellian key” places an optimistic face

recognized

by Pirandello himself

naturally emerge, in

my

—on

my

—rather

book as being “in

Pir-

than the pessimistic one

“the three faces” of the film which

view, as its basic, overlapping motifs. Fancifully, the

moral world of Pirandello’s plays wears an ominous, “3-D” complexion, where the added implication of the depth element serves as an agent of confusion, bewilderment and tragi-comedy. But

why cannot

the extra dimensions of con-

one

sciousness be controlled, be proven a positive intellectual instrument:

bringing a special, and happy, illumination to the habit of looking at movies?

This to

me

is

what

I

have

tried to accomplish

with Art,

Dream and

Cult, which

function as the “length, breadth and thickness” of the film’s significantly

true measurements. P.

14

T.

more or

less fine



The Movies as a Fine Art

When

I

was

in Paris in 1954, 1

was conducted through several

floors (evidently

a converted mansion) of the Cinematheque Franqaise, which then housed a great exhibition of cinema history that began with the earliest photographic

many

studies of motion. Apparently in working order were

ing gadgets,

and

I

was

“Neolithic”-look-

were gathered— actually — the most precious and

told that here

style of a display of Oceanic culture

with

all

the

significant filmic

documents possessed by Europe, particularly by Italy. Though it was handicapped with crowding, this very condition promoted the air of departed parlor magic which the tortuous exhibit revived; frankly, istic

I

expressed

pleasure. Downstairs in the projection hall, I beheld

two

my

Surreal-

classic film curios

dating from the second decade of this film-making century; their heroines were

who persistently took fluid postures alternately smackand the inmates of sanitariums in their less tranquil moments. The best acting I saw that evening was by a lady who, abused by the world and her lover, threw herself without ceremony on the floor of a cafe and gave a prodigiously prolonged exhibition of writhing. It was certainly, however polished, the agony of a fine art. But which fine art? The cult of the movies is probably wider and more innately furious than many innocent movie-goers and readers of best-sellers (as well as insulated admirers of Picasso and Pollock) imagine. Right along with majestic retrospective shows of modern painters, the Museum of Modern Art which includes a modest “cinematheque” of its own lately announced, without a quaver of self-consciousness, a retrospective of “The Films of Samuel Goldwyn,” honoring a gentleman who may truly be said to have helped, in his way, to make Hollywood history, but who otherwise may be said to have meaningfully enriched the public domain only with malapropisms. The clear fact about all locales and grades of film museums is that they belong to that category neatly and alertly labeled by Andre Malraux “The Museum Without Walls,” which suggests itself as a univalent term for modern civilization. As a branch of Roman antiquity, the movie belles I saw at the famed

Italian beauties

ing of pagan statues



)

the three faces of the film

Cinematheque properly mimicked the attitudes of statuary and properly evoked, circa 1911, the furors of Futurism with

wrought, and the patterns made, by machines.

may

record of moral and physical dynamics,

its

urgent graphs of the havoc

The

movies, a “living” pictorial

pretend to historical status, and

while they are notably void of vast theory, no doubt exists as to their vast space, the is

camera eye and

its

privileges being such that, potentially,

human

sacred to them, whether

or that of remote nebulae.

The

no privacy cult of the

movies is based mostly, therefore, on their history not as an art but as a humanly directed technological instrument. They have contributed to telltale missiles more than to fine art. As museums of natural history are steadily becoming more artistic, instead of remaining like monumental antique shops made from taxidermists’ premises, so art museums are becoming, de rigucur, more naturalistic with only



“token” walls such as the four sided movie screen has. After

now a

cult at the

Museum

all,

Hollywood,

Modern Art, is more “natural history” than “art Museum’s programs, one laughs and marvels at

of

history.” True, during the

fashions in acting and dress, sometimes nostalgically or otherwise admiring

them, but one does the same at the in protozoa,

Museum

of Natural History before fashions

which can be fantastically funny.

How

serious, in

one respect,

must have been struggling up from the slime and the ooze! But having come all this distance, when we see it ingeniously portrayed and enlarged by immaculate forms of tinted glass in a museum, we marvel and laugh indiscrimlife

inately.

Psychopathologists

more

sinister

Marx observed tragic

is

in the cult

if it

somehow

programs of

apt to look farced. Of course,

changed within the is

say we laugh too much, and the laughter

may

reel of

film

when history repeats museums what was meant

it

is

it,

as

not that history has actually

and the

Bernhardt, acting Queen Elizabeth for the

it-



antiquated film, except to deteriorate

that history has changed outside

be

soars to the historical level, where

(with stinging persuasiveness) that

—as happens

self

may

than we realize

new

risible art,

awe

its clarity; it

of seeing Sarah

prepare for a pratfall

on a mountain of pillows and then duly land, has mainly to do with changes in stage fashions and the superior mechanics developed by acting, which now sustains a calisthenic grace it lacked in the last century. Everybody loves seeing Joan Crawford hoof the Charleston in a film of the twenties: she had and still has the know-how.





Yet the

historical level of film art is like the historical level itself

when

considered as humanity’s overall, persistent case: everything (but everything!

depends on the relative rightness of the gauge

selected.

art is never monolithic but fraught with divisive

The know-how

and decisive

of

an

subtleties that

stay outside history; outside, that is, the mere technical progress of an art medium. “Cinematheques” more accurately might be known as “Smithsonian Institutes.” A film showing on Broadway this week may avail the very flower of camera and laboratory processes, and we can estimate if its leading ac-



the movies as a fine art tress is

a decent spectacle

— the precise degree

gestures has been outmoded.

But

this

aesthetics of fine art where, in a sense,

moded.

If

museums

Perhaps, of

tell

to

which the Delsarte manual of

has nothing whatever to do with the

an authentic tradition

us anything, they

tell

us

never out-

is

this.

dance actually changes the least. American ballet danchave developed an athletic style (no matter how “Classic”

all arts,

ers, for instance,

the ballet) that distinguishes

them nationally and

Modern

we

inflects the

new

ernized Classic figures they are taught even in

ballets.

somewhat mod-

Thus, in the

Mu-

manoeuvres of Mile. Geltzer of the Imperial Russian Ballet, performing with male partner a bacchanale for two, and there also we sit awestruck by a Hollywood test film

seum

of

Art’s film auditorium,

giggle at the fastidious

“The Dying Swan” only

of Pavlova, dancing

for the camera’s approval: the

change of art manners corresponds to a shallow but positive bility.

The

aesthetic

problem grows complex when the film

complete and unique in their own

right.

The

cult for film

shift in

our sensi-

documents are documents, signified art’s

by the more or less mushrooming societies and clubs of the big cities, is sometimes frenzied and dominated by that comfortably smug, lazy exclusiveness of all clubs.

and true

“We are to

the elect;

we

an Alma Mater

are the nucleus, undeluded

— D.

W.

Griffith,

by passing fashions

Erich von Stroheim, Robert

—but

Flaherty, the Russian School. Yes, the old ones had their faults faults are as nothing to the faults of the

The modern

all

their

.

overwhelm us, if it can, with “docuBut evidence of what? The rub is knowing the prove and what it is worth in a known scheme of

kinds.

exact point one wishes to

Do

.

intelligence tends to

mentary evidence” of values.

new ones

the cults demonstrate only that the movies “have a

past”?—are

“respectable” like other fine arts? But everything in the world has a past! For time, going forward with Proustian virtuosity, seems to go

multaneously, and with disturbing elan. are, outstandingly,

backward siPound and Eliot modes and religious fashions, and

The major poems

resumes of aesthetic

of

hence their paramount relevance to the Symbolist anthropology of Frazer’s school. The Cantos and The Waste Land literally tend to be “museums without walls”: culture as a pure, essentially timeless, spatial complex which appear, like space in the film, as a labyrinth of openness.

Maybe

this

“agoraphobia” of the

fine arts

may

(ambivalently allied to that plain

claustrophobia that sends hall-bedroom dwellers into movie palaces) is owing as much to the paranoia of the old in pre-atomic and atomic days as to the perennially expansive rebellion of the young. Minor conclaves of film cultists



are apt to be voluntary concentration



camps

of self-congratulatory nostalgics.

Poets, truly, are not so sociable as film cultists, but the effective imaginative trends of modern literature (Marianne Moore’s poems are like exquisitely ar-

ranged shelves of antique and modern bric-a-brac) plainly point to an Alexandrianism of the art ethos. If Joyce’s Ulysses could be dubbed an intensive capitalization of a day’s culture, every Hollywood studio is to some degree an

19

the three faces of the film

Alexandria of technical devices and cultural fetishes working on speed-up daily schedules.

As Pound paradoxically emphasized, one must know “how

to read” before

one can enjoy the rich stores of a super-library. The Cantos at large are merely a more or less eloquent guide to a presumed Alexandrian library of twentieth-

century culture. In such smart documentary exhibits as I saw fleetingly at the

Cinematheque Frangaise, the collage principle of display bears witness basic filmic device formulated best

by

Sergei Eisenstein:

simply the formal juxtaposition of images which

to a

montage. This

is

are not necessarily related in

and space but which, when placed with plastic symmetry together or sequentially on the screen, yield a specific feeling or idea. In this objective time

symbolism-tending optical device (with

may

its

mechanical relation to Surrealism)

be perceived, at once, the basic principle of the metaphor as well as of

The Waste Land and would be “cultural ellipses,” for their object in both poems is to establish identity and congruence over large, shifting spans of time and space. The historical level of all the fine arts is where Pound directs our gaze on to the high level and if film history as the evolution of a fine art had its encyclopedic “Pound,” that is where he would direct those elaborate metaphoric constellations distinguishing the Cantos.

One term

for these constellations





our gaze: telescoping Melies’ primitive Paris studio with

all

the superequipped

playground-factories of Hollywood, Elstree, and Moscow.

Whether casual collage or calculated montage, the documentary method of museums is all right so long as one knows how to interpret it in correlation to internally aesthetic values; i.e., “how to read” what is on view. The Surrealists, for their part in film history, quickly perceived the extraordinary faculties of

the film camera for magical effects, and hence there arrrived the classic, small-

Chien Andalou and Cocteau’s Blood of a

cult repertory films, Dali-Bunuel’s

Poet.

The ever-growing and world-wide Experimental School has based

four-square on these two films and,

Well

may

more

recently,

on Cocteau’s

the clever Cocteau, with subtle French directness

Myth

and

itself

films.

simplicity,

have perceived that the straightest line between the film studio and the

Museum

Without Walls was precisely the “film magic” implied in the high legerdemain

was a “natural” for Cocteau. more orthodox Surrealist line in Chien Poet was that, in the latter, the creator had

of classical myths. Orpheus’ legend, in this sense,

The

great disparity of aim between the

Andalou and that in The Blood of a in mind an “Alexandrian” or capitalizing exploitation of the aesthetic experience

itself:

the artist copiously in relation to his “magic” as

the world in his

if

contemplating

own navel.

Rather than straightforward Surrealism, Cocteau’s art here was a fantastic

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had utilized Neo-Medieval symbolism (remember that Dr. Caligari ’s story turns out to be an asylum inmate’s hallucination). The Blood of a Poet is simply a montage of fantastic image sequences in the service of a perfectly reasonable and comone, utilizing Neo-Classic symbolism as

pletely stated idea. Cocteau

knew enough

to

know

that the artist’s magic

is

no

the movies as a fine art

mere private matter and that the explicit idea of a world “navel” existed in antiquity; if this navel was geographically identified, as antiquity identified it, it still symbolized the center of the world as the artist presumably symbolizes the center of the corpus of the of art, the artist ritually (that

human imagination. is,

In the temple (or

“museum”)

symbolically) commits suicide as an individual

only to be automatically reborn as an “Orpheus,” the public laureate presses the sensibility of a great aesthetic collective.

assumed



hoped

or at least



Of

all arts,

who

ex-

the movies are

to express the sensibility of a “great aesthetic

the “great,” of course, defining quantity rather than quality.

collective”:

Cocteau’s last

Myth

film,

Orpheus, super-telescoped the chamber drama of his

“Experimental” Blood of a Poet by tracing, as it were, his own history as an avant-garde artist who became a member of the French Academy. At last, earlier

Museum by

he might enter the is

what he

did.

The

the front, rather than the back, door

illusive walls; indeed, as such, it parallels

when

his

Museum

irony remains that the

—and that

has come to have only

The Blood

of a Poet’s last scene

muse, an armless statue, solemnly proceeds out of the art salon,

— the

where he has shot himself, into the indefinably open space of the stars “stars,” one It

might add, of the movies as well as of the universe.

would be a

mistake to suppose that any actual museum, however

fatal

inhibitively physical its walls, represents a highly selective process

vulgar and the pretentious have been adequately eliminated. filmic selectiveness

pride.

is,

of course, national pride

Independent hope

for the film as a fine

by which the

One

obstacle to

and another is sectarian, or cult, art lies mainly in what the term

Experimental implies in the total cultural context: the conscious resort to basic studio

and laboratory methods rather than conscious emulation of the

broad, and quickly academicized, formulas achieved by the movies at their

commercial

best.

So

heavens, so

much

is

little is really artful in

the “open space” of the cinema

merely chameleon! As widely acknowledged as this

the cultivated public, even film

museums

fail to

by

and coherent standards by which what they find worth preserving.

to judge the merits

Maybe a museum

to

selective example, vital

of

is

provide, with critical hint or

(like a

monastery)

is

a place

in

which

wander and muse

rather than (like a university) to learn and judge. If that were quite true, there would be no quarrel as to whether the young,

being rated as a fine

museum

art.

But, in the

first

young movies deserve

place, they

have entered

flexible

makes them a singular not to say also an embarrassing case among the arts. In some colleges, their history or their technique may be taught, yet that is hardly enough to rank them with music or painting, which have their own departments and their own schools. The movies have their “scholars,” even (Heaven knows!) their walls without being taught as a fine art at colleges, which



they have yet to create a recognized “school” of their own. They simply don’t constitute a major academic subject even though they have imitated not only statues, but all the arts, for a very long time. There is no art, in “critics”

fact,

they have neglected to assimilate and ended, inevitably, by contaminating.

21



the three faces of the film

To be a true art, the movies must not only be “fine,” they must be “great.” Wrong in method, Hollywood is right in aim. But for greatness, no “montage” however major, will do; there must be major vision. Today, scholars have created a Society of Cinematologists yesterday,

of documents,

it

did

;

not exist. It

may

basic problem of

be a small but important step in the direction of prestige.

how “fine” an art

The

the movies can be remains a tantalizing prob-

why the movies These reasoners don’t mean that Holly-

lem. Characteristically post-facto thinkers never understand still

have to prove themselves a

wood’s own Academy

Broadway’s logical

is

fine art.

enough or that the movies are

argument

for

God’s existence. If

only an advanced art of the nickelodeon!

motion picture as

classifiable

really

an extension of

but are like those who use the onto-

tacit institution, the Theater,

were a question of “the movies” as

it

—but

it is,

they think, a matter of the

with painting or sculpture! Mainly, this

is

to rely

on an insidious concept of antiquated date: the movies as a sort of painting and/or sculpture

in motion.

In

brief, it is to

assume Richard Wagner’s grand

synthesis of the arts transported to the film studios and ipso facto an accomplished fact (musical score

by so-and-so). But because Wagner’s reputedly

“filmic” stage directions are followed today, at Bayreuth,

by the projection

film during his operas, does not supply the necessary proof.

must stand or

or falls on his music as the movies

fall

on

Wagner

still

of

stands

their vision. Abstract

formal values can be discerned consistently in the best movies of the past

Dr. Caligari, Potemkin, Broken Blossoms films will

remain relatively superficial

—but

the worth of these “silent”

the art can develop an independent

till

imagination which builds supremely important themes basically in terms of still

and moving photography. Borrowing

War and Peace



is

not enough.

The

—as

with such “literary epics” as

“original script”

must not be an adaptation

but a creation that starts with nothing in the mind’s eye but what Tolstoi started with; that

“walls.”

22

is,

a view of

life

as

life,

not as a

“museum

without,” or with,

The Eyewitness Era

in

Film Fiction

i

documentary as a film form drew its main impetus from two sets Robert Flaherty’s earliest travel films, Nanook of the North and Moana (1922 and 1926); and the Russian propagandists films, Eisenstein’s Potemkin and Ten Days that Shook the World (1925 and 1928)

The

ideal of

of pioneer film-making:

and Pudovkin’s The End of

St.

Petersburg (1927). Naturally,

reporting” of the ordinary newsreel that appealed to the

it

was the

men who

“fact-

visualized

the documentary style. The one man most responsible for the development of documentary as a form to transcend the workaday newsreel is John Grierson, a Scotsman, who gave Great Britain her early lead in the documentary field. It was Grierson who was individually inspired by Robert Flaherty’s travel films and who termed his other chief source of inspiration, Potemkin, a “glorified

newsreel.”

The rise of a film style that should, in essence, glorify reality has been going on steadily for some time, not only in England and Russia 1 but also in the United States. A very recent, outstanding example of serious documentation in film fiction

came from

trek across country.

Australia,

The

The Overlanders, concerning a famous

cattle

tendency, as writers have frequently remarked, has

been to consider British film as generally characterized by a

realistic style

related to Grierson’s long championship of documentary. Indeed,

it

would seem

true that the treatment of even such melodramatic entertainment as England’s

Odd Man

Out, with its careful and varied social faceting, was influenced by the documentary ideal. It must be noted that the development or more or less imperceptible infiltration tional





of “newsreelism” in film fiction took place as the result of educa-

aims

in

film-making, extending to the propagandistic. This was true in

different senses of England,

Germany, and Russia, and comes under the heading and domestic, including the effort to create

of general propaganda, both foreign 1

It

gained headway in

Germany between

the

two wars.

the three faces of the film

good

by a

will in other countries

factual rendering of the native people

and

institutions rather than a fictional rendering. 2

Mr. Grierson has

documentary in his colDocumentary 3 It is, in brief, to draw men together into a homogeneous global group by portraying them so that the essential humanity of each nation will shine through its strange clothes and exotic habits. I do not have in mind the social and political significance of this ideal, despite the large group of films encouraging moral reforms by various clearly stated his ideal concerning

lected film writings, Grierson on

means, but rather

its

.

aesthetic importance to film as form. Grierson has been re-

sponsible for a great deal in the artistic application of film style as a means, as attested

by documentaries as diverse

Night Mail. The

in subject

matter as Song of Ceylon and

latter introduced into the narrative of the fast mail train be-

tween England and Scotland both verse and music as highly modulative

ele-

ments, which would mean, as to aesthetic surface, the reverse of documentary

The most important aspect of the subject, however, is signified by In what way does documentary differ in its basic technical

into fiction.

the question:

premises,

its

and practice, from straight film fiction? It is the which documentary has lately been trying to fit.

aesthetic theory

large frame of the latter into

n

We may strike at the heart of the matter without delay by going back to some of the earliest films

made,

to,

indeed, that French precursor of the “glorified

newsreel” Potemkin, depicting the same event

— the insurrection

of the sailors

on the Russian battleship of that name and the massacre on shore of the sympathizing townspeople by the Czarist troops. This now thoroughly anachronistic film fore

was

was made shortly

after the event took place (1905)

in effect, especially since so brief,

were painfully

artificial

and

its

and

a fabricated newsreel. While

acting unbelievably awkward,

it

there-

its sets

probably

movie patrons of that time. As with Intimate Scenes of Convict Life, made in France the same year and ostensibly portraying conditions on Devil’s thrilled

Island, the primitive French version of the

the function of a visual newspaper, to rather than in words.

The modern

presentation of “fact”

still

deed, the formula reporting.

may

At once,

to be

tell

Potemkin

affair

sought to

fulfill

a true story in animated pictures

journalistic parallel of these films

is

that

found in imaginative news supplements. In-

be expressed as a neat blend of Jules Verne with simple

we

then,

see

what the ideal of the visual newspaper came to would be the more palatable the more decora-

be: a variety of information that tive

and exotic or sensational

it

was.

The

documentary, those of documentary late

Yet going behind one essential

to the 2

The

seeds of fiction were planted early in

in fiction.

this inevitable ideal of the earliest film-making,

fact

—rather than

British Information

Film Service

ideal or

offers this

moral aim

of the

country a variety of documentaries on

social problems, including juvenile delinquency. 3

we come

—at the base

Compiled and edited by Forsyth Hardy (New York, 1947).

the eyewitness era

in film fiction

fact was nothing but the photographic image whose chief distinction (even when not yet in motion) was its “factual” or “truth-telling” nature: “The camera does not lie.” At this late date we can deal with this axiom with the proper scientific skepticism. But at one time it

documentary conception. This itself,

was mainly because

first

the

still

and then the moving camera were innocently

supposed to duplicate reality that movies achieved their

later fame.

Thus, even it

was

modern French term

for

though the Potemkin incident took place at a faraway Russian seaport,

deemed veracious

to represent

it

as actualite, the

newsreel film being actualites. Briefly, truth

it

was a reconstruction of the form

known as history.

Now

this

was

precisely the premise

Eisenstein’s

own

later film, the classic

cal classic of revolutionary

struct

it



I

may

say the aesthetic premise

Potemkin. For the incident was a

Russia and

all

that Eisenstein did

was



itself to

of

histori-

to recon-

on the basis of the authenticated and manifest record of the events.

simple visual problem presented

of

A

the Russian director, that of fabricat-

ing a spectacle which should have every aspect of being the real thing, in other

words, as the Potemkin affair might actually have taken place. Therefore, the

had to graft itself more accurately, on a

scenario or shooting script of Eisenstein’s Potemkin merely as a story of visual action on a “slice of history,” or given, or prior, reality which

it

sought ingeniously to duplicate as though the

narration were that of a gifted and peripatetic eyewitness. In the same

manner

the happenings of Hiroshima might be cinematically reconstructed with John

Hersey’s report serving as scenario.

So what

ment from

may

be termed the eyewitness character of film

relating automatically to the it.

The

film eyewitness

is

a

scientific ele-

documentary technique and inseparable

would thus be a

sine

qua non of documentary:

a theoretical safety valve on propagandistic aims, since what the movie camera sees

must be

it

any sense a fabricated actualite like modern newsreel to be authentic, then,

actualite in the raw, not in

the primitive French Potemkin. For the

must have been “on the scene of the crime.” Hence there are newsreel scoops and singular events as an automatic adjunct of journalism.

of great catastrophes

The importance of the eyewitness element to the film during World War I, when various war films advertised

public

was observable

as “taken at the front”

were questioned as frauds or as largely fabricated.

hi

When

Grierson applied the qualifying adjective “glorified” to the noun

“newsreel” to describe Potemkin, just what did he signify by

it? He was making an important observation because the glorification consisted not only in the

elaborate detail that

made

Eisenstein’s film so convincing, but also in the

elevation of newsreel events to that level of dignity

we conceive

as the category

of history. History implies not only recorded events but furthermore a narration of events having

form

—that

is,

a beginning, middle, end, and a coherent out-

the three faces of the film

documentary does not

Clearly, the newsreel form as a variety of

line.

the category of the history form chiefly because the actualites of narrative, or meaningfully factual, context. In short,

judgments of events

it

satisfy

shows are out

we cannot make proper

terms of cause and effect unless we see them in sizable

in

abstract perspective, that

a narrative perspective combined with a logical

is,

perspective or one of ideas. In regard to public events the annals of history

automatically supply such a perspective.

Here time itself must enter as an aesthetic element in our consideration of documentary technique. Obviously, the snapshot quality of regulation newsreel

journalism tends to

make

actuality

fragmentary, superficial, and even technique

is this:

aim

the

seem

trivial.

(in

terms of formal significance)

So the documentary ideal of film

of presenting formal wholes

above a minimum of

factual significance, taking the alternate forms of narrative or, as in films of scientific subject matter, logical exposition.

The

latter, too, in the special

shape

would be narratives of a sort, like the biological narraof tracing the chicken from ovum to hatching and beyond.

of laboratory processes tive

Yet aside from

all

such formal considerations or aspects of photographic

technique alone, one indispensable factor

documentary, and

mentioned, actualite; that of which

documentary

Thus,

our

in

is

to

be admitted to the ideal of

this is the principle of subhistory to

is

own March

is,

be termed, as previously

prior reality as a rigid logical premise, that reality

to be conceived as merely the photographic reflection. of

Time

glorification of the newsreel, certain scientific

and the pulp-paper and on a rough narrative

or informational subjects, such as classic American jazz industry, were conceived as formal wholes, actualites,

basis were presented as they developed from their origins to their present status.

Naturally, in the formal sense, more or less fabrication or fictitious duplication of reality

is

necessary in such film processes, depending on the specific character

of their subject.

But

if

authenticated facts, the

intelligently

March

of

conducted according to the historic or

Time

actualite

is

to be accepted as true,

and essentially real. As a purely rhetorical category, this form of subhistory would be scientific knowledge. We realize, of course, that levels of depth and points of relevance qualify all scientific knowledge. accurate,

We must turn now to an ineluctible aesthetic axiom. When it is a question of formal representation, where deliberate choices must be

and

logical omission as well as commission, not only

creep

may

in,

made

as to emphasis

can mechanical error

but also psychological prejudice or so-called distortion of the facts

operate.

The

artistic or creative ideal of

their apprehensible

form

is

forms are ignored, the actualite

sacrificed for the synthesis

known

that, while literal facts in

is

knowingly, purposefully

as the higher truth of art, or to echo Keats’

Thus at its most “actual,” no better than a rearrrangement of the facts. Naturalistic techthe novel and in painting relate themselves to this rearrangement

paradoxical formula, as the “beauty” of “truth.” art can claim

niques in

of the facts.

26

It is this

very borderline between art and actuality that the documentary

the eyewitness era

in film fiction

seems to straddle, for primarily documentary must aim at the economically logical arrangement of a given order of facts in line with the category of scientific

knowledge just mentioned. At times, however, as we see from the most imaginbecomes a rearrangement, producing what is almost a poetic rather than logical order an order, one ative documentaries, the logical arrangement of facts



might say in literary terms, of high descriptive prose

was such an eloquent descriptive prose of

in factual narrative. It

film in Flaherty’s early

work that

attracted Grierson’s admiration: a sense of dealing with a beautiful, not merely

a

true, subject matter. In

terms of poetic presentation the montage (or severely

technical) creation of such films as

Song of Ceylon, Easter Island, and Black

Friendship (to cite three of the very best) outstrips Flaherty and compares with Eisenstein’s

own documentary montage;

of course, these later films have

the advantage of the audio-visual presentation, including music

and verbal

commentary. It is

on considering such a film as the

made on

ill-fated

Que Viva Mexico! which

and which was issued only in commercially butchered versions, that we may arrive at one key to the documentary technique in recent film fiction. By the same means we can understand the trend that recently has sent companies to Mexico itself to film fiction stories having that locale. A perfectly natural bridge lies between documentary and creative film: the existence of specific places and their verifiability beyond the fiction convention. The factual time element of history or true event (consider Potemkin Eisenstein

or others)

is

the actual scene

theoretically equivalent in

element of true place or scene.

The

documentary

to the factual space

suitable combination of these elements

would be the ideal toward which documentary should strive. While the scene of Potemkin, Odessa, changed in time, so to speak, it remained the same in space. As a place, Russia, although it underwent a historical

same as physical background 4 So background, or place, is a more permanent and reliable factor than history, or time, with its fluctuation and complex modes. We recall that whereas the classic Moana of Flaherty had no fictitious element of narrative, no story beyond the daily routines of its South Sea islanders, another Eskimo classic, Wedding at Palo, literally had a triangle drama, a love story. Yet it and Nanook were in the same documentary category as Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! which also contained a transformation, remained the

.

love story, because they placed so

much emphasis on

natural background, or

true place, as well as on native customs. Ethnologically its fictitious vein,

Que Viva Mexico! maintained

and

scenically, despite

the category of scientific knowl-

edge.

IV Art, in the creative or fictional sense, deals with time

or incidentally; its direct subject

is life

a dimension theoretically immeasurable 4

The same was not

true circa 1949

when

and place only indirectly

—a permanent and universal

in

any factual sense and

this essay

was

reality,

visible only in

written, nor, of course, at present.

— the three faces of the film

symbolic form. Although the scene of a novel Scotland,

what we experience

may

of these scenes as physical places in which various

from day to day, which other people particular

human

visit

and

it is

New York

or

not the essence

and numerous people

leave, but only

live

a segment of

behavior within these places and the moral significance of

human

such specific

this behavior;

be Paris or

when reading

aesthetically

significance exhausts the reality of the art

form.

Now

may be taken as, in one respect, the complement of such artistic reality. In presenting man, in Grierson’s phrase, “here and now,” documentary even at its most poetic supplies a version of the implicit residue or natural background of art works; it supplies man as a permanent human society delimited formally by geology and nation, social custom and government. In the documentary or super-newsreel perspective, human society in all its diversity exists as an unbroken or global nature, partaking of all living visible forms from the amoeba to man; today, documentary has actually amassed a record of these very forms. Here the law of the the ideal of film documentary

antithetic



photograph operates and



in



what may be

called the ideology of aesthetic

transcends film fiction by positing a theoretical actuality behind every effect of action, lighting,

and makeup

formal, or artistic such effects

in creative film,

how

Consequently, no matter

no matter how melodramatic,

may be. ingenious as to scenario, or

artificial

presentation in montage technique, a film such as Song of Ceylon or

Mexico! may film posits

be, the aesthetic

as to

Que Viva

emphasis remains documentary because such a

an actual, photographable, and unfabricated nature as the back-

ground against which men inevitably act and from which, in the ethnological sense,

men

just as inevitably

draw some

of the

meaning of

their acts. It is true

that the civilized backgrounds of cities, an agglomeration of so buildings, imply

much

less ethnic

many

kinds of

unity than the crude natural backgrounds of

primitive societies, and so are less significant as clear-cut, dominant presences;

a failing in civilized life of which Mr. Grierson, incidentally,

is very sensible, and remedy of which he has directed much documentary energy. But to isolate the principle: the eyewitness camera, no matter how fictitious the narrative it photographs, provides unavoidably (according to the documentary thesis) the telltale or statistical evidence of the real world, in which the spectator no less

to the

than the actor moves.

By

the path of such a basic film principle,

what

I

may

term journalism has

crept into the techniques of American and British film fiction. Despite film virtues the

documentary may encourage

accomplish conclusively on

its

own ground,

its

in general,

and whatever

it

has slighted

its

propaganda documentary

its historical films

fiction

about the enemy.

for straight

may

As

fic-

for Russia,

propaganda

fiction

own Alexander Nevsky and Gang was American propaganda

such as Eisenstein’s

Ivan the Terrible. During the war The Hitler

what

techniques, as absorbed into

tion forms, are obviously subject to various aesthetic hazards.

even in

it

the eyewitness era

in film fiction

V If we glance at literature for a moment, we can observe the growth of a documentary feeling not only in the naturalism of Zola and Flaubert, with its emphasis on environment and contemporary actualite, but even in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where the historical facts of the Napoleonic War in Russia

hover behind the

fictitious narrative as

dependent as though

came

it

a time-space entity virtually as

Modern

were actual historic record.

in-

civilization itself

some documentation with such a novelist as Arnold Bennett, whose chief objective in The Grand Babylon Hotel was to depict the organism of the great hotel of our times, something echoed in film fiction by the Grand Hotel genre of movie: during the war there was a Hotel Berlin, after it a Weekend at the Waldorf. Larger attempts at special group portraiture of the

in for

human race have been made; outstanding, no doubt, is of Good Will, the epic of twentieth-century Paris and

Men

part of which of Mexico.

As

is

an urban portrait corresponding

in the latter film

the background of institution,

human and

and

Jules Romains’

France, a great

to Eisenstein’s rural portrait

in Flaherty’s

Nanook and Man

of Aran,

natural or architectural mass, as well as social

merges imperceptibly in Romains’ novel with the account of

imaginary characters. The documentary form as personal memoir entered prose

fiction

mentary we

with

may

Proust’s

Remembrance

Things

of

note that the generic becomes a value in

genus being as papable as any

human

Past.

In

docu-

itself,

the

human

individual, just as the city landscape of

Paris becomes as important in Romains’ long novel as the

home

of

any

in-

dividual character.

Wars, especially while

mentary

in progress, provide ideal

who

fiction writer,

media

for the quasi-docu-

thus takes advantage of something in the very

Inevitably, the documentary received

new impetus

in the last

air.

war and ap-

proached a prose poetry of form in such a Technicolor film as The Memphis Belle, about flying fortresses and their missions. But war is a tremendous group activity rather than a background, and must fade in time as soon as it is over.

What

remains? Literally, espionage remains as the inter-bellum activities of

government agents

in counteracting foreign spies, the native land being

a back-

and space. How logical it was, then, for producer Louis de Rochement, trained by the March of Time documentary, to conceive the pioneering spy films, The House on 92nd Street and 13 rue Madeleine, both “based on files of the F.B.I.” An American precedent for these films was Conground continuous both

fessions of a

N azi Spy

The documentary

(

idea

in time

1939) based on a supposedly factual book of that name. is hit squarely in the center by the street names and ,

numbers, which take their cue from the highly documentary “10 Downing Street.” 6 6 Although not detective stories, two postwar films naming streets in their titles, apparently to aid authenticity of plot, were It Happened on Fifth Avenue and Miracle on 34th

Street.

the three faces of the film

Grierson would be shocked at what he might term a sheer distortion of

documentary method in these American films. The stories themselves have the same melodramatic plots as hundreds of previous American films less conscientious about realistic backgrounds

and

details.

During the

war Noel

last

Coward conceived a fiction film, In Which We Serve, utilizing documentary in a manner which probably won Mr. Grierson’s approval. It afforded a good example of the British

film style previously mentioned:

a realism of docu-

mentary character. The national cohesion of the British make such a style possible, although I think

been achieved with

amounting

to

it.

it

For example, the

Coward

This

film,

Happy

documentary morality,

feeling of a

an assertion of national character

a more recent

fiction

incorrect that anything significant as art has

in

terms of history, appears in

Breed, a latterday Cavalcade that

the story of a middleclass family from 1919 to 1939.

An

is

ingenious scenario and

make this modest social cycle into quasi documentary; added London background, we have the moral backbone of the British people. However sentimental this movie in actual substance, the new form is there.

excellent acting to the

It

remained

for

American

film,

however, to create a sense of invading the

very heart of fiction by documentary devices.

The most obvious was

of well-known or identifiable backgrounds, filmed

on the original

the choice

spot.

Boom-

erang has a small Connecticut town where the actual murder case of the story actually took place, tries to

and Kiss of Death has

New York

City, where an ex-convict

go straight while mingling with crowds about such landmarks as the

Chrysler Building. story, the

most

Among

perhaps

Boomerang, with

is

by Orson Welles

structural device exploited

Not only

recent efforts dignifying the crime and detective

significant

in Citizen

its

hark-back

did Welles’ objective in this sensational film about a millionaire

youth who became a famous publisher and capitalist smack richly and cally of actualite, but also to

to a

Kane.

he was clever enough (how deliberately,

I

specifi-

cannot say)

adopt a pervasive attitude of journalism toward his story, even to encom-

passing that basic element of the camera’s newsreel veracity. Rather than photo-

graph the world

in its true

technical devices.

ways, however, Welles imitated actualite with various

He erected his story on

the premise that his famous

man had a

sort of Freudian secret, transpiring in his deathbed utterance of the word

“rosebud”; the mystery of this

little

word so piques a newspaper reporter that

it. The narrative, thus, is told in a series who have been intimate with the famous emulation of newsreel cameramen “on the sneak”

he embarks on a private search to solve of flashbacks, testimony by the people

dead man. Several shots in

aesthetically bolster the effect of verisimilitude, as likewise

shots facing the glare of the footlights.

from the dead only as data

is

By

available, the

a kind of census taker, and signally

fails,

amateur detective-reporter becomes as though such a secret would not

yield itself to the inquiring reporter line of research.

tour de force, the camera eyewitness

is

do backstage opera

tracing an inner secret, available

But as a matter of

fact,

by a

enabled technically to solve the search

the eyewitness era

in film fiction

We learn the origin of the mysterious word when the camera privileged documentary agent than any human being in the film, more eye, a floats over the mountains of Kane’s post-humous bric-a-brac to focus on a of the reporter.

small sled just as

it is

being put into a furnace; painted on the sled

Apparently the sled symbolizes Kane’s parents,

from

whom

is

“Rosebud.”

he was separated

by his mother’s decision to give him a new life with his inheritance. It was entirely through technical devices of photography that Welles reinforced the identifiable public myth implicit in his story. These later melodramas, on the contrary, rely almost wholly on background, and

camera was crucially

sonality of the

official

document, identifiable actual

and story. Yet the eyewitness perexploited by a film called The Lady in the

realistic detail in acting

Lake, in which the camera eye is identical with the eyes of the detective involved.

The camera

itself is

moves forward, and

a pun for the detective’s body, moving forward when he so on.

of him.

is,

see the world through his eyes

when when he sees

when he extends an arm

himself) or

The obvious documentary

and fragmentation

and glimpse

his

a mirror happens to come in line with the camera’s

face or figure only vision (that

We

value of this device

of visibility, because the vision of

is its

or leg in front

very indirectness

an individual

equated

is

with the universal vision of the camera, thus limiting the latter’s scope arbitrarily.

Moreover, the story implicitly says: This

you are privileged is

to see with the detective; he

is

the visual evidence, which

saw no more than you

see.

What

a technical handicap for the sake of the spectator’s fun becomes a scientific

virtue;

it is

also an experiment in competitive detection or logical reconstruction.

human human agent

Unfortunately the eyewitness camera behaves as independently of

agency

in

Boomerang as

it

fails in his factual search,

honest,

and

ating a

man

Here, then,

does in Citizen Kane. In the latter the

and

former the district attorney, while

in the

brilliant,

energetic, fails to catch the true criminal, succeeding only in exonerfalsely accused is

and almost railroaded by some crooked

politicians.

one of the main aspects of the application of documentary tech-

nique to the fiction type

known

as detective story. It

experimental method of science

itself;

search for the relevant, conclusive facts. the newer documentary fiction

is its

is

a method paralleling the

a tentative, and not always successful,

The most remarkable

novelty about

extension of Welles’ tour-de-force camera-

eye detective to Boomerang’s semi-omniscient, roving eye of journalism. In this

way what may be termed an

mentary view emerges. That

moving photograph eyes.

irresponsible narcissism of the docu-

the presumably mechanical reproduction of the

has, implicitly, a kind of mystical

nothing else can, even

human

is,

if

that power

is

power

to reveal

what

not always available or operative through

This hypothesis would account for the

scientific

vanity and

pretentiousness of Robert Flaherty that his filmic invasion of the island seen in Moana solved an anthropological problem, whereas self-evidently his theory

only a rationalistic, layman’s sort of fiction. One might say that Welles’ impersonal eyewitness camera had the same vanity as Flaherty’s abstract is

the three faces of the film its catching the word “Rosebud” on the burning sled per se some F reudian problem all it really did, as a lucky roving reporter might have succeeded in doing, was to catch a piece of photographic evidence far more melodramatic than conclusive. Likewise with the literal detective-camera in The Lady in the Lake, which symbolically justifies the mythic claim of private de-

theory, as though

solved

;

tective agencies to be

an “all-seeing eye.”

Within the context of so much verifiable reality (that Building and Connecticut actually exist),

documentary eye of ness.

The

point

is

film thus

that

we

is,

the Chrysler

strange to observe that the

it is

assumes a certain inexplicable,

selfish

are implicitly reminded in various

knowing-

ways

of the

camera’s presence as a documentative agent. Whereas this very knowingness

would seem technically quite natural in straight implausible the story,

it is

as soberly, technically conceived.

True

no matter how

fiction,

structurally at variance with the

documentary form

science does not boast;

it is

modest,

tentative, conscientious, even as the talented Connecticut district attorney.

In

Boomerang

the penetrating ominiscience of the

camera eye lacks the pedantry

of Welles’ coyly clever camera. It does operate, however, to

make

the audience

acquainted with a structural element of which those in the movie are ignorant. This is an interview which the to-be-murdered priest has with a guilt-ridden

man who Because it

is

seeks his advice and to

this

apparently he

possible

who

by the camera’s

testimony

is

whom

he recommends a mental institution.

harassed being believes the priest means having him “put away,” later shoots him.

Although

later identification,

not absolute, conclusive.

will

it

The man who has

priest faithfully attends the trial of the accused

anticlimax,

who

is finally

this conclusion is

secretly interviewed the

man, who, with melodramatic

exonerated by the fearless district attorney.

figures in the story observes the said individual nervously

the courthouse and subconsciously notes,

it

made

be observed this unofficial

would seem,

A

newswriter

hanging around

his resemblance to the

accused. But after the acquittal the guilty-looking lurker speeds out of town in

an auto and dies in a smashup.

When

the newswriter sees his photograph in

the paper reporting the incident, a vague idea seems to

dawn

in his

mind

.

.

.

but here the movie ends. It

might be argued that the ostensibly guilty

man

is

never apprehended in

the film because the movie-makers wished to remain true to the record of the



a record whose contents are by the voice of narratage accompanying the film off and on throughout. This voice of the news commentator is, of course, pure newsreeldocumentary. The case was one in the early career of Homer Cummings, who later became United States attorney general. So here the documentary technique rises toward the previously mentioned ideal category of history. Somebody, a script writer might argue, killed the priest, and it would merely be robbing case in the

files

made known

of the Connecticut courthouse

to us

the customers to keep his identity the total secret that real circumstance kept it.

32

So a red-hot suspect

the

man in

is filtered skillfully

into the facts of the fiction to give

the audience an “in” on the actual, hidden circumstances.

The Art Pre-World

War

I

stage conventions reigned

Art Films until, with the appearance of The Cabinet oj Dr. Caligari, modern aesin

thetics created a true plastic

dynamism

the film frame. This classic of the

repertory,

made

in

for

museum

1920, heralded the best

realizations of the Art Film, including the

pioneer Surrealist works. Breaking free of

both naturalism and hollow Caligari identified the

with

the

exotic,

the

new

artificiality,

visual sensibility

extravagant,

and the

dreamlike.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Early Italian Film

Courtesy Gideon Bachmann

Courtesy Gideon Bachmann

Dom Serenity (Markopoulos) Courtesy Serenity Productions

(Borowczyk-Lenica)

Courtesy " Film Quarterly

'

Animated by Jean Cocteau with his early The Blood of a Poet, the museum image of the classic statue became a dynamo of the new Art style. This motif of the poet’s classic role of establishing a new focus for great traditions has vied with Surrealist iconoclasm and Expressionist fantasy for ascendancy in avant-garde filmmaking. The Polish Surrealist with a clothes

dummy’s

film,

Dom,

parodied the statue motif

head. Commercial “art films” have suc-

ceeded only in superficializing and botching the artist’s biographic legend, but recently an inspired Japanese film, Rashomon, made an

unexpected contribution to the advanced cinema by rendering experience in terms of the psychology of modern art.

human

Rashomon (Kurosawa)

Courtesy Edward Harrison

Films

Brandon

Courtesy

(Eisenstein)

Sun

the

in

Time

Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)

Sergei Eisenstein

was the only

film artist

with the “eyewitness” psychology of the

camera who desired, and was

able, to create

plastic compositions of the highest value.

When

he essayed purely imaginative works,

he readily resorted to the devices of chiaroscuro as a medium of poetry and drama. The frames of film action on this page might be based on details abstracted from the variegated pattern of the couple in the swing from his unfinished film, Que Viva Mexico! Compare any whole frame on this page with imaginary rectangles made by a quarter or an eighth of the beautiful composition opposite; also note, in all four shots, the dynamic quality imparted by Courtesy Janus Films

diagonal thrusts.

On

the

Edge (Harrington)

Courtesy Cinema 16

On

these two pages are examples

of the dramatic use of black-and-

white

that

characterizes Caligari

and Eisenstein ’s best

films.

How

simply white-on-black and blackon-white are balanced (above)

in

same frame, while the scene from Ivan the Terrible (left) is a the

little

'“sonata”

whites

of

picked

out of black. Opposite are two excellent

fluence

results

of

of

broad

in-

painting

on

the

modern

such as that

shadow Expressionist gloom in Munch’s painting

while, below

it,

film:

at top, concentrated

evokes

an

concentrated light

evokes a Post-Impressionist brilliance such as that in Bonnard’s work. Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein) Courtesy Janus Films

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)

Courtesy Janus Films

Courtesy Janus Films

Day

of V/rath (Dreyer)

Courtesy Brandon Films

The

film

composed Strikingly

shot reproduced above was as carefully as the great painting reproduced at left.

similar

in

their

Baroque

lighting,

they offer but one eloquent proof of dramatizing the individual in space, whether (as here) he is an agent of concentrated light and dark, or (as elsewhere) he is abandoned to the risks of undefined

This composition by Dreyer is a measure tightly the film actor can be made to fit the perfectly controlled manipulation of plastic space. of

how

values.

Rembrandt: The

Toilet of

Courtesy The Metropolitan

Bafhsheba

Museum

of Art

— ,

the eyewitness era

in film fiction

VI

Another name

for verisimilitude in art is probability.

mistaken testimony of

to the positive yet

probable that the falsely accused

Owing,

in

Boomerang,

five identifying witnesses,

man must have

it

was

borne a close physical resem-

blance to the real murderer, and this resemblance was supplied by the film

manner given above. But

fiction in the

ity is disqualified it

;

certainty

is

of the accused

man’s innocence that

The main dramatic

invention here would

was by creating the reasonable certainty

the district attorney

seem an error I

won

documentary sense probabillife, and

in the strict

the cornerstone of the reflected image of

his acquittal.

of the documentary-fiction cult through overzealousness.

have mentioned the documentary as equivalent to the generic, the archetype

human society; one such prototype is unquestionably the crimwhose mythical first father was Cain. A way of emphasizing this incontestable reality is to photograph specific and actual prisons, literally identifiable

or prototype of inal,

buildings, not only the Chrysler Building, as in Kiss of Death, but also the

Tombs and tive

that cradle of crime, the

New York Lower

camouflages himself daily with such perennial

East Side. The real fugi-

realities.

Consequently, links

of greater or lesser specific character appear between action

and scene

in the

latterday documentary thrillers.

Inseparable from crime

is

the investigation of the police department, a civic

institution with its varied public edifices, both judicial

prison

Warden Lawes,

official,

by appearing

lent his personal

and punitive.

A

famous

documentation to a movie once

At the same time (as we learn from Boomerang ) human limitation and error inconsistent with what might be termed its architectural surface. This could seem a documentary demerit. And all documentary realism— from the mere title, Alcatraz, and a few in

it

himself.

police investigation

is

subject to a

shots of Sing Sing from the outside, to the presence of

might seem designed

Warden Lawes

to lend credibility not only to obviously false sets

himself

and trans-

parently hopped-up stories but also to the reality of the axiom that Justice

is

often blind.

The

case,

as lately,

is

however,

worked

is

more subtle than

are, literally or symbolically, already

to

compass the

that. If the fiction of a

into a hybrid recipe of fact

fiction itself.

For

and

fiction, if the

crimes treated

on the books, the verisimilitude tends

this simple reason: the

murderer as individual

is

technically a fiction until legally convicted; even a suspect, as

in

Boomerang,

is

melodrama,

we

see vividly

a legal-fiction criminal only, as anxious as a certain group

is

to

him a real one. This theoretically imbeds fiction in the chosen theme Crime detection is therefore allied to the method of scientific knowledge

consider of fact.

already mentioned as a category of documentary.

hension and

trial is

secure in a past fact

an experiment conducted

to

The whole process of appremake a present hypothesis

by connecting, beyond any reasonable doubt, the doer with

the deed.

Could

it

not be maintained that the latterday exhibits of detective film fiction

the three faces of the film

are manipulated to suggest lessons in crime detection and conviction? Assuredly the documentary feeling has also entered via the psychiatric clinic

and we

receive lessons, however dubious, in apprehending the guilty elements of dream. Significantly, Spellbound

combined the murder story with the

clinical

drama, as

did also Shock. In Crossfire one catastrophic result of a great social problem, race prejudice, yielded to the scientific

method

of the police.

Though

the

abstract “edifices” of both private morality and social justice are so insubstantial, the institutions

ground of

solid

scientific

We may conclude identified, a la

devoted to upholding them are built on the supposedly

method.

that the police detective as an agency in real

life

has been

documentary, as the potential or would-be eyewitness, and that,

we come nearer and nearer (how literally The Lady in the Lake!) to legal, or quasi-

as the pursuit of the criminal advances,

through the detective-camera pun scientific, fact.

manner

We

in

are permitted to reconstruct the crime in the well-known

of real as well as storybook detectives, so that

we

see paralleled, in

terms of method, the specific reconstruction of history entailed by a historical

documentary such as Potemkin, except

X

imponderable, an

be revealed.

If

our

that newspapers,

thrillers

if

that, to begin with,

factor: the identity of the criminal that

have a journalistic sensationalism,

we

deal with an

may or may not it may be argued

not themselves scientific instruments, are on the documen-

tary side of science; however approximately, however propagandistically, they deal with facts.

Crime detection in film, being a sort of scientific experiment, logically draws means not only photography (actual photographs, of course, play a scientific role within crime detection) but also the backgrounds of actualite. In the labyrinth of a city the criminal hides as effectually as the hunted animal in to its

the labyrinth of the forest or the guilty impulse in the labyrinth of the private self.

But

in the abstract or universal picture of all things

“all things”) the criminal

where



(and reality finally

often, presumably, in the “vicinity”

— the material camouflage

very walls of buildings implicitly documents his existence. identified as actual,

if

is

cannot totally efface himself. Since he exists someof the

If these walls are

they are on 92nd Street, the criminal’s reality

is

that

much

more authenticated.

The

infiltration of

documentary into

film fiction, whatever the artistic

worth

must be gauged as part of the overpowering forces of a technologiwhich film is still the important scientific discovery it once was

of its results, cal era, in

hailed as. Scientific techniques, after in

modern

social ethics.

historical statement of

“The

all,

have a secure and unchallenged place

basic force behind documentary,” to quote the

John Grierson, “was

social not aesthetic.”

But there

is

another side to “the picture.”

34

The hit film Naked City clearly showed that the documentary vogue in fiction had brought Grade B movies up to Grade A stature. This meant only one thing: the crime melodrama without star actors. In Naked City it is Manhattan Island and its streets and landmarks that are starred. The social body is thus,

the eyewitness era

in film fiction

through architectural symbol, laid bare (“naked”) as a neutral fact neither, so to speak,

may

good nor bad, but something which,

catch a disease

A good piece of

— the criminal —and

human organism itself, may elude its detectors.

like the

this disease

was the incident near the end, the turnbumps against a blind man and his seeing-eye dog; the murderer’s sadism flares, he fires his revolver at the annoying dog, and his pursuers are led to him by the report. In the same way the sick body blindly reacts to the hidden disease in it, and then draws the vigilant ing point,

intuition, in this light,

when

the criminal in

full flight

“police of the blood” to help fight the disease. I

don’t think this analogy

is

a coincidence.

structure of a great city, in one sense, tectives at the

same time that

it

is

The

fact is that the vastly

provides tiny clues as important as certain

obscure physical symptoms are to the trained eye of a doctor. As the ideal of science dominates the fiction documentary in film,

technique

is

strictly

complex

a supreme obstacle to the police de-

have observed, and the latter’s

I

analogous with the method of logical deduction (the ab-

method of seeking out and following up clues (the Of course (and here the point presses against all the problems of true art), this film vogue is another modern means of avoiding the basic problems of the human spirit and of human society; in brief, it is a journalism of stract) as well as with the

concrete).

science as well as of fiction.

35

Rashomon

Rashomott, the Japanese film masterpiece, rape and homicide (or possibly suicide). It

is

told in retrospect,

and

is

as

Modern Art

a story about a double crime:

The time

the eighth century a.d.

is

by the three

in successive layers,

participants, the

dead warrior (through a mediumistic priestess), his raped wife, and a notorious bandit perhaps responsible for the warrior’s death as well as for his wife’s violation,

and by a woodcutter who

the whole episode.

The

alleges himself to

have witnessed, accidentally,

quality of the film narrative

so fine that an astonish-

is

by the three and (following the inquest) by the lone witness. The bandit and the woman have separately fled the scene of the crimes, where the woodcutter claims, at first, to have arrived only in time to find the warrior’s corpse. Nominally, the film comes under the familiar heading of stories that reconstruct crimes. However, this story does not go much beyond the presentation of each ingly unified effect emerges from the conflicting stories furnished

principals

person’s testimony.

The woman claims

to

have

killed her

after the rape took place; her

of grief

husband

husband claims

and humiliation; the bandit claims

in

to

an irresponsible

have committed

to

have

killed

him

fit

of horror

hari-kiri out in

honorable

combat; and the woodcutter confirms the bandit’s story while picturing the conduct of describe

it.

all

participants quite differently from the

As no

trial of either

of the living participants

ways they respectively shown, and as no con-

is

sequent action reveals anything conclusive as to the crime, the decision as to the actual truth of the whole affair falls to the spectator’s option. Since technically the woodcutter

is

the only “objective” witness, he might seem the most

reliable of the four testifiers.

version detail

by the

But

his integrity is not

beyond question; the

warrior’s ghost has contradicited his version in an important

—one inadvertently confirmed by the woodcutter’s

implicit admission (in

an incident following the inquest) that he stole a dagger at the scene of the crime.

The ghost has

testified that

he

felt

dagger with which he alleges he committed

36

Logically,

if

“someone” draw from

his breast the

hari-kiri.

one’s aim be to establish in theory the “legal” truth of the affair,

rashomon as modern

art

method

the only obvious

is

to correlate all the admissible facts of the action with

the four persons involved in order to determine their relative integrity as individuals

—a procedure complicated necessarily not merely by the given criminal

status of one participant but ingly

assumed

guilt.

fact that all but the woodcutter

by the

A further difficulty, in general,

ground of any character

is

in the

will-

given beyond what can be assumed from his visible

behavior and his social status; for example, there

something unusual

have

that nothing of the back-

is

is

only the merest hint of

journey of the warrior and his lady through the forest.

we have

Again, even from direct observation,

to

depend a great deal on these

persons as seen through the eyes of each other. So, unless one be prejudiced for

one sex or another, one

social class or another,

seems almost impossible to

it

any ) Are we to conclude, in this dilemma, that Rashomon amounts to no more than a trick piece, a conventional mystery melodrama, left hanging? My answer is No. There are several things about the movie which argue it as a unique and conscious art, the opposite of a puzzle or at least, no more of a puzzle than those modern paintings of which a spectator may be heard to say: “But what is it? What is it supposed to mean?”

make a

really plausible choice of the truth-teller (if

.

;

Perhaps more than one profane

an Ernst, that

it

demands, a

critic

“the reconstruction of the crime.” for the elucidation of

has wisecracked of a Picasso, a Dali, or

posteriori, the

My

method described by the

opinion

Rashomon’s mystery

is

is

something corresponding to a

Such a judgment, aesthetically speaking,

jury’s verdict.

police as

that the last thing required

is

as inutile

for

appreciating the substance of this movie as for appreciating the art of Picasso.

In Rashomon, there painter’s purpose

is

no strategic

effort to conceal

to conceal instead of reveal.

is

must always be what the creator Picasso’s Girl Before Mirror, this

enigma

is

it

may

any more than a modern

The

basic issue, in art,

Of such a painting as contains an “enigma.” But

desires to reveal.

be said that

it

merely one specific aspect of the whole mystery of being, a par-

ticular insight into

human

consciousness in terms of the individual, and so has

that complex poetry of which

all

Rashomon. This great Japanese existence itself

is

aesthetic senses.

profound art partakes. So with the enigma of film

is

a “mystery story” to the extent that

a mystery as conceived in the deepest psychological and

As applied

certainly unfamiliar

to

a movie of

this class,

however, such a theory

is

and therefore has to be explained.

Chagall with his levitated fantasy-world and childhood-symbols, Picasso

with his creative analysis of psychological movements translated into pictorial vision

—such painters

set forth

nude mysteries of human experience; each,

static field of the painting, reveals multiple aspects of a single reality, literally or in

in the

whether

symbols. Rashomon, as a time art, cinema, corresponds with

art. The simplest rendering of time phases an object within the unilateral space of a single picture is, of course, in Futurist painting, such as Balia’s famous dog, ambling by the moving skirts of its owner; the dachshund’s legs are portrayed multiply with a fanlike, flickering

multiple-image painting as a space in

kind of image similar to images as seen in the old-fashioned “bioscope” movie

the three faces of the film

machine. The same dynamic principle was illustrated by Muybridge’s original

time-photography of a running horse, except that the register there was not instantaneous but successive; at least, the photographer had the cinematic idea

show the pendulum-like span of its front body seemed to stay in the same place (treadmill dynamics). Even in the contemporary movie camera, some movements may be so fast that one gets the sort of blur shown in Futurist images. The analogy of of keeping pace with a running horse to

and hind

legs while its

Rashomon with such procedures single action photographed, a

and

for the single viewpoint

The camera

points.

in this

of stating physical

toward

movie

is

this action, multiple

different, of course, not

is

that, for the

substituted,

is

(and successive) view-

actually trained four times on

same episode; if the results are each time the camera represents the viewpoint

different each time,

tically is the

mainly

movement

complex action (or “episode”)

what theoreit is

because

of a different person; a viewpoint

because of the physical angle (the camera

is

never meant to substitute for subjective vision) but because of the psychological angle.

“Simultaneous montage” in cinema

is

the double exposure of two views so

that multiple actions occur in a unilateral space visually while existing in

—as when a person and — separate

separate spaces literally and possibly tion are

his visual recollec-

superimposed on the same film-frame

able aspect of the

method

of depicting

also in

memory

Rashomon

in

each person, squatting in Japanese fashion as he

testifies,

times. is its

A remark-

simplicity:

squarely faces the

camera and speaks; then, rather than simultaneous montage, a flashback takes place: the scene shifts wholly to the fatal spot in the forest. The police magistrate

When

is

never shown and no questions addressed to the witnesses are heard.

it is

the dead man’s turn to testify, the priestess performs the required

becomes possessed by his

rite,

back as with

little

spirit,

Thus we

in the other cases.

intervention between

speaks in his voice, and the scene shifts

receive the successive versions of the action

them and with the minimum

of “courtroom

action.”

Of itself.

course, there

The

is

a framing story, which retrospectively reveals the inquest

action literally begins at the

woodcutter and the

priest,

who

Rashomon

Gate, a great ruin where the

has previously seen the

woman and

at the inquest, are sheltered during a rainstorm; joined

been present

by a tramp, these two

gradually reveal everything that has taken place according to the several versions.

What

is

important

is

the inherent value of the

flashback has been variously used.

The

forward, equally forceful; no matter which version another’s, every participant behaves with the

was

certainly this spectator’s experience) one

implicitly as

it

unfolds,

way

the technique of the

separate stories are equally straight-

and oddly none seems

is

being related, his

same conviction. As a

is

own

or

result (it

compelled to believe each story

to cancel another out. Therefore

it

would be only from the policeman’s viewpoint of wanting to pin guilt on one of the persons that, ultimately, any obligation would be felt to sift the conflicting evidence and render a formal verdict. Despite the incidental category of its



rashomon as modern form,

Rashomon

art

work

as a

of art naturally seems to call for a response having

nothing to do with a courtroom.

Of an event

less significant, less stark

and rudimentary

in terms of

human

behavior, the technical question of “the truth” might prove insistent enough to embarrass one’s judgment. late

The

inevitable impulse, at

on which of those who claim guilt

is

first sight, is to

whatever conclusion be tentatively reached, what eventually the spectator’s

mind and possesses

pattern: that violence which

medieval period the man, ties

from

is

him

is

it,

is

slips

But

back into

the traumatic violence of the basic

The

the heart of the enigma.

civilization of this

turned topsy-turvy by the bandit’s strategy, in which he tricks up,

and

forces

him

to witness his wife’s violation. It

forward that the stories

this point

specu-

really guilty of the warrior’s death.

differ:

the

woman’s reaction

is

only

to the

bandit’s assault, the husband’s behavior after being freed from his bonds

everything

disputed by one version or another. But

is

is

not the heart of the

confusion within the event itself? Is this happening not one so frightfully destructive of

and that

this

human

poise

and

ethical

custom that

it

breeds

its

own ambiguity,

ambiguity infects the minds of these people?

from shock: the warrior’s agonized ghost, his

All the participants are suffering

hysterical wife, the bandit,

when

caught, seized with

mad

bravado. Unex-

— the paths the couple and the bandit have crossed purely by accident— three being reduced have been

pectedly

of

for

irretrievably altered after

lives

the most primitive condition conceivable. best, etiquette has only

Two men

(in a

to

manner

in which, at

a vestigial role) have risked death for the possession

woman. Basically, it is a pattern that was born with the beginnings of mankind. Such an event, in civilized times of high culture, would of itself contain of a

something opaque and even incredible.

moment

to

moment, the

have been played at

all.

affair

The

illicit

as the lady’s long veil blows aside, sense of reality at forest’s

it

in

matters morally its

is

not how, from

actors but that

it

should

impulse springing up in the bandit’s breast

is

so violent that its consequences attack the

root. Regardless of

summer day, each

what

literally

participant

took place in the

is justified

in recon-

a manner to redeem the prestige of the moral sense, which, con-

sciously or not,

is

a civilized person’s most precious possession. It should be

who are involved, and that to them paramount value; even the bandit is quick to seize the maintain truthfully or not that he behaved like a man of

emphasized that is

moral

depths that mild

structing

honor

its

What

was played out by

it is

the Japanese people

of peculiarly

opportunity to





caste rather than an outlaw; he has testified that following the rape (to which,

he says, the

him in

fair

woman

yielded willingly) he untied the husband and worsted

swordplay.

Hence, a psychologically unilateral, indisputable perspective exists in which the tragic episode can be viewed by the spectator: a perspective contrary to that in

which one of the persons appears technically guilty of the warrior’s death. is simply the catastrophe as a single movement which tem-

This perspective

porarily annihilated the moral reality on which civilized

human

consciousness

is

)

the three faces of the film

based.

The

statistics

as

“legal” or objective reality of the affair (what might be called

is

its

exactly what cannot be recovered because the physical episode,

human action, has been self-annihilating. Of course,

then,

might be claimed

it

that the woodcutter, not being involved except as a spectator,

is

a disinterested

witness of the episode, and accordingly his story that the three actors in the

tragedy really played a grim farce, in which two cowards were the heroes and

But the opening scene of the framing mind is in a state similar to that of the participants themselves; indeed, he is evidently dismayed and apparently by the fact that all their testimony belies what he proceeds to reveal to the priest and the tramp as “the truth.” However, as the shocked witness of such a debacle of the social order in any case a victory of evil over good this peasant may have withheld his testimony out of superstitious timidity. If, in fact, he saw all that took place, then the added confusion a shrew the heroine, story

makes

is

the correct version.

plain that the woodcutter’s

it





that the participants contradict each other

mind

—may even tempt him

may

raise

bewilderment in his simple

to exploit his subconscious

envy and resentment

against his betters by imagining their behavior as disgraceful It

and

ludicrous.

seems within Rashomon’s subtle pattern to suggest that even a simple,

terested witness should be after

all,

there

is

drawn psychologically

no proof that he did not invent

distin-

into the chaos of this incident; his

own account

in competition

with the others’. This assumption would lend credit to the conclusion that the

own

sense of reality, how-

each witness’s story

is

to salvage his

ever close his version to the event as

it

took place. Perhaps

real function of

it

would be accurate

add that the facts themselves have no true legal status since each witness is forced to draw on his subjective imagination rather than on his capacity to to

observe. In this case, each

is

in the position of the proto-artist,

who

only as a crude norm; the sense of invention enters into reality.

hand, there story, in

uses reality

On

the other

the literal truth of the denouement, the climax of the framing

is

which the woodcutter adopts a foundling baby who has been

the Gate’s interior.

The relation

left in

of this incident to the story proper strikes

the most problematical element of

all, if

me as

only because the film would have

re-

mained intact without it. Morally, of course, this incident functions as a reinstatement of in the sense of good.

hopelessly degraded priest) is in

But the

itself in

specifically religious

human

the forest episode (the view represented

more external than essential

values

view that humanity has

to the whole conception.

The priest

by the thinks

terms equivalent, logically, to the law’s terms: truth or falsehood. Since

some lying

is

self-evident, the sin of

concealment

cealment of the truth, not of the crime, for

become a

What seems

all

is

added

to crime;

i.e.,

con-

profess crime. Ironically enough,

significant to the whole is the coloutnumber the truth-teller (whichever he may be). The “sin” involved has gone beyond individual performance and exists objectively as would a natural cataclysm such as a volcanic eruption. That each participant assumes guilt, including the dead man, reveals the com-

confession has

sin.

lective nature of the liars: they literally

s

rashomon as modern

art

A

prehensiveness and irresistibility of the disorder.

lie,

then, actually

becomes

the symbol of the operation by which these people mutually regain their moral identities.

force

These

having been destroyed as though by an objective

identities

beyond anyone’s

any means seems

control,

fair to regain

them. Since,

however, they cannot separate themselves from the sense of tragedy, they prefer to

be tragedy’s heroes



animating

its

will rather

than

its

passive objects.

But why should the three tragedies seem as one? To revert to our analogy with the visual media of painting and still photography, the plastic reality with which we have to deal in Rashomon is multiform rather than uniform. Within one span of time-and-space, reality (the episode in the forest) has been disintegrated. While the witnesses’ stories accomplish its reintegration, they

do not do so in terms of the physically unilateral except in work exists all at once in a

the final aesthetic sense in which the totality of a spectator’s mind.

The analogy

is

complex, but

literally it is

with the Futuristic

image of Rashomon varies only in detail and degree. There is no variation on the background and origin of the tragedy; no contradiction as to the main physical patterns of the rape and image of the walking dog;

the death of the warrior

like this image, the total

by a blade wound. So the main

firmly, unilaterally, in place.

visual aspect

is

held

Another image of Futurist painting renders the

angles of air displacement caused by the nose of a racing auto. Such “displace-

ments”

exist in

Rashomon

action deriving from one

The

severally in the respective accounts of a physical

main impetus: the

rendered in

literal

time as

is

music.

A

woman.

desire to possess a

total psychological space in this movie,

because of

its

complexity,

similar psychological space

is

rendered

is

simultaneously in Picasso’s Girl Before Mirror by the device of the mirror as

Her moonlike same person; that is, her fullface denotes her personality as it confronts the world and her profile her personality as it confronts itself: the mirror image in which the fullface character of her aspect is diminished. To Meyer Schapiro we owe a basic obby the double image of

well as

profile-and-fullface on the girl.

face has a symbolic integralness as different “phases” of the

servation as to this painting:

it

plays specifically on the body-image which each

individual has of himself and others, and which

is

distinct

from the anatomical

image peculiarly available to photography. The mirror-image

in Picasso’s

datum parallel with the dominantly each witness in Rashomon’ tragedy. The mirror of

thus asserts a psychological

testimony of screen

is

like the mirror in the painting as telescoped within the

total painting; successively,

we

work

subjective

the movie

image of the

see people as they think of themselves

and as

they are to others; for example, at one point during the woman’s story, the

camera substitutes dagger:

we

for the viewpoint of her

see her as conceived

by

husband toward whom she lifts a would have been in

herself but also as she

her husband’s eyes. In revealing, with such expressiveness and conviction, what novels have often revealed through first-person narratives or the interior monologue, the film necessarily emphasizes its visual significance.

narratives in

Rashomon

rests

on the elements of the tragedy

The sum

in

which

of these

all

agree:

the three faces of the film

one raped, one was raped, one

killed,

one was

killed.

The

“variations” are ac-

countable through something which I would place parallel with Schapiro’s body-

image concept: the psychic image that would apply especially to the memory of a past event in

which the body-image

moral integrity,

its

is

charged with maintaining, above

all,

and

dignity. In a sense, Picasso’s girl reconstructs

its ideal

synthesizes her outer self-division within the depths of the mirror; so in the

depths of each person’s memory, in Rashomon,

is

recreated the image of what

took place far away in the forest as consistent with his ideal image of himself. In modern times, the

human

personality

the tragi-comedies of Pirandello

makes a esting for



is

—as outstandingly demonstrated and dramatically

technically schizophrenic situation important

in

But what

easily divided against itself.

inter-

paradoxically, the individual’s sense of his former or possible unity,

is,

without this sense he would not struggle morally against division: he would

be satisfied to be “more than one person.” In analytical cubism,

an

torial style expressing

ironic situation within the

physique, including his clothes;

we do not

human

we have a

pic-

individual’s total

perceive, within an individual por-

trayed by Picasso in this manner, a moral “split” or psychological “confusion”; rather

we

terms of of being,

internal or “depth” elements, its overlaid facets, or

— though presumably not meant —correspond

which

personality all

phenomenal appearance portrayed formalistically

see the subject’s

its

to signify a conflict in the

logically, nevertheless, to the

moral dialectic within

consciousness (subjective/objective, personal/social, and so on).

The same

more plainly in the anatomical dialectic Tchelitchew’s recent paintings, where the separate inner systems are seen logical

correspondence

is

seen even

labyrinthine relation to the skin-surface. Indeed, is

common

plying, as

to diverse styles of

human

spiritual being.

tion

painting,

man all

of in

as an internal labyrinth

such styles necessarily im-

statements, the sometimes bewildering complexity of man’s

Great beauty

indirectly symbolize

Rashomon

modern

in

complex layers

is

found in such aesthetic forms, which

justifiably

an ultimate mystery: that human mystery to which

so eloquently testifies in

its

own way and which comprises

from birth to death, from the organic to the inorganic, which

the transi-

is

the indi-

vidual’s necessary material fate.

Against the awareness of his material fenses: art, pleasure, ethics,

acts

whose continuity

in

God,

fate,

religion,

many

de-

ideas, sensations,

and

the individual erects



immortality

him are preserved by constant

cultivation, periodic

renewal, unconscious “testimony.” These constitute his moral identity in the social order. In

ment (such

as

them it

be),

resides the essence of his being, the

and

his rational ability to function

law of his content-

from hour to hour.

In the lives of the persons of Rashomon, where this objective order prevailed, utter chaos

came part

was suddenly

injected.

of that blind flux

Each person was shaken out

birth with that of the suspense-before-death

was largely because vanquished

and whose name

of the tragedy’s physical violence,

human reason.

If

of himself, be-

which joins the intuition of the suspense-before-

we look at the terror of war

is terror.

This

which temporarily

as depicted in Picasso’s

rashomon as modern Guernica, is

art

we observe a social cataclysm of which

the forest episode in

Rashomon

a microcosm. Curiously enough, Guernica happens to be divided vertically

into four

main

sections, or panels,

which Picasso has subtly unified by overlap-

ping certain formal elements. Thus, while the great massacre simplified here in visual terms,

stages or views.

it is

As wrenched by violence

congregate, so to speak, to

make

is

of course highly

moreover synthesized by means of four as are the individual forms, they

order out of confusion.

Though Picasso was

not recomposing from memory, he might have been; in any case, the drive of art is

toward formal order and the individuals in Rashomon, as proto-artists, have

this

same

drive.

As gradually accumulated, the sum total of Rashomon constiwhose unity lies in the fact that, however different are the

tutes a time mural

imaginations of the four witnesses, whatever harsh vibrations their mutual contradictions set up, the general design (as the film-makers have molded

remains and dominates the work’s

final

it)

aspect of great beauty and great truth.

43

The Film Sense and the Painting Sense

There has always been commerce, more or less conscious, between painting and the film. When first photography was invented, the aim was to duplicate the aesthetic effect of painting.

Then when

the concept of motion

duced and the movies arrived, the aim deviated to a quest for

was

realities

intro-

on the

one hand and magical fantasy (such as stage illusions) on the other. The very nature of the movies as visible animation suggested adventure rather than for-

mal

control, sheer excitement rather than aesthetic emotion.

have continued to obey

Commercial films

this suggestion while serious tendencies in the

picture have developed the plastic

ance with aesthetic principles. If consider the movies an “art,”

motion

and dynamic senses of the medium in accordsome enlightened persons are disinclined to

it is

not only because movies reproduce images

mechanically but also because they so seldom, in their instantaneous imagery, suggest the calculated and controlled design of painting.

Because objects in the

real world,

moving or animate, may be

faithfully re-

corded by the film camera does not produce on the screen a dynamic effect except in the most elementary sense, or a plastic effect except in the sense that the

To attain consistent and must be used consciously, selectively and inventively in regard to what it photographs and how this is photographed. A rudimentary plastic design such as Mickey Mouse or a highly complex one such as Bosch’s Garden of Delight are “stills,” inanimate subjects, which the movie camera as we have seen can approach as raw material, just as though they were life itself. By thinking of the movie camera as an independent aesthetic agent, distinct from the art work it represents, we can

may

framing

casually create a rough composition.

satisfying plastic

and dynamic

effects,



observe

its

the camera



function as an animator in a rather strict sense.

Griffith, in his film Intolerance,

approached his huge panoramic Babylon

way the camera may approach, as it did lately in The Titan, the great structures of human anatomy that Michelangelo placed on the Sistine wall in The the

Last Judgment. Both those photographed objects were created plastically before the

camera faced them, yet the camera tends

to

“dramatize” them as

the film sense

though

and

the painting sense

were an individual spectator noting them

it

And

detail, or vice versa.

in

just as a kind of narrative

is

ensemble and then in

involved with Griffith’s

Babylon, which was only an immense stage

set, so

volved with the single plastic entity that

Michelangelo’s mural. Since the

cinema as a form

show

is

literally

is

a series of pictures,

a kind of narrative

it is

is in-

automatically adapted to

narratives, or action in quantitative time. Therefore,

it

may move

before

Bosch’s congeries of images as though they were a medieval passion play; similarly, it

may

pass before Giotto’s murals relating Christ’s story in the Arena

Chapel and reconstruct the Massacre of the Innocents as though

it

were

live

action.

In the recent Leonardo da Vinci, the flight

were animated

in the

artist’s analytical

drawings of birds

in

orthodox “Disney” fashion. This cannot be done

with other authentic works without a deal of faking, but an approximation of Pictura, two stages of a kick in drawings of the

it

by Toulouse-Lautrec. In

has been employed twice in the use of dance-drawings

same dancer are repeated over

and over rapidly to give the standard animated effect, while in Moulin Rouge a sequence of Lautrec’s dancehall figures are run swiftly before the eye and intercut to produce the impression of real action in the in his October,

animated three separate sculptures of

famous

cafe. Eisenstein,

lions,

recumbent to ram-

artist

may

pant, with distinct comic success.

Animating a given

plastic composition

by a great

strike

one as

not only a vulgar but also a criminally absurd idea. Yet in The Titan, for an outstanding example, an effect of

camera at

close range

much

subtlety was obtained

by passing

the

around the somnolent figures Michelangelo placed before

the Medici tombs. This might be called a controlled spectatorship in which the

photographic values of black and white within the quadrangular two-dimensional

frame contributed an “interpretive” rendering of the allegoric sculp-

tures. Signally, too,

with the Bacchus, the movie camera “narrated” a way-of-

looking that was a way-of-feeling, the rectangularly isolated views achieving a special plastic effect that

would not have been thus precise without the camera’s

use.

The

Titan’s interpretation of the Michelangelo sculptures, bringing three-

dimensional works to the movie screen as though they were elements of

flat

composition, refers to an important aspect of the art of the film. This, as Eisenstein has voluminously shown,

is

the conception of film not as a representa-

tion of a three-dimensional world in terms that (like those of sculpture relief)

remind us

mind us first it

literally of the third

literally of the

and bas-

dimension, but rather in terms that re-

two dimensions of painting. Eisenstein’s completed

part of Ivan the Terrible earned unfavorable criticism as “static” because

clung to single plastic compositions for such protracted periods. Analysis of

these compositions

show the

lasting effects

on Eisenstein of

his early experience

as designer of abstract-geometric stage sets. Actual motifs of Kandinsky’s

imagery are discoverable in Ivan. In his unfinished Que Viva Mexico! Eisenstein constantly bore testimony of

the three faces of the film

by projecting screen shots that were virtually “stills,” carecomposed with plastic values in mind. Essential to these beautiful shots

his debt to painting fully

were the two-dimensional feeling of surface and, of course, the rectangular screen.

The

was apt

was always an element

latter

of the movies’ artistic function

and

to operate best in the pre-talkie era since in the talkies the film often

tends merely to photograph actors speaking, and to follow them about as

though they were on a theater stage. This Hitchcock did

composition in the If life

last,

Rope, thereby destroying

in

indeed,

all

specifically

is

what Alfred

opportunities for true cinematic

“still” sense.

one film trend animates painting, as we have noted, another de-animates

into the

still

terms of painting insofar as

composition as a unit in plastic,

its

its

aim

spatial-temporal art.

is

two-dimensional composition which animates

tions, totally replacing

plastic two-dimensional

One may

a series of muta-

one composition at a certain point with another. Style

many

is

the element expected to unify so

is

a fused art of time and space. So, in a distinct capacity,

in other respects,

define the film as a

itself in

different compositions. is

The

film, then,

the theatre. So are,

mural painting and the “narrative pictures” of the Renais-

sance. Technical animation of the popular cartoon kind,

when

applied approxi-

works such as the sequence of Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge drawings, actually treats plastic images of dancers as though they were live performers and mately

to

not as the central forms in works of a two-dimensional

art.

Among

what such animation accomplishes is a “flashback” impression elements which temporally went into the making of the work.

The technique

other things,

of the

of the film has allowed us to see, as one continuous

dynamic

movement,

a plant growing from seeds below ground to sprouts and leaves above ground

(F arrebique) and a rose developing from bud to blossom. Analogous to

this

dynamic process is what the film may do with the progress of a painting’s creation. In a documentary on Matisse, we are shown how the artist developed his conception of a head in a series of sketches from a quasi-naturalistic version to the final form. This was done by superimposing the finished sketches transparently so that an illusion of organic evolution was obtained. Mickey Mouse as well as Lautrec’s dancers seem to turn into organic beings before our eyes. But in the case of Matisse’s head the visual intensification of an objective

element of mutation

is

added; in

fact, the

animation resides

strictly in this

element.

The

painting-in-motion genre of the film art has been long in existence.

The

pioneer Oskar Fischinger animated pure-abstract forms in a kind of ballet to

Norman McLaren and Whitney brothers) has been done in the experimental-film field. Of special interest is a little tour-de-force by Thomas Bouchard in his documentary on Fernand Leger. The distinct formal units of one painting, having been analyzed, were cut out, painted as in the work, and then, by way of Leger’s own hand, placed piece by piece in a position so as to reconstitute the picture. Previously Leger has been shown drawing directly from nature so that the collage opermusic and recently much work of this kind (notably by the

and

the film sense

the painting sense

ation of the film, especially since photographed from directly above, has an air of magic.

A

distinctive aspect of the

animated cartoons

is

background in contrast with the cavorting figure ground simply as a drawing.

We

sense the back-

with the blank ground of drawing

It is likewise

paper or canvas on which the designs of

the absence of motion in the in front.

through the

artists,

magic attribute of “organic growth.” Yet

this

film,

acquire the

blank “background”

is

not a

void but a physical plane surface limited by edges; in this sense, the sides of the

paper are equivalent

frame as projected. In the old days

to the sides of a film

when animation was becoming popular, a clown used to be born illusorily from an ink bottle in lines of ink, and the humor of it was his dependence on his creator for things to use, a world to live in, and sometimes even ground to stand

was a comic version of the myth of divine creation and like all myths we saw one of the ingenious UPA cartoons, Christopher Crumpet, in which properties and backgrounds are created as well as animated before our eyes, appearing and disappearing as necessary. Here, in a pointed sense, the world is shown as man- created, and

on. This

elements reverberate in time and space. Thus

its

this is

what, in our urban civilization, the visible world often

A great live in

problem of our time

and

their capacity to

or passively to be changed field

change

by

have contributed insights into

this

tion of the film’s aesthetic possibilities.

basic odyssey: that of the

world according to needs and desires

this

Imaginative workers in the experimental-film

it.

Blood oj a Poet, has been most

is.

the world which group and individual find to

is

human problem by ingenious exploitaThe classic avant-garde film, Cocteau’s

influential in this respect.

human

creator.

The

Cocteau created a

narrative fluidity of his film

was

oriented to definite stages so that the mutating image of the hero becomes a

spectator of closed interiors like small stage sets, visible to

keyhole.

an

The

final set,

the largest

and equivalent

exterior characterized as cosmic space,

plicitly that of all artists, is finally

Maya Deren The

is

a film-maker

him only through a

to a small theater, opens into

where the hero’s destiny, and im-

transmuted into glory by the

who has

profited richly

artistic instinct.

by Cocteau’s example.

theme of some half-dozen films by her is the odyssey of an individual in something like an obstacle race and behaving like a somnambulist or one moving through an actual dream. The rhythms are often choreographic and dreamlike, the visual overtones labyrinthine. When, in Miss Deren’s Study in Choreography for Camera, a dancer begins his movement in a wood, chief

always engaged

continues terior,

it

without the least interruption as the scene shifts to a private

in-

then to a hall in a museum, then to another interior and back to the wood,

we have an active, whose seemingly arbitrary and movements and of which he seems

reaching his climax with a triumphant sense of dance-flow, self-contained figure seen before a background

sudden mutations are independent of his quite unaware. This

is

a parable of the individual’s integrity in a changeable

environment. But what gives this dancer his implicit confidence in the continuity of the solid ground he requires for his steps? It

is,

I think,

the confidence of the

the three faces of the film artist

who

essentially creates his

dynamic rhythm he assumes

is

own space by

time and following

in

it

establishing

some

plastic or

through consistently. The “ground”

the basic, limited ground which every artist uses.

Evident in Miss Deren’s film fantasies (and in conspicuous ones by Sidney Peterson, Curtis Harrington, and Kenneth Anger)

nary visual world trol

which tension

in

and equilibrium within

it.

We

is

see the

of the animated-cartoon characters.

“Mr. Magoo,” is

The

same

basic

mean.

What

is

implied

theme

fabulous feats of

blissfully unconscious of his perils, is

special tension I

the creation of an imagi-

is

supplied by the protagonist’s effort at con-

is

in the

UPA’s

adventures

short-sighted

a distinct example of the

the very aesthetic of the film, which

the continual replacement of imagery (mutation of the whole composition)

while sustaining intact certain pivotal elements of substance, form and style.

John Huston’s Moulin Rouge and Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath are two films by scene, the latter consciously aimed at a Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro. In the nonchalant assumption of the usual commercial film that the only necessary formal element is plot and that merely conventional “framing” and clear photography are required for that have profited from the sense of painting; scene

plastic values,

we

find the reason for the vulgar journalistic look

and formless-

ness of standard movie products.

The

Hollywood cameras

up” space on their recurrent Hollywood conception of space as a jungle, a chaos, whether void or occupied. Art, on the contrary, is produced by the controlling principles of a cosmos, which underlies all casual aspects of confusion and variety and represents destiny as opposed to chance, form as opposed to formlessness. To achieve a meaningful art, the film has frantic drive of

“trips to the

moon”

to invent not only in terms of its

formal law which

to “eat

directly reflects the general

it

own

exclusive nature but also in terms of the

shares with painting. Documentaries and newsreels can

passively resign themselves to reporting. Creative films must obey a synthesis of aesthetic principles that have existed since the origin of the visual arts.

A

scrutiny of the animating devices

can be formally initiated and

48

may

inspire us to perceive

artistically controlled within

how movement

a given space.

The Artist Portrayed and Betrayed

Does “the”

artist exist?

The

bohemianism, the myth of his

cult of the artist’s

genius allied to his abnormalcy and extremism, the statistics, often so misleadingly publicized, of his strivings, his

life

and

his death, all

have enormous

currency and have crystallized here and there into popular stereotypes. That

an

artist

should be antisocial

haughty and harsh,

if

is

no surprise

not ashamed of

its

to people

own

excesses

who

believe that genius

is

and strange look and thus

“shy.” Painters have always enlisted unusual public interest because they provide such concrete “imitations” of flatter the individual



to give

life.

They

him a lovely

are empowered, above

perhaps overlooked or sabotaged. Certainly this Toulouse-Lautrec, a dwarf, yearning after

homage

genius paying his his

own

image. It

is

to

all,

to

portrait of himself that nature has is

part of the charm of seeing

women whom he paints:

the crippled

beauty and perfection beyond his reach, alien to

of a very sad, but perhaps symbolic, significance that in

Huston’s Moulin Rouge, the most ambitious fictional “portrait of an artist”

Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec should be given not merely a known image, but also a forged Lautrec hand work and a forged Lautrec portrait of a lady: Marcel Vertes was

since Korda’s

stuffed-suit incarnation of his

drawing his

the stand-in for these details of performance. Though we had, in Moulin Rouge, some unusually good “atmosphere,” including the Technicolor, we also had an

emphatic token of the spurious conviction of the movies that anything shape of a photograph

is

in the

triumphantly persuasive of truth.

Lautrec’s legs are the disguised thighs of an actor with normal-sized legs.

When

Lautrec

is

seen reclining, the visible trouser legs are stuffed. Mr. Ferrer

was well instructed in the stances, moving and weak legs, who usually has to look skyward to Bailey angle of the artistic genius

we

is

here

inert, of

someone with

short,

The Barnum and given a naturalistic shaking-up. And see things.

are supposed to be grateful for a milieu of scientific conscientiousness which

shows us so faithfully a famous painter truth

is

he lived. But the actual modern modes in fiction such matters. A bitter and

in his habit as

that all the clinging-to-fact paraphernalia of

serves only to emphasize the fudge at the heart of

)

the three faces of the film

beautiful story, with an appropriate image of the

louse-Lautrec’s

What we have

life.

man, could be made

“realism,” itself only a frosting over of

any responsible image

Tou-

himself to death over a one- woman love

is

more grotesque

The

of the truth.

who

convention of a sacred/profane eroticism and of the great genius

about Lautrec’s

of

a politely iced dose of sentimentalized

is

in itself

drinks

than anything

real life.

But keeping movie cameras away from the “story of a genius” stereotype would be

like

keeping ants out of unprotected sugar in the country.

than-mythical assumption of the movies natural domain of sweetness which, equivalent,

is

is

that happiness

is

by some machination

some

The more-

vast, quasi-

of the devil or his

human consumption. The artist becomes happiness no less than its natural enemy and victim;

repeatedly spoiled for

a natural apostle of this

usually his agency (egotist that he plastic imitation of life has

supernatural, about

is)

directed against himself.

is

something wicked as well as sublime,

if

That

the

not actually

an axiom of which vast numbers of people are con-

it, is

vinced by their education and experience of the world. So

it is

with the spell

by the sidewalk artist who sketches your head for a dollar, and so it is with the spell cast by Gauguin, who was so odd as to renounce modern comfort and a “respectable” existence to be poor and paint naked natives in the South Seas. The milieu which entranced Gauguin and unloosed his full genius, as imitated in Albert Lewin’s Hollywood production of The Moon and Sixpence, has all the authenticity of a department-store display. Indeed, it is as bad as cast

the use of the white-man-gone-native stereotype which Somerset

vulgarly exploited for the novel on which the movie

is

Maugham

based and which was

submissively followed by Lewin.

Heaven

artists their

catering to crude and vulgar is

cater to these myths, as

it

due “dignity”

handed

artist!

they

of deliberately

But what they do instead

were, off the cuff and automatically. Such an ad-

to sophisticates in this

in the typical studio;

artistic that

myths about the

vanced movie art as Lewin’s, therefore, slyly

—so advanced and —should be accused

forbid that serious movie-makers

on giving

insist

is

day

an art of camouflage: sops more or

of enlightenment.

gone the beret, the flowing

tie,

Gone

less

the nude model

the loverlorn look that,

if

make people laugh. People might easily made of her in The Blonde Venus and at what

seen nowadays at the revivals, can

laugh at Dietrich and the statue

happens

to the

work and

its

subject.

But obviously the Pygmalion legend still is seen in Rembrandt when the

appears in rented, albeit “correct,” clothes. It artist

persuades his housekeeper

What

—dressed—

to take Galatea’s role.

could be more correct as theatrical

mummery,

in

Rembrandt, than

Korda’s careful pictorial reconstruction of Holland according to the Dutch painters?

—the Dutch

Though

the

screen

quite capable of imitating Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro (as

was

is

painters, that

demonstrated in Dreyer’s

Day

of

is,

Wrath

other than Rembrandt.

it

was Vermeer and

his lessers that

Korda’s photography sought to emulate. Certainly, according to the film laboratory’s bible,

Rembrandt looks better moving

in

a light to which photography

is

and betrayed

the artist portrayed

thought best to correspond: dramatic contrasts, sharp silhouettes, “sculptural”

And, indeed, he

clarity of form. his outside.

which the

But

this

artist is the

Of

creative work.

is

seen better

if

by “better”

is

implied merely

means, too, the “outside” of the familiar stereotypes in hero of a romance, not the hero of a

course,

Rembrandt (played by Laughton)

life

is

dedicated to

certainly

as a painter, with a specific painter’s presumed temperament, but

be embarrassing to check the recorded facts of his

life

it

shown would

against the “facts” of the

screen story about him.

In the movie process, the loss to truth by approximation, theoretically only a technical one,

is

willy-nilly a loss to truth in substance. It

technicality that Gauguin’s leprosy.

eczema becomes,

to

Lewin

in

Wilde’s ambiguous fable,

may seem

only a

movie and novel, Strickland’s

But the solemnly silly insinuation is that leprosy

of an artist’s spiritual corruption. Art as the

made

in

is

the physical allegory

image of corruption came readyThe Picture of Dorian Gray. But

had nothing to do with Wilde’s story. It was the employment of a legitimate painter, Ivan Albright, rather than some anonymous hack, to achieve the fatal Hallward portrait of Dorian down to its in this movie, the chief “authenticity”

last stage of corruption.

Granted that here we see a

in the ridiculously faked

real painting (as we do not Gauguins supposed to be Strickland-ne-Gauguin’s

masterpiece going up in flames),

it is still

not the sort of corruption that Wilde

visualized for his imaginary heartbreaker. Exactly the literal flesh, is

emphasized.

The

truth

was

wrong

aspect, the one of

that Albright’s talented obsession

with decadent flesh was seized on by Lewin as a super-photogenic element. Striking in artificial

its

own way,

was quite the wrong insight into Wilde’s very Lewin was plausible to give Hallauthor of the portrait, a nice clean face and a velvet jacket, this

allegory of the corruption of love.

ward, the fictional

the latter typically Victorian, but the conversion of his pseudo-Sargent portrait first stage) into Albright’s hyperbolic modern style was a false translation what would be apt to happen, even magically, on a canvas in Wilde’s era. Romantic movie style hits the loneliness of an artist as “Oh, the loneliness!” and the pity of Lautrec’s physique as “Oh, the pity!” and the Gauguinishness of Maugham’s Strickland as “Oh, the Gauguinishness!” But, as it is hard to evaluate the self -isolating impulse of any specific artist or the way in which a man of genius is to be pitied, so it is hard to express the definition of any artist’s identity. Gauguin did not always, or essentially, “loll” in the tropics when he wasn’t painting: he published a newspaper protesting the colonials’ treatment

(the

of

of the natives. It

is

hard even for serious prose biographers to do an

artist

both

honor and justice.

A recent

fashion, probably a result of Merezhkovski’s

nardo da Vinci, has given

rise to the

The Romance

use of a hybrid biographic fiction

less also part of the current scientific

mania

to “verify” all aesthetic state-

ments: a reactionary trend, I think, seriously damaging to the view of

much

is

of Leo-

—doubt-

actually “verifiable” in biographic items about the screen’s

art.

new

So

pre-

tentious fictions about artists (including recent fictional biographies such as

51

the three faces of the film

The

Titan, dealing with Michelangelo) that one

mantic element for granted; to

We

let,

supposed to take the ro-

is

so to speak, the romance “fall where

are supposed to divine the romance of an actual

hands and actually filmic

falling off the scaffold

man

it

may.”

having magic in his

he used in the Sistine Chapel. The

attempts to interpolate “naturalizing” details, concocted in studio and

laboratory, to provide a portrait of the artist while exhibiting his works has

been, as such, uniformly disastrous, and

may

reach a stultifying vulgarity, as

and Rodin, in which are represented the deserted glasses of Lautrec’s liquor parties, whose contents he always mixed and drank off, and the hands of “lovers” (owners paid by the hour), supposedly the inspiration of Rodin’s sculpture. The image of the artist thus transmitted is of a romantic fellow who might have worn a beret, been utterly handsome or monstrous, madly in love or morbidly self-isolated, whether he did or didn’t, was or wasn’t. But if there is one thing to be had, of recent times, in screen representations of artists, it is variety. With the huge boom in color movies and the popularization of “modern” art, even esoteric art came unexpectedly into the spotlight, it

did in brief art documentaries on Lautrec

arrayed in Technicolor, in Hans Richter’s fantasy, Dreams that

Buy. This ness

is

title

was

Money Can

too perfect an index that Hollywood’s money-minded-

all

not confined to Hollywood. In fact,

of motifs borrowed from

its

version of

modern

art as matrices

dreams came on the screen after Dali had been em-

ployed to illustrate a popular screen hero’s dreams with his Surrealist-painting ideas. Richter

had determined that modern

art

was as valid a

relative of

dreams

as the movies and sought to demonstrate this relation in terms that admirers of

Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman





could underif persuaded to look at them As though to cement the authenticity of his interpretation, Max Ernst and Fernand Leger appeared in person in what amounted to prop-imitated versions of styles and imagery in their work. The question I ask is: Why should stand.

an

artist’s portrait

be imaginatively authentic merely

if

he appear photographed

with the objects whose genre corresponds to the objects and that inspire him?

The

notion seems to

me

pernicious. It

is

mode

like

of behavior

having induced

Michelangelo’s ghost to materialize in order to get him to pose with some con-

temporary Italian gymnast.

The horrible cult of documentarism as “the truth” is firmly allied, alas, to the propaganda of the photograph as a parallel form of absolute persuasion. The authenticity of an artist’s imaginative world appeared

Blood of

much more

persuasively

where the inner tensions of an artist’s life were related to physical objects with something near the truth as verifiable through the artist’s personal testimony. But Cocteau (Surrealist orthodoxy to the conin Cocteau’s

a Poet,

trary notwithstanding)

is

a genuine

if

not always, of

late,

a perfectly sincere

and he, not another, made the film. A dazzling irony is secreted in his image of an artist who, while called a poet, is actually seen first as a painter, nude above the waist and wearing eighteenth-century breeches and white wig. Unquestionably, this costume came directly from Valentino as he appeared in artist,

and betrayed

the artist portrayed

a scene from the commercial film romance, Monsieur Beaucaire (the actor’s face

and

hair, in addition, are

much like Valentino’s). Surely we have an interwho is an artist in his own right produces a

esting subtlety here: a film-maker

convincing image of an artist by imitating the image of a screen

star. Isn’t

Hollywood naive to assume the opposite?— that by producing the image of a screen star it imitates a convincing image of an artist? The intuition that an artist is someone with a “uniform,” both mental and physical, is sound from a symbolic angle, but most dangerous in modern times. Just

how dangerous can be gauged

as a

melodrama

Out. In this

we

(or vice versa)

accurately from a social allegory disguised

which Carol Reed made

see the Artist as a type next to

economic and

offenses against political,

roughneck bohemian

artist

England,

in

Odd Man

an Ordinary Guy who commits

social laws.

Robert Newton as the

has been supplied with a costume-caricature out of

Dickens: old clothes and long unkempt hair as bristling as his temperamental

and drunkenness are once again the stamps bestowed on and drunkenness, that is, and wanton inhumanity. Perhaps the authors of this film fiction sat around congratulating themselves on their “realism” regarding “the” artist isn’t he as ruthless toward the human stuff he eccentricity. Dirt

genius; dirt



paints as a tyrant

is,

An odd angle (one doesn’t know Odd Man Out was aware of it) is that a valid

or was, toward a slave?

whether anyone connected with literary legend does exist

about the inhumanity of

artists as

a classic

trait of

Louys wrote a story about one of the late classic Greeks (Parrhasios, as I recall) who buys a slave just in order to torture him to death that he may copy his agonies for a painting of Prometheus bound. And he’s very theirs. Pierre

debonair about

Out

is

it,

of the hapless fugitive of the

him

in his studio so

cross.

dionysianism in

too. Possibly the painter’s latent

Odd Man

a reflection of this oblivious indulgence in cruelty. Anyway, he gets hold title,

now dying

of his

wounds, and

keep

strives to

he can sketch his features for a painting of Christ on the

Whatever point of truth about the

artist’s

nature

clownish allegory is quite dissolved by a glance over the

may

artist’s

lie

under

this

shoulder at some

of his finished works, which are hideous.

A really wondrous point

about those who are religiously conscientious about

such “reality” on the screen

is

the laissez-faire they seem to have concerning

work exposed as the products

the

artist involved is

of a

presumed

artist.

characterization and the allegory in a film such as

strued as a direct libel on artists and a

Of

course, part of

The

issue is that,

if

the

not a ranking talent, but any old dauber, then the type-

more

Odd Man Out

or less deliberate

movie nonchalance about taking

are to be con-

show

of insolence.

artists Mwseriously is

due

specifically to the exploitation of the popular unconscious hate for the artist as

a being assuming certain superior,

if

not really antisocial, postures and pre-

The screen’s cachet is torn between characterizing the artist as “just you or me” or as a monster of mythical proportions, whether clown or dis-

rogatives. like

guised werewolf. Elements of both are also in Scarlet Street, where they are

painted as

much like the Old Adam as possible. Here is a sort

of burlesque of the

the three faces of the film

Strickland prototype of a frustrated, neurotic, oh-so-vulnerable Sunday painter

who

is

an undiscovered genius. Since the part

art collector,

Edward G. Robinson,

is

not altogether creditable to the parties involved.

a once reputable director, Fritz Lang)

ambiguous

fairy tale built

come from?

—and

acted by Hollywood’s leading

this portrait of

is

an

The

artist

has a special brio

tone of the film

that the fable of genius

is

(made by

basically an



on an impenetrable mystery where does genius any comedy or melodrama to be made of it is quite legitimate because nothing about its values or meaning is certain. The Sunday painter here is some kind of morally emasculate, conventioncrushed barbarian who, though he has fallen hard for a pretty and pretty transparent hustler, believes in her and finally permits her to rob him of fame when (for money) she palms off his paintings as her own. This “genius” is thus discovered and celebrated on Fifty-seventh Street by proxy, and is perfectly happy until he finds out that his little lady has betrayed him with her boy friend, who had cooked up the plot in the first place. Then he murders her, escapes detection by a fluke, and begins the inevitable path to the gutter: no painter now and ruined by his conscience. The public, to be sure, is never so comfortable as when an artist ends up in a pit of corruption, whether it be Tahiti, a park bench or a lunatic asylum. What demon of sober judgment or unsober perversity, I wonder, induced Lang to cause to pass under our eyes again and again the most jejune and fakey daubs as the products of his hero’s genius? They are fit images to place by the image of Robinson as the Sunday painter, whose Milquetoast personality here allows him only a brief moment in which to be the beast he constantly was in his gangster films.

The is

that

paintings are independent statistics that the story in which they appear

also a fraud.

That Hollywood people can be blind

to such glaring statistics

while they cultivate their eyesight so assiduously for reading box-office receipts

may seem

to be in the nature of things, insofar as

peculiar inconsistency which, indeed,

has back of

it

may

it is

another example of that

characterize genius

itself,

but which

nothing of the animating, ordering and consolidating force of

What Hollywood cannot see (this defect permitting it to exhibit false and unconvincing images of the artist) is that the artist exercises a moral control over all contradictions and tragedies, personal and social, and that without such a control, he would not be empowered to create his masterpieces. The acceptance of the false-faces of art works that have to be clapped in as “props”

genius.

of a romantic hero

is

simply one side of a coin, the other side being the

jection of the true artist for

what he

is:

“eccentricities” are the instruments

a powerful and deep

he employs

human

for his ascent

re-

being whose

and conquest of

Parnassus. It is a relief to be able to note, in a foreign movie, a representation of an artist whose only weakness appears to be a casual addiction to erotic commitments. It occurs in Colette’s story, “Envy,” in the distinguished Italo-French omnibus

comedy, The Seven Deadly Sins, and that the

woman he

tells in

simple style

has just chosen as a mate

is

ruled

how a painter

discovers

by the envy she

feels for

the artist portrayed his kind of life,

share

both social and creative, because she

unfitted

by character

to

episode makes a point of his business-like attitude toward his

whom

he draws in the nude, and that his wife has no thought or cause

for sexual jealousy. Imagine, fans! too,

is

The

it.

model,

and betrayed

by the look

Here

—whose human

of things

is



artist and rather bohemian, and whose libido shows no dis-

an

ethic

agreement with the practice of his his true love because, beautiful

genius.

Be

sure: this

is

art; who, in fact, automatically relinquishes and sexy though she is, she is allergic to artistic

the heart, not the stuffed trouser legs, of being an artist.

55

A

Preface to the Problems of the

Experimental Film

The

history of the Experimental (avant-garde or poetic) film

is

a curious one

Hollywood phase, when professional workers with serious, as opposed to commerical, ideas decided on their own, and on very small budgets, to do imaginative work that used the camera the way a poet uses his pen: as an instrument of invention; it is significant that these professional workers were typically camera specialists, for the first step in visualizing the that even possesses

its

Experimental film as a distinct reality

is

to conceive the proper role of the

camera as a visual medium. In the big industrial studios, the camera



is

—now as

large as a public

monument

a sort of gargantuan fetish, a Frankenstein’s monster that can swallow and

reproject vast panoramic spaces as

on the new grandeur

symbol of commerce. The Experimental camera personal as a hunting

rifle

when compared

is

screens. So

not at

to the collectiveness of

battleship. If, in the art of painting, the brush

is

it is

all like that,

a

fitting

being as

cannon on a

traditionally the indispensable

instrument of work, in the art of film this instrument

is

the camera.

The com-

mercial industry regards the camera only as a carry-all, an ingenious baggage

compartment into which an

art is stuffed

and then purveyed

be unloaded in theaters. Actually the camera contains as

in

“magic reels”

many

to

secrets of “sig-

by modern painters who pour their forms on canvas. A standard technical book on the film by Raymond Spottiswoode is called A Grammar of the Film. Can one imagine a book called “A Grammar of Poetry,” nificant

form” as does a

pencil, a brush, or, for that matter, the spout used

or of “Sculpture,” or even “Playwriting”? No, one speaks of an “art,” or, at the

most rudimentary, a “craft,” of the established aesthetic domains, as with Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction. The “grammar”! This means the art is

—and so

it is

here



in the

kindergarten stage. Therefore, Jean Cocteau’s kindly,

paternally valid advice to a young film-maker is

who would

take his art seriously

to equip himself with a small camera, go out into the world, and impro-

a preface

to the

problems of the experimental

... In view

vise.

film

enmeshed with the

of all the factors

film craft, this

ABC

advice is very sound.

When medium

one scrutinizes the basic craft of communicating meanings to the film to just photographing, in the journalistic or sub-docu-

with

the arts to be classified as visual, with poetry in so far as

—as opposed mentary sense—one

sees that

all

common

a problem held in some degree in

it is

directly with images and, of course, with painting.

As a

deals

it

total theatrical art,

where the film combines with music and spoken dialogue, the auditory and

liter-

ary enter the scheme; one deals with a theatrical spectacle of a given and

complex kind. The movies, at

much

this point in their artistic history, are all too

a synthetic art of an “easy,” commercial type.

To

believe, however, that

mere appearance, automatically contributed an independent aesthetic dimension to the arts would be to believe that telegraphy as such contributed something independent to literature or photography something the film, at

its

independent to painting. It

is

true that

we can conceive “telegraphic”

literature

and “photographic” painting: literally translated Oriental ideograms are a virtual telegraphese. But literature and painting respectively absorbed the technical innovations of the ideogrammic phrase

produced optical register of the photograph. such,

we can see that from

the start

it

and the instantaneously

When we

re-

deal with the film as

has partially constituted a simple pictorial

documentarism, a kinetic visual journalism and a kinetic visual science. But

in

and education have simply absorbed new techniques of expression, new channels of communication; no new dimension has sensibly been added thereby to a visual art. It remained for the aesthetic instinct this regard, journalism

animating

all

The one if

gifted

the arts to

make

the ultimate filmic contribution.

striking thing about the Experimental film

and

sincere, automatically acquire a

but the independent art of the

film.

is

that

its practitioners,

unique aura. This aura

is

nothing

Let us concede without quibble that some

Experimentalists are naively misled, that some are even a bit opportunistic. It is

so

human and

“traditional” to be opportunistic!

right intuition of the art

whose essence

is

Many

film-makers, with a

the replacement of words with vision,

go astray or remain insignificant because, though their chosen path one, they have

more optimism than

talent,

more

is



such a thing, however, as stick-to-itiveness, a

one

will find that

first

first

cousin to intuitiveness, and

a young film-maker, once articulate as “having something to

say,” usually says

The

a true

who fall by the wayside in every art even, and most popular, the most commercial, forms of an art. There

ambition. But there are those especially, in the

is

unsatisfied vanity than sturdy

it

again,

and more complexly, perhaps says

virtue of film Experimentalists

is

the state

known

it

better

.

.

.

as radical, which

only means aesthetically speaking, being near the root of the matter, being close

enough

to

understand and maneuver the root of the matter. In the very simplest

sense, after certain technical rules of

perimentalist does exist.

This

is

is

mechanics are grasped,

all

translate his feelings into images as though

what he must want

to do,

must aim

at doing,

the film Ex-

words did not

must

set

up as an

57



the three faces of the film ideal.

may

Here the procedural question of the

be a shooting script



film script necessarily arises.

—even a shooting

There

script with poetic qualities such as

but unless its words can be successfully translated into had better not exist at all. The misfortune that befell the commercial film was, of course, the sound that

Eisenstein wrote optical terms,

it

became speech, actual words. It was a misfortune, however, only because the huge potentialities of the film as a visual medium had not been adequately one should say radically achieved before sound came and all too quickly triumphed. The history of the film art is a history of the corruption of an infant art before it had a chance to grow up; the stage play and the novel, the very media which intellectually and emotionally helped the movies develop beyond their primitive fairy-tale and vaudeville routines, also injected them with a virus of premature growth similar to the artificial intoxication of Easter plants, which must be sold at once, before their glory perishes through the same intoxication



that suddenly vitalized them.

For prestige, the early movies moved the heaven of the stage play and the earth of

all literature.

Commercial

famous Broadway successes, literary classics as well as

film, as partly

name

novelists.

the latest Cinemascope epic utilizes

now

a “poster”

—even

art,

had to advertise



and For prestige or ballyhoo, whichever,

classic actresses

the

same

Sarah Bernhardt

prestige devices, but what-

ever the intrinsic artistic worth of prestige sources, they put no

deceptive gloss on the hybrid product of the film as

expanding technical phases film art,”

To

to that synthetic

sum

it

more than a

has evolved through

its

of techniques, passing as “the

on popular screens today.

get more people into the theaters

—that

is,

to uproot

them from

comfortable living-room chairs in front of the television screen

have been overreaching stage and novel

to call

their

—the movies

upon the dynamic sensations of

kineaesthesia through the third-dimension effect and the illusion of being sur-

rounded by the area of vision instead

of,

In the case of Cinerama, the gimmick interior stations of actual flight

—and

moving vehicle

maximum

illusion;

is

however

cozily, being seated before

—the airplane and the automobile or any rapidly on a flying carpet of Cinerama screen has two “arms” perpetually

to take the spectator to far places

thus, the

stretched out to lure the viewer into the illusion that he third dimension because he seems to pass through

possible to science

is

it.

to use the theater as a substitute for

it;

is

that

experiencing a true

is, all

the visual help

brought to bear toward the illusion of passage through

space. Vain delusion! Because “italicized” physical passivity, in conjunction

with illusory flight through space, merely isolates the watcher from “reality”

without necessarily consolidating him with “dream.”

nous state of wish fulfillment while,

of

.

.

.

like the

man

He

exists only in a gelati-

in the stratosphere

who,

for a

was nowhere in particular.

The creation of space (a sense of dimension and human and even superhuman experience) is, of

the arts,

and each

art has developed special

means

all it

may

signify in terms

course, an objective of

all

of attaining specific effects

a preface of

to the

problems of the experimental

“grand” space. The stage

itself, in

film

the hands of

men such

as Reinhardt, felt

the need of involving the audience in the dramatic action as though the theater

were a kind of church; hence a spectacle such as The Miracle. This theater piece united the space of the spectator with that of the spectacle.

The modern

stage

has utilized the aisles of the theater, and various stations in the theater, as well

momore keenly by the

as specially constructed stairs, aprons, and ramps, to create the feeling of bility, so

that the spectator should feel the witnessed action

sensation of being involved with

Now, whatever

it.

the technical virtues of such procedures, however mechani-

and however much they may help weak productions of good plays and desperate productions of weak ones, the fact remains that the first law of projection exercised by a work of art is its appeal to the imagination and the cally clever

sensibility. In other words,

created

no matter what the means, the “space” ultimately

situated subjectively,

is

i.e.,

it

exists in the hearts

and heads

of the

But head and heart are not precisely the nerves. Unless the elaborate devices of mobility and depth allure, regardless of what art form be involved, assist serious motives in the makers and appeal to important feelings in the spectator, they are no more aesthetically significant

audience, and

if it

doesn’t, art has failed.

than seeming to chute the chutes at Coney Island or

fly

over the Alps in a balloon

while actually sitting in a theater before Cinerama or Todd-A-O. I

think the mobility theater, as a matter of fact,

is

a clever mechanical toy

work both ways, for or against solid illusion, depending on exactly what is done, when, and how. As a modish aesthetic, a director may get away with it and incidentally add a little shock value just as though the arm of your theater chair were suddenly to become electrified and give you a mild shock. I felt such a shock, with an accompanying puncture of illusion, when watching Tyrone Guthrie’s Old Vic production of Troilus and Cressida that played in New York recently. It was at the moment when Thersites, characterized as a that can



cynical spot-photographer of the nineties in Guthrie’s modernization of Shakes-

up with the Trojan War and its mock heroics and makes his On this occasion, it happened to be the aisle by which I sat, and I recall thinking, as he passed me, not of Thersites and what he meant to the action on the stage, but of the visible make-up of the actor playing the part and thus of the fact that, as a repertory actor, he also played Romeo, and peare, gets fed

escape up the

aisle.

that he seemed really

tall

rather than illusorily

either Shakespeare or the performance

had

tall.

At

this

tried to create

moment, everything

went

for nothing

but

a shock of dislocation. In a different way, the complex “depth,” “space,” and “mobility” theater of commercial movies accomplishes the same dislocation of illusion:

a shock that

being in a

New York

may

help would-be tourists to reconcile themselves to

theater rather than in Spain or Bali but that amounts,

by

aesthetic computation, exactly to zero.

Such commonly available experiences as these emphasize but one point in my theme: the whole shebang of the commercial film’s “space de-

relation to

vices”

amounts

to a pricked balloon

when

set next to the

most elementary poetic

;

the three faces of the film

step in an Experimental film.

Once

this

equation

is

understood and borne in

mind, the virtues of the so-called “professional” as against the defects of the so-called

“amateur”

radically

compromised and subject

(or, as the professional

true that the Experimental film also

pretentiousness

calls

it,

the “arty”)

become

is

immature, but

it is

honestly so, and

its

the pretentiousness of raw youth, inexperience, and the sub-

is

terfuges of a scarcity budget.

commercial film

world

to severe reversals of value. It is perfectly

On

the other hand, the pretentiousness of the

that of success intoxication, vulgar worldly sophistication,

is

and being just purse-proud. Experience can never help the commercial experience

smugger

it

gets

film.

and the more

Quite the opposite

— the more

careless of serious values. If

it sits

on

its

laurels

direction of old-fashioned corn or new-fashioned gadgetry.

Of course, there are

always exceptional directors, exceptional actors, exceptional “art” films the vicissitudes attending genuine talent in the film world,

step

up

cold,

if

it

and expects to hatch more of the same; if it becomes hysterical and panicky and resorts to desperate measures in the

“succeeds,” fails, it

has, the

it

to its status ten years after

it first

clicks,

if

—but

told truly step

by

would make the blood run

not also the hair stand on end. For one Bicycle Thief, there are ten

alleged masterpieces of Italian Neo-Realism; for one Cabiria, sneered at

Bosley Crowther, the film

critic for

The

New

by

York Times, there are a hundred

American, British, French, and Italian films that are no better than they should be,

and yet many

Crowthers.

I

of

which are greeted with smiles by the same and other Bosley

think a profound lesson

lies in

the following easily assimilated

fable of fact:

Two of the most honest and artistically memorable films to come out of Hollywood were certainly von Stroheim’s Greed and Huston’s Red Badge of Courage each remains, as is, a superior film standing out easily from the rank and file of commercial productions. But, even if Lillian Ross’s damaging book on Huston’s ordeal in making his film had not been written, the fact remains that, after their respective studios got

through with these two movies and they

were released, neither von Stroheim nor Huston would look at what had been

made of

the best, most serious effort of their respective careers.

Against the manifest vice of the commercial industry’s bureaucratic editing

and revamping system, the Experimentalist, merely by being in sole control (while perhaps working with one or two close collaborators), looms as Filmic Virtue incarnate.

The Experimentalist’s chief problem can hardly be

tion to be popular, as is the

the tempta-

commercial film-maker’s; at the same time, now

that film societies are growing so fast, the danger of such a temptation remains in the offing.

When

resisting a genuine vice, however,

an

artist

may stumble

on a virtue operating contingently as a “vice.” Exhibitions of the definitely avant-garde category of Experimental are limited in scope by the presence of radical optical styles (such as the systematic distortion of

as well as of esoteric subject matter

When

anamorphic lenses)

and approaches.

assessing the “problems” of Experimental film,

it is

important to

re-

a preface

to the

problems of the experimental

film

member that the phenomenon of the moving photograph appeared at a moment when there took place a radical change in aesthetic taste on the high level: when the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Expressionists, and then the Cubists in the visual medium of painting, and Symbolism and Surrealism rose up in literature. As a result, stage decor became symbolic, fantastic, and abstract, as these twentieth-century movements gained speed, in turn influencing the visual style of such epoch-making films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Berlin: Symphony of a City, and The Passion of Joan of Arc. To

and the Futurists appeared

be sure, those three films were primarily designed for popular markets, chiefly in

Europe. But already several painters and poets, among them the poet-painter

Cocteau and the photographer-painter that

is,

Man

Ray, had essayed poems

in plastic;

forms in motion, not as things but as forms or symbols. Hence, in the

very domain of the new visual of painting

and sculpture

art,

“the movies,” the twentieth-century struggle

to dispense

with naturalistic and classic forms found

a potent ally in the radical inspiration of film Experimentalists. Basically, the legend that the commercial movies have gotten no further than

nineteenth-century painting

is true.

Yet

photography as such invalidates the artistically

and creatively

possible,

it

it is

unfair to conclude, therefore, that

film as

an art of creative

caliber. Still

seems to me, are the visual novel and the

myth films, which have influenced avantmuch as his Blood of a Poet. But beyond even that, such is capable, as many more or less primitive experi-

visual fable; such, indeed, as Cocteau’s

garde film-making almost as the cinematic faculty as

ments have shown, of producing the textures and the “significant” or irregular

Norman McLaren’s color what I mean, while Sidney Peterson’s Lead Shoes has the best anamorphic photography I know. Thus, by being “radical,” capable of sympathy with the newest styles of visual art, the movies possess, in the work of the Experimentalists, the one youthful factor that forms of modern painting

itself;

so far as they go,

abstractions set to music are ideal illustrations of

is

not a

symptom

fulfillment as

of arrested development, but rather one of

much promise

of

an adult art.

Among real dangers to the Experimentalists’

fire of

youthful enthusiasm must

be listed the temptation for facile emulation of the forms and textures of modern painting, as though the film were mainly Abstract Art operating in the of

movement. Here the very mid-century

focus.

What is the aesthetic

future of the

crisis of

domain

the visual arts comes into

human image and of

that surface repre-

sentation of nature which the photograph seems so eminently adapted to register? is

The

link between the film

and a “distortional”

style such as Expressionism

plain enough and demonstrably evident: camera angle, exaggerated close-up,

film, makeup, and decor are elements already used many times to the end of “Expressionistic” film. But if Expressionism is currently on the rise in

melted

painters’ studios,

ism.

it is

At the same

Exwhat may be termed emotive, forms is most suggestive. Art must so long as humanity remains human, to the emotional gesture, to

pressionistic, or

ever return,

so chiefly as the sheltered ally of all-powerful Abstraction-

time, the very retrenchment of Abstractionism within

the three faces of the film

the

we

human image itself though it be reduced to hieroglyphics: made of crossbars and circles in animated cartoons.

to that

“man”

see

It

seems not only the duty but the destiny of the Experimental or avant-garde

film to use both surface nature

and the

literal

human image

as a vehicle of visual

creation that eventually will reconstitute the lost supremacy of the hero of the

nineteenth century. This will not

mean

a revival of the nineteenth century as

rhythm which has always taken

such, but a mere reallocation of that cultural

human

place and which will take place so long as appraisal of

all

tradition, including the

abstract style. Here

is

the root of visual style

civilization survives:

a

re-

modern, and a new criticism of the

the value of the Experimentalist strategy: to be near

sense in the infinite possibility of distortion a

itself: to

purely expressive means; to regard, in brief, the image-distortion of a Caligari

and the visual-angle displacement

“grammar”

of a

Joan of Arc (Dreyer) as a mere

of those formal inventions discussed in the books of great practic-

ing craftsmen such as Eisenstein

and Pudovkin.

Acquaintance with poetry and

by such pioneering the American Lot in

ritual has been encouraged in Experimentalism Blood of a Poet, Andalusian Dog, L’Age d’Or and Sodom. Many valuable lessons have thus been learned even

films as

in the partial successes of

young

film Experimentalists. Alliance with the art of

dance has been as important as with that of painting, ritual contribute

most of the style-atmosphere

.

.

image charged with complex relations so as

ture, the

for in dance, poetry

to be a kind of living

meta-

phor; such are the nude, basic implements in poetic film as well as in dance. novel, despite

James Joyce and the

Surrealist

movement,

is still

having fallen back badly into stale nineteenth-century habits. This reason, doubtless, for the triumphant mediocrity of

national colleagues. “Fabulous” patterns of to inhere in the novel,

aware of

this

by

is

part of the

Hollywood and

human behavior,

and some contemporary young

The

too realistic,

its inter-

of course, continue

novelists have

become

even apart from the special influence of Kafka’s novels. Disguised

The Bicycle Thief by De Sica-Zavattini and La Strada and Ca-

fables such as biria

and

the formal, symbolic ges-

.

Fellini

have appeared

lizing” of Cocteau,

which (as

in healthy distinction to the self-conscious “fabuin

The Eagle with Two Heads) slipped into a taste. Very young Experi-

decadent romanticism unjustified by preciousness of mentalists, just arrived on the film scene, are plest forms of

aware of the fact that

in the sim-

human behavior, such as the deathless theme of adolescent sex and

its pristine discoveries, lie

hidden some of the most indispensably meaningful

patterns of legend, ritual, and myth.

Films by Experimentalists Sidney Peterson, Willard Maas, Stan Brakhage,

Maya

Deren, Curtis Harrington, Charles Boultenhouse and Kenneth Anger,

though a significant style

is

attained in only a minority of their films, illustrate

human emotion

in the Initiation Rite, which is a lost and dance which themselves may tend to disguise its presence. Actually, the chief problem of film Experimentalism is to find in ordinary behavior, where pure instinct is given the widest range and

the profound situation of

tradition of fable except in poetry

a preface

to the

problems of the experimental

film

myth The very

achieves the deepest sense of freedom, those prime sources of ritual and

where humanity refreshes and fact that the

renders

its

revitalizes itself as in a mystic bath.

Experimental film uses, to begin with, the

most

literal optical register,

opportunity to create extraordinary visions.

fertile

men and women

simple, the everyday, to see

lumined with inspiration, becoming rhythmic, behaving as

dreamland rather than

most

in the conscious,

startling transformations in things,

were “the order of the day” Experimentalism. For

all

.

.

this

.

this to

waking world and

.

in time, as

“magic”

To

see the

as they are in mirrors, but

is

.

.

if

and

il-

they were in to create the

though such processes

the kindergarten stuff of film

comprise more than a talented exercise, a

stimulating blackboard lesson, film workers have to try very hard and must possess, to begin with,

an innate

the space in which images

beyond

this, in

of themselves

order to get something on film

able, film-makers

with images and controlling and are moved by the camera; that is distinguished and memor-

gift for inventing

move

must have something

of their

own

to say: a personal

message

as well as poetic inspiration.

Naturally, a good deal depends on the amplitude of the mere mechanical

means, the availability of technical equipment, which in monetary terms

is

ex-

tremely expensive and, even with the most discreet and canny usage, tends by its

nature to be wasteful. This aspect of the problem

responsibility of the

perimental

film.

In

is,

to

some

all

discouraging fact, there are far too few provisions in the

charters of institutions of public benefaction covering film work, and

do

exist,

The

extent, the

Powers That Be and the well-wishing public of the Ex-

when

these

they cover uncreative rather than creative work in the filmic medium.

bright solution of the film Experimentalist’s problems, therefore, depends

mostly on his own immediate

means at

skill

and energy

in demonstrating, with the limited

his disposal, the inherent virtues of filmic creation.

63

more

or less mythical

Dream

Structure:

The Basis of Experimental Film

In the twenties, American amateur film-makers were inspired by the most

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Eisenmain sources of inspiration, the result was not quite what might have been expected, and yet the reaction by those of aesthetic bent against the commercial motion picture had definite results in two inexpensive, noncommercial types of film: the cine-poem and the city-symphony. The former included trick stories told with objects, among them Story of a Nobody (Lewis Jacobs) and No. 9413: The Story of a Hollywood serious examples of foreign film, notably

stein’s

Potemkin. Considering the

Extra (Florey-Vorkapich) to

Dawn

(Stern-Byrne)

;

level of these

simple essays in basic

;

or fantastic

of Robert Wiene’s Caligari, such as

de-force

vision of a in

drowning

commerical

film,

film.

tales

as

Dawn

directly under the influence

from Poe and a psychological tour-

lifetime rehearsed through the fleeting



man an idea that might be, and probably has been, used What distinguishes the record of American Experimental

which today has arrived at decided prestige and an accelerated growth,

the absence of the

hokum and

pensable to Hollywood; it

two

named The Last Moment, a

human drama, such

melodramas

might seem now,

so,

may

is

elaborate vulgarity that seemingly are indis-

such an oddity as The Last Moment, however crude

be taken as free of the systematic effort to

public by prettifying and simplifying; but above of translating the irrational element of

human

all,

flatter the

free of the aesthetic crime

experience into cheap rational

equivalents.

At the same time, through

its

superior honesty and direct feeling for pictorial

beauty, Experimental film for the last four decades has been nothing artistically

“proper” and even, in certain respects, “conservative.”

plex visual patterns and vivid contrasts of the

modern

if

not

The com-

city inspired the early

Experimentalists to seek artistic effects in pictures

by means

made by buildings, especially camera angles and arbitrary “framing,” so that approached a certain geometric style of abstract paint-

of extraordinary

aesthetically their films

67

the three faces of the film

At first, the city-symphony and the cine-poem existed side by side in a domain of aestheticism. When films appeared such as Ralph Steiner’s H fl, entirely of water patterns, and Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island, an impressionistic study of Manhattan, nature and man’s world of machines and architecture seemed pleasant bedfellows. Abroad, abstract painting had come into its cinematic inheritance with films by painters: Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mechaniquc and Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, a film made of ing.

single

painted spirals on revolving disks. But by the time the forties arrived, the city-

symphony had

definitely evolved into the informational

and

socially conscious

documentary, usually one part moral reform and the other part newsreelism (the most interesting and competent example, this group). It

is

impossible to estimate

The

City, remains archetypal of

how much “pioneering”

film talent,

aware of the pure values of the imagination, have been lost to commercial opportunities and their ingenuity wasted. Of course, some has been lost, and to Experimental film must seem,

their originators, those primitive efforts in the

now, like true enough excursions into Dreamland. so

The far cries from the original artistic impulses of the American amateurs, much impressed by the imagination of Caligari and the narrative art of

Potemkin, became

indeed. Despite weird dreams and other experiences of

far,

subjective and psychological nature, the approach

by the Experimentalist

to

both art and reality has been more genuine than that of the commercial film-

maker. Gradually, in view of thousands of productions down the years, Holly-

wood has managed

to

do at

consistently, intensively, effects”

least once all the things that Experimentalists

and sincerely:

i.e.,

do

use of the vocabulary of “special

(dissolve, multiple exposure, distortion of image, stop-camera,

and

slow- and rapid-motion) as well as the basic film vocabulary, or “grammar,”

denoted chiefly by the term montage. Though technique

wood

divinity,

montage

is still

is

a lower-case Holly-

such a caviar quantity in the movie city that

just as the make-up man and But technique in the montage sense used to be the bread-and-water of the cine-poem and the city-symphony, which as labels are more historic data than familiar usage. These genres, truly, were nothing if not self-consciously formalist and even somewhat stiff and limited. All the same, reality or a widely conceived

screen credits are given the experts

who

create

it,

the costumer are credited for their contributions.

“nature”

—received



the important tribute from the Experimentalists of not

being distorted or sentimentalized—at least, so

it

was loosely assumed, and as

and benevolently, we may regard them in present-day perspective. Yet actually a formidable road lay open to serious film-makers; it was, indeed, the loosely,

road to Reality, but

its

patron deity was Science rather than Art, and

muse Journalism. Thus came

into being the school of

its

favorite

documentary as

distinct

from that of Experimental: the worshipers of Fact as against the worshipers of Fiction, the latter becoming a dream to be shunned rather than explored. In

68

necessary to

observing so morally decisive a

split, it is

that Experimental film

adjudged “decadent,” or merely “Surrealist,”

is

to be

let

perish the thought

dream

structure: the basis of experimental film

or (in any case) “obscure

and incomprehensible,” as

it is still

called

by the

backward.

The

nominally Experimental films to gain an international reputation,

first

and to be shown in New York theaters as well as in educational institutions, were respectively Surrealist and quasi-Surrealist: Dali-Bunuel’s Andalusian

Dog and

Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet. Yet, having

much

“Surreality” in

common,

these films were built on opposed theories of aesthetic value; Cocteau never

belonged to the

official Surrealist

movement

in Paris.

The use

of the automatic

image and the supernaturalist manipulation of bodies (active or inert, human or otherwise), as well as a general character of the poetic and fantastic, were

two films held commonly not only with each other but also with German and American Experimental films of the twenties and thirties;

traits these

certain

for example, with such

which applied a

an important work as Lot in Sodom. (Watson-Webber)

free poetic treatment to the Biblical legend.

The

tion of decadence that has accrued so easily to artistic fantasy

popular misunderstanding, based on the fear of inward

and frightened people

self that

is

evil reputa-

the result of

sends distressed

to psychiatrists.

We must look to the canon of the dream itself to find what most draws and most repels people confronted with Experimental films. Of late years, in both and native films, there have been numerous, more or less serious attempts dreams as clinical realities, but the clinical perspective is extraneous artistic aims and the challenge to Experimental films must be met on its own

foreign

to deal with

to

The orthodox criticism of so-called “Surrealist craziness” in these films however ingenious or “pretty,” this dominant element divorces itself

ground. is

that,

from “reality.” “realistic,”

I

would ask:

Is

a poem “real”? And answer: Yes, but

even in narratives, for normally

elisions (equivalent to a type of

or temporal order.

A

uses

many

,

is

is

especially

it is

rigid logical

complex and “irregular”;

the psychic order of association

“poem,” one might remark,

is

seldom

figures of speech, time-

montage) and as a rule follows no

Modern poetry

basic order, like that of dreams, gestibleness.

it

its

and sug-

what a cine-poem normally

sets

out to be.

With respect to emotions aroused by situations in drama or novel, and even by certain qualities within language itself, “poetic” is an adjective perhaps too easily applied. Even documentaries, we find, sometimes seem “poetic.” One might speak of Robert Flaherty’s of its sequences,

last film,

and surely a recent work

human

Louisiana Story, as poetic in certain of documentary-fiction,

One,

is

tions

do not define the chief purpose of either of these

threaded with a poetic

tenderness.

But such

The Quiet

adjectival qualifica-

films,

nor do they justify

by the distinctive standard of what may be called the Experimental cinepoem. A theme similar to Flaherty’s in Louisiana Story appeared in the Hollywood film, The Yearling; while the latter was pretentious in certain ways, it was fundamentally, and in fact more consciously, what Louisiana Story was on its human side: the sex initiation of a pubescent boy a vestige of ritualism as either



old as the

hills.

the three faces of the film

As a thoroughly modernized, or

quasi-scientific quantity, reality

removed from the intensive aestheticism and fantasy world film.

much

is

of Experimental

Rightly speaking, however, reality includes imagination and mind, no less

than their counterparts, fact and body. This comprehensive notion of reality

might be termed an axiom utterly

by documentarists of puritanic

lost sight of

temper when thinking of the technical ingenuity of Eisenstein’s famous

tale of

the rebellious battleship Potemkin, and of the classic naturalistic outlines of

Flaherty’s pioneer records of exotic and primitive places; obviously, Flaherty’s

“primitive” reality has extended to current practice with results quite as unfortunate as fortunate. of these

The most genuinely impressive

two men were that they took the

filmic

about the work

facts

document as an adequate con-

—not the customary “short subject” but a long “feature film” — and that they undertook the given task with a sense

ception of

ness.

as

life

The newly won

subject, a

as

prestige of the feature-length

work, Que Viva Mexico! unavoidably

to the ill-fated Eisenstein

of right-

documentary was attached left to

us only in

fragments edited by other hands.

While a poetic stein project,

it

reality

emerges even through the warped forms of

this Eisen-

holds aloof from the cine-poem developed by practising Ex-

perimentalists through remaining securely in the everyday world of waking experience.

The most

persistent charge against the Experimental school

is

that,

seeking fantasy and “night-mind” experience, they overexploit camera tricks

on the formal side and hallucination on the side of content, and thus indirectly flout “reality.” If reality

be conceived at the level of the conventional, quasi-

realistic novel, or of the facts

read in the headlines, or of elaborate research in

phenomena such as undertaken

natural

— truly—Experimental

then

in recent years

by

the Disney studio,

film has very little to do, directly or indirectly,

with reality. Obviously, on the other hand, reality should be taken at a higher level,

from a deeper and broader viewpoint, than any

visible in

expression as those just given, even though such models, like

such models of life itself,

may

supply facets on which the imagination can legitimately build.

The metaphor,

the automatic image of the Surrealists, the

dreams or trance— this

trio of

elements

make

phenomena

of

neither subjects for “scientific”

inquiry nor yet “abnormal” fantasies for morbid exploitation by irresponsible persons.

They

As

signify cardinal points in the Experimental film creed.

for every genuine artist, they are part of, or a technique for expressing,

human

experience, a working of the imagination projecting itself honestly in

terms of a given medium. Reality

important sense,

is

subjective as well as objective and, in an

fiction as well as fact.

In the determined,

position of documentarists to Experimentalism, tion of the imagination as a significant

Among

we

if

not always

form of experience in

the greatest works of drama, poetry,

kinds.

The imagination

fair,

op-

find nothing but the rejecits

own

right.

and painting, nature and “normal”

reality are indeed usually present but sometimes, notably, in symbolic all

true

normal

forms of

uses facts only as starting points, as elements of



dream

structure: the basis of

experimental

composition, for a total form expressing

if

film

not always identical with a complete

human experience. As a human motive, art has its genesis innerness, man is not a living soul but a

within man, and without this basic living thing.

huge

typical heroine climbing over the roots of a latter

—as she disappears above —changing

We

Maya

see

tree lying near

into a long table in a

it

room, on the top of which she crawls as through the underbrush of a

we

ward,

Deren’s

a beach, the

banquet

forest. After-

see her like a sleepwalker walking, running, climbing through a space

periodically undergoing “magical” changes of scene; yet her action, the duration

human

of the

dreams and

in

kinesthesia,

continuous. This

is

poetry and in certain kinds of

is

a normal phenomenon in

fiction, particularly in

mythical

and magicians perform supernatural actions. The realistic power of the photographic image, on the other hand, is such that audiences are inclined to believe that reality is before them as in an ordinary mirror, passively poetry, where gods

recording ordinary images. Cocteau, however, has assured us that art’s mirror magical.

“Magic” itself may be no longer, as once

in nature, but certainly

many

it

of our experiences,

if

was

we

is

believed, visibly present

care to note or admit

it,

what is hisa truism that the film camera is

are uncanny and suggest in their spontaneous nature the structure of torically described as supernaturalism. It is

active as well as passive; that

all

we know

as “film technique”

is

a product of

cinematic inventiveness and manipulation formally parallel with the structural

known

theory of actual magic. But cannot this widely

and hallucinations

imitate magic, dreams,

—be used poetry, and— that as

it

pleases

cavalierly used

by Hollywood

to express reality primarily as imaginative reality, as

visual style to

in

faculty of the camera to



which Experimental films give prominence

pantomime? The only element dream finds necessary to reach order is rhythm. Art supplies this. It seems only technically feasible, then, to let the camera photograph what it is, by its potential nature, fitted to reflect best. Camera trickery, so close to stage magic but much more, and infallibly, dextrous, is used often for comic effect in commercial films; the same tricks, indeed, appear copiously in French films circa 1900-1910, when the motion picture was only toddling. Yet the particularly as a sort of dance ritual, a ritualistic

the

truth

is

that mental action itself

barrier toward recognizing this

is

may

be of the so-called magical order. The

merely the superficial and limited, but hard,

form the mind must adopt to move about for

One

its

daily tasks in the external

Hollywood directors, John Huston, during an interview given some years ago to the New York Herald-Tribune, called attention

world.

of the better

to the fact that the

may

movie camera imitates mental action

in the

way

the gaze

automatically shift around the room. This was an understatement, ob-

viously, for the

camera

is

capable of imitating

all

mental impulses, whether as

The wellknown state of daydream illustrates a more or less voluntary surrender of the ab-

simple as a shifting gaze or as complex as a sudden hallucination.

stract visual attention to the

necessarily noticing

it,

meandering and sharp turns of the mind. Without

our minds are in the habit of “irrationally” mixing

the three faces of the film

thoughts and images of the external world, and entertaining disguised elements,

may

which

may

or

not come to the surface,

long. 1

day

all

When

mentalist deliberately utilizes this sort of mental behavior, he

not called, by most, odd, arty, or just

To

is

the Experi-

lucky

if

he

is

futile.

must be granted that the Experimental genre is far from persome of its outstanding instances. It is often guilty of lapses of and oblique breakdowns in form; also, it seldom has ideas of much be sure,

it

fection even in taste

originality or great significance. Extenuation for these defects fact that material resources are usually very restricted

film workers

and much too

little

financial

reward

is

is

present in the

among Experimental

obtainable from the circula-

and ingenuity

tion of their products. It takes a great deal of courage

the major effort typically required for a feature film; which

is

to

make

to say, to render

a complete imaginative experience, in fifteen to twenty-five minutes’ running time, at a cost of less than a thousand dollars, yet this filmists

is

what talented American

such as Sidney Peterson, Willard Maas, James Broughton and Miss

Deren among the older ones have done

in recent years,

and Curtis Harrington,

Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Charles Boultenhouse among the younger ones.

The

artists

quality of style and imagination in the bulk of

work by these

film

cannot equal the classical Experimentals of Dali-Bunuel or Cocteau, nor

such a unique imaginative revived in

New

York.

If

effort as the late

Jean Vigo’s Z6ro de Conduite, often

even Miss Deren’s structurally strong and intensely

personal films suffer from the Surrealist “cliche,” pains. In fact, perhaps the

Experimentalism

is

it is

most encouraging factor

only a variety of growing of

more recent American

the quality of dance ritual featured principally by Miss

Deren’s films.

The ritual instinct in man is inseparable from the rhythmic instinct; the human body naturally develops a choreography of gestures expressing its most intense, and especially its recurrent, emotions. The atmosphere of the private dream corresponds,

in a certain obscure

but exact sense, to the atmosphere of

modern ballets; Hollywood Gene Kelly and others having exploited dance as a fantasy-impulse of dream-like character. Mankind, after all, has traditionally danced its greatest moments at temple celebrations, at orgiastic fertility rites, in paying tribute to the dead. Dance is anciently an act of clairvoyance and magic. The choreographic inflection of ritual survives in the public fantasy- work, such as romantic and

itself

has become sensitive to

this,



church services as well as on the ballet stage; style of

movement

suitable to poetic

in a film already

it

appears significantly in the

mentioned, Lot in Sodom.

Human

gesture

symbolism and nervous rhythms of emotion appears

in

James Broughton’s satiric Mother’s Day and Curtis Harrington’s lyrically simple Fragment of Seeking. It is hard for the young and materially handicapped film worker to eliminate “amateur” notes in the bad sense. The attitude toward technique, more than the technical accomplishments themselves, ele1 One wonders if, even in more enlightened been properly learned.

circles,

the lessons of Joyce’s Ulysses have

dream

structure: the basis of experimental film

vates the vision and forms the importance. Mother’s of objects as fetishes,

and

for the

same

Day makes

spirit of using objects,

significant use

both Louisiana

Story and The Quiet One were to be applauded. Neither of the last two set in the usual, external, daily world,

but they

hold more than a few hints of the boy-hero’s private world as a realm

fertile in

exploits

dreams as such, being

fantasy states.

man

In devotional rituals,

revives himself through his generations.

pernicious element in anti-Experimentalist reasoning

is

Documentarist reasoning: dreams and hallucinations are and, as the typical modern psychiatric film,

split

The Snake

The

same as that

the

away from

in

reality

Pit, misleadingly

implied, are the natural resources only of psychopaths; of exiles from “normal,

right-thinking” society. This, of course,

now given a

is

an old story

in

popular attitudes

by the prestige of the idea of psychic therapy. Nevertheless, poetic creators in all media have perennially “dreamt strange dreams” as did the Psyche of Greek legend, the subject of one of Gregory Markopoulos’ films, and enriched vision with eternal ambiguity thereby. In dreams and spontaneous wild imaginings, man hunts down his innermost secrets, and by ritualizing this vein of the imagination, grows familiar with his inward, less conspicuous self. For its part, documentary film does almost nothing to mend the dream/reality split so insidiously and irresponsibly nurtured by Hollywood, while at least in theory, Experimental film is dedicated exactly to mending this split. In Hitchcock’s Spellbound, we found incorporated a Daliesque dream which indicated merely criminal guilt feeling and had to be treated strictly as a technitoward

art,

characteristic timely twist

cal obstacle to the hero’s happiness; psychoanalytically,

to eventually proving his innocence of the crime involved.

the

work

of the Experimental film makers, the

same

magical condition as operated in this dream-sequence analysis, as the

means through which

their ultimate desires.

must learn

To know,

to interpret the

as

it

provided the clue

On

the contrary, in

sort of supernatural or is

used, without psycho-

the protagonists are able to recognize

an audience,

this

supreme

distinction,

we

symbols in Experimental films not as psychoanalytic,

To assume them as having the same irrational premises by having, is itself a rational step toward making them con-

but as poetic, material. that dreams begin

tribute to cultural experience. This does not

mean

that their contents are to

be treated as “latent” and “manifest,” in the manner of psychoanalysis, and then translated into simple and concrete terms of logic; on the contrary,

means Blake,

it

we take for granted the metaphors in a poem by Donne, or Hopkins, we are to accept the dream-structure element of the pictorial that, just as

inventions of Experimentalism.

73

Film

The subconscious

Form and

Ritual as Reality

is a theme to which the As we know very well, the

ingenuity of commercial film-makers

present writer has devoted considerable attention.

conditions of the commercial industry are conducive, through the feverish desire to

supply what the public wants, to that extremism of pure device that often

borders on fantasy; of course, this has been most true of American movies,

unhampered as they are by

limitations of taste.

The dream

fantasy, consistently

with the vogue of “psychiatric” films, has become more and more pretentiously

A

comedian Danny Kaye, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, was one fantasy after another; the basic theme is private hallucination. exploited.

vehicle for the

At the same time, we witness

Down

to Earth, starring Rita

Hayworth

chore, abiding in an appropriately organized heaven, with a

(“Mr. Jordan”) who

is

very

much

how, enraged by a parody of herself

down

a vintage floorwalker. The plot

Broadway

show modern creatures the modern dance was here opposed

to earth to

Serious

like

in a

as Terpsi-

supreme monitor tells

musical, Terpsichore comes

“real goods.” to the vulgar, jazzed

up version

of

modernism. The representation of the Muses, including Terpsichore, was of course not

itself

serious but done with the tongue-in-cheek supernaturalism

more significant comedies as England’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Rene Clair’s American-made It Happened Tomorrow. As for Down to Earth, it should be noted that, like more than a few other Hollywood exhibits, it was unconsciously gauged to be parable-fantasy of what happens to the conceptions of serious art within the confines of the movie studios. Thus, Terpischore’s “real goods” is itself a Hollywood version of serious ballet, so that the revue-ized version of Terpischore’s ballet, seen in the same film, is but one farther remove toward vulgarity. The British production, Stairway to Heaven, was set in an elaborate vein that characterized such

typical of film fantasy. fide supernaturalism,

The movies

but do not

hesitate to accept a perfectly serious bona-

feel inclined to neglect

a genre so obviously

medium. After all, what is so mechanically close to the principle of ancient animism and that of latterday stage magic, alike, as

suited to the nature of the

film

form and

ritual

as reality

the film device of double exposure and such effects as the materialization of a

vapor into a person (as we saw in Clair’s 1 Married a Witch)} Stairway to

Heaven made use

of the stop-camera device very ingeniously to indicate a

supernatural order of time, but

way by H.

predicted that

The purely same

the

aesthetic value of

time,

many

note that

we

portrayed heaven as though

it

had been

it

G. Wells.

cannot,

movie supernaturalism

we take

if

is

not in question. At

the position of serious analysis, fail to

book The Film Sense)

film devices (see Sergei Eisenstein’s

have a basic kinship with literary and plastic devices in painting and poetry, notably with metaphor itself. Hence, in the light of tentative belief in the world of the supernatural, film supernaturalism

comedy.

It

must

rely

equivalent to myths and dreams, but wouldn’t so? Meanwhile

we may sympathize with

it

on the brand of pathos-

may

behaves as though to say: “All this

be mere hallucination,

be marvelous

if it

the dilemmas of those



to find themselves with supernaturalist experiences

were really

who manage

thus, logically, with super-

must oppose the lightand divine being that we habitually

naturalist beliefs.” Unquestionably, official religion

mindedly ambiguous view of

spiritual

—but such a

criticism

find in the

An

movies

is

not the present objective.

English studio has produced a film which, making use of the above-

mentioned pathos-comedy technique

in

melodramatic fashion, gives an arche-

typal form to the supernatural patterning of commercial movies. It

Night, so very significant because

is

Dead

of

not only has a typical kind of supernatural-

it

mechanisms which unite mechanism of dream and of supernatural hypothesis. Both dream literature and psychology, especially psychoanalysis, have made

ism, but also reveals in terms of parable the film film with the

us familiar with the recurrent dream. This over-all plot pattern of

Dead

of Night.

is

The

the basic subject as well as the film opens with the shot of

automobile approaching us along a country road;

it

stops; the driver,

its

an

single

occupant, looks at a large residence set back from the road; he turns the car into the driveway.

.

.

.

It develops, after

going on inside the house, that he

is

he becomes a member of the tea party

an architect who has been invited for a

week end

to discuss additions to the owner’s house.

architect

is

had

—a dream ending

To

But

it

also develops that this

experiencing in self-evident reality a dream which he has repeatedly in death

and

terror.

do to say that everything happens as foreby his dream, even to the point of his killing someone and violently striking a young girl the latter incident takes place in his own hallucination following the murder and constitutes the chaotic terror of a climax typical of dreams. grasp the form at once,

it will

told

;

Indeed, as the gentleman in question suddenly wakes up at evident that what

we have

seen has

all

been a dream

.

.

.

home but

.

in bed, it is .

.

the tele-

and we observe that he receives that original invitation which supposedly had actually drawn him out to the country and to the

phone

at his bedside rings,

house of his recurrent dream.

We

do not have a

startling novelty here, certainly.

But the device has an

75

the three faces of the film

automatically attractive ingenuity. Spectators of this movie, I had occasion to

“Ah!” and marvel

note, were inclined to exclaim

a bona-fide supernatural

somehow reality

tale,

the reality-principle

and dream

in such a

may way

ciate

it

There has been a

be involved. Indeed, the story has involuted

brilliant tour

arily

know as “truth” or

we have criticize

reflective wit,

is it

phenomena

of

it is

in

that comparing

quite lost

life, is

de force of the kind to

with sleight-of-hand on the stage;

phenomenon, and so ingenious

when they hear

that the basic condition of supernaturalism

as distinct from “naturalism,” or the verifiable sight of.

as people do

momentarily entertaining the hypothesis that

make us

asso-

a sense a perfectly manifest it

with the thing

we custom-

the content of “belief” seems redundant. Yet, of course,

which enables us

to descry the nature of the trick

and

it.

Viewing Dead of Night from one standpoint, we can easily condemn it as melodrama which goes out of its way to mock the commonest truths of

sheerest life;

hence,

it is

phists, could be

morally frivolous. Perhaps only that strange

sect, the

Theoso-

persuaded to take a systematic and wholly approving moral

view

if challenged to do so. There is, otherwise, the classic objection that in any case such phenomena are so rare as to be insignificant to man as a society. If an average member of the movie audience were asked pointblank if he “believed” that such phenomena as in Dead of Night could be real, he would be bewildered and probably answer that he was unable to decide. But he might go on to say that the separate episodes preceding the murder-and-hallucination sequence of the architect, and told by other guests of their own experiences, held phenomena which might be true; just so does one run across people who tell stories of supernatural things, usually involving telepathy, to whose authenticity

they can swear first-hand.

Now

us examine the plot mechanism in the round. The fact is that it is by the anticlimactic device of the architect’s awaking to reality, as though the whole film had been a dream, only to have reality reproduce the mechanism of the dream, that we are allowed to accept the whole thing as let

precisely

something more than a tour de force or form of fantasy. Because

if

the architect

had conclusively awakened to reality, the original plot-hypothesis of come true” would have thereby been part of the dream, and so the

his

“dream

film

would

have taken a purely cynical view of supernaturalism, since by the same token,

met at the house party would have been would merely have dreamt about having a dream not such a rare phenomenon. It is only through the phone’s ringing at the architect’s bedside and the actual occurrence of the invitation, that we the supernatural stories told by people ingredients of this dream.

The

architect



are once more, supposedly, in the “real” world of dream-come-true.

The

flavor of this

movie strongly suggests the work

of the playwright, Luigi

Pirandello, except that the latter juggles with the involution of fiction reality exclusively in subjective terms of the psychic convention.

net effect of

Dead of Night

is

As

and

I say, the

that of playing with a serious hypothesis as though

a

film

it

form and

were a

ritual as reality

One may

trick.

work which attached hypnotist.

The

recall

Thomas Mann’s Mario and

the Magician as a

serious symbolic significance to the antics of a stage

figure of

Mann’s mountebank had a

sinister quality

trayed the artist type he was supposed to represent as one

which por-

who “plays” with

things that in the real-life dimension are deadly earnest. In fact, the magic in

Dead is

However, the great Mann’s purpose and that of the makers of Dead of Night

of Night replaces hypnotism with ventriloquism.

disparity between

that the latter’s ostensible subject matter

is

not the normal

of society

life

but certain exotic phenomena on the margin, the doubtful realm that scientists claim (and artists are ready to agree) exists only in man’s imagination.

The

Mann’s story and the plays of Pirandello is that men are illusions and sometimes really die because they cannot correctly

tragic irony in both

victims of their identify reality.

A

law of reality

is

seen to triumph

insanity that overtakes Pirandello’s

—even

if it

“Henry IV.” As Henry IV

be the absolute also,

our archi-

tect is driven to kill.

In the case of the movie under discussion, while reality esis (that

the world

is,

we know

is

is

a necessary hypoth-

the inevitable setting even of such events

is left in doubt. Man’s decision as shown psychologically at the moment when he is dream from reality, yet there are no consequences of this “mo-

as shown), the intellectual nature of reality to the character of reality

unable to

tell

is

ment,” either moral or philosophical. Life merely goes on. The cyclic feeling of the film becomes absolute

when we

see the opening shot repeated at the end:

the auto approaches us along the road and stops as the architect looks toward the house.

The only

implicit reality

a harmless dilemma.

The

is



the eternal recurrence of

may

architect, ergo,

the terms of this fiction, but at least he

whole lifetime of waking up, that he

is

to

first to

this is

important—

know dream from

reality in

guaranteed eternal recurrence

experience great

relief,

and then



to realize

undergo the “nightmare” events of the dream, at the end of which

nevertheless he

is

assured (as though to be rescued from eternal damnation)

exemption by reawakening.

No judgment

tion of the reality-principle, has been life

is

not

of the nature of reality, no formula-

made except

to leave self-manifest that

has two qualities: “reality” and “dream”; the relationship between these

qualities

Now, that

is

in absolute suspense.

considering that a psychiatrist

it is

is

one of the characters in the movie and

he who upholds the skeptical views of science in face of the general

inclination of those present to credit supernatural

phenomena,

it is

only

fair to

take a more advantageous view of the proceedings than was available to this

unfortunate psychiatrist, tect’s

who chanced

to be the victim selected for the archi-

murder. In the view of psychopathology, the original mechanism of the

was carrying out the events of his recurmurder dream might itself be a fiction: a common enough paranoid phenomenon. Resistance to criminal deeds may become so desperate in certain

architect’s representation that reality

rent

psychotic types that eventually they are prepared to say that they have

77

the three faces of the film

“dreamed” what they

In this

finally decide to do.

may

be remarked by other members more profound than any

light, it

that the anecdotes in support of the supernatural hypothesis of the house party are themselves explicable

on a

level

suggested by the psychiatrist.

Not

go into too

to

many

man

plot details: the experience of one

is classified

by the psychiatrist himself as a trauma of the death fear, appropriately enough having befallen an automobile racer who has almost died in an accident.

A

lady

first

tells

of an experience dealing with the hallucination of a

man who

is

her fiance, then her husband; a psychoneurotic delusion transparently

based on an impotence neurosis, which

become

irrationally jealous of his wife.

atrist, its

first

The

makes him

and then by the psychi-

fear marriage

third anecdote

is

told

supernatural hypothesis being explained, accordingly, scientifically.

This story happens to be the only one of complete authenticity while most unusual,

in the film,

and

individual components are quite within the realm of

its

possibility.

Its basis is the homosexual complex comes the object on which he projects in

of a ventriloquist, his guilt.

When

whose

dummy

be-

another ventriloquist

dummy for his voice-trick, the first ventriloquist whom he now identifies with his guilty desires. As a

good-natured sport uses the

becomes fixated on

this

man,

with his guilt takes the form of imagining the dummy, called “Hugo,” has an independent existence and wishes to become partner to the other ventriloquist. The “rival” ventriloquist receives proposals made in Hugo’s result, his struggle

voice, apparently

on Hugo’s

lips,

signs of being intensely jealous.

proposals of which the

Here too

is

quite logical that, eventually, his career ruined and ventriloquist, the guilt-ridden

man

quist destroys for his rival,

him

who

dummy

fixated

dummy’s

tells

is

on the other

affections. This, indeed,

being restored to his owner in

Hugo

after is

still

should try to murder his rival under the

delusion that he has “alienated” the

happens. Finally, the

dummy’s owner shows

a familiar enough mechanism. It

him he has

jail,

is

what

the ventrilo-

definitely decided to leave

him

recuperating from his bullet wound. In a truly appalling

denouement, the ventriloquist, having

fallen into catalepsy, is

aroused only to

who visits him, in the voice and with the facial The transference is complete, the guilty desire now

greet the other ventriloquist,

expressions of Hugo.

.

.

.

in the open.

The presence

of this brilliant episode in the plot serves to root the movie

indisputably in a domain opposing

convention

;

common

about a pathological human being

in film. Its force is

of the other, less convincingly real, episodes. ventriloquist’s story is analogously stories; it is

only that the

room on

own

his

dummy

locomotion.

The

The

bound

to affect

made

our view

supernatural element in the

weaker than that

in either of the other

two

apparently goes to the rival ventriloquist’s psychiatrist plausibly suggests that without

Hugo’s owner took him there himself so as to be able make his accusation and stage his drama.

being precisely aware of to

pathology to the supernatural

surely, nothing so eloquent or artistic as this episode has been

it,

film

form and

What

I

ritual

as reality

wish to point out about these independent minor plots

We can

cance of their form rather than of their substance. their substance, as I say, with pathological

is

the signifi-

analytically identify

mental phenomena. The peculiarity

of their form in this movie, internally connected with the over-all plot (itself

explicable on psychoanalytic grounds),

be interpreted in terms of film

all cases

forms,

is

that the supernatural element can in

itself,

that

in terms of its technical

is,

quality of illusion.

its

In the episode of the automobile racer, the subject of the hallucination obtains it

while lying alone in his hospital room, reading a book; he looks at the clock

by the bed and observes that apparently eighteen hours have passed Something makes him rise and go to the

ticking

after only a few minutes’ ticking.

window, whose curtains his nurse has drawn before leaving him. He throws them back and looks out upon the afternoon light of a quarter to four rather than the dark of about ten at night. Looking down into the hearse

.

.

and so on.

.

Now

this hallucination

street,

he sees a

has occurred in a window space

that has exactly the shape (and even the opening curtains) of a movie screen.

We may note further that it is precisely in a movie after a matter of seconds. It is likewise at the

that

we

see

movies that we see

often fantastic and hallucinative in character;

day follow night artistic material

would, moreover, be amazing

it

to witness later, as the racing driver did in this case, the virtual repetition of the

vision in actual experience.

In the next episode, the frame of the hallucination, being a large mirror, has the approximate proportions,

a movie screen.

And we recall

if

not also the straight sides and right angles, of

that film itself

of the mirror in the story merely tion,

which

is

is

a mirror. The Chippendale style

conforms with the character of the hallucina-

a room of the last century. Whenever the

man who

is first

fiance

then husband looks into this wedding gift from his wife, he sees not his

room

in

which he stands, but a somber Victorian

affair

which we learn

own

later is

presumably that of a gentleman who once owned the mirror and the room seen therein,

and whose delusions of

It is entirely

his wife’s infidelity caused

him

to

murder

her.

appropriate that the previous drama of sexual jealousy and attack,

which the young husband proceeds

to repeat in his

own life, should

be of a kind,

and with a setting, typical of horror melodramas seen of late years in British and American movies; Gaslight, for example, is memorable. This plot and its features

make a

perfect parable for the effect of such

melodramas on psychotic-

am

not suggesting the general

ally inclined individuals

who go

to see movies. I

plausibility of such a parable of actuality but merely indicating the logic of its

form

in this place, so significant (as I shall

show)

in the over-all pattern of this

movie.

The

relevance of the ventriloquist episode to the film

medium

scure, yet certainly not without validity. It is not merely that a actor, the It is that

dummy,

is

is

fairly ob-

symbol of the

present; this would also be true of the legitimate theatre.

one of the faculties of film

is

the widely

known “dubbing

in” of voices,

the three faces of the film

usually done

when a

having no singing voice of her own, must

star actress,

another’s voice appear on the sound-track

if

she

is

required to sing, and

let

now

frequently true of foreign movies, which are “dubbed” in the language of the

country of import. This

is

a parallel of ventriloquism. Moreover,

we must

identify here, as in the other episodes, the constant factor of projection (com-

mon

to the

mechanism

mind and

of

provide the film-like scene in the

symbolic figure of the

and that

actor,

dummy

his voice

—that he

the “scene” of the projection

is

dubbed

is

which the window and the mirror and second episodes; in the third, the

film) of

first

in

is

an

according to the ventriloquistic mechanism,

are facts merely enhancing the aptness of his use. Is

it

not possible for neurotic

homosexuals to project their repressed or unconscious desires arbitrarily onto others, especially

on an actor or actress seen

in the

movies?

—and

in secret

fantasy, perhaps, to interpret a masculine business partnership in a movie as

something perverse?

We

cannot

fail to

recognize the frequency of such phe-

nomena in our society. I

am

not trying through this analysis to impute to

ulterior motives,

on the part of

its

I offering, strictly speaking, either

factors are logically corollary to striking degree of unconscious

experience of movie spectators

The

fourth sequence

that the episodes related

dream proper; only

purpose, which

symbolism

their

which he experiences

is

the “author” of the dream. After

When

typical film devices of

the architect

(as I mentioned) at

all,

we must

note

own

is

to

stories as

be is

left

having been part of

alone with the burly

so left)

and

to strangle him,

own hallucination: an imaginary young-people’s one who hides in a game, then tries to violate the

discovers him; this sequence

dream through

are projected.

his

party in which he plays the

who

to indicate the

by the others have apparently had no place in the images have been present as members of the house

psychiatrist (as, ostensibly to be “psyched,” he

girl

is

in this film as a parable of the

who face a screen on which fictions

dream. The climax for the architect

after

am

a sociological or “clinical” analysis. Such

my main

party; the architect does not mention their his

of Night either

the deliberate yet unmotivated murder of the psychi-

is

by the architect who

atrist

Dead

makers, or practical consequences; nor

mobbed for his home in bed. It is

is

is

significantly given the

mad

air of

a

crazy angles and sharp foreshortening.

attack, he

wakes up

in

a sweat of terror

needless to tabulate this man’s psychotic

symptoms, which indeed might have led

in reality to the

murder and the

attendant hallucination.

But several things are evident in With kaleidoscopic rapidity, before

relation to his

own

movie conventions and

fantastically identifies himself with each episode he has heard related

other guests.

Hence

I

ritual.

hallucination ends, the architect

by the

propose the architect as the arch-symbol of the movie-



Dead of Night not necessarily as the paranoiac which the internal elements of the case make him out, but rather as an innocent movie-goer, a “normal

goer in

80

citizen”

whose neurotic

proclivities fleetingly induce him, via the aesthetic

.

film

form and

ritual as reality

convention, to connect himself with the monstrous fantasies he

is

accustomed

on the screen.

to see

We

are familiar in the movies with the alternately innocent-looking

and

straightforwardly weird-looking edifice which turns out to be a nest of horrors,

and which at the beginning some

intrinsically innocent

wayfarer stumbles upon,

perhaps in a storm. If we take this architect as the archetypal movie-goer, and

we imagine him

entering a movie house rather than a

manor house, we would

he then asserts, as he does in Dead of Night, that he recognizes the people, the house, etc., for the simple reason that he recognizes find

it

them

just as plausible

if

generically, as obvious elements of “another of those horror

stories.”

His “certainty” that various things

happen

will

is

about approximate things, a result of his familiarity with the

The orthodox theory

of this type of movie.

common

mystery

again a certainty rigid plot-patterns

of recognition admits, indeed, the

factor of substitution of particular identification for general identifi-

cation (a factor, incidentally, which the psychiatrist brings

up

in reference to

the racing driver’s story)

Let us suppose, furthermore, since goer has a private,

more

if

it

seems strongly indicated, that our movie-

not deadly, neurosis of his own, and hence that he

one screen fantasy than

willingly lend himself to the elements of

elements of another.

popular

artistic

I

need hardly point out in passing that, of

entertainment, that of television and the movies

daydream, so

to the conditions of private

“hero”

is

with his

it

would be

all is

may

to the

forms of

most akin

definitely apt that our

an architect, one who wished to modify the “public edifice” of dream

own

private “additions.” Especially since psychiatric films have

won

and since a psychiatrist is an undeniable figment of social reality linking dream fantasy with hidden truth, our architect movie-goer may, in a

popularity,

spirit

perhaps of resistance to having his private

gated, imagine the psychiatrist he finds in

and may identify himself as

some

life “scientifically” investi-

film as his personal antagonist,

his screen murderer;

if

said psychiatrist isn’t

actually murdered, perhaps the movie-goer believes the murderer should have

made him his choice. Such a mental pattern he

is

for

our movie-goer

is

necessarily a

mere hypothesis as

a hypothesis for the architect. Yet the present procedure of analogy

serves this function: the involuted dream/reality (or fiction/reality), so

biguously presented in reality, if

we regard

for the practical

Mr. Average

Dead

becomes coherent, a part of

am-

verifiable

the whole movie as a parable of this kind; namely, a parable

workings of an aesthetic convention. It

Citizen, faithful movie-goer,

Walter Mitty, the hero of necessary,

of Night,

can—with

is

easy to imagine that

the fantasy projection of

—overcome a

Danny Kaye’s movie especially, we may

by strangling him;

note,

if

psychiatrist,

if

he inclines sentimen-

a frivolous but lingering belief in the supernatural. Here we have the conbetween the psychiatrist and the others within the film reflected in the mind

tally to flict

of a spectator “pulled both ways.”

One might even

agree that, on a cold-blooded

81

the three faces of the film level, the

movie-goer resents the “technical” introduction of a

the psychiatrist, whose role

is

away

to explain

scientific agent,

phenom-

or cure all the fabulous

ena (and perhaps prevent the implicit rapes) which the movie-goer’s imagination enjoys

and

to the “belief” in

that Frankenstein’s monster

to another aspect of the fiction,

The movie-goer all,

returns

which his mind secretly

clings. It is

he

home

is

a libidinal dream realized.

as the architect awakes



movie

phone

inevitable. Surely enough, the

last seen, the current

may

one

be better

ing hope that “something real” inheres in

rings.

No

to realize that

and

perforce, a dream, a fiction; something both horrible

somehow

not only

a scientific dream realized but that, according

is

matter

—and there

is

it is

attractive, yet

how banal

the

always the sneak-

the fantasy, that the natural

all

conceals the supernatural as cleverly and as easily as a magician’s cloak a

squawking goose. In a way, no doubt,

does.

it

familiar faces flash

So he heeds the automatic “invi-

... In

tation,” he gets in his car, he arrives.

the theater, he sees the old,

on the screen.

The importance

of the continuous performance in film houses should not be

Dead

underestimated. In

of Night

it

has been ingeniously associated with an

eternal idea of recurrence: the beginning again of the cycle which

at the point

faded

it

The

in.

identifiable with that of life

American

especially with the go-getting psychology of

any

Dead

religious conception of recurrence goes,

factor of supernaturalism,

its

was



so far as

The movie-goer

see as the

principle of the old-fashioned serial, with its con-

stant renewal of effort and typical situations, itself

we

and the action fades out

architect stops his car, gazes at the familiar house,

is

a parody. But that

is its

life.

Of

point in this analysis.

have proposed as substitute for the architect

I

course,

of Night, even with

is

also a

parody of him, as any spectator must be a parody of any character in whose role he may incongruously imagine himself. Is not Hugo, indeed, a parody of his master’s hidden personality? In the

Danny Kaye’s and emulates

film

is

in his

same way, the character

daydreams. Mitty

is

a

man whose

hypnotized not by reality but by the movie version of that he

is

of Walter Mitty in

whom

a parody of the true-adventure heroes

it.

The complex

a parody within a parody, as the architect’s dream

a dream. For, in

effect,

the comical

parody of other movie heroes who,

Danny Kaye

he worships

imagination has been

is

in the role of

Mitty

in turn, are parodies of the aviators

surgeons they impersonate in more or less serious screen stories. Just

Hayworth

as Terpsichore

musical-comedy dance

is

is

so,

is

a

and Rita

a parody of serious ballet dancers, as, in turn, the

in her film is a

parody of Miss Hayworth’s “Terpsi-

chorean” choreography. This parody-principle principle of the thesis of

irony

a dream within

Dead

of Night.

is

as involuted as the reality-

The movies

are not only a hotbed of

show that this film’s realityprinciple is genuine and ascertainable by the same standards as we determine parodies if we assume the premise of the reality of a form: the filmic form and its psychic spectator-components. reality-parody but of self-parody. I have tried to





,

The

Myth

of the Great Lovers

Valentino, Garbo, John Barrymore: a triumvirate of great lovers. Valentino

and Barrymore are dead, Garbo has been away from the screen so long that she seems almost “dated”; in any case, she is disinterested in a comeback. What has happened to “great love” on the screen aside from occasional throwbacks in French films and the ineptly remade Blue Angel? It is now a humble romantic stereotype or, as in an outstanding British film of past decades, Brief Encounter it is exactly what the title says and implies it is brief and it is only an



:

encounter; it is

it is

sentimental,

not “immoral.”

The

it is

not great.

certainly

of great love in its mythological capacity.

necessarily disaster, but certainly the severest test of

not necessarily

And

cannot bear to leave her husband and no serious

“wrong” has been done. Tragedy is a necessary element

Not

it is

lovers in Brief Encounter are married but not to each

woman

other; in the end, the

even tearful, but

Romeo and

Juliet,

human

character;

but at least the heroine and the hero of

Camille. Is our current epoch too sensible and “life-loving” to believe that love is

worth dying for?



or even losing social status for? Basically, that is the

question. If self-preservation, comfort

and

social position are too attractive to

be sacrificed for love, then the hungers that

low moral ness It

is

poorer than

it

might seem to

adventure practical

make man

eager for

life

are on a

happiness does not require happiness-in-love, then happi-

level. If

used to be or should be.

many

fiction, for

that romanticism

is

old-fashioned

daydreaming prose, but not

for life.

—something

for

There are many

arguments against romanticism. But there always have been! Such

arguments existed when Valentino danced the tango

in

The Four Horsemen

of

and leapt into stardom. Such arguments existed when John Barrymore showed his captivating profile and excellent legs on the Broadway

the Apocalypse

The Jest, a drama laid in Renaissance Italy. Such arguments existed when Garbo exposed the arms and bosom of an Aphrodite in the Swedish film, The Story of Gosta Berling, and answered the prompt call she got from Hollystage in

wood.

83

the three faces of the film

Such arguments, indeed, existed when human society

in the seventeenth

century renounced the medieval heritage of the Renaissance and embarked on the great adventure of Science. Such arguments held

sway during the eighteenth

century when the cult of Reason demoted Shakespeare to the sphere of the

And what were these arguments, exactly, directed The excess of emotion in private life, more particularly in sex. Racine’s of tragedy retained great love only to show how “irrational” it was,

emotionally unbalanced. against? revision

how

unsuited to duty and decent happiness. With Corneille and Racine, moral

became more important as a tragic theme than love itself. The Story o) Gosta Bcrling, based on Selma Lagerlof’s novel, displayed a romantic love that redeemed an unfrocked minister and a wife of unfaithful heart who have fallen madly in love with each other. And it ends, at last, happily. But life and so-called happiness must be risked for passion’s sake else “love” is not “great.” The romantic view is that passion disrupts and that it

criticism

should finally triumph even though at the price of is

life

to

one or both parties.

It

usually overlooked in such discussions that science and politics are also sus-

ceptible of “passion”; that the French Revolution

the determination of Pasteur to cure the sick to invent the telephone.

However

and

was a passion, and so was of Alexander

Graham

Bell

(as the movies themselves have demonstrated)

such passions or “obsessions” have emergent social value as well as peaceful,

happy outcomes, usually bringing fame, at last, to the scientist. Love is the most speculative of human obsessions if only because its material is another person; that is, it depends entirely on the immediate and purely human loyalty of a single person. Therefore its success or failure has only a mythical and aesthetic value; it is a legend concerning two individuals who provide those other than themselves with nothing but an example of personal conduct—one not necessarily considered edifying. Except in the case of an historical theme,

and then but

rarely,

it is

impossible to cite a contemporary movie in which

things turn out happily at last for lovers such as an “unfrocked minister” and a

“wife of unfaithful heart.”

Modern

decline in religious belief includes a decline of the belief in the

romantic value of love because the latter too, in

its

way, depends on the virtue

and the sacred — that the Dionysian marriage. The ancient cultures the was a most important world and often entailed— of varying periods— the

of ritual: on very ancient ritual

initiation in

latter

over,

the bridegroom.

revel

of

after

Romantic love

is

ritual sacrifice

the vestige of ancient ritual in connection

with sex (an obvious “psychological” complication

is

the desire of the married

couple to remain together beyond the prescribed period). Survivals of primitive

modern life, aside from assimilations by orthodox religion, exist mainly and on the stage; for instance, in ballet. The love-death convention Wagner’s music dramas is the outstanding vestige of such rituals available

ritual in

in poetry

in

in art today.

The

great popularity of Valentino’s best-known film,

to the anachronistic

The

Sheik,

was owing

glamor of the Sheik’s erotic technique: he kidnaps a beauti-

the myth of the great lovers ful

woman and compels

her to

fall in

love with him.

The

essential primitiveness

of this technique recalls those elements of ancient ritual in which a bride

won by

feats of physical or mental daring or lost

by a popular version

also to be illustrated

the figure of Tarzan, whose adventures film fare, of course, the

yet Tarzan

is

such

“caveman love”: As considered low-grade, and

survive on our movie screens.

stories are correctly

of Valentino’s advent to the front rank of

And

movie heroes

this genius

made cheap

such as The Sheik into a genuine love legend.

Valentino “convinced” his audiences and thus achieved the of the professional actor.

Of

first

which mainly determined

and the

fact that

He could

qualification

course, he played only the Great Lover. Thus,

conviction in this role was also his “last” qualification as an actor. trait,

was

feats. It is

of the legend of

still

that he had a genius for being the romantic type.

fiction

failing in

fundamentally a romantic hero who defies rules in gaining his

is

The meaning

bride.

Tarzan

by

his success,

was

One

personal

his instinctive feeling for

he was not ashamed to be graceful even

risk being “effeminate” precisely because

he was,

off

dance

the dance floor.

in the sexual sense,

Not so with other actor types of the American screen. If we glance at love among popular heroes in the films of today, we find it among the virile, certainly, but there especially in the tough guy and the two-gun men of the Old West it is a counterpoint to manliness rather than an expression of it. This is why the tender sentiment is mixed by the tough guy with cynicism so truly

virile.





(i.e.,

fear

and

distrust of the sexual impulse)

shyness or awkwardness

(i.e.,

Valentino’s foreign origin

is

and by the adult Westerner with

lack of the sexual impulse).

To some

extent,

responsible for his perfect sexual instinct, but this

origin does not account for his purity or for his special grace

synthesis of the Great Lover in this actor

was

and charm. The

universal, even to the point of

compassing the gigolo.

John Barrymore, however, belonged to an American acting family and meant He looked upon the movies with aristocratic disdain but was finally lured (by money) into acting in them. It was inevitable that two “class” in every sense.

of Barrymore’s chief roles on the screen were traditional of these also the Great Seducer,

Don

Juan. The

male beauties and one

other was Beau Brummel, also

a seducer, but a bored and curiously perverse one. Strikingly, Brummel’s end,

man, full mind the contrast provided

that of a penniless, bitter old

of hallucinations

brings to

in

dual one of Jekyll-Hyde. is

to

The

ineligibility

in

an asylum,

impressive point, with special reference to love,

the alteration from supreme eligibility

supreme

and dying

another film role of Barrymore’s: the

(Brummel

(Brummel

as an old

sets of transformation entailed parallel

in his

youth and Dr. Jekyll)

man and Mr. Hyde);

these two

changes of make-up. Such change

of the ironic poetry of the Great Lover’s role: its eventual collapse

ambivalence of good and

What was

special,

evil in

is

part

and the

it.

even unique, about Valentino and Barrymore was their

individual genius. While Barrymore’s counterparts were to be found numerously in

European

films of the

same period, Valentino himself was Barrymore’s only

the three faces of the film

a romantic type in America.

rival as

If the genius held in respective

these actors has a technical definition, style of personality.

spective,

we

When we

examine the psychology of love

find that temptation is

ways by

style: not a style of acting

it is

in a

but a

broad per-

always the keystone of romantic episodes;

temptation, of course, yielded to under

difficijlt

What

circumstances.

force

is

and destroys social morality? Personal magnetism (primarily beauty), nothing more or less. This is the reason which made Valentino successful and defined Barrymore, when he entered the movies, as preeminently an erotic type rather than an actor. Hundreds of actors act in a style that is to be termed “themselves” only and

it

that causes surrender to temptation

so their limitation

is

obvious. This style was no “limitation” in the cases of the

triumvirate, Valentino, Barrymore,

and Garbo, because

of the extraordinary

self-awareness each brought to his or her personal beauty in terms of perform-

Woman,

ing in the theater. Like Garbo, the Fatal

were Fatal Men. This means, visibility

merely by appearing

tempted hearts and homes to break.

in public, the characters they represented

Their sheer

Valentino and Barrymore

in the simplest sense, that

was the motive power

of temptation-

—to themselves as to

others.

The

lesson of the Fatal

personality has

become

its

Man

and

Woman

is

that beauty

decisive moral instrument. This

and the gigolo are “dangerous”

social types.

They morally

is

is

“fatal”

why

when

the

the courtesan

instrumentalize their

beauty, something not done by beautiful males and females in respectable society except (in the old-fashioned sense) to

make

profitable marriages.

“sold” on the open market.

An

But

the beauty of courtesan and gigolo

is

to this taint of the social status

the profession of acting. But, in the cases of

Valentino and Garbo,

we have

is

the type of “professional lover” raised to the

stature of the theatrical, or public, image. It

love

nowadays as something

much

alternative

may seem

naive to speak of

illicit

special or socially demarcated, but the truth

is

As recent as were our triumvirate of lovers, they belonged to a late “age of innocence” when the pure instrumentalizing of beauty had a certain dignity and glamor which it no longer that I speak as

has save in the

But the tic

love

for history as for the present.

where it is obviously a pretense. and Barrymore was to make roman-

strict sense of theatricalism,

special genius of Valentino, Garbo,

and beauty seem

sincere: a part of actual, ordinary, unprofessional

life.

Today, the legend of Narcissus has degenerated into the moral idiom of the psychiatric clinic. But Valentino was a consummate narcissist in the perfectly valid sense of placing a conscious value on his looks

and grace and behaving was love. As

as though he were constantly aware of their great function, which

Barrymore could play Beau Brummel as a very



Valentino could play Monsieur Beaucaire handkerchief and even beauty spot

One key

to the

Great Lover

is

narcissistic heartbreaker,

in white wig, silk stockings, lace

—without

sartorial style;

being ridiculous or incredible.

he

is

a natural dandy.

Nobody

America could have gone through ten reels of the incredibly slow action of Beau Brummel, a 1926 version of Clyde Fitch’s play, with the utter self-

else in

the myth of the great lovers

possession of Barrymore,

who

obviously never tired of being a mannered fop

with character; truly, as he was called, the “Leader of Fashion.”

In the case of Garbo, in whom, as a woman, clothes had a more readily negotiable value, she had a distinctive use of the body which, without being that of the grande

fashion

dame

in a courtly sense,

mannequin she tended ;

Should one

call this style that of the

courtesan. Indubitably,

was equally

to treat clothes,

far

from being that of the

even ball dresses, most casually.

courtesan? Well, a very superior kind of

the style of erotic consciousness. Something that

it is

Garbo stayed on the screen long enough to experience was the effeteness of this same consciousness, just as Barrymore grew old enough in the movies to be compelled to rely on transparent professionalism to salvage his personal style; he became a poseur in every role, whether Mercutio or the temperamental director in the farce, Twentieth Century. Garbo renewed her contract often enough for box-office disaster to befall her. Her last film was Two Faced Woman: a confession of the breakdown of her true romantic style. It was the story of a sportswoman who, fearing to lose her new husband, starts to imitate the city sirens he is used to by impersonating her own mythical twin sister, a “glamor girl.” The personality of the Fatal Woman was thus made into a pure charade; passion had literally become a pretense and glamor was used not to define love but to mimic it. Hence love became mere seduction. By this time, Garbo had grown bored with her Narcissus image (as her previous film, Ninotchka, had hinted) and the heroine of Camille at last had turned into a sort of nightclub parody.

The meaning

of the professional fates of our three

broadest interpretation of

it is

to be

found

a form of sickness or infantile regression



in the

Great Lovers? Perhaps the

modern idea that passion

death and suffering; for illustrations from literature, see

Thomas Mann’s

and Disorder and Early Sorrow. The

The Magic Mountain, Death

in Venice,

tendency merely rationalizes

all moralistic,

especially puritanical, opposition

and “psychologically” abwas treated in the form of a pseudobiographic romance because his “double” had been discovered (Anthony Dexter), it was plain that the public had been deemed unprepared to accept the historic Valentino as anyone but an ambitious, hard-working professional who was good-looking and could dance, too; though he parodied Valentino’s old love scenes, he was not even portrayed as a narcissist. Far from being a Don Juan or a Great Lover, this fictitious Valentino was a frustrated lover whose innate “decency” finally makes him sacrifice the consummation of passion (and indeed its very idea) for his beloved’s “good name.” An art so popular as the movies must necessarily whitewash its Don Juans and its Great Lovers, especially nowadays. Even the traditionally perverse and evil Salome, in the person of Rita Hayworth, was lately reformed to more than satisfy the restrictions of the Motion Picture Code. But the fact remains that Valentino and Barrymore could convey the power to do otherwise in their roles than a reto romantic love

normal.

When

by viewing

is

virtually a “stupid” infatuation with

it

as “physiologically”

recently Valentino’s life

87

the three faces of the film straining authority often

made them

do. Valentino’s double, Dexter, could

convey no such power; he soon slipped into obscurity.



The same faculty of suggesting the extreme of “immoral” passion and its consummation belonged to Garbo. It is instructive that one of her important pictures, when she first spoke on the screen, was Anna Christie. Even if the “bad woman” was redeemed, in this version of O’Neill’s play, she had demon-



was the exact pattern of The emergent puritanisociety at large during the past century and a half, is that fundamentally “bad love,” an exhibition of moral looseness

strated that she might have been the “worst.” Such

another of her films, The Fall and Rise of Susan Lenox. cal idea, strong in

“romantic love”

is

its sexual abandon per se but because this and thus rendered morally tempting if not empirically valid. We know very well that all kinds of immorality are enjoyed by the film public so long as conclusive punishment is appropriately meted to the transgressors. Valentino, Garbo, and Barrymore proved that great personal beauty and its self-conscious style could justify an implied challenge to this hypocritical moralism of their public, and sometimes make possible a fairly plausible rendition of sexual passion as it boldly and deliberately flouts public morality. Certainly, Marguerite Gauthier, the heroine of Camille, had the obvious status of courtesan, something which the film could not change without sacrificing the idea of the story. But this status was permissible because the “bad woman” generously gives her lover back to respectable society and a respectable bride. However, their mutual love persists in its essential purity. On the other hand, Marguerite’s fatal consumption is, as it were, nature’s no less than heaven’s “retribution.” Both Barrymore and Valentino are believed to have died of illnesses brought on by what broadly may be called overindulgence in living. There may be true poetic irony lurking in this fact as much as in Marguerite’s

undesirable not precisely because of

abandon

disease.

is glorified

Perhaps “great love” inevitably tends to burn away the very being.

Yet, in the absence of public figures (either in society or the theater) justify the “excess” of sexual sonalities,

and nothing

“erotic obsession”

is

else,

who can

emotion on the moral strength of their own per-

we have

to accept the verdict of the clinic that

not merely “immoral” but also “pathological.”

it. The record says that Garbo disliked Hollywood and society in Growing gaunt and mannish in appearance, with a chic bohemian dowdiness, she still does not mix nor frequent cafe society. It seems obvious

So be

general.

that she felt progressively less incentive to art.

fill

the role of Fatal

Woman

in her

She probably liked doing Ninotchka so much because, as a Communist

Russian at

first

disinterested in love

and

clothes, she could portray disdain for

her former “passion” and indirectly for the fashionable society in which she

was expected

to

move. For the

first

time, in Ninotchka, her falling in love

was

sentimental rather than passionate. But I suggest that her lack of artistic

was because she understood all too well that the theme of great love had almost no relation to life as it was lived especially in America. The curious frigidity that she developed in her style therefore seems to warrant a complex

incentive



the myth of the great lovers

explanation.

The

conclusion

were visiting exotics

in films,

is

inescapable that she, Valentino and Barrymore

unable to

resist the

fame and money which

their

apparitions could lure from the mass public.

Dreams, hallucinations! To be its

remoteness,

its

sure.

These are the true elements of a legend,

otherworldly spell; in a phrase,

unreality, the improbable.

.

.

.

its

peculiar look of chance,

Valentino was a bedroom apparition, Barry-

more a drawing-room apparition withdrawn to a corner on a moonlit balcony, Garbo an apparition to sit magically next to you at dinner or travel on the same plane an object of endless curiosity, but not precisely a woman! Yet these



legendary beings, regardless of their relative qualities as actors, could really

move on

the hearts of spectators, so that their narcissism consisted of reflecting

their faces

and bodies the

ideal

emotions which they inspired

in others.

No

doubt, these sentences themselves must appear rather “ideal.” In an age of cynicism, the public which accepts any as

it

looks like a “circus,”

is

bound

amount

of sexual immorality, so long

to balk before the extravagances of authentic

passion because, and only because, this passion

is

too serious. Obviously, on

the other hand, an “obsession” that any good psychiatrist can cure of the “circus”: see the stage-film extravaganza,

Lady

in the

is

Dark.

only part

Reality into

Myth

An

occasion conies

even

in

France)

myth

its

when

obliged to depend for

Charade into Dollars

in a single stroke both on both of which it finds itself existence. This occasion arises when it selects a theme of

and

than ever to invent, to exploit its

myth

of reality,

overt self-inspection, revealing certain processes of

modicum that

is,

into

the film industry (there are no exceptions these days,

feels freer

of technique

into

Dream

of the lasting, dreamlike effect

its

make-believe and a

produced by these processes on

on the personalities of the actors. This was done in A Star

of the earliest Technicolor features of the thirties;

Is

reality;

Born, one

and even then the rudiments

of the strange ritual were plain.

Not so many years ago, A Star Is Born was remade in a quite undistinguished The scene was still Hollywood, of course, the object still to provide a glamorous morality play concerning the awful damage which time may wreak on the fact and myth of personal success: that timeless entity of these version.

was also the theme of Sunset Boulevard, but theme was prospected with what straight good faith the movie people then were capable of, which was more than in the forties or the fifties. Ours is the day of candid-camera lowdowns as witnessed by Life, or a good centuries of individualism. This in the thirties the

proxy, and hence realism that

we

is still

got, in the epochal Sunset Boulevard, the sort of

are perennially pandered in gossip columns.

Hopper,

is

moral

capsuled in archly cryptic items about the stars’ lives that

The

real film columnist,

Hedda

not on the telephone in the last moments of Sunset Boulevard for

nothing.

As

for the self-kibitz,

it

was nothing

really

new

for

Hollywood, least of

in the shape, as here, of farcing the personality of the female star.

all

The same

and by no means without fun, in Bombshell, so-called to suggest the effect of Jean Harlow on her hypnotized public. This film featured as background the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot as Sunset Boulevard

was done

was due

in the thirties,

to feature the

Paramount

lot.

In Bombshell,

life

was seen as a Holly-

reality info

dream

wood Bowl

of intimate charades, the whole being as aptly comic-strip as the

into

myth

into

adventures of Orphan Annie or to say that the

bright boys

same were true

who made

serve in passing that that

all

Hollywood private

it,

charade

Li’l

info dollars

Abner.

would be a small boon, at least, But the strategy of the

It

of Sunset Boulevard.

Brackett and Wilder, was otherwise.

the world needed lives

was

One may obmyth

television to help along the

could be brought, bag and baggage, into every-

one’s home.

The modern wrinkle was girl,

to

do a nostalgic myth by hiring a once-great glamor

Gloria Swanson, and a once-great foreign director, Erich von Stroheim, to

portray roles decidedly not themselves as they were circa Sunset Boulevard,

but apparently genre types which, at least once, might have been carried to

such extremes as those revealed in this artifice

film.

On

the other hand, so

supposed to have entered the Hollywood bloodstream,

it

is

much

is

perhaps

anything about the home industry is ever expected to American movies have a golden rule, it is this: The swallow anything so long as it be done with enough punch and

flattering to pretend that

be quite “real.”

customers style. is

will

And what

If the

is

punch and

style in this particular case?

The

style, as always,

opulence (here documentary because of the actual professional background)

and the punch

is

the spectacle of a one-time real star pretending that

one-time real stars

make scandalous

fools of themselves

nowadays

and even shoot

their

unfaithful gigolos in the back.

now. Yet one opines and was, false. Real murder has taken place within the professional colony of Hollywood as elsewhere in If

it

was true

in 1950, it

was probably meant

that this allegation, on the corollary evidence,

to be true

is,

the world, but exactly because of this fact, discretion forbade that the rough stuff of

Sunset Boulevard should bear any tangible resemblance to

the heroine, there are

still

ex-stars out there

who

it.

If, like

cherish insanely pretentious

making comebacks, one trusts that in private life they are more mad and amusing than Miss Swanson succeeds in being as Norma Desmond. Her really good moments (most of them pathetic) are wasted in a part which as an entity has neither authority nor finish and from where, to be sure, could the “authority” have come? All that has authority in this film is the scale implicitly present in the ex-star’s million dollars, and visible in her huge ornate house and swimming pool and the dozens of photographs of her decorating her living room. We have here one more way of reflecting the industrial power that is at the heart of the Hollywood scale. Was all this, as the kindest commentators suggested, tongue-in-cheek satire? Scarcely; since the actress legend was all too realistically framed by the documentary saga of an ambitious young script-writer, whose hard luck has guided him spank into Miss Desmond’s lonely arms; result: tainted romance. The Paramount lot, as I say, is literally present in Sunset Boulevard. Furthermore, by some odd coincidence, Miss Swanson, when she worked steady during the twenties, was a Paramount star, and Cecil de Mille (shown directing Samson and Delilah, which he did direct) made Miss Swanson’s biggest pictures, in delusions of

convincingly



91

the three faces of the film

the old days, and

made them

certainly change,

and farce may contract open

business goes on it is

Paramount. Stars

hopefully) as usual;

( i.e

kept in the family.

mount

for

The romance

script department,

woman

is

go, fashions

a morality play, but

the better, one

all

of the subplot

where a young

away from

may come and

liaison with

may

infer, if

bred right in the Para-

anxious to write film stories

when the rest of the True love blossoms despite hell and the climax comes when the anxious ex-star, checking up on those nights out, discovers all and spills the facts to the young lady over the phone. Angry script-writer-gigolo leaves ex-

entices the gigolo

studio lot

is

his dishonor to assist her

dark.

star precipitately: bang-bang!

An

new was the socko finish to this very gaudy tale. If there was the least common sense to it, it was the sadistic common sense of the audience: all in all the most dependable factor present. Most audiences derive a profane joy, I daresay, from seeing wealth and fame end up with the wrong end of the stick. The special moral of the script-writer-gigolo’s end may have been harder for the fans to savor. The efflorescence of the young man’s conscience, when he strips off the expensive baubles with which he has been showered and denounces his corrupter, is (besides being lugubriously and unintentionally funny) one of the most callous and tasteless scenes I remember ever to have seen anywhere. It was amazing film

elaborate mad-scene, in which the lady imagines she

triumph and not walking downstairs to be carried

is

acting in a

off to jail,

to find, even in the movies, self-conscious masculine virtue so thick-skinned,

indeed, —grotesquely the back crazy mistress and packing bags—considering childish

and mechanical

for only a

stupid,

goon would not have anticipated that shot

in

that, at the

his

conspicuously, a

movie public

felt

little

ham-headed

after insulting

revolver nestled nervously in her hands.

a half-

moment and

But perhaps the

that the gentleman in question, having been such a traitor to

decent manhood, deserved his unparalleled stupidity.

Of

anyone could be found lurking in Hollywood, now or life as shown in Sunset Boulevard is anything, wholesome, money-making scheme. However, a shrewd

course, I doubt that

yesterday, willing to testify that at bottom, but a clean,

enough resident might suggest that the

real factual pertinence of the

in its being a satiric obituary for the star system,

the last quarter of a century.

The

movie lay

which has been very unwell for

strongest survivor in the

vamp

style

was

Garbo, who went and apparently won’t ever come back. The foreign director, too, insofar as

he hasn’t been assimilated,

is

in disfavor,

and Von Stroheim was

notorious for never having been properly naturalized in Hollywood. Playing the ex-star’s

ex-husband

—now, and

still

worshipfully, her butler

—Von

Stroheim

provides a caricature of himself at his worst, the operetta-style Prussian

officer,

but so paradoxically grim here that he manages to seem like nothing so

who has missed his calling. Yet both Miss Swanson and Mr. Von Stroheim,

much

as an undertaker

as workers

who

in the past

gave Hollywood long and valiant service, were suitably rewarded here in the

92

twilight of their careers.

The home

industry

is

never averse to posing as a



reality into

dream

into

myth

charitable institution with actors. It

is

into

charade

into dollars

more imagination and cash than a home for retired on the documentary angle in

plain, moreover, that the insistence

Sunset Boulevard produced a quasi-Pirandellian brand of illusionist realism,

which the industry

is

destined, I hazard, never to get out of

serve the naked elements of the case:

according to her repeated comebacks a fictitious ex-star film’s

who has

its

system. Ob-

A real ex-star who has never quite faded



is

climactically hired to impersonate

quite faded, automatically disproving, thus, the

obvious slant that undying glamor psychology leads surely to disaster.

mechanical self-contradiction,

minded movies at

its

this,

No

but the calculated whirligig of the charade-

dumbest and dizziest. Instead of holding a charity benefit work for her money and made more than a few

for Gloria, they asked her to

honest dollars for themselves.



The Dream-Amerika of Kafka and Chaplin

Had Kafka never written at all his fragmentary novel, A merika, and a critic had suggested, on the basis of the other two novels, that inflected, the

accordingly

naturalistically

saga of his hero, K., might well make use of the European myth

of “America,” one can imagine the of opinion

if

would have exhaled as

murmur

of skepticism that a certain school

to the probability of

such an event.

And

yet

Kafka did write A merika, he did export his epic hero to the shores of this country and subject him, in deliberately Dickensian manner, to the hazards of a young modern civilization, ending, as customarily, on an ambiguous note, but this time of hope rather than of despair. It has been pointed out that Kafka was not so Dickensian as he imagined, and indeed, far from taking Dickens’ satirical slant on this country, he merely put it in the line of those homes of bureaucratic mechanism and economic hazard that appear as “Continental” entities in The Castle and The Trial. Inevitably, Kafka merely extended the vision of his self-hero and his spiritual adventure by taking him to something so identifiable as the Statue of Liberty and, finally, to Oklahoma. Max Brod reports that Kafka found light-hearted pleasure in speaking to his friends of his hero, Karl Rossmann. One cannot help feeling that in recognizing K. as an immigrant to an identifiable “foreign country,” and having him seek there an ordinary job like anyone else, Kafka was to displace his hero, K., to a purely figurative dilemma from what had been a realistic one; he was producing a conte in the old-fashioned sense, a tale of temptation and adventure, innocence and world-wickedness. This procedure, of course, did not deflect Kafka’s peculiar drive toward the statement of his situation. In making his protagonist, Karl, so young, K.’s

master seemed, at the same time, to be relinquishing in advance the subjectivity

and moral world. In substance, he converted his own personal European constriction and metaphoric girth (the “fairy tale” land of The Castle), into a common myth with a legendary openness, America itself, land of two writers he admired, Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman, land of physical girth and job opportunities. of his intellectual

myth, with

its

the dream-amerika of kafka

and

chaplin

seems most significant that, as his biographer, Brod, reports, Kafka could gleefully recite to his friends the beginning of Amerika. There was something It

an unburdening, no doubt, in sending his little hero something comic in visualizing him sighting from the of

a

off to

real country;

sea, like

hundreds of

—her

arm oddly, in myth of pre-existent dealing with Amerika, holding aloft a sword. Kafka was a if his hero was to imagination strange land, though one testable only in the a with Kafka’s somewhere branded remain indelibly his (as though his body were fatal initial), he also entered a domain astonishingly similar to the one braved by Charles Chaplin’s real and fictitious “immigrant.” Kafka wrote his novel, strangely enough, at the same time that Charles Chaplin was molding his theatrical fortune in this country, having arrived from England in 1910. The date of publication of the first chapter of Amerika is thousands of other Europeans, the Statue of Liberty

;

1913, the year that Chaplin’s vaudeville act, with which he had been touring the States, attracted the notice of

comedies for

Mack

Sennett.

Hollywood

Though

;

the following year, he

was making

actually, like the immigrant Karl Ross-

mann, Chaplin was a young man seeking to make his way in life, the motley he first assumed for the movies was that of his vaudeville “turn.” It was the stock villain, inherited from the Victorian era, in dress suit and top hat and with walrus mustache. However, Chaplin’s now traditional character, Charlie, soon emerged a boy in charade as a man. Where innumerable young male immigrants are involved, why should Kafka’s “Karl” and Chaplin’s “Charlie” be worthy of special comparison? The most :

obvious reason has been noted by other commentators: the general resemblance of the plot of

Amerika

“derivation,” yet that

Charlie the

Tramp

to the plots of Chaplin comedies.

makes the parallelism

all

the

There

is

no question of

more important; Karl and

are heroes of the identical international myth: the great

adventure of the young foreigner coming head-on to the United States to start a

new

and hoping to

life

rise to

a level beyond any available to him in his native

was literally Chaplin’s career; he was, of when he landed, but a very modest one: he succeeded here more quickly and more grandly than he had dared to hope. Karl Rossmann’s uncle, Senator Edward Jacob, is himself the successful immigrant made over according to the Land-of-opportunity legend. Yet in two years’ time, land. In the real-life dimension, this

course, already a professional

Chaplin had evolved his farce-villain into a comic picaro, the daydreaming

“Tramp,” perennially destined to be the economic dregs and chivalrously to pursue true love in vain. Thus from the purely economic angle, Chaplin’s character enacted the moral history of Kafka’s K., never able to climb the

ladder of success to economic security and professional orthodoxy and never able to extricate himself from the suspicion of crime, of being an “undesirable.”

Thus we and

fictitious

It

see that the “undesirable alien” familiar to the history of this country,

typified

by Charlie the Tramp,

is

the correlative in actual

life

of K., the

“undesirable alien” of Kafka’s Castle-land.

cannot pass as insignificant that so

many

of the inventions of Chaplin’s

95

the three faces of the film

comedies,

mann

first to last, relate

a servant

is

girl’s

so closely to inventions in Amerika. Karl Ross-

bastard while Charlie’s origin

is

appropriately obscure,

being hinted indirectly only later on in one of Chaplin’s masterpieces, The Kid,

where the baby picked up by the Tramp

in

an alley

is

also illegitimate. Karl has

a box and umbrella that correspond to Charlie’s standard wardrobe; the cane

and the bundle. Karl’s film

known

as,

among

“a misunderstanding

when he

uncle,

first

articles are mislaid

other

all

titles,

around as

to the

appears, carries a

(Charlie often fought with his cane) Liberty’s torch in Kafka’s novel. of sheer force

is

and returned; by curious chance, a

Charlie and the Umbrella (1914), features

ownership of an umbrella.” 1 Karl’s

“bamboo cane.” This quasi-weapon is

What can

suggested by the sword replacing this

mean but

that a certain degree

required to succeed in the country which Karl

is

entering?

Karl’s struggle with the bureaucracy begins on board ship where a roughhouse of farce-comedy inflection takes place. Chaplin’s

and he is

immigrant role came in 1917

involved in complicated business with a coin in a restaurant, just as

is

Karl after joining the vagabonds, Delamarche and Robinson, and going to a

restaurant with them. Charlie’s coin falls through a hole in his pocket; Karl’s

money

is

There

hidden in his clothes is

interesting

lining,

where he surreptitiously has to dig

no deep symbolism about these casual if

it.

merely because they point to the framing situation of the two

immigrant heroes, but such inventions

common

for

parallels. Indeed, they are

situation

;

still

are not mere logical parallels in a

in turn, they relate to the sensibilities of the

two

artists re-

sponsible for them, one mutually illuminating the other. If Charlie can be seen in Karl, and Karl in Charlie, the fact suggests a higher relationship between their creators;

and

in

To

by happy coincidence, the very names of the heroes are equivalents,

one sense

it

seems obvious that Karl

is

nothing but Kafka’s “Charlie.”

continue the parallel of Active elements: Karl’s perpetual run-in with

the authorities

is in line

with Charlie’s mishaps on his recurrent jobs; equally,

Karl and Charlie obtain good jobs only for fate to play them some trick so that they find themselves “on the road” once unintelligent as Charlie

is

more and

in disgrace.

Karl

is

not

not unrefined; but their very sensitivity and dignity

are misunderstood, are the very traits which help most effectively to render

them

outcasts. Karl is unwarrantably

tumbled out of

his

Uncle Edward’s

patronage because of an oblique personal “betrayal,” one of those affairs

saga, the equivalent of Karl’s uncle

Lights,

little

judged with blind bureaucratic arrogance. In Charlie’s perpetual

who

Where an

befriends

is

the dipsomaniac millionaire of City

him while drunk only

to repudiate

him when

sober.

arbitrary ethic operates in Kafka’s story, a Dionysian vice prevails

in Chaplin’s.

But the

arbitrariness of the adult patron’s behavior, in each case,

is

the signifying factor in relation to Karl’s and Charlie’s innocence and helplessness.

Uncle Edward, Mr. Pollunder, and Mr. Green form a triumvirate of

fat,

cigar-smoking “capitalists” that correspond directly to the type as found in Chaplin’s comedies.

96

1

An Index

to the Films of Charles Chaplin,

by Theodore Huff (page

4).

#

Reflections

on Black (Brakhage)

Courtesy Cinema 16

The The

Dream

chief imaginative trend

among Experimental

or avant-garde film-makers

is

action

dream and the actor as a somnambulist. This film shot employs actual scratching on the reel to convey the magic of seeing while “dreaming awake”; the world in view becomes that of poetic action pure and simple: action without the restraints of singlelevel consciousness, everyday reason, and so-called realism. Dangers of excess and as a

other errors lurk in this sphere of artistic freedom, but

cinema and can be applied

— as

it

is

the one inevitable road

from which this shot was taken to common human experience as well as to the “exotica” of pathology and supernaturalism. As proven by the brilliant commercial film, Dead of Night, these “exotica” become, in any case, the common human experience of the thrill-adof true creation in



dicted movie-goer.

in the film

Cesare, the somnambulist of

The Cabinet

symbol quent avant-garde film-making, one Caligari, has been an arch

heroines

is

seen below. Art

knits the passive dreamer, as

of Dr.

for subse-

of

whose

is

the action which

it

knits the passive

spectator, to realms of experience

beyond

his

conscious and unconscious control. In such realms, wild excitement the movies. films,

But

is

often found

rarely, except in

by way

of

avant-garde

does the strict pulse of beauty govern the engines of “wild excitement.”

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Courtesy Gideon Bachmann

Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren-Hammid)

Courtesy

Maya Deren

Movement is

for its

own

sake, as in the Action

Melodrama,

a special madness of the commercial film.

On

this

page, however, are vivid examples of the mobile tech-

nique used aesthetically to create a dimension of

movement movement

sculpture, and an extra dimension of dancer by successive replacements of the scene through which he dances. All such devices, evoking a super-real plane of movement, aspire to in

still

for a

that magic freedom of action which

is

characteristic

of dreams.

Study

in

Courtesy

Choreography Moya Deren

for

Camera (Deren)

Visual Variations on

Noguchi (Menken)

Courtesy Cinema J6

Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein) Courtesy Janus Films

The Lead Shoes (Peterson)

Anamorphic photography compression of image by

Courtesy Cinema 16

(vertical

or horizontal

special lenses)

is

a de-

vice for creating dreamlike illusions. Its aesthetic

value

is

accurately suggested by comparing the

woman and

the deepsea diver, as they appear

here anamorphically, with the location shot,

where the “eyewitness” camera has recorded them. The plastic tension of this particular anamorphic shot acquires further interest by comparison with a very similar image by Eisenstein the normal horizontal figure is “pas(above) sive” while the anamorphic vertical is “active”; both are highly evocative of mood. :

The Lead Shoes (location Courtesy Cinema 16

still)

The hand

as plastic

symbol and “dancer”

has had a distinct role in the annals of avant-garde film. The world’s most ancient artists,

who painted on

the walls of pre-

were aware of the hand as an instrument of magic power at once

historic caves,

empirical and symbolic.

The

horizontal

“dreamer” of the avant-garde film does not forget this primordial reality; on the contrary, he resurrects it as an immediate visual presence, as his

own

eidolon of

organic beauty.

Hand Written

(Boultenhouse)

Courtesy Cinema 16

Prehistoric

Hand

Courtesy Cinema 16

(Castillo,

Spain)

In a fictitious romance of 1950, Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson revived her own past glamor, exemplified in this “lovers’ pose.” It is at once a travesty of life and one of its valid archetypes.

The man shown with

Barrymore, survived

all

her, Valentino,

along with Garbo and John

the movies’ tawdry conventions to create lasting personal

legends as great lovers. Opposite are views of a feature-length avant-garde film in which the pleasures of Eros are also explored in a spirit of travesty

and fantasy, yet deliberately

so: In this film, projected in “polyvision” (or

the Brussels International

triptych)

at

and the mind’s inner workings form a legitimate basis the absurd, the extravagant, and the dreamlike.

Fair, the truth of the senses

Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino

in

the Early Twenties

for

The Mirage (Weiss)

Courtesy Peter Weiss

One

most recent and ambitious efforts is a Swedish film whose hero, shown here going “dancecrazy” from hunger, emulates our century’s in

of the

the realm of the avant-garde

greatest interpreter of the hallucinated under-

new hero also demonstrates the important link between Chaplin’s tramp and Kafka’s hero, K., who wanders amid the chaos of great cities. In fact, dog, Charlie Chaplin. This

the above glimpse of industry’s “daymarish” labyrinth,

with

its

cement-doused worker, Kafka’s novel, Amerika.

illustrates the very spirit of

The Mirage (Weiss) Courtesy Peter Weiss

and

the dream-amerika of kafka

In

my

book on Chaplin,

I

chaplin

traced the pattern of partnership with an older

artistic life. The same theme occurs in Amerika when Karl encounters the ship’s stoker; the purely intellectual aggressiveness and moral precocity of Karl is emphasized because here it is he who tries to help the stoker out of a jam, rather than vice versa. Yet this is precisely the situation when Big Jim, the gold-mine prospector in The Gold Rush, gets knocked on his head, loses his memory, and has to employ

man

throughout the comedian’s

at the very beginning

by being “unwitted,” the older man becomes dependent on Charlie’s “dim wit” and yet stalwart, loyal spirit. The parallels strangely interlace. The vagabonds, Delamarche and Robinson,

Charlie’s aid in locating his rich claim;

men “young” but definitely older than Karl

(a “European intermediate pupil”),

pick Karl up in order to take him along to “the gold fields of the West,” or mythologically speaking, California. It

Amerika,

finale of

is

typical that, even at the optimistic

hero gets only as far as Oklahoma, but

its

Karl has

still

been in the company of two “adult patrons” however irresponsible; actually it is they who are to exploit him. Scenically, it is easy to see why Kafka’s and

much

Both are largely legendary, “theatrical,” and for reasons perhaps more complex than at first may appear. Since Kafka did not know America save from literary accounts, he visualizes Chaplin’s “Amerika”s are so

it

much

akin.

as a spectator might, as a sort of “theater”; consequently, the device

“Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” an actual

of the

Karl as one of

finally absorbs

It is the

its

metaphoric figure for

theatrical project

employees, acquires an inevitability of all

which

its

own.

America as visually anticipated by those

it by an ocean: the Land of Opportunity as a by “female” angels raised high above the ground. The commedia dell’ arte vein of Chaplin’s farces gave an artificial feeling to whatever was identifiably American in his films. In sum, Kafka’s “Amerika” is reciprocally telescoped by Chaplin’s. It is a land of phantasmal mechanisms

naive ones

still

separated from

stage setting presided over

(Klaus

Mann

once noted that the elaborate desk

in the

house of Karl’s uncle

resembles a trick affair in a Chaplin comedy), riotous saloons, millionaires and servants, complicated mechano-organisms such as hotels, political rallies,

mad

activities like

and the lurking threat of the policeman (especially

allergic to

an immigrant). Karl has a nightmarish vision of a “telegraphists’ hall” that suggests, both psychologically and mechanically, certain sequences in Modern Times.

One passage

in

Amerika can be

called positively cinematic;

a panoramic impression of Karl’s while in

New

York:

“.

.

.

it

describes

there opened

out on both sides an endless perspective of pavements

filled with a moving mass whose singing was more homogeneous than This might be an actual excerpt from a synopsis

of people, slowly shuffling forward,

that of

any single human

meant

to indicate

voice.”

montage effects of audio-visual nature: superimposed marchers with vocal chorus and music.

The atmosphere

of

Mr. Pollunder’s great house, described as “a

fortress not

a mansion,” has the chinoiserie of “mystery houses” on the screen and something of the tone of Hearst’s legendary dwelling as parodied

by Orson Welles

the three faces of the film in Citizen

Kane. In

athletic daughter,

this house,

Karl

treated to jiu-jitsu

is

who almost knocks him backward out

by Pollunder’s most

of a window, a

familiar incident in the hurly-burly of Charlie’s physical career. This episode also affords a striking instance of the cruel disillusionment so typical of Charlie’s erotic fate. Karl’s wrestling with Clara Pollunder has already hinted of Charlie’s

combats with hefty dames (for example, Marie Dressier), and late that night, when it would seem the erotic intimation of their struggle is about to be carried out in Clara’s bedroom, the girl asks Karl to play the piano; music then seems designed as the sentimental prelude to their stolen happiness. But suddenly

Karl hears applause from the next room, the connecting door

beyond

it

Clara’s fiance

is

the two already sleep together,

who could

find

is

opened, and

discovered sitting in bed; obviously, Karl realizes,

and he has been made a dupe by the young man,

no other way than

this to

induce Karl to play for him. In the

etiology of Kafka’s symbolism, this incident no doubt has a rather complex

meaning, but fact:

its parallel in

embodied but one hard, ineluctible in the Tramp’s idyllic dream of

Charlie’s history

monotonously crushing disappointments

love.

Certain details of pure invention by Kafka suggest the very tone and style of Chaplin’s inventions; conspicuous

dormitory which Karl

visits:

the behavior of a sleeping

is

man

every time the

elevate themselves from the bed; also,

we

breathes, his legs

man

in a

and arms

see the disreputable Robinson, after

a drunken debauch, extravagantly swathed in bandages as a practical joke. It is

precisely these literal resemblances

do not such

things, as well as the aggregate of these parallels, indicate

essential brotherhood

One

of the

which point the difference between the

Kafka’s comedy and that of Chaplin’s; on the other hand,

intellectual tone of

an

between Karl and Charlie?

most remarkable

mood

stylistic traits of

Kafka’s art

and even

is

the total barren-

what might be and “love scenes”; a certain shy, reluctant will, however, characterizes Karl’s erotic impulses. It is an ambivalence of sensory taste; he shrinks physically from Clara and seems to disdain contact ness therein of the

of sentiment. Karl,

K., have

categorically called “sexual relations”

with Therese, the forlorn “servant-girl type” with

whom

he forms a friendship

as Charlie used to do with luckless female workers. Karl’s reunion with Fanny,

posing as an angel outside the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,

comradely, not sentimental or intense. of Amerika, analyzed

The “manic”

by Paul Goodman,

lies in

is

and

jocular

quality of the denouement

the general atmosphere rather

than in anything intimate or personal. Charlie, for his part, has a “manic of truer character when, in

dream is

The Kid,

all his

fit”

troubles disappear in an ecstatic

of heaven, where he disports himself on wings with a girl-angel. Charlie

invariably sentimental, even exquisite, with his girl friends, but the element

uniting the erotics of the two heroes, like the arbitrariness of behavior rich adult patron,

is

an almost inexplicable

barrier, signified usually

humiliated awareness of his inferiority; he the substance of the Tramp’s legend

is

is

by

by the

Charlie’s

loved in return, sometimes, but

alienation from sexual happiness

—as

;

the dream-amerika of kafka

and

chaplin

denouement of Monsieur Verdoux.

was

significantly

The

principle of alienation just as accurately defines K.’s,

enough expounded

in the

if

not also Karl’s,

women. The maternal symbol appears twice in Amerika, as the “Manageress” of the hotel and as the stout but “beautiful” opera singer, so much like a schoolboy’s fantasy and worshiped by Delamarche and Robinson position with regard to

Karl, however, rejects the singer, thus implicity refusing to “find his mother” in her. If Karl’s sexual future

seems happy and secure by token of the isolated and

imperfect climax of Amerika, Charlie’s seems the opposite by token of the climactic film,

Monsieur Verdoux, assuming that we may regard Charlie’s

story as an unbroken continuity.

however, and has the

By

token of Verdoux, Charlie

bitter, ironic inflection

the pessimistic fables,

The Castle and The

Verdoux, ends in the execution of

its

sophisticated, having risen to success

which corresponds Trial.

The

is

latter, like

hero as a criminal. Verdoux

and

fallen; thus

he

of Chaplin’s prolonged tale of the picaro. But, like K.,

an innate weakness, a flaw that brings about

is

changed,

to K., hero of

Monsieur is

mature,

not the “Charlie”

Verdoux has secreted

his downfall;

if

he has succeeded

temporarily he has done so as an opportunist and a swindler, one of whose

weapons

is

murder; likewise

(like Charlie so often),

Verdoux has been a

masquerader, a charlatan. So the principal difference between Karl and K.

is

exactly that between Charlie and Verdoux: one of the two in both pairs

is

essentially innocent, the other essentially guilty.

Verdoux’s “Europe”

is

K.’s

“Europe” with the ambitious French bank clerk

succeeding by dishonesty, by a defiant plot against established authority. As

we know, K. refused to use illicit means throughout the two parts of his story, The Castle and The Trial. Charlie, naturally innocent as Karl is, will not even if

—use such means. Charlie’s “dishonesty”

only because he cannot



is strictly

defensive, his flight from the law substantially the result of a “technical mis-

understanding.” With odd identicality, Karl

is pursued back and forth through Amerika even as countless times Charlie was chased through the endless purlieus of his comedies. If Charlie is guilty of some chance misdemeanor, it is no more than that of a homeless “juvenile delinquent”; all that he needs to “reform” him is “normal conditions,” security, and self-confidence, so that he can “grow up” properly. Of the scene of Amerika, Max Brod writes: “In enigmatic language Kafka used to hint smilingly that within this “almost limitless” theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery.”

city streets

by a policeman

Something of

this

same

in

feeling, albeit sentimentalized,

permeates Chaplin’s

by the Tramp in T he Kid. There is no question but that, in this film, Chaplin in some sense was reviving his own youth as an urchin on London streets, a fatherless boy who doubtless longed for a male parent. Chaplin’s “kid” finds his real mother and a foster father (Charlie himself). This search for the lost parents is extant in Amerika but unsuccessful in story of the infant waif succored

99



the three faces of the film

the unfinished novel, while

it

is

overlaid

by allegory

in the other

works of

Kafka. Brod, as quoted just above, was referring, of course, exclusively to the hero

Nothing

of Amerika.

in Chaplin’s comedies, analogously, refers to the history

of Verdoux’s youth, except as inflection.

But

background; first

we can imagine

is

like Charlie’s given a dissident

Verdoux does have an early

strangely enough, in his famous “variety” act and the

it lies,

quasi-villains of his pristine

Chaplin

it

in the sense of artistic origins,

days in Hollywood. In these one-reel

films,

seen as a burlesque of the dude portrayed in Monsieur Verdoux; the

mustaches are pointed, formal clothes that

fit

are usually present. Like “Desper-



Desmond” of the old American comic strip a clear vestige of Victorianism Charlie’s comedy villain is a degradation into ham melodrama. In the epochmaking Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the youthful face of the Tramp emerges with unique and transient clarity; the mustaches are now smaller, neat, divided ate



coquettishly in the middle; they are the hirsute ornament of a good-looking

young dandy, echoed later by the mature dandy of Verdoux and close to the boulevard comedian of Max Linder, who inspired Chaplin to emulation. This Chaplin villain, however comically, created disorder through willful design; not more or less inadvertently, as did Charlie the “prop man” and Karl the “lift

operator.”

Verdoux

is;

The

early,

heavy-mustached

villain is

a home-wrecker even as

so in this latest version of his protagonist, Chaplin undertakes a

conscious malice, and taking leave of Charlie’s ill-fated innocence, assumes a conscious guilt.

A

great deal has been written of the motives and character of Kafka’s guilt

as mirrored in the mythical quandaries of his hero, K. is

taken for granted;

cannot dispose of

is

it is

preemptive, beyond choice.

The guilt in The Trial The problem which K.

the role of his consciousness in assuming guilt and so merit-

Metaphysically—here is the redemptive aura of his fiction obscure arena where he meets death from the two executioners the abstract and subjective realm of self-condemnation for a crime, of which

ing punishment.

he is

is guiltless ; the

“technically” he

is

guilty,

if

only because of the pain that has been equivalent

commit. ) he did not “knowingly” Whatever misadventures Charlie the Tramp endures must be observed as having this same subjective innocence and objective guilt. There is the epic incident in Modern Times when he picks up a danger flag fallen from the back of a to

a punishment, but which (even as Oedipus!

truck, finds himself at the

head of a demonstration of

And

radicals, is arrested as

The Great Dictator, there is the “crime” of being a Jew. In terms of moral consciousness, on the other hand, how curiously, precisely inverse are Chaplin’s Charlie and Kafka’s K. Charlie knows what he is (or does) but cannot be aware of anything as a crime. K. is very much aware of a crime but he cannot identify what crime he has committed. their leader

and thrown

in jail.

in

!

The

inverse parallelism extends to the relation between the remaining

bers of the two pairs: Verdoux also

knows what he does but

knows what he does and

it is

it is

guiltily

mem-

done; Karl

innocently done. Chaplin posits guilt for his

.

the

dream-amerika of kafka and chaplin

Active hero through real moral action (Verdoux’s schemes), innocence for

through the subjective ambiguity of symbolic action (Charlie’s dream

him

life).

Kafka does the reverse: the real moral action of Karl establishes his innocence, whereas the symbolic action of K.’s subjectively ambiguous world establishes his guilt.

The of

ject,”

succinct in Amerika; the imaginative goal, the “aesthetic ob-

Rossmann.

If guilt adulterates the total consciousness of

places the imaginative goal, of which the Castle

reach,

and

art can represent only the tortuous

The

that goal. it

is

can be attained only through a genuine, clear-headed innocence such as

that of Karl it

by the Nature Theatre

position of illusion, the artistic symbol, rendered

Oklahoma,

is

also a symbol,

a man,

beyond

antechambers to the sanctity of

sentimental waif Charlie always lived in his “nature theater,”

was a world of comic plunge and

reversal projected

from

own innocent

his

imagination: compact with the hobgoblins and hidden traps of “reality.” the

Tramp awoke from

When

dream, he found himself “Verdoux,” a part

his doorstep

of “the system,” part of an urbanization of the “nature theater,” the arena of ruthless profit

and

loss;

here, he could only carry out logically the lurking

villainy of the “social leper.” cal,

When

Chaplin’s misfit “hero” became too practi-

he reverted to the misfit “villain,” now armed with a conscious moral

apology (Verdoux’s witness-stand and death-cell speeches)

The most



Charlie

significant thing

always

is

in a

seems to be that Chaplin’s hero

kind of

flight.

He

—Verdoux

or

turns his back on his situation; in-

nocent or guilty, he prepares for a sudden departure, he vacates, he runs away or shuffles off as

the distance. It

we saw

is

Charlie do so often, his silhouette growing smaller in

not for nothing that

latest film; all that

he “faces”

is

it is

M. Verdoux’s back we

death. Kafka’s superiority as a

be that he was always “facing” everything:

life in

see last in the

man seems

to

one chunk ahead of him.

Whether it is K. dying by the executioners’ knives or Karl climbing toward Fanny on her aerial pedestal, one feels the farewell steadiness of a direct, open,

—never the back view, however depressing (Verdoux) or pathetic

frontal gaze

(Charlie). Karl leaves his post as

lift

operator and later

is

punished with

dismissal, but through his defection he has faced a higher moral obligation:

humanity toward a fellow creature. Yet finally it is the weight and Karl and Charlie under the roof

definition of a scene

which brings together

same world. In whatever moral or physical stance we may leave the Chaplinesque or the Kafkan hero, we sense around him the strange, by no means reassuring, atmosphere of a “World’s Fair,” an often shocking polyglot of art and reality, a “theater of action” containing castles and courtrooms, nature and machines, love and murder, jobs and joblessness, the innocent inextricably fused with the guilty, and youth making its dreamlike way; in other words: a fantasy “Amerika” that we find difficult to

of the

keep separate from the real one.

101

more or

less refined

Hollywood

If it

were stated as a thesis that Hollywood

is

as a Universal

indifferent to everything but the

personal-professional triumph, and that therefore

constitutes (since

it

is

Money

as the presiding deity, that thesis might be called “obvious.” it

might be

its in-

a Universal Church of professionalism, with

virtually limitless)

fluence

other hand,

Church

contradicted by those

flatly

who

On

the

admire, or at least

take seriously, the films of social purpose, the “problem pictures.” For aren’t these films “about something” in terms of facts existing

My answer is “Yes!” statistics

which inhere

which they carry

like

—something contemporary,

close,

and

verifiable

beyond Hollywood’s doors?

But what determines their true content is neither the them nor the ostensible message of social toleration

in

a picket

sign,

but rather the precise inflections of their

and the form inevitably given them by various Hollywood prejudices and conventions. I intend to marshal first a number of general facts which are well enough known by some, but which, when taken in relation to the perspective of the problem films, assume a new edge and importance, and reveal thereby the tacit presence of what may be dubbed Hollywood’s “Higher Creed.” plots

The

reader is asked therefore to be patient while, preliminarily, certain basic ground is surveyed.

A

background of commercial film in the United Hollywood is a cohesive group in which the unit

single fact permeates the

States. Professional society in

does not emerge as an “individual” until his height and thickness and placement

name appears

in letters of a certain

—and stays that way. The resulting internal

snobbery means that social gatherings and the standards observed therein are

dominated precisely by

size of salary,

and “culture”

is

thus unequivocally

equated with money. Not that purely social cliques are nonexistent. They assuredly, but are dominated exclusively

A

prime theme of Hollywood for

many

years,

we may

success story, and especially the internal success story

on stage and

screen.

The dramatic

limited, naturally, both

exist,

by top professionals.

— that

note, has been the of theatrical talent

resources of such film stories have been

by standard taboos and by the narrow material usually

105

the three faces of the film

One

chosen. success

thing has been easy and frequent:

when fame and

hard, and that even

is

individual, his bed

may

be expensive but not

all

show that the road

to

to

fortune are achieved by the

of roses. This formula has been

Vernon Castles and Fasteur, John L. Sullivan and assorted aviation pioneers, George M. Cohan and the Curies, Bell and Gershwin, Zola and A1 Jolson. Moreover, there has

applied at large, of course, to

all

professional groups; to the

been the garden variety of success

epic, usually

about

composers or

fictitious

showgirls (for example, the mythologically conscious Ziegfield Girl).

The

recent inflections of this archetype have actual precedents not altogether

without implications of social prejudice. While anti-Semitism as such did not

hamper John Garfield in his roles as the violinist in Humoresque or the prize fighter in Body and Soul, no secret was made of his national origin indeed, what ;

may

be called his “race” served well to accent, however implicitly, his

not also his

fall.

Such tacitness

in the studios operates the

more

rise if

forcefully in

those biographic romances where, as with A1 Jolson (two installments) and

Gershwin, the Jewish hero

is

a resounding celebrity of

real life.

Wherever

professional snobbery might have operated against singer or composer on the rise,

prejudice as a factor was excluded simply because of the secure truth

that the theater, especially

Hollywood and the musical-comedy

been democratically open to whoever could make the grade

stage, has long

—“regardless

of race,

creed, or color.”

For us

United States, the world of professional entertainment

in the

economic democracy where the true ethical responsibility,

Society at large it

for the

and the human objective

is

who

is

profit

entertain

is

is

an

without

and nothing more. it

than about those

mostly because stage and screen are realms of make-



masquerade, where

to begin with

— the

rule for general purposes

Jewish entertainer, on every but the highest

artistic level, to forget or

two monumental

facts should be explicitly

disguise his Jewishness. In passing,

recorded: First, nose operations

concerned, and are in

product (“entertainment”)

particular about those

receives at home. This

believe, of is

is less

artistic

Hollywood

commonly

may

be de rigucur where topflight success

desirable in lay

life;

and, second, religion

is

taboo

stars’ publicity.

The argument

for

Hollywood standards as a strong democratic force might

be thought, offhand, well based, because of the very conditions describing.

is

But what

is

the formal

mode

creates universal criteria for noses, manners,

I

have been

of this “democratic force”

and acting

talent? It

is

which

monolithic

and hierarchic with only a slight modification of uniformity. This modification is a dualism derived from comic values, symbolic evil, and old age; this means

and “heroines,” character and comedians, the last of whom may have outrageous noses and be geniuses of clumsiness. At the same time, even comedians appear in the mufti of private life, and to a certain extent, if famous enough, they even have “glamor”; thus, we must assume that comedians also may develop the drawing-room manners of a Fredric March (who, after all, can in that screen stories require, no less than “heroes”

actors,

106

deep-dyed

villains,

hollywood as a universal church

Hyde) and

turn impersonate Mr. to a role of

—bob

;

romantic lover in real

if

physically a comedian

life,

he

may



Jimmy

like

is

too

much

unsuited

(Snozzola) Durante

his nose a little.

If we are to conclude, as seems inevitable, that Hollywood’s standards set up an internal convention perpetually refining itself toward universality, the instance of Danny Kaye offers a very particular import. Here is a comedian

“resembling

much

life” as

who was

as did Harold Lloyd,

the most normal-

looking of the outstanding silent-screen comics. Both are Jewish and both

achieved the big-time; both have exploited a semipathological awkwardness, primarily of sexual origin. But in Kaye’s case one will note that he has an especially flashy personality

A

tion.

and

is

a whiz (as seen

nightclub “emcee” rather than a clown,

Up in Arms)

in

Kaye began

at impersona-

his career in the

Borscht Belt and, without getting permanently into costume or devising a genre manner, climbed to a

command performance

before English royalty and

a visit with Bernard Shaw.

Kaye seems

to illustrate the very pith of social-professional success in

handicapped person who has overcome his

liability

(perhaps stuttering or

a

girl-

by inverting it into an Does anyone stop to consider that Kaye is Jewish? I hazard that many Jews do, and that his triumphant caterwauls echo intimately in many a breast in his audiences, especially in that of someone as personable as he, who hopes it is as short a step to Broadway as Kaye’s film, The Kid from Brooklyn, demonshyness, or both, as elements of his routine indicate) asset.

strates.

We have in Hollywood, then, in or out of mufti, nothing less than a Universal Church absorbing both Jewry and Christianity by means of a rigid social-professional creed. Yet, as

we have

seen recently, social reality has brought about

an external modification of the monolithism: an prejudice” which, with respect to Jews,

explicit recognition of the “race

so irrelevant in the social strongholds

five

important commercial films on this

theme: Crossfire, Gentleman’s Agreement,

Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries,

of professionalism.

There have been

is

and Pinky. The idea that Hollywood should even seem to take sides in such large issues as social prejudices against Negroes and Jews was so shocking that the desire to exploit the commercial opportunity has not prevented big-time

movie producers from begging In

fact,

off indirectly

by

insistence

on the internal creed.

except for a fresh opportunity to spread the professional doctrine, the

producers would not have considered doing films on these public moral issues.

Let us see what light

may

was a “natural”

be thrown on this point by an analysis of these

films.

John Garfield to take the part of the race victim in Gentleman’s Agreement. Having been typed as rugged and sympathetic, rather than refined or handsome, his face was just right for that of the deserving It

for

And who is the gentile hero who finally takes up Garfield’s cause? one but Gregory Peck, correspondingly typed as handsome and noble, thus overwhelmingly ideal as the “Aryan” movie hero. What happens? Peck starts underdog.

No

out by impersonating Jewishness (in

name only)

in

order to write a series of

107

the three faces of the film

feature articles for a well-known magazine.

eventually and somewhat ludicrously, a real this

Thus we do not see humiliated, Jew but a charade Jew. Through real Jew until, as Garfield, he has

odd initiation rite, Hollywood spares the Peck in there punching for him. We hardly need Peck’s masquerading secretary in this movie to inform us that, in Hollywood and every other

gentile girl

business, Jews,

male and female, disguise

their national origin “for professional

more than adequate emphasis when Peck’s conspicuously gentile fiancee cannot persuade him at first that she would marry him if he were really Jewish. The plain issue is that of “successful masquerade” for which the best, and certainly the most lucrative, formula (it sticks out like Peck’s manicured thumb) is that of being a Hollywood actor. Significantly, the fate of Garfield, Peck, and wives in their anti-Semitic suburb is never seen; Hollywood knows very well when to draw the curtain. Crossfire provided a perfectly complemental example of the professional ethic; here a candid-camera Jew is dealt death by an equally candid-camera gentile. Moral: Those who passively and naively accept their Jewishness (that is, do nothing to “improve” accent or physiognomy or mannerism) are open to victimization. Once again, the nominal gentile is physically superior to the Jew with whom he is juxtaposed; by this “superiority” is indicated that social eligibility residing in a limited brand of personal attractiveness. For the gentile fascist, the casting department wittily employed an ideal “G.I.” physical type if ever there was one, Robert Ryan, who found it as possible to look villainous as Sam Levene, who played the Jew, has found it possible in some villain’s role reasons.” Yet the point receives



he has played in the past.

wood

The

social eligibility ratio, according to the Holly-

telescoped standard of sex appeal, manners, and looks,

the movies under discussion; the higher ratio

lies,

is

the

same

whether he be hero or

in

both

villain,

with the gentile. In these “problem films,” we are viewing a “realism” self-consciously equating

itself

with

life,

so that our cue

is

not to think of lack of personability or

physical irregularity as a “talent possibility,” having an internal side exploitable

by comedian or character

actor, but only as

something to be com-

pensated for in society and the extratheatrical business world. Thus, Hollywood,

by

indirectly elevating gentile above Jew, is “anti-Semitic” only in that its

absolutist creed is pro-assimilative.

Now, how may cisely the kind of

this

simon-pure creed be stated in broader terms? It

snobbery operating

in

is

pre-

“beauty” and “talent” contests every-

where, based on the truly mass ideal of good looks and good manners encompassing every element important for any job except the specific technical competence. In other words,

aspect of

all

business



if,

Hollywood preeminently stands above

all,

be only a side dish simply because but

its

showcase

it is

never serious about anybody’s business

own.

Amazingly enough, the Negro

108

for the

of its own. Its pleas for social tolerance can

films follow suit in being fables of

mere

illusion

despite the indelible sign of black skin which, in two cases, “haunts” the pro-

hollywood as a universal church tagonists. Here, too, the

human

personality

is

presented as a showcase, rein-

human

forcing the implication that, legally white or colored, the

being

is

regarded, as far as possible, as a flexible and a surface phenomenon.

legend of Gentleman’s Agreement

is

matically reversible logic as though

Jew may

successfully

archetypal because

it

it

to be

The

possesses an auto-

were two sides of a magician’s cloak:

masquerade as a gentile

just as a gentile

may

A

successfully

masquerade as a Jew. Isn’t this the easiest way to deal with prejudice? Of course, when it comes to the Negro situation and its known statistics, the shoe must be subjected to a certain compensation mechanism to prevent its pinching too hard (in Hollywood) the other foot of the social problem. The Negro G.I. in

Home

of the Brave, being a pure African type, can never conceivably pass

himself off as white. This man’s absorption with the color of his skin logical that his dearest wish

is

so patho-

might be that, some night, the Lord would change

his color and modify his features so that, even as Scott Carter of Lost Boundaries and Pinky herself (both bred “white” through intermarriage), he too might

“pass.”

The producers that a

of

Home

Negro may have

niles except a

all

Brave went

of the

to a great deal of trouble to prove

the characteristics of one of filmdom’s leading juve-

The young and most personable African-ness,

white skin and the corresponding type of feature.

Negro here has

dignity, natural gentility,

suitably exploited

by close-ups

in

which a trembling

lip (signifying

suppressed

emotion) puts him in a histrionic class wth Jennifer Jones. Hence, while showing the character thus impersonated as a victim of race prejudice, largely due to his

own

ability.

neurosis,

Hollywood sneaks

in a

good dose of

its

Where, however, does “Hollywood talent” land

own

this

cult of person-

black hero, Peter

Moss? Paradoxically, it doesn’t save him from the trauma doubly occasioned by the persecution of a white G.I. and by the gruesome death of his own white G.I. chum. A psychological fault of the film is that this persecution by a G.I. (malcontent with the war because it has displaced him from a well-paying desk job) is shown as a routine, subcultural prejudice against black skin. The Moss’ personality, is that the white G.I. is irritated specifiby Moss’ modest, tacit assumption of social equality as a well-spoken, educated being, a “Hollywood talent” supposedly out of place with a black truth, according to

cally

skin.

However, the Negro’s downfall (shown physically by is

his inability to

walk)

duly staged under excruciating circumstances on a Japanese island, and has

to be unstaged

psychiatrist.

by the rather melodramatic maneuvers

Presumably, Moss

is

of his delusion that a black skin life

of

an omniscient army

enabled to walk again through the destruction is

a fatal curse; thus he

and locomotion by yet another delusion: that some

is

restored to normal

sort of neutral skin

color exists in the abstract, indeed, the very “color” that is meant by “equality” on the democratic politico-economic “palette.” Since the Hollywood “glamor

act”

is

unachievable in the case of an indelibly black skin, recourse must be

taken to the larger and more hazardous “act” of the equality myth. Just

how

the three faces of the film

hazardous

this

is, is

cruelly indicated at the end,

become Moss’ partner

offers to start.

The moral

white

man must lose an arm

made

is

in

after

to equate himself in worldly eligibility with a black '

Home of the Brave appeared, Lost Boundaries arrived to show,

no minced terms, that

racial intermarriage

race, eventually, to stage its “equality act.”

and

A

overt through the film’s articulate testimony:

man having both arms. Yet soon

when a white G.I. amputee Negro wants to

in the restaurant business the

his bride, light

enough

is

way

for the black

the story of a

Negro doctor

one

This

is

sure-fire

to pass easily for white,

whom

circumstance

effec-

tually tempts into betraying their original decision to live “as Negroes.” Unlike

Gentleman’s Agreement,

it is

an

masquerade by mem-

explicit tale of successful

bers of an underdog group. Certainly, with

its

conventionally attractive hero

and heroine typifying the millions of technical “Negroes” passing as whites the United States, Lost Boundaries quietly hits

We

its

is

quietly

in

aimed at sensationalism and

mark.

have already seen a roster of films in which persons extraordinary and

ordinary have been restored to normalcy and/or their regular professions by psychiatric treatment

(

The Seventh

Veil,

Spellbound, The Snake Pit, and the

Lost Boundaries, orthodox religion performs a very similar restorative

like). In

role as a public act; here, a minister’s sermon persuades the small-town community which has discovered, with appropriate alarm, that its well-loved doctor and his family are “Negroes” that, since God made us all and this

doctor

an incarnate symbol of good deeds, the town should continue to keep

is

him and

to

behave as

if

no Negro blood flowed

in his veins.

The townspeople

de-

cide in Dr. Carter’s favor.

But what, the question

mony

of purification?

instantly supervenes, has

Not merely

made

possible such a cere-

the factor that the Carters are absolute

models of the conservative middle class (though necessarily the a priori factor that they were

this too is essential)

made

eligible for

but most

such a socio-

economic success through racial intermarriage. Thus, what the white minister fundamentally puts forward

in the Carters’ behalf as Negroes is that their proshowed the good intention of assimilation, a good intention which Scott Carter and his bride personally have carried out to the last dot. Assimilation is thus placed before the Negro and white public by this movie as a sensational transformation act that has an excellent chance of success without as much

genitors

trouble as the Carters ran into ternal angle

is

simple

when

their secret leaked out.

—only through the supplementary

Hollywood’s

asset of

in-

“good breed-

ing” (speech, deportment, and so on) could the Carters have put across their

“act” as whites! live

up

to

In her

it

To have

in every

film,

a white skin

is

only the beginning; one must learn to

way.

Pinky too

equipped in no mean sense to put across her act in up North, but she is harassed by a “race conscience”

is

the South as she has done

into sacrificing the prospective social career of being a white doctor’s wife in the

North

in order to establish

and head a nursing

clinic for

Negro children

in her

hollywood as a universal church

home town. An

whom Pinky

eccentric old lady

tended on her deathbed has

Worthy of note “human law” involved

left

her the means by willing her a fine house and grounds.

is

the letter of the law (including especially the

in the

that

Hippocratic oath) receives a great deal of tacit respect in these problem pictures

about Negroes. In Pinky, the process of triumphs below the Mason-Dixon

Boundaries triumphs above the rascally relatives is

who

it.

legal justice,

somewhat

to one’s surprise,

line as the process of divine justice in

The southern

Lost

court decides against the claim of

contest the old lady’s will.

The

movies

issue of both

that of national institutionalism: religious and civil law as nondiscriminating

toward

race.

The

costs because

hint to Negroes

Home

victim of “race trauma” in

no “Red.” Her

by means of

is

Keep within the law at all army psychiatrist saved the black Brave. As for Pinky, she is certainly

plain enough:

intends to save you as the

it

of the

up democratic

film vehicle backs

racist intention

witness Pinky’s clinic in

and

racist result;

institutionalism 100 per cent

before the last fade-out,

In transcending orthodox religion, while offering no opposition to

wood

is

it,

Holly-

the one “church” whose shibboleths cannot even be remotely construed

to interfere with

any economic or thereto. 1

amendment

cratic

we

bloom.

full

political

When

worthy of the smiles of divine and Fate, the ostensible inference racial tolerance as

one

tin

United States, or demo-

in the

Negro

as

civic justice as well as of the fickle goddess,

that

is

cup and

law

the studios have portrayed the

Hollywood has contributed its tithe to Does it matter that

to patriotism as another.

the racial thesis of Pinky in terms of general ethics contradicts that of Lost

Boundaries? For one thesis does contradict the other. Substantially, Lost

Boundaries says to the white-skinned Negro: “Pass with you!” Pinky says to him: “Don’t pass even

if

if

you

you

will

—and God be

can— adopt

racism: It

needs you.” This quite unintentional propagandistic double-entendre possible only

that

is

On

by one

thing,

which

is

made

underlined by another visible phenomenon

is

coincidental only in the temporal sense.

the

same

bill

with Pinky at

its

original

Broadway

run, a newsreel carried

the face and Charles Laughtonish voice of an American Federation of Labor official

who, just returned from Europe and reporting in behalf of the theatrical

American movies are having an “impact” on European

professions, said that

audiences grown tired of the “propaganda” handed out by Russia and reacting in favor of the

between

American

this opinion

films’

and the

complex than the sort

to be solved

that the function of propaganda of entertainment

is

“entertainment.”

social

also to be

is

The apparent

contradiction

message of Pinky and the others,

merely by a semantics of rhetoric.

is

more

It is not

also to be entertainment, but that the function

—not only

propaganda

for

American democracy, of

course, but likewise for that Universal Church of monolithic socio-economic eligibility

which

is

a tangible element of this democracy, and of which Holly-

One may technically remain a Negro, of course, while not looking or behaving like, or pretending to be, one. The law does not require white “Negroes” to declare themselves except for the possible purpose of legal documents. 1

the three faces of the film

wood (with

its

trade unions as well as

its

stars)

is,

as

I

am

arguing, the self-

conscious shrine.

Does the ideology of one Hollywood product contradict another’s? What do you know! The wiseacres of show business naturally including everyone involved and certain others are not disturbed; only a “nut” would bring up the point in the first place. If, in Pinky, the Hollywood cult casually sacrifices, to





the ethical ideal of racism, the rewards automatically open to white-skinned

beauty (for example, the chance to win the bromidic cachet right in the plot to justify

The

film guilds of

title

it

of

Miss America), there

in cardinal

is

a

terms of “the faith.”

Hollywood can hardly be wrong on a question

like this: In

motion pictures, “entertainment” precedes and ultimately defines “propaganda.” Our heroine experiences one of those “private failures” combined with a “public success” which if

is

a sentimental cliche of the biographic romances;

she deliberately flops in putting across her private act, she stages her public

one with a vengeance, converting a southern ancestral mansion into a black social institution right in the faces of her white tormentors.

All over again,

we have the perennial Hollywood underdog’s smashing, pubOne can imagine the solemn “radical” minds of the

licity-getting triumph.

West Coast congratulating themselves that Pinky voluntarily

gives up the kind would choose without

of glamor that the “pinkies” of real life presumably hesitation: marriage to a white ever,

is

man and

a white future!

The

“sacrifice,”

how-

obviously predicated on a richly furnished power of choice which, on

by numerous individuals of on the downgrade, the sensationalism from the white viewpoint is ideally wedded to a sensationalism from the black viewpoint. It is, as it might be phrased, “the sort of publicity which Negroes

the whole, should be received as welcome flattery the

Negro

race.

With

couldn’t pay to get.”

box-office receipts

Even

without journalism, and scale, the

the Universal

it is

Church

of

Hollywood cannot get along

elementary journalistic wisdom that, on such a

problem film accomplishes, beyond

all

speculative “social good,” one

unquestionable and massive public mission: It super-glamorizes the

common-

place act of “passing.”

From

the serious ethical standpoint, the pith of the matter has not even been

touched by Hollywood’s innocents, though

it is

right under their noses. It

nothing but the problem of “identity” of whose “mistaken-ness” they have

is

made

such straight-faced sport with Jew and Negro. Long before existentialism, the

drama

of

Oedipus helped to teach

What

us,

through

art, the

importance of personal

and Lost Boundaries? Aunt Dicey, Pinky’s black grandmother, who can neither read nor write, is a more instinctive metaphysician, one would hazard, than any of the movie’s creators. However blindly, she puts her finger on the essence of the matter when she says reproachfully to Pinky: “People shouldn’t deny what they is.” Aunt Dicey’s point is that being a Negro, Pinky should behave as though she identity.

is

the true problem of identity in Pinky

were.

112

But Aunt Dicey, and Hollywood

too, should be told that Pinky, as her white

,

hollywood as a universal church skin informs

and sundry, “is” a “Negro” only because of a

all

legal technicality

only because white society arbitrarily ordained that she be “black” rather than “white.”

On

the contrary, biology plainly states that she

more “white” than “black.”

both, and probably

is

Strictly speaking, although the color line is in

regions a social absolute, the mulatto

is

some

a borderline identity. But Pinky finds

the borderline problem insoluble and must cheat 50 per cent of her rights as a

human

individual

by deciding only

for the black side.

How

literal the classic

“black or white” choice of moviedom’s fiction has become! It was overlooked, dramatically, that Pinky’s “white” symbolizes just as much a group duty, biologically speaking, as her “black” blood,

she

tity, is,

is

and

in choosing

a black social iden-

convicting her progenitors of the social “crime” of assimilation— she

in effect,

denying the very moral

will of fused

black and white that brought

her into being.

In giving up “personal glamor” for “race glamor,” Pinky

is

the heroine of a

curiously paradoxical exploitation of the Hollywood professional myth, whose

conditions

I

have already explained. Objectively, one might quarrel over Pinky’s

logic as conceivably reactionary in that

Negroism perforce

militates against

up sexual barriers that hold the races apart. But patently, Hollywood’s angle leaps clear of the argument. Behind all the means which tolerance in putting

white-passing Negroes and potentially gentile-passing Jews have in

and consolidating

for attaining

their

“masquerade”

is

common

a simple motto for

garden-variety (or Hollywood-conscious) democrats: Every De-Racializing

Move

is

Move

a Sure

in the Direction of

Glamor. This axiom, indeed,

is

un-

contradictable on the level of personal charms and personal success so ascendant in

an era of individual competitiveness and

in

a society where the dominant

moral ideas derive their ideal nature from the ideal aspect of the economy.

Hollywood,

Church an

in

I

dare say flatly in conclusion,

and

anti-intellectual, “nonsectarian,”

tially, it is

the

fulfills

the place of a Universal

propagating the sacred image of a basically snobbish democracy: socially crass personability. Essen-

but a hardened vaporization of the old melting pot doctrine on which

economy

of the

New World

is

explicitly built. It has

verted to the Hollywood perspective,

I

structures have been found inadequate to totally unite a (all

been gradually con-

should say, because the existing economy

democracy retaining

sentimental optimism to the contrary notwithstanding) serious racial and

religious differences.

In placing a quasi-celestial ideal of

human appearance and

behavior before

a democratic public, the melting pot doctrine via Goldwyn and Zanuck veers

from

its

original

economic status to a socio-biological status, by whose regula-

tion orthodox religion as a serious force goes underground,

speak up for

all

to hear (as in Lost

doctrine. In this

Hollywood ideology, assimilation

as $5,000 weekly

Jeanne Crain

is

is

and

is

allowed to

Boundaries) only in behalf of the melting-pot is

a higher stage of tolerance,

a higher stage then $1,000 weekly and as going out with

a higher stage than going out with her stand-in. It might be

the three faces of the film

nominally identified as the Cult of the Divine Robot, in which mixing racial colors is

and

in

which an undesirable

or taking a course in diction.

114

all

the

supposed to produce, not a depressing gray, but a glowing pink, religion

may

be overcome by changing one’s nose

A

The problem

of

Modern

Fable: Miracle in Milan

meaning becomes unusually delicate

in our time because of

complex factors: not only the international situation with

its

primarily material

and

outlook, but also the situation of man, the decline of whose moral

religious

standards have weakened both the reading of motive (good or bad) and the reading of destiny (good or bad). “Is humanity essentially good?”

almost as old as the

hills.

answers; moreover, there

He

is

plays in the control of

immensely widened the

the pristine problem of God, especially

human

field of

—notably,

The

brief

affairs.

a question

much

what

role

Then, modern psychology, having

moral behavior by attaching to

scious realm of motive, has done

bad

is

Various religions and philosophies have had various

it

the uncon-

to complicate the values of

of course, with respect to criminals

and

paragraph above might seem to represent

good and

their motives. all

our problems today

The perpetual “what” and the perpetual “how” still remain in vital suspense I mean for all who care to think seriously about man and his works. Among those film-makers who seem to care, today, is the team

as a planetary society.



of Zavattini

and

De

Sica,

which gave us the outstanding

film,

Bicycle Thief.

Their film of some years ago, Miracle in Milan, was designed apparently to enrich what might be considered a realm of gorical tale

which

simplifies existence to

much deficit in modern

art: the alle-

an obvious set of values and furnishes

man and his destiny with a single archetype. Modern poetry, we might note, has felt unable to do exactly this. I think anyone, who claimed that the righteous skepticism and forlorn faith of Eliot’s Waste Land

is still

the measure of spiritual reality for our time, would have a

highly plausible argument. Consider, too, that the tellectually serious has tended to to

show us the dark

drama wishing

side of

emphasize (as Pirandello did pro to typically) the quandary of

than his certainty. Modern novels have followed

suit,

to be in-

men’s moral struggles:

man

rather

and, like Celine’s, have

been grossly cynical, or surrendered to intellectual paradox. The encyclopedic novelist,

Romains, at the end of

his

grand sequence, leaves mankind stranded

between two philosophic views, the Apollonian and Promethean, metaphorically



the three faces of the film

locked in struggle like two battling gods. For him,

human

destiny ends

up

discernibly nowhere.

On

seeing Miracle in Milan, then, one might well ask, after the

moments, why

De

few

first

human

Sica and Zavattini should have chosen to depict the

scene with such an outdated mythological formula, combining fairy-tale literal-

and attaching it obviously to But recount a fable, doubtless, is what they systematically have done. A person called “Toto the Good” is its hero. Toto is a familiar clown’s name. But this Toto is totally good rather than totally junny. In fact, his characterization is utter and obvious: he is the symbol of ness with a very recognizable Redeemer-myth,

modern scenes and

conditions.

man’s natural innocence. I

think the greatest difficulty faced by

De

Sica and Zavattini in their chosen

task was that of making Toto convincing in the one indispensable

have been convincing;

i.e.,

Christian- Judaic world, he inherits miracles.

And

yet he

is

far less authoritative than Jesus, early in

He does not have Jesus’ anger, nor is he conscious of his destiny bestowed on him by the

heaven

way he should

and primacy in nature. In a Jesus’ prerogatives of wisdom, kindness, and

his eternal authenticity

spirit of his

to give him, in a

moment

dead

foster mother,

life,

till it is

became. literally

who comes down from

of great social peril, the

magic Dove.

He

is

quite irresponsible, in any intellectual sense, for the magic deeds he performs

by holding out the Dove in his hand. He is, in fact, as dazed as the povertyridden community he suddenly benefits, and in the midst of his official miraclemaking he forgets everything else to enjoy the blossoming of his love for the servant girl who adores him. His earthly destiny is to save his community from those who persecute them, specifically now from the rich landowner who wants to push the squatters off his property as soon as oil is discovered there. little

Toto almost succeeds, but finally the best he can do prospect of jail by leading them up to heaven and



them from the

is

to deliver

if

not to heaven, where?

on flying broomsticks. Toto’s personality, as rendered in the movie, should be closely observed, for it

holds the key to any inward consistency the film

and the resemblance of don, Jimmy Savo, and

his deeds, to such

may

have. His resemblance,

comedians as Chaplin, Harry Lang-

their deeds, are unmistakable;

course, to the fable-making of Chaplin in his later art.

and especially

Most of

so, of

the inventions in

Miracle in Milan are stock comic situations which go back to a theater antedating even Chaplin’s

first

Toto

in relation to the

very

mask

movies. But several great differences are notable of

comedy-film heroes who preceded him. Above

of his face:

largish, mature, paradoxically aquiline.

grotesque make-up in Toto’s face unchildlike, neither

Charlie or Harry

is it

mask

is

all,

one important element. Not merely

reinforced with the artful

make-up

the

Absence of is his

of the early

Langdon or Jimmy Savo. I pick these three because it is they who have exploited best on the screen or the stage a childlike innocence; indeed, who are responsible for the archetypal image, in American theater, of the

116

child-man.

a modern fable: miracle

The

artifice of Charlie

characterized them,

it

milan

in

and the others served a

special function

individualized them. Indeed,

it

own

almost everything around them, even from their

it ;

made them

groups; they

from

made

alli-

woman). Think

ances, usually, only with other individuals (as a rule, a

Charlie in a flophouse, and you see him isolated amid his

not only

alien

own economic

of

class.

Certain phases of the allegory are very clear; for example, Toto symbolically takes on the physical flaws and inadequacies of others stature

much

—by naively mimicking them.

—a squint, shortness of and a builder—as

Also, he is a leader

Redeemer myth should not be overlooked; if Moses is found as an abandoned infant amid bulrushes, Toto is thus found in a cabbage patch. The timeless and placeless Hoover ville of the squatters is the wilderness out of which Toto makes a city, with even a a Moses as a Jesus.

statue in

its

When

The Judaic element

of the

public square.

Charlie wished to place his traditional tramp in a contemporary and

consciously social perspective, he

made him an ordinary

worker, and his es-

capes from reality remained chiefly imaginary: wish fulfillment escapes. Charlie never became a savior of society (much less his

own

savior)

and when he did

impersonate a savior, he was a fraud: the Hitler parody of the double role in

The Great Dictator.

Charlie’s clown remained

an individual. And

if

other fine

comedians revealed the same type of lovable simpleton, the universality they all

achieved was the universal model of a type-personality.

whom

there

is

Not

so Toto, about

a curious “naturalness” of personality that coincides with the

absence on him of clownish make-up or costume properties. At the same time, however, that Toto

and as such,

is

a naturalized clown he

is

also

tempting our incredulity.

so, that is, as

Of what reality in human nature is Toto supposed of

its

Toto

is

among “the men

rudimentary incarnation.

Now

and Zavattini seem to have made that

to

convince us? Apparently

basic goodness, that very thing which appeared in the title of Romains’

extensive novel. will’s

an abstracted personality,

his “universality” has been dangerously simplified; dangerously

it is

good

in regard to the

will.”

good

He

will of

simple-mindedness;

fairly close to pathological

intellectual.

of

is,

indeed, good

the important statement which

it is

human

De

Sica

nature

is

completely non-

This seems a pretty big and pretty positive judgment. And here the

movie should be defined. Toto is only superby being super naturally simple-minded: a trait to be connected with

role of the supernatural in this

natural

who

the personality of his foster mother,

is

she “mouths” like a baby) even for an old

extraordinarily infantile (at times

woman

in her

“second childhood.”

There are symbols in the early part of the movie which, in this regard, seem to me actually metaphoric. Toto, while a foundling and thus unrelated in blood to his foster mother, takes on her infantilism as a permanent trait. Moreover, she

Toto

is

is

the

medium

careless after using

it.

of the

He

is

magic property, the Dove, about which

so

much “out The

proper caretaker of magic within this world. therefore consistent: as a

Redeemer he can only

of this world” that he

is

apotheosis of the climax

offer his

no is

people the redemption

117

the three faces of the film

of the Afterworld.

But

still

When

another thing operates as a significant factor.

Toto’s foster mother, on her deathbed, makes him recite equations from the multiplication table, the size of the equations steadily diminish is

till

“3X3”

when he has become the guiding spirit of his Hooverville, conventional street names to multiplication formulas, calling

reached. Then,

he changes the

one of them “Via 1X1-” It seems very likely that this going backward to the beginning signifies a starting over again for mankind itself, perhaps to the very beginning of time; not merely to “Anno Domini,” the year of the Redeemer’s birth, but to the origin of the

(“1X1”),

to

whom,

human

progenitors,

Adam and Eve

terms of time, grandmother and grandchild alike would

in

be as children.

A

when

turn of the plot, reminiscent of this type of comic stories comes

Toto’s servant-girl sweetheart pursues the patrol wagons

Dove

order to return the lost people.

A

second time in the

to Toto, so that he

film, then,

full of

squatters in

can liberate himself and his

a female character

De

is

the vehicle,

if

not

and Zavattini’s previous film, this should be read, I feel, as a matriarchal prejudice on their part. We saw, in Bicycle Thief, how church, police, and trade union all patriarchally dominated failed to assist the worker looking for his stolen bicycle, the wielder, of the magic. Especially in the light of

Sica’s





sometimes even provided obstacles. This gives a certain point Miracle in Milan,

it is

to the fact that in

God’s angels who steal the Dove from Toto; thus, the

“jealous” patriarchal supervision from heaven limits Toto’s earthly effectiveness.

Curiously suggestive about the plot of Bicycle Thief was the machinery by which the worker catches the bicycle thief and is then effectually tempted to steal a bicycle himself, thus automatically taking

ing himself of his moral anxiety. It teller that

is

on

all thieves’ guilt

and purg-

the impulse to consult the female fortune-

puts him in real proximity with the thief, for immediately after leav-

ing her with her cryptic reply hanging in his mind, he sees the thief on the street outside, chases him, refuge.

The realm

he seeks, which

is

of

and traps him

women

in the

whorehouse where he has sought

rather than the realm of

men

yields

him the object by becoming

really the thief rather than the bicycle, for only

a thief himself, and being forgiven as the bicycle’s owner forgives him, can he learn the lesson of I infinitely

simpleton I also

who

human

prefer is

De

frailty

Sica’s

supcrnaturally simple. This

is

it is

his destiny to learn.

naturally simple to

may

De

Sica’s

be a personal prejudice. But

is a much more eloquent, much truer, work of sympathy with common humanity seems much less pretentious than

think that Bicycle Thief

art. Its

does that of Miracle in Milan,

makes

and charity which

worker who

(or seems to

make) a

if

only because Miracle in Milan, as

final

envoi, rendered verbally at the movie’s final shot, flying into the clouds

‘Good morning’

really

I

have

said,

moral judgment of the best in mankind. The

when we

see all Hooverville

on broomsticks, looks forward to “a world in which

means ‘Good morning.’ ” Therefore the moral intention The most important thing in life is man’s good

of the film cannot be missed.

a modern fable: miracle will

toward man, even

milan

in

to support this judgment, the

if,

downtrodden and de-

prived must be consoled by such fantastic myths as that embodied in this

movie. Finally, Miracle in

Toto

is

Milan

is

only a portrait of the myth-making faculty

itself.

but the incarnation of the good-boy-in-the-fairy-tale translated to

all those rendered helpless by their by a negative route that Toto becomes merely human as well as merely good. His humanity exists through a defect: he does not hate. His instinct is for cooperation on an absolute plane. When he is

something close to the conditions governing

innocence of

Thus,

evil.

enough of an individual it is

his sweetheart

Does

this

mean

it is

to forget his mission, as during the courtship sequence,

who reminds him

that

man

is

of

to look to

than to the father-god of the past?

it

and returns

his gift to him.

a mother-goddess of the future rather

One might reason

the true ideology of the film: the evil of the world

is

so.

Indeed, this seems

the aggressiveness con-

centrated in the masculine personality; to be good, the male must sacrifice his so-called political

by the

wisdom with

spirit of the female,

its

which

is

ambiguous good-evil nature and be purified maternal goodness unqualified. This should

how many times it fails, for only by persisting man ever create a truly good society. The known implied philosophy of De Sica’s and Zavattini’s allegory

be his true “politics,” no matter in his instinctive

goodness can

ideology closest to the is,

I

imagine, Gandhi’s. It

is

the political

magic of an incarnation of the

We see,

spirit

weapon

of passive resistance:

uncompromisingly dedicated

in Miracle in Milan, that the

Dove

is

the

to peace.

instrumental only in a defen-

and what amounts to a sham, war, and that it is ultimately effectual only in delivering humanity to its sublimal, not its mundane, destiny. The film’s envoi might imply only a token hopefulness; again, it might imply that earthly progress is achieved in the recurrences of the heavenly Redeemer. Miracle in Milan is not sure enough as a work of art to make clear its final message. As to its sexual implications in the personality of the “Redeemer,” I think the film bears all the marks of an emasculated mental and moral operation. It quite lacks the positive character of a moral allegory such as Gulliver’s Travels. Too many ambiguous social tags are involved; for instance, the resemblance between Toto and Mussolini in physical terms is too obvious to be overlooked. Thus the personality of the Redeemer is shown as compromised, vulnerable as, indeed, an historic question mark. sive,



119

Dawn of

the 3-D’s

demonstrably

dialectical, not

stereoscopic illusion that

was a pastime

The

That part

of history

which

is

the motion picture

to say also (I quote) “unequal.”

of our great grandfathers is

overwhelming

The

is

about to become, in tri-dimensional movies, an

rival of television in the sphere of optical susceptibility.

mentioned from the platform by a spokesman

for

As

Twentieth-Century-Fox,

whose 3-D product is CinemaScope, the newest invention in motion pictures is aimed at counteracting “the unequal competition of television,” which means that, without paying so much as an extra nickel, you could, and can, stay home and be visually and aurally entertained by the television screen on which, of course, old-fashioned 2-D movies are sometimes cast. What the 3-D’s in the theater will compete with, therefore, is the feeling via television of getting something for nothing rather than with any actually optical pleasure from television; and also, perhaps, with the charm of the lazy option of turning a dial on a passing impulse.



As

to the aesthetic quality in the optical image, television assuredly gives the

movies, as yet, no competition at in a

movie house

is

to registering images,

To prefer TV home entertainment to sitting

whereas the visual

eyes to do more than just see. to

all.

implicitly to decide that the function of the eyes

is

confined

of course, that art has anything

Yet the term, art of the moit be, an accrued the idiom of motion picture criticism. If the movie industry

hesitates to boast of its “art,”

it is

is

gratuitous.

and

as old as the century

currency-value in

is

one need hardly note, require the

The assumption,

do with the entertainment industry

tion picture,

arts,

has, dubious though

because the term

is

suspect in the popular

vocabulary. But there are ready-made and utile substitutes: “spectacle,” “entertainment,” and that definitive, all-purpose adjective, “great.”

The

shiest partisan of the 3-D’s is apt to launch out with almost

that has been complimentarily used for the film product, only

bigger

now

any term inevitably

and better than before. In two of the new products that have been to date, Cinerama and CinemaScope, the wide-angle lens provides a

sampled

120

triple-screen horizon (curved) approximating the real optical field

commanded

The Cult The

great cult of the average movie-goer

is

a curious mixture, containing,

among

other things, the lay religions of snobbery and social climbing. These have oddly

masqueraded, in social-problem pictures of recent years, as the “evils” of racial and religious prejudice. The true content of such films has been the potent glamor of the industry’s own profession, one element of which (as signalized in this study of profiles) is a desirable type of nose. Here, light ironically sets off two “opposed” physiognomies having but a single aim: all those privileges, both professional and unprofessional, to be won by conformance with a given personality norm.

Crossfire

Courtesy

RKO

Radio Picture

I

Live in Fear

Miracle

in

(Kurosawa)

Milan (De Sica-Zavattini)

Courtesy Toho/Brandon Films

Courtesy Joseph Burstyn

Inc.



Recent international trends in serious films more important as propaganda than other varieties of problem-picture— have been the fable of the economic underdog and the anti-war film. These were fantastically combined in Miracle in Milan, whose Redeemer-underdog (opposite, below) is seen restraining a brutal protest by the most deprived of the social strata. Other signs of this liberal-pacifist viewpoint have been the debunking of chivalric valor as typified by the “two-gun man” cult of the Westerns, and the addition of another problem-picture hero: the juvenile delinquent. But these heroes, however socially and psychologically interesting, are less impressive than a new culture-hero unique in our time, the Atomophobe, whose origin, appropriately enough, is Japan. Below, in a masterfully composed shot, he becomes the fear-maddened destroyer of his own fortunes; opposite, above, he wears the “three faces” of a latent global psychosis: Fear, Anxiety, Doubt.

I

Live in

Fear (Kurosawa)

Courtesy Toho/Brandon Films

,

This and the two succeeding pages contain examples of the cult of the human image as reflected in the artistic revision which it endured from the end of the last century when, even in sculpture, it took on the melting lines of something vaporous and illusive, to its recent total immersion in abstract space. These versions of it should be contrasted with the way its identity, on previous pages, is preserved even while accorded an illusory and dreamlike aspect by cinematic

From Rodin’s classical human image proceeded in painting

devices.

vestige, the

to the neo-African fetish (Brancusi) and parody by the studio armature (de Chirico), through identification with manufactured objects such as furniture, machines, and clothes (Leger and Duchamp), to extreme hieroglyphic (Miro) and on to visual punning with all nature (Tchelitchew) culminating in an ingenious “costume” of

spatial planes

Rodin:

Marca-Relli

).

Orpheus and Eurydice

Courtesy The Metropolitan

de

(

Chirico:

Courtesy The

Museum

of Art

Troubadour Museum

of

Modern

Miro:

Brancusi: Socrates Art

Courtesy The

Museum

of

Modern

Art

Group

of

Women (detail)

Courtesy Mrs. Marcel

Duchamp

Duchamp: La Marie mis a Courtesy Philadelphia

Leger: Le

Grand Dejeuner

Museum

nu, par ses celibataires,

meme

of Art

Courtesy The

Museum

of

Modern

Art

Tchelitchew: Hide

and Seek

Marca-Relli: The Strategist

Courtesy The

Museum

Courtesy Kootz Gallery

of

Modern

Art

These two

film scenes

convey the presence of surcharged human

situations of which the film and the stage remain the only

adequate media of expression. The memorable Polish film below is probably the most powerful of all movies involving the operation of psychic forces. In the scene from Ivan the Terrible, three period-styles, portrayed by human faces, serve a complex development of the dramatic action: the young henchman at the left transmits the smile of an archaic Greek statue to the tyrant Ivan, who is cast in Byzantine features, while the foolish, epicene, but bold physiognomy of the mock emperor stamps him as the “photogenic type” of our film-making century.

Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)

The Dybbuk

Courtesy Janus Films

Narcissus (Willard Maas-Ben Moore)

The

direct imaging of the

human

Courtesy Cinema 16

face,

regardless of style accents or plastic

form, possesses an induplicable appeal.

The

surviving cult of the classic

human

image seems to depend solely on the movies, whose camera remains the only medium properly equipped (and still willing)

to portray its true personality.

The Red and the Black

Courtesy Valiant Films

the

dawn

of the 3-d's

by the human

eyes.

The

sensational advantage of this technical feat

factually nor theoretically in doubt. Mechanical

is

neither

means have simply brought

“natural vision” to the service of entertainment in every type of film from

why

newsreels to (and

When

not?) Shakespeare.

it is

considered that

3-D has



an illusion of “roundness,” that is, of real depth, the logical claim to borrow from the ads is that indiscriminately a lovely lady or a lion can lurch or



lunge into your lap.

Genuine tic

artists accept

a technical innovation, such as a new pigment or plas-

element, as a challenge to aesthetic possibility.

terms, the panoramic spirit of motion pictures

About three decades ago, Abel Gance, a French of

it

As projected

in technical

not, however, strictly new.

is

director, used a crude

form

(minus the depth-illusion) in his production, Napoleon. His technique

meant only an outdoors and shifting equivalent of a large theater stage, and he composed his scenes accordingly. With the gradual filmic advance, since then, of close-up technique and image definition, the scope of the wide-angle or triplescreen 3-D also gives us and fairly near actors moving from side to side of a large room. In the case of Warner’s Natural Vision and Oboler’s independent





3-D, the standard-sized screen

must be achieved with

is

retained with the result that the roundness

special eyeglasses.

As irksome

as these facial appurten-

ances are, the roundness bestowed by them seems more positive than that available to the naked eye in the other type. This is owing,

first,

overall compactness, forcing attention on the central

second, to

its

somewhat sharper stereoscopic

definition.

to the former’s greater

and nearest image, and The imagery of both, for

technical reasons, remains relatively flat like cardboard figures placed in front

of one another;

what

is

emphasized, thus,

volume) but the empty space in which

an art so spiritually

is

not the object

it exists.

(its solidity

and

Dangerous, one might say, for

thin.

Both stereoscopic types have stereophonic sound (i.e., sounds seem to originate from their true, visible and invisible, sources) as well as Technicolor or some other color process. Thus, even if television appears with color— as it



seems about to do

the rivalry shapes up this way: Television

relation to its spectator’s axis,

3-D movies

is

centripetal in

drawing the world into his domestic space, while

are centrifugal in relation to their spectator’s axis, drawing

collectively, into the world’s space.

The

him

out,

limited 3-D, requiring the eyeglasses,

produces a tantalizing visual sensation: one seems to be in a dark tunnel at an uncertain distance from a large rectangular peephole beyond which, contracting and expanding, a somewhat unstable tri-dimensional space appears. Those Arabian Nights magicians did not foresee the vicissitudes of the magic-carpet idea.

The psychic

tension deriving from these

new sensory

experiences accordingly

depends on a modification of the spectator’s passivity. The implied aesthetic

problem

is

where the

line

is

to be

drawn between vicarious experience

of the real

world and that purely passive psychological state necessary to the experience of art. Aligned with this problem inversely to be experienced in the future without

is

E.

M.

Forster’s fantasy about

life

moving from an armchair. Not only are

the three faces of the film

the frontiers of aesthetic experience challenged

put in question again (see the

final

by stereoscopic

sequence of House oj

Wax)

vision but also is

the disputed

margin between pornography and artistic representation.

The

ideal condition of the spectator implies the strict symbolic nature of the

spectacle, signifying a taboo

on any

illusion of his active participation.

In dance

numbers, contrarily, the stereoscopic screen seems to put us on the stage under the very feet of the dancers and in general the 3-D’s bring apparently real per-

sons within apparent touching distance. Despite the hypothesis of fiction and all

the artificial conventions, the tri-dimensional screen favors a quasi-real world

inviting the total participation of the senses. Dialectically, this

enlarge the art of the motion picture. In any case,

it

may

eventually

has promoted the demand

and (much more difficult! ) stereotactile touch. Those lured away from television, while being treated by the movies as usual to symbolic participation in seen and heard actions, also find the suggestion that they jump out from under the wheels of a racer about to smash up. It may take some time before a comfortable psychologic-aesthetic adjustment can be made. Meanwhile the familiar artifice of the movies has acquired a fresh for stereolfactory odor

dimension;

it

renews, under special conditions, the eternal psychic tension in

the individual between acceptance

and

by the

There are Atop a comic-strip mountain, Daisy Mae tragically observes Li’l Abner impaled below her on a needle-like peak. One half expects, the next moment, that one of her companions will reassure her: “That ain’t stickin’ through his gizzard, Daisy Mae, it’s

odd

stickin’

122

rejection

real world.

possibilities in the operation of the general psyche.

through his

CINERAMA! ”

American Film Trends

in the Fifties

There are certainly two aspects of human spectacle in which American movies show and the gun battle. It is to be noted, in any summation of modern trends, therefore, that these two spectacles have a historic and related status, a status originating with the growth of show business in

are incomparable: the floor

America.

An

alternative to the

gun

professional.

A

famous

—one — the

battle

as elegantly done in American movies

just as

is

fist

relished

and

just

both amateur and

was The

film of the teens, later remade,

set the standard for that sort of thing in

much

fight,

Spoilers,

which

movies over the world. During the

Canyon Passage, a Technicolor western, flatly indicated that the grudge villain in the Old West was far from being the edifying moral event many have supposed, and instead was a kind of gambling show, promoted by bettors who regarded the two warriors much as they would two forties,

fight

between hero and

bears drawing blood, perhaps

life,

was the masculine contribution off,

from each other. In other words, the

to the floor show, then as

fist

fight

now, on platform or

consisting of girls.

After mid-century, the knightly ethics of the lethal gun battle have given

way now

before the pressure of common-sense and humanitarian criticism, and the

gun

battle survives in the higher film brackets,

it

if

does so as the form of

competition that certain sports are today: a benign superstructure of the brute kill. Jennifer Jones as a female gun battler was an anticlimax some when even the habitues deemed her role excessively bloodthirsty. After all, she was a girl. It was no coincidence that in High Noon a formal sense dominated the visual style to a degree conspicuous in a western. The fact is that glamor was removed from the two-man gun battle which is the film’s climax, so

impulse to years ago

that the event becomes the mere routine of the sheriff doing a singlehanded job

on a notorious outlaw and of

it all.

his gang:

uppermost in

In High Noon, a social element

law-abiding group, which

is

cowardly.

is

feeling is the stark formalism

emphasized by the defection of the

The catch

is

that the townspeople, in

terms of moral prejudice, prefer (for whatever reasons) to be the spectators of the event. It

was too bad they couldn’t get it by

television.

But the usual show

123

the three faces of the film

at least what the customers in the movie house get. The man in the audience and the townspeople of the film represent two forms of “innocent bystanding” is

that are curiously akin in the light of total morality.

—which

Humanely, our century century

—assumes that

criminal can bring the 3-D’s its

make

little

killing is

has already killed more than any other

morally hideous; even the execution of the

moral edification. Yet the spectacle of

have

thrice real) continues to

its

killing

(which

floor-show appeal as well as

automatic documentary or newsy caliber. Cease Fire was a three-dimensional

Red Garters focused on the two-man any illusions that the westerns keep ancient chivalry alive. Why the term “floor show”? it signifies the intimate element, the aesthetic relationship most easily fusing spectator, in our time, with spectacle. “Ringside seats” expresses what I mean. As wrestlers and boxers are literally thrown into spectators’ laps, and showgirls in night clubs seat themselves there, the 3-D’s make the same thing seem possible and blood seem spilled perspective on the Korean fighting, while

gun

battle as a floor-show burlesque of



at your very feet.

Deep thinking in boy

in the street

these subjects

must come upon a paradox: every other

has Gene Autry or

Roy Rogers

television rivals) for his gun-toting hero,

woman from being scalped or well

is

or Bill

Boyd

and yet the heroism

raped and pegging the dirty

little

(or one of their

of saving a lovely

a fare-you-

villain for

presumably as morally dead as historically dated. Lately, the movies

have not been behindhand in focusing on the the reservoir of chivalric myth.

little

The chief popular

boy of indeterminate age as

knight-errant in the American

second quarter of the century has been the Lone Ranger. In the documentarily and humanely slanted Little Fugitive, there is a mock killing played as a trick on a little boy to make him believe he is his elder brother’s murderer. In lone flight, the little “killer” unintentionally lands in Coney Island, which to him is the most available land of real adventure. But his ideal of the cowboy has explicitly

been derived from television movies. Ostensibly

harmless, everything ending happily, but the image of

door floor show involving let’s-pretend Wild West

it is all

perfectly

Coney Island as an

stuff is the

out-

impression that

survives of this miniature odyssey.

The mock death in theatrical

of the big brother

make-believe

itself.

On

is

emblematic of the mock death rendered

the pure level of fantasy, there

is

bound

to

be a fusing ambiguity. Is art, even as in the plebeian movies, primarily a land of wish-fulfillment behavior

where honorable murder

dead-and-gone culture? Shane, the runner-up to High

is

the old wives’ tale of a

Noon

in

terms of scrupu-

lous production, tells the story of a good-bad hero (suitably Sphinxlike) through

boy who worships him. A less distinguished western recently boy to believe, for quite a spell, that his own dad w as no hero but a lowdown murdering horse thief. Indeed, the eyes of the young must judge these matters; must judge, in short, what constitutes the “heroism” of killing. Not long ago, Audie Murphy, of all people, played the role of a professional killer with “virtue”; that is, one who follows an Old West code of fair fighting the eyes of a

allowed a

124

little

little

r

american

film trends in the fifties

(and who reforms, of course, at the picture’s close). Movies do not hesitate up such moral ambiguities. The audience, no less than the film-makers,

to play

cannot be blind to the indirect commentary on war that

is

involved in these

mid-century entertainments. “Is the modern soldier a hero?” obfuscated proposition. Peculiarly enough, this

is

by Hamlet of the tragedy of blood. Does honor and entirely of demanding blood for blood, life is

the corpse? Perhaps his virtue

In

Red

is

much

is

the blunt

like the question

if

asked

consist, that is to say, exactly for life?

—and who,

precisely,

in doubt.

Garters, filmed entirely with backgrounds equivalent to stage sets

comedy

of the musical

cowboy hero

genre, the

arrives

on the frankly

artificial

scene to avenge the death of his brother. Every element of the standard western is

em-

deliberately present with a special spoof-it-out-of-countenance accent

bodied in frequent songs and dances. So one ing absolutely everything that

may ask whether Red

Garters, hav-

Oklahoma! has, isn’t making a euphemistic joke cowboy charade. It is interesting that a

of the contemporary reality behind the

great effort

is

made

in the film to reveal the absurdity of the chivalric dueling

Both participants

tradition.

worked on by the humanitarianly inspired Meanwhile a self-confessed coward shoots them, but fortunately the heroine has had the

here,

heroine, deliberately fire to miss.

from ambush to

kill

one of

foresight to place blanks in the skunk’s guns (etc.). If one conforms with the

apparent wish of this and other movies to consider questions are not in order. But all

if

any

all

the world a floor show,

relation to reality is meant, one

may

ask

the questions admissible to a courtroom concerning motives in this “illegal”

duel.

Re

the soldier as knight-errant,

Quentin Durward (with

its

The Knights

of the

Round Table

anticipated

glamorizing of the “last” medieval knight). These

and other romantic spectacles have gained a transfusion of charm from the ambitious dimensions of CinemaScope and announced that the spectacle has been Definitely Revived by the 3-D’s. The diagnostician of trends must inevitably remark that nothing recent or current hints of any diminution of confidence in film-makers that some moldy old stereo won’t do very nicely for the time being, especially fide

war

Envy

if it

has the conman’s Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, a bona-

hero, or a bona-fide heroine from the realm of Alcholics

Anonymous.

make Hollywood producers take itself explains why envy is not enough.

of television might seem enough to

supreme

There

is

risks,

but a look at television

nothing in television that hasn’t been in the movies

—by

which

I

mean all kinds of floor shows. Glancing to one side at the artistically serious

efforts of

present classics or near-classics, there springs to recent

example of Simonizing Shakespeare

for the

film-makers to

memory Orson

Welles’

mobile camera, Othello: a brilliantly

and inevitably and aridly impertinent piece of work. Julius Caesar in V and Hamlet, but cannot be said to have solved the problem of transferring Shakes-

skillful

1953 was an emulation of the previous British productions of Henry

peare to the screen any better than did

its

models, and in some respects

it

falls



the three faces of the film

below

its

models.

A

pretentious kind of art film has reached the fiction genre.

Huston’s Moulin Rouge had some superlatively successful atmosphere but the treatment of

hero, Toulouse-Lautrec, while apparently

its

it

heralds similar

exploitations, leaves out almost everything to be desired of a film about a great '

artist.

Othello, in English,

nomic

factors, indeed,

was produced as a

sort of international enterprise.

have made American enterprises on foreign

Eco-

soil attractive

and producer. Bing Crosby surprised by coming forward with Made in France and released by Paramount, it was a remarkable example of disciplining the glamor ego down to sensible size. Bing is nothing if not sincerely modest in it and plays a beautiful foil for a mesmeric child actor, Christian Fourcade. There have been many child heroes in the latest decade of film, and if any promising or aesthetically hopeful trend exists in American movies, it is the humane dignity and care and chaste sentiment which to both actor

Little

Boy

Lost.

a child’s presence has the faculty of conferring on his handlers.

As obvious

as Little

France and French actors



it is

sentiment. If the Western hero

one scarcely dare hope

for

is

Boy Lost

was,

bilingual

—and

—or

it

at least

profited

perhaps some other

right off the wide-open

its

little

Western

in

contact with

never overflows into vulgar

anything so epoch-making) perhaps

child’s direct observation. If little Christian

serious,

awakening

about to be revaluated in America (though

start with a small boy’s hero-worshiping, subjected as in

and

by

it is

sound to

Shane to the laws of a

Fourcade can render Crosby sober

boy can laugh Roy Rogers and colleagues

floor shows. It hasn’t

suggests that the broad tongue-in-cheek fantasy of

happened yet but

it

Red Garters is not altogether

without interest, especially as that film had a conscious grasp of the underlying

and its negative component in modern life. One must account for two impulses in human temperament regarding the taking of human life by man: that of the young soldier, Zossima, in T he Brothers Karamazov, who repudiates the ritual duel as wanton killing, and that of Ilusha, the little boy in the same novel, who so passionately wants to avenge his father’s humiliating chastisement by Dmitri Karamazov that he throws a ritualism of the chivalric duel

stone at Dmitri’s brother, Alyosha (a “Karamazov”), and bites his hand.

Personal and family honor

can wash away a moral

is

the sole content of the ritual duel. Only blood

As Zossima understood, every instance of the sacrifice. Modern wars, however, make all Christian scruples into metaphysical and individualistic issues. It is the mortal verve of Ilusha, the “natural boy,” to which we must look ritual duel is

a direct challenge to the adequacy of Christ’s

for predictions

Jesus

is

stain.

about the ethical status of human

no competitor of

Roy Rogers

the faith of socialist thinkers in the

as collaborator with

Revolution and

126

its

in its controlling

human and

killing.

Many might agree

that

as a mythical hero without relinquishing

power of reason. But the history

of reason

aesthetic emotion, beginning with the French

revision of neo-Classic tragedy, does not inspire confidence

power, unless as a mere discipline of the static ideal of pa-

american

film trends in the fifties

But in the latter case, it must be remarked that there is no dividend which is the prime interest of the aesthetic motive. The cynicism of High Noon, if this film be considered in the light of

triotism.

in tragedy,

Corneille’s Horatii,

One seems

is

that brother betrays brother in the family of just society.

vague parable of propaganda for the United Nations as a

to read a

possible “lone sheriff” pitted against a certain “deadly

But

of the world neutrally looks on. plausible,

makes High Noon a fantasy

menace” while the rest however formally

this interpretation,

reason to justify.

difficult for

The United

States in the international field can hardly justify the small boy’s faith in the

Lone Ranger simply because

it

probably not be necessary for

will

it

to

do so;

anything short of a globally decisive world conflict in the future seems inconceivable. Nevertheless the longevity of the

Lone Ranger

seems unlimited so long as individualism can sustain constrained to wait without

with the one

who

much hope

for the

as a fantasy hero

symbols

its

in art.

One

is

unique child who, parallel

perceived that the Emperor wasn’t really wearing any

Lone Ranger

clothes, perceives that the

is

something hanging in a dressing

room.

But

is

that

all

he really

is?

Perhaps not. Perhaps we can never read “fact”

without cognizance of the symbolic clues lying in “fantasy.” As film such as

substance

The Outlaw, both a

may lie

timeless

and

strictly

we saw

in

a

contemporary moral

behind the old-fashioned cowboy’s shirt and in his “two-gun”

mechanism. But the “unique child” of American recent phenomena,

is

films,

according to the most

the juvenile delinquent, gangsterish and yet necessarily, as

a problem child, an individual. The Blackboard Jungle, a movie based factually

on moral depravity and violence among the the high-school youth of the cities, was realistic to the extent that the young actors of the cast had no charm and in most cases were actually repellent. A fact which Hollywood would never admit, and about which public recognition still seems vague, is that the publicity given in this way to the juvenile-delinquent group glamorizes it and compensates its members for lack of natural human charm. Of course, such objective social documentation could not in itself become a vehicle for a star actor. Thus, when Marlon Brando and a newcomer, James Dean (killed several years ago in an automobile accident), were selected to illustrate the neurotic types that make up rebellion in the young, general human sympathy was engaged for the social problem of juvenile delinquency, though the results held an inevitable ambiguity of value.

The Wild One, banned it

sounded the

and

common

defies standards of

in

England, was an apt

title for

Brando’s vehicle, for

family chord as to the “black sheep”

good behavior

in the

who won’t conform

community. The nomadic crew of

motorcycle-mounted hoodlums headed by the picturesque Brando represents the wild juvenile element, untethered from

verging on gangsterism. James

Dean

of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause,

home and “good

influences”

and

lived to appear in only three films, East

and Giant. The

first,

from the well-known

Steinbeck novel, gave him a chance to portray a highly neurotic character

127

;

the three faces of the film

with Brando mannerisms, perhaps more appealing as a “juvenile” since

Dean

was younger and slighter in build than Brando. But, in essence, both actors are ideal for showing the neurotic trends in delinquency as both are (or Dean was) naturally infantile types, and their acting styles grew out of unabashed infantine intuitions of reality. It is the actual personality of

interest should

Brando, and formerly that of Dean, on which

be focused rather than on the films themselves. For the

self-

evident true temperaments of these actors show the psychological basis in society for what, in individuals

work and

will to

who

lack talent for a profession or the normal

and often

play, tends to function in idle, undisciplined,

destructive ways. Ironically, perhaps acting

the only profession which could

is

have adjusted both young men to the regular occupation of working. Because both were so good-looking (Dean had a rosebud mouth and Brando’s babyish

pout qualifies the beauty of his classical features), the social moral of the juvenile-delinquency theme was sacrificed in their cases to aesthetic pleasure.

This

is all right,

theoretically, for art.

But

if

Brando’s and Dean’s films of this

kind be regarded as “social problem” pictures, the same factor of exceptional

human charm becomes

embarrassing. Rebel Without a Cause

is

a

title

which

provides a “benign” moral definition for the typical juvenile delinquent. But the

same epithet becomes



cause”

and any It

good itself

The

as,

trivially

unhappily, the case

visible trace of

good

romantic

of course, ethically liberal to

in

him

only the

evil

the specific “rebel without a

often be

him can be

in

extirpated.

has a charm even when, in physical and/or moral form,

fact remains,

often so

it is

on the other hand, that juvenile delinquency,

entertainment. Contemporary realism, it, is

much

tions that are easily

human charm

assume that any human being has some

which has grown up

quasi-criminal or criminal theme in the movies,

of

utterly lacks

instinct.

is,

if

if



may

when

“decoration” in that

it

it

is

Youth

misshapen.

like

any other

apt to be only grist for

comes down

to real analysis

arouses mere melodramatic emo-

purged without leaving behind a moral sediment. The

by violence and vicarious indulgence of “forbidden” apthis is the be-all and end-all of a large range of American films. Wild petites juvenile delinquents replace wild Indians; a young district attorney or an idealistic teacher replaces the Lone Ranger. Entertainment can only aim at art approximately hence, its “hits” are abortive. What must perish, for movies to be art, is the popular formula. But movies without the popular formula?! this would connote a new stage in the evolution of human society. public

is

entertained





128

On

It has

the Cult of Displaced Laughter

been more than half a century since the medium of moving photography to furnish one of its first thrills of eroticism, The Kiss (which lasted

was able

a minute), and one of

its first thrills

and Fantasy are the twinlike realms

of fantasy,

A Trip

to the

Moon. Eroticism by

of filmic eloquence chosen respectively

the editors of two recently published, historically impressive books of “stills .” 1

These volumes are notable world and the

air

for both exhaustive research

among

the films of the

given the movies of being something that shifts easily and lust, fantasy to fun, and science to on one side and cineastes from the other,

amusingly back and forth from horror to sex.

Of

course, observers of society

with plain movie fans between, have long been familiar with the phenomena rather elegantly exploited by the two albums, which originate in France and whose captions are French. One finds that a little French, even of the collegelearned kind, goes a long way through these pictorial labyrinths, even a bit farther than necessary to grasp the “hidden message” of a displaced laughter.

Perhaps the unique, the precious, thing about

all

laughter

is

that

it

provides

any age the perfect key to society’s various cults, whether as open and simple as those of Marilyn Monroe and Mae West, Garbo and Dietrich, or as closed and complex as those signalized by the Robot-Queen of the old German in

film,

Metropolis,

who

is

readily identifiable in these Gravesian days as the

White Goddess in her “terrible aspect.” Encyclopedic example: the “still” showing Mr. Hyde of Dr. Jekyll fame assaulting a prostitute: the players are Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins. They wear one supposes involuntarily, which makes it all the funnier identical expressions in which “lust” meets and marries indistinguishably with “horror.” Incidentally, one also detects the bad Roman imitations of the Greek tragic and comic masks. The movies, whatever their passing virtues and faults, may be depended upon to remind us of certain popular fantasies, certain vestigial myths, which find it as



— —



1 L’Erotisme au CinSma. Par Lo Duca. Jean -Jacques Pauvert, Editeur. Pauvert. Paris. Le Fantastique au Cinema. Par Michel Laclos. Jean- Jacques Pauvert, Editeur. Pauvert,

Paris.

129

the three faces of the film

hard to die as Frankenstein himself. Haunted, hard-working Hollywood lately

came up with a “teen-age Frankenstein.” Though not

so distinguished as his

cultural daddy, he at least proved the survival of his line. write,

still

another cult-pregnant Frankenstein item

At the moment

I

going the rounds of the

is

New York film houses. way,

If culture, in its vast

is

timeless

and

too fluid, cults in their triviality

all

tend to be neat, timely and assessable. Yet they have a reflexive

back from the grave. After Frankenstein’s monster

first

way

of

coming

established himself on

more or less biological bastard of science and sexiness, was decided (shades of the caged ape! ) that he needed a mate; hence: Bride of Frankenstein. There is a very funny “still” in the fantasy album showing Boris Karloff as the monster and Elsa Lanchester of all people! as his bride. the world screen as the

it





Scars of surgical zeal near their necks plainly reveal the hideous truth: both

morgue or a

are resurrected from the

more astonishment than

show

similar repository. Their expressions

erotic susceptibility: a bias

which might reasonably

be inferred from their late ordeals; neither expected to be given another chance at “love” after their exits from this Vale of Tears. Part of our laughter, even

part of our chill (automatic in that

men and women,

and

their features

in

and

all

perishable flesh)

is

changed; that

of tragedy

is

owed

to the fact

submit to anesthesia while operated on

is,

the purpose of restoring or acquiring charm, beauty,

The impact

certainly

out of the acting profession, get their faces lifted

relatively timeless

for

and/ or youth.

—as the

revival of

Greek

classic



drama in our era demonstrates yet the impact of comedy, much more qualified by passing social humors, varies widely throughout the history of the arts. The question might well be proposed, considering

how moody society has been may not have bound up

since the start of the century, whether the movies their

own nature with

the audience’s nature, and in Pirandellian key shuttled

reality with fantasy as glibly as

comedy with

tragedy.

The appearance

of the

French picture books, obviously signifying a polite pornography of the vated,

may indicate merely

culti-

the responsiveness of a single sophisticated cult, one

of all too subtly displaced laughter. According to the

audience (go to the nearest art-film house to hear

it),

key response of

love

this

and the imagination,

at the shortest possible notice, are subject to being swept into the realm of

science fantasy

and burlesque sex by one

audience simply is it,

effete,

ill-timed guffaw.

morally exhausted? Is

it,

by and

Now

is this

cult

paranoid? Or

large,

perhaps, becoming part of the Existentialist milieu of “strangers” to

existence

—and thus strangers

The canned economy

to aesthetic as well as to moral values?

involved with a notably canned product

something very important about

it.

may

The movie convention known

reveal

as the

“trailer” seeks to condense into a few minutes of intense animation the

most

“salable” elements of the coming program and so produces shameless vulgarization in an object of already compromised dignity. taste.

But grim,

received. I

silent revulsion is

The

not necessarily the

trailer is in atrocious

mood

in

have even heard connoisseurs declare that seeing the

which

trailer

it

is

makes

on the

displaced laughter

cult of

unnecessary to see the

it

by no means averse

film.

However

true this

may

be, art-film houses are

to letting their choicest exhibits be seen in the trailer’s

inflammatory spotlight. The other evening, for a frankly sensational,

I sat in

a theater where the trailer

though presumably serious, sex romance was disclosed

soon as the feature had flickered

in briefs, as usual, as

Its

off.

corny com-

mentary, together with the obliquely suggestive sequence of shots, held the audience in perpetual uproar for

its

duration.

One could assume

a cult phenomenon consciously sparked by a few ultra-aesthetes

but suppose, assuming quite another perspective, one could take

judgment by

that this

was

in the audience, it

as a sound

good sense? These days the movies, even a large proportion of the foreign ones, begin by wanting sex to look both sexy and amusing, and through systematic vulgarity end by making it look even funnier society’s deep

than intended. Possibly an inexorably moral logic, of which these two picture books are simply a veracious symptom, has been long at work; the Cult of Displaced Laughter

among them

is

is

based on certain stark truths of modern society: chief

the great disillusionment with institutions

—with comedy and

tragedy as with democracy and dictatorship.

In such a despair of the cultural economy, what as commercial vulgarity

is

to

is

universally recognized

—according

be as heartily enjoyed

to rules of the

—as high tragedy or high comedy, and the

Cult of Displaced Laughter

tends not to care which grand aesthetic principle, precisely,

cultist

being vitiated.

is

Man more promore decades, than has come to particular notice. At least, stoic vulgarity would seem the aesthete’s only alternative to excessively

Perhaps the Tired Aesthete has replaced the Tired Business foundly, and for

submission to

sophisticated howling at of Existentialist so, that those

it.

On

the current off-Broadway stage, the rising star

comedy has almost

who

risen to

middle-brow popularity; so nearly

cherish the true aesthetic reaction are heard to complain,

between acts of a Beckett or Ionesco comedy, that the audience the

is

laughing “at

wrong places.”

Are these

delicate handlers of aesthetic conscience not being reactionary?

Theater comedy

may have come



the creator’s intention

is

to the point

always

right.

the trend I mean. Tennessee Williams

is

—regardless

where the audience

An

of

anecdote will serve to illustrate

who

a notable American playwright

cannot have failed to be as sensitive to transoceanic influences as foreign audiences have been to certain of his plays.

An

old tale

is told

premiere of The Rose Tattoo (later a screen vehicle for

whom

of the Chicago

Anna Magnani,

for

was written): the lead actress lamented backstage, during the performance, that the audience was laughing at her serious lines. “If they laugh,” it

the playwright

is

reported soberly to have reassured her, “it’s a comedy.”

Now

there are, of course, the hybrid theatrical genres that perhaps Euripides himself

(with such works as Alcestis and Helen)

may

be the

first to

have invented as

primordial parent of the Cult of Displaced Laughter. But the ready chameleon-

ism of Mr. Williams’ reply to his lead seems compelling: no aesthetic

logic-



the three faces of the film

comes to audience response! The Rose Tattoo, despite thereafter to be a comedy. Could there be something global about the contemporary emulsion of the

chopping when

it

its

moments both sordid and romantic, was genres? Subtlety

art

one side as a sophisticates’ squabble, the death of old-

all to

fashioned slapstick in the movies was the end of a broad genre far more

elementary than “Aristophanic” laughter; in a historic visual

ingenuity of the

its

requiem has already been sung

anthology called The Golden Age of Comedy. Even the fey

Marx

brothers,

Today

finally yielded to time.

whose

was always

relation to Surrealism

plain,

the inherently verbal character of radio as trans-

mitted to television has promoted the non-visual elements of this newest of

by no means now reign in TV studios. As for by the vanished silent-screen comedians, it is a museum curio, significantly relished only by cineastes and nostalgists. On the radio, comedy became soap opera; now on television, gags mixed with personalities have finally almost pushed the comedy of movement and the folk media, so that “sight gags”

slapstick

movement, as

glorified

clown’s deformity off the scene of the popular arts. It

is

time for every celebrity

seem as ridiculous as Garbo in the very last film she made, Two-Faced Woman, little more than a charade of the two personalities which box-office sentiment had compelled her to develop. If Dietrich, fresh from resurrective techniques, is still “delicious,” she is deliciously funny rather than deliciously glamorous: a sort of “retouched” photograph of Mae West. Glamor, to be sure, is still pay-dirt yet now it is best that it be pay-dirt with cannonading of the to



vocal cords. Tallulah

Bankhead apparently was judged neither

fantastic nor

erotic

enough

point.

She was a star who vulgarized herself with an honest good-will, and for



years

for inclusion in

after failure in

our two picture books but she

is

—was

Hollywood and on Broadway

a classic case in

a radio “comic”

glorying in her sarcastic fate.

Kidding itself has always been the privilege of the upper classes, professional and social. Has it at last become their necessity and is the truly cultivated class among those for whom the classic privilege has become a “necessary”



luxury? Top-level sophisticates can

moon

movies and bygone glamor boys and

girls

cult-reaction in

is

over the aesthetic grandeurs of silent

as

much as do

more naturally poker-faced. Garbo

Beau Brummel

or

Moby

it is

whom

classics of the heart as of the

museum. Speak-

our grandfathers and grandmothers in general that

regret; not just their aesthetic responses

and opportunities

all

and

the dignity, along with charming quaintness, which their traditional

images can inspire in our roll

we

to enjoy a perished

art of the theater, but also their clothes, their relative moral simplicity,

above

the

John Barrymore

Dick, the “great” slapstick artists of the screen,

have disappeared only to become ing nostalgically,

cineastes, for

in Camille,

up nostalgia and the

The French albums

of eroticism

and fantasy

latest in science fiction into, so to speak,

one endless

feelings.

we get the impression of a newsreel documenting What Fun from Cocteau to Comedy regardless of date-of-issue the Movies Can Be.

film-strip so that



However, after the

first

few chortles and giggles, one grows a

little

grim, even

on the stoic.

cult of

displaced laughter

Exposed on the

title

page of the erotic album

is

something which unites

Daumier at his: a an undertaker reaches up to affix a fig

Alcibiades at his blasphemous tricks with

puritanical gentle-

man

leaf to

in the

garb of

an antique

statue.

This naif-sophisticated image

is

taken from an equally naif-sophisticated

Experimental film by a middle-aged member of the avant-garde school. It was placed thus strategically in the album partly because of view, which to

is

“Earth Mother’s view.”

leaders

and

art

its

angled from the ground. “Worm’s-eye view”

Maybe

albums of the

it is

cutely insinuating is

closely related

chthonic laughter to which the cult

film world invite us: that chthonic laughter that

belongs to Hades and the grave as well as to the womb-from-which-all-things-

come. This would explain to

companion each

other.

why

the French albums seem so successfully designed Yet an aura of impurity hangs about this Madame

Tussaud’s of the movie cliques. One finds oneself supersatiated after hardly

more than tasting the fun. The comedy rigidifies into the poker-faced aspect of Samuel Beckett’s stage, where it is not that the pathos is too much for laughter if only because the audience laughs “at the wrong places”— but that the comedy as such is in bad taste. It is the ironic gusto of bad taste that feeds



the Cult of Displaced Laughter.

133



The Atomophobe:

A man wakes up one morning

to find himself

A New

an obnoxious

Culture

insect,

Hero

one frequent-

ing domestic interiors; he cannot go to work, he becomes a tragic plague to his family,

and he

realizes

an external, irremediable form has been given his under-

ground shrinking from his common daily

life.

as yet no super-insecticide has been invented.

Metamorphosis, a

man

its

His

The

is

a human doom for which

story, of course, is Kafka’s

protagonist the author’s legendary hero of Alienation. Or,

finds himself arrested for a crime

whose nature continues to be concealed trial for it seems indefinitely post-

from him after his apprehension while his

poned; mechanically, he goes about seeking to “arrange” his exoneration along sub-rosa

official

paths: another hero of Kafka’s, this one as inextricably trapped

as the insect hero. His

name

throughout The Castle, he

The Castle and The

in the novels,

tries to

obtain that from which he

is

Trial, is K.;

suddenly de-

tached in The Trial: a job. Thus what

is called “alienation” might be termed Atmosphere connoting a radically negative phase of ordinary human existence. K. is never in a job; though technically he may once have occupied it, it has no true existence, in the sense of possession or dura-

in general a Totality

tion.

job

To

all visible

intents

and purposes

—the nearest he comes

comes an itinerant worker

K. never occupies a immigrant who benovel, Amerika. Essentially, Karl

Kafka’s

in

fiction,

to doing so is as Karl, the in the earliest

belongs to the “eternally unemployed,” being symbolic of the permanent statistical

margin of the actually unemployed.

Another Totality Atmosphere in modern is

to be detected in

fiction is Proust’s.

Perhaps a third

Camus’ The Stranger, where a spontaneous homicide

portrayed as quite without conscious or particular motive. erally said of such “atmospheres”?

They

are, to

What can

be sure, subjective

is

be gen-

fictions only

because so exclusively subjective and extreme in feeling, for they relate to very recognizable experiences in

human

society.

And

yet, as planetary life

proceeds from day to day, paced by conventional ambitions and preoccupations,

such moral reflexes as are found dominating the lives of Kafka’s K. and Proust’s

134

Marcel

—whose Total Recall

ritualizes the past as

an imaginative absolute

the

atomophobe: a new

culture hero

are completely absorbed into society’s vast normal rhythm. All the heroes I

have mentioned are symbolic extremes of human behavior and human motives



in fine, of human consciousness. They are curiously brought into line with a new type of conscious extreme that indicates a new Totality Atmosphere without actually projecting it. This has occurred in a new Japanese movie, / Live in Fear, whose hero sustains a state of mind which, grasped as it is here in relation to the real world, makes him appear in much the same light as Kafka’s insect

hero: he

is

a plague and a freak whose relation to suppressed or unconscious

factors of ordinary psychic life

is all

too close and pointed.

The theme of the movie, as it were, creeps up on one. Unfortunately, American audiences to touch

The

it.

may

it

never see

it

since distributors, for obvious reasons, have declined

even though virtually

filmic scene against

all

the rest of the “civilized world” has seen

which the movie’s credits are projected

of ordinary people, probably office workers, going to

roads; though the locale

is

all

that,

in type: a corridor in a family court

among

tell

young a curious “internationalism” stamps its

is

so widely ranged

even as we get into the film, The dramatic situation to which we are introduced

in the

a mural

that faces or clothes, at the given distance,

Japanese physiognomy, indeed,

look.

is

fro at a big city cross-

Tokyo, or some other Japanese metropolis, the scene

might be Times Square for us.

and

where the

midst of their humiliating dilemma.



only positive “Japanese” thing about him

is

old and

also notably universal

litigants in a dispute are



caught

A

modern patriarch

is

being accused of “quasi-incom-

his fan the

petency” by his wife and grown son and daughter. His alleged incompetency,

we soon

learn, consists of only

one thing, but

it is

as effectual as the physical

transformation of Kafka’s hero, Gregor, into an insect pest: he

is

an Atom-

ophobe.

Dreading the next war as a universal destruction by radioactivity, the

patri-

arch, a well-to-do factory owner, has recently designed his life as a field of

preventive operations to guarantee himself and his family against what he

presumes as the coming general annihilation. His

first idea has been an underground house, and as the movie opens, he has already executed and abandoned this plan because tests have shown the structure would be vulnerable to radio-

activity.

The expense has been enormous, and

to his wife

and son

his legitimate family

viously,

the plan especially objectionable

since the underground colony

would include not merely

but also two mistresses and his illegitimate offspring. Ob-

from one angle, the situation involves that human “remnant” which has

been the focus of imaginary

tales of earthly destruction ushering in

or utopian, society. However, this movie never projects its Totality in such

ways but

is

confined to insinuating

headstrong Atomophobe.

He

is

it

an

ideal,

Atmosphere

through the isolated case of

this

a Camuseque “stranger,” dedicated to com-

mitting a potential, though undeliberate, crime. In substance, this “crime”

is

by the presiding judges and his advisers (a lawyer and as disruption of the existent and desirable psychic order of society in

reluctantly recognized

a dentist)

the present world situation

;

this is a basic order to

be called, perhaps, a pseudo-

the three faces of the film

peace since the international “peace,” beyond question, if

is

an ever-threatened,

temporarily working, status quo. If this status quo were not preserved in

the “total” sense, social panic would automatically result.

has actually happened to the private and individual psychic order of

What this

An

Japanese hero, so decisively alienated from the pseudo-peace of the planet? insanity test is not even required in his case: he would be sure to emerge

from

it

with flying colors. In fact, his poise and reasonableness, in his critical

and humiliating

situation,

They

defense in camera.

who

much

impress the three arbiters

are shaken

are “cowards” because they

sit

when he

them

tells

it is

who

listen to his

they, not himself,

calmly, passively, awaiting the

doom which

he visualizes so clearly. It cannot help occurring to these astute and equable

gentlemen that, once granted the acute anticipatory vision of the defendant,

would be merely “logical” to behave just as he “vision,” of course,

is

neither logic nor reason, but emotion

is

the “accident” of his private temperament.

it

doing; what accounts for his

The

and imagination:

legal panel is given further

pause by the fact that, at this point, the alleged semilunatic does not plan to build a space ship

and escape to the moon or anything of that audacious variety. do is to emigrate with him to South America, which

All he desires his family to

he has decided fatal

is

the only continent having a plausible chance to escape the

consequences of an atomic war. Having already set in motion a deal to

exchange his factory for a farm in Brazil, he has forced his rebellious family’s

hand hence, ;

From

their lawsuit

is

a truly desperate measure.

the average psychological viewpoint, the old

whose obsession tends to overthrow Finally, the case

money

decided against him, and he

is

to forward the emigration scheme.

Now

man

a supercrank

is

whole order and happiness.

his family’s

is

prohibited from using his

a moral leper as palpably Metamorphosis and he becomes a dreaded stranger Gregor Samsa felt like vermin, and for this reason alone, he

is

as the verminized hero of in his

own

house. If

apparently, wakes

up one morning

up one morning to find himself one, this Japanese wakes an “incompetent” because of a parallel imagin-

to find himself

ative obsession; though not incarcerated as mentally

ill,

he

is

a hopelessly

The hydrogen bomb which remains a present fact to him is, by token of the legal verdict, a lunatic’s myth to which he evidently What clings and which forms, in his presence, a Totality Atmosphere. stigmatized individual.

.

distinguishes this psychic atmosphere is its time-relation.

oriented to the past and K.’s to the present, the factory owner’s future.

a present

fact,

is

is

oriented to the

“Anticipation” does not become a total

—such as the corresponding

subjective atmosphere till

.

His is the Totality Atmosphere of Anticipation. Being, however, a future

possibility rather than



.

While Marcel’s

the court’s decision

is

states in Proust

and Kafka

delivered against the patriarch; then,

what was

reasonable precaution against the evidence of the imagination becomes, naked

and absolute, the evidence of the imagination

136

itself.

.

.

.

The poor man goes around all too consciously wrapped of “mad” eccentricity. His condition is climaxed in a last

in his disgraced aura

hysterical plea to his

the atomophobe:

a new

culture hero





no longer dependents but their own masters to obey his and buy the Brazilian farm. His pathetic abjection, significantly, touches none of them but his helpless teen-age daughter; after collapsing, he creeps onto his couch, that night, a tragically numb and defeated man. But he lies awake eavesdropping on the family’s plans and gets a fugitive inspiration. When all are asleep, he manages to set fire to the factory, hoping by this “strat-

assembled relatives will

egy” to compel them to

with his design.

fall in

Inevitably, the only result

is

a taste of the

final

calamity which he wishes to

spare himself and his family, and just as inevitably he exhibits acute signs of

mental breakdown as the logical outcome of his cumulative hysteria. His workers, beside the ruined factory, of them.

demand

His paranoid reasoning does not

fail

of

him

him:

he cries out. Now, of course, his destination

is

to say

“Come

what

will

become

with us to Brazil!”

not Brazil but the insane

asylum, where we next see him being visited by the dentist who sat on the panel that condemned him. This man has been the one most doubtful of the verdict rendered by the panel but has bowed to the arguments of his colleagues.

The

patriarch, reading cross-legged

on

his

bed

in his private cell, at first takes

no notice of his visitor; then he turns casually from his

“By the way, what happened The itself,

poetic effect

is

a

little

though well done in

piece. After all, as I said,

phere.

Still,

breathtaking and makes one regret that the movie

many ways, it

book and asks him:

to the earth?”

is

not closer to being an artistic master-

connotes, rather than projects, a Totality Atmos-

as the confirmed paranoiac walks to his window, he catches sight

of the sun shining at

him through the

as the earth aflame in

its

frosted glass and, exclaiming, identifies

death throes. This

pation: that mirage of terror which

is

is

it

at least a glimpse of Total Antici-

patted to sleep, night after night, under

more than one comfortable pillow. Here is the kind of hero whose authenticity cannot be doubted and yet whose phenomenon is a surprise—almost (this explains the reluctance of the film distributors) an unpardonable “indiscretion.” It is just as easy to imagine in passing the Atomophobe hero as it is hard to consider him an “Existential” fact such as Kafka’s insect hero. This is the difficulty experienced by the patriarch’s judges: he seems to belong in the world of fiction rather than in that of fact, for in the latter he ultimately must be classified as “incompetent”; that is, as totally alienated. Taking the objective stance toward potential psychopathology, the movie concentrates on the realistic “other side” of science fiction’s utopian outlook on scientific progress. The man-

made

satellites that

have circled our globe possess, everyone knows,

sinister as

well as benign connotations for futurity. In focusing a hero’s consciousness

the sinister outlook



in presenting the

psychic fact to a single private individual



this

Japanese film adds a provoking

cultural statistic to those implicit in the Active atmospheres of Proust

Kafka. It

is

on

hydrogen bomb as an overwhelming

and

precisely lack of confidence in the future that renders the Totality

Atmospheres of the Recall and the Alienation heroes what they are and so it renders that of this Anticipation hero. Beneath the surface of the Japanese

137

the three faces of the film court’s logic

is

the radical psychic principle of global moral necessity: a wholly

tacit confidence in the future

must

exist to

keep the world running whether or

not the future does hold an all-out atomic war. This confidence would never be

put in question except by one of nature’s well-known, tions such as the logical,

Atomophobe, which perhaps

a term for this hero.

truly serious worrier. In

new

138

any

Maybe

is

if

inexplicable, aberra-

too portentous, too patho-

he should be considered our century’s

case, his motif of Total Anticipation

first

makes him a

culture hero, one that should not be dismissed as merely “morbid.”



Movies and the Human Image



One wonders if photography competes with art in the way that as E. E. Cummings once poignantly noted poetry competes with elephants and El Greco. The consciousness of such a hypothesis may depend on the development



more or less remote ancestors (including the aesthetic), any great moral issue had when deciding with fewer factors than we. A “global” community of nations has meant, whatever the specific problem, that more factors must be considered, all at once, on of one’s competitive sense. Intellectually, our to deal,

parallel levels.

the classic

many

So asking the question “Have the movies prolonged the life of I am aware that one might attack the problem by

human image?”

routes,

that the issue

some deceptively simple and yet is vital, if

all really

not to the movies, at least to

One presumes

devious.

art.

Perhaps the movies

aside from the avant-garde ranks, which are very, very small

—don’t

care

whether their imagery has an aesthetic status, so-called, and perhaps abstract artists, for their part,

cial

are

by now

so convinced of their canon’s public

and

finan-

triumph that the notion of the movies’ doing anything in our time to revive

the prestige of the classic

human image seems

frivolous



if

not downright

irrelevant.

Merely

to equate the terms in

my

formulation brings up startling contra-

dictions within the formulation. First of all: Is an equivalence between photog-

raphy and

classical art not far

aesthetic? For instance,

what

more

“statistical”

and “documentary” than

vital, artistically critical relation

has the con-

ventional image of the movies to an antique sculptural frieze or to Poussin’s version of such a frieze? This objecting query might emanate from the admirers

who would urge that the photowhat holds the movies back. Indeed, to consider the atmospheric effects possible to modern photography, as well as the distortion possible through objective and laboratory means, is to conclude that an equation of photography with “classic” form represents an old-fashioned prejudice for which commercial filmdom alone is to blame. Through sheer movement with its attendant blur of instantaneous imagery and the rapidity producing a of Poussin as well as from true film devotees,

graphic image per se

is

139



the three faces of the film

purely psychic “blur”

have been, and

Where does and

this reflection

classic art? Just

photography and imagery

is

—highly

are, obtained

expressionistic, no less than surrealistic, effects by imaginative movie-makers. leave the present equation between photography

about no place inevitable. Granting that, with imaginative increasing technical resources, a highly realistic, stylized

its

obtainable for the film screen, a stubborn element persists in the

aesthetic equation I have proposed: an element against the grain. Abstract

painting of the non-objective kind seriously differs from

filmic

all

imagery

except that which (sometimes without photography) exactly and exclusively literal

and un-

human experience. A seeming paradox naturally

follows:

imitates such painting; that

mistakable referents to howsoever, this outside

human

is

is,

non-objective painting disposes of

not to say that non-objective abstractionism

An

experience.

abstract painting from

important point

Mondrian

to

is

is

an art wholly

to be observed of extreme

Rothko, Reinhardt and company:

to offer viewers not, precisely speaking,

it

tends

a picture, but rather a creative decor of

the mural type.

A Mondrian

or a late Rothko, purified of figure and primarily “inactive,”

remains pure design

—though

design-atmosphere would be a better term

because late Rothkos look like tranquilly pulsing atmospheres of color. This is intended as the modulation of a wall, whether private or museum and is the dernier cri of interior design. Its pretension to being art, rather than mere decoration, is based on a quite simple idea: an aesthetic image need

pure design wall,

not be a statement concerning something external to

itself; it

may

“state” itself

any other object does. This theoretical position has animated the practice of pure-abstract art from the beginning, when Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pevsner, Gabo, Malevich and Delaunay talked like philosophers and advocated, in one as

respect or another, a

new

“realism.” Non-objective art (“extreme” or “pure”

(.) Supposedly, it evokes a “mood,” a psychic some kind. But, thus, it enters life like any other motivation, cause or visual happening as would a meteor from outer space or a perfect stranger The said meteor and the said stranger may affect one’s life on the doorstep. all. Like Kilroy, it “was here,” and sometimes one remembers or not affect it at

abstraction)

a statement period

is

vibration of



it,

encounters

Now

its

mark, or prefers to keep

the only sensible, irreducible

it,

even falling in love with

and unavoidable thing

it.

.

conception of the work of art as a “non-objective” phenomenon, which really objective after

human

culture

all, is

—which

hole in a wall. In

my

that

it tries

to

it fill

.

is

produces a gaping hole in the tradition of

up exactly

as though

it

had made an actual

aforesaid proposition, therefore, the issue concerning the

photographic in relation to the classic

human image

devolves not upon the

question of style, or so-called distortion in art, but upon the question of ity’s ability to

.

to say about this

human-

produce and assess works of art through conscious means having

nothing to do with the necessary dependence of form upon content; nothing to

do with the

classic aesthetic

dualism of form united with

its

content.

By

its

nature, photography possesses a highly prejudiced standpoint on this issue.

— human image

movies and the

As many have already observed, the aesthetic character of the movies begins by being so naturalistic, so “documentary,” as a notation of life that, among all the arts, the movies evoke the most urgent sense of comparison and contrast with life itself. Film is the art and this is a pivotal definition where the finished “form” is the most easily soluble into raw “content” or ingredients of meaning. Both psychologically and technically, the photographic lens is a





mirror, even

if

a sometimes flattering one. For this reason, the relation of classic human image is simple and direct. Classic Western

photography to the

come as close to nature (or “content”) same act “idealizing” it: giving it a flattering look (or

art evolved through the aesthetic desire to

as possible while in the

“form”).

Now,

if,

in time, the idealism of the ancient

coldness of Neo-Classicism and

its

Greeks produced the aesthetic

remoteness from

common

experience

thing that was radically challenged by nineteenth-century artists true not because Poussin and

what they painted, and

to

David

failed to

became

some extent how they painted it, became irrelevant and

the congruent rise of individualism

and so on. Yet soon a reaction

When

—some-

this

be great painters, but because

objectionable to a vital social experience composed of various

in painting.



new moral

factors:

and the bourgeoisie, the French Revolution,

set in against the nineteenth-century “revolution”

the Impressionists

came

along, they seemed quite as dis-

interested in violent feelings as they were in violent actions.

Impressionists, carrying forward

Van Gogh’s

And

if

the Post-

violence through the Fauves,

returned to activized brushes and activized feelings, theirs was simply a reaction to a reaction. In fact,

when

the twentieth-century began, painting was a

more

or less restless heap of “school” reactions, a heap both topped and toppled,

temporally speaking, by the chaotic nihilism of the Dadaists and Surrealists.

and Marwho have used art however debonairly as in the case of the Dada-nurtured Duchamp as a highly organized aesthetic instrument both creating and criticizing human values. All the same, in artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Jacques Lipchitz

cel

Duchamp,

this

century has produced heroic figures



Andre Breton, the best-known theorist of Surrealism, is notable for his classical poise and his equally classical literary style. After all, nothing in the tradition of classical humanism interdicts violent or positive feelings; all artistic discipline, indeed, requires initiative and decisiveness, which cannot exist without their

of

own

driving power. Chirico’s art

is

proof-simple that the style-atmosphere

Greek classicism, the mainstay of the humanist

tradition,

had a twentieth-

century application: was convertible into a new art idiom; his art displays the

most serious use of the Surrealist postulate of synthetic vision: the “psychological” as opposed to the “natural” landscape. But when has the painted landscape ever been quite “natural”? Romanticism once had

and as

for the

Baroque before

its

that, its landscapes

psychological landscape,

were nothing

if

not “the-

atrical.” It

may

be time to insert the question of

history with

man

why we tend to equate our cultural human image.” The essence of

as specifically the “classic



the three faces of the film

Christian-pagan idealism

and therefore “humanist”

necessarily philosophic

is

in

the widest possible as well as the narrowest sense. In this specifically humanist role of classicism, the aesthetic tradition

has actually subsumed

and “reactions,” Neo-Classicism, Romanticism and Cubism classicism

is

nothing but the moral preeminence of

or “rationally,” perfectible

man

is

inspired

if

by God, but

at least he

is

tacitly

of

assumed



Man man as a theoretically,

given his basic meaning by the ability

All the aesthetic revolutions of “schools,”

The

“revolutions”

not perfect being. Preferably and conventionally,

men, and nature as well as to

to reason, to relate himself to gods, other

have

all

alike. Historically,

even some

art.

in the twentieth-century,

this “classic” tenet of art.

Dada-Surrealists, in their animosity against the “conventional” image

man and

his world

—what roughly may be

were attacking not the means of nature in

all its

art,

but

its

end; not the image of

man and

variety and possibility, but the lack of imaginative energy with

which the classical-humanist tradition was being preserved by the

Even Futurism’s

literary arts.

image

called the photographic

machine imagery did not

suit the Dadaists’ revolt; this

and schema to

pictorial

violent conversion of the Cubist

was because they could Cubism pro-

sense the academic future of so systematic a formal procedure as

posed; surely enough, today abstract art has arrived at

its

own

rigid, sterile

academism. It was, then, in behalf of the inherent vitality of classical-humanism that the

Dada-Surrealist spirit proceeded with chef-d’oeuvres {etc.),



of

owned by

the Philadelphia

Collection, is one of the

chef-d’oeuvre.

What,

Here man

exactly, does

if

kudos,

Museum

since

is insect,

.

.

.

and did

shocks and

its

The Bride Denuded

acquired the Arensburg trick, shock,

kudo and

mannikin, hieroglyph, and even “thing.” It says that

On the other hand, exist,

before

necessarily implying that crucial evolutionary into being

glass,

it

man

—man, one should add, with

by showing how

—the world

is

actually

that, like orig-

man; it is a world, moreover, not movement of nature that brought

all

his astonishing ability to trans-

form and “distort” himself and the world around him. Accordingly, something most significant

exists

non-objective art

post-humanist: the world-without-man

inal nature, could exist,

man

its tricks, its

most important: a combined

The Bride “say”?

very specially he can exist

pre-human

its

which certainly Duchamp’s great

lies in

.

.

.

the fact that, at the

ment that twentieth-century painting was girding

same mo-

make a complete movies came into being

itself to

break with representationalism, the “representational”

and cast their universal public spell. If Surrealist painting and collage, with its supreme dislocation, its fragmented and as it were “paraplegic” world of the senses, was to attack classical humanism, it was to attack its complacency, not its historical roots in man. On the contrary, in embracing the non-representational world, abstract art ultimately took the most radical step possible against human and social consciousness as the cradle, critic and creator of aesthetic values. Hence, automatically, while in a prejudiced and deceptive way, the movies adopted a hostile position toward abstract art, though on a moral rather

movies and the

than an

human image

artistic basis; in this distinction

opposition to abstract art

lies

and vagueness about the

have proposed: whether as an art they have prolonged the

issue I

classical

human

image. For, as

have

I

way

of their being as

said, they

much

so as they please



stress

why

why, commercially or

of the classic

human

these premises are so “arbitrary.”

not, the movies

image. Let

clings to the junkiest movie.

which

I

if

now wobbly

art.

One need not is

of the

not technical limitation,

is

but simply the arbitrary premises of filmdom’s highly organized

—commercial

life

can be, and have been, as ex-

even as abstract as they please; the obstacle

pressionistic, as highly “formal,”

in the

within the character of the movies’

the “rub” of complexity

have devoted

many

me

The

may

The point

at issue

be said to take the aesthetic side

point out the naive “magic of effect” that

movies’ hallucination of reality

is

a theme to

thousands of words, and always with the assump-

tion that the terms of the formulation, “reality”

and “hallucination,” have an

equal and reflexive weight. Reality in the movies reasserts “content” in the classic aesthetic dualism, hallucination reasserts

ing of the movies’ advent so significant

“form.”

What made

was exactly that the whole

the timtradition

which a painter such as Ingres had inherited from the Renaissance, and the super-photographic perfection he gave that tradition, was swiftly turning into

academism, which seemed to the Romantics, and finally the Expressionists and the Cubists, to have a static, unbearably complacent look. Just at this moment of greatest peril for the classic human image, the mechanism of photography intervened to mock the accumulated craft of the hand and the pencil, the hand and the brush. One might argue that photography— despite its early motives both “aesthetic” and “romantic” killed academic art; well and good, but suppose it also killed the classic human image? If I think that photography did not do this, but the opposite, revived the classic human image, dull



it is

only because photography began to move: became the movies. Suddenly

man’s representational image was galvanized, and

in this sense

human

identity

was given a new meaning through its additional element: kinesis. Painting and sculpture “move” in a quite different sense from the cinema. It is instructive in art

that not until after the movies were invented,

and had progressed

in technique,

did the artist’s eye, through Futurism, dedicate itself to an isolated “aesthetic” of

movement; to a plastic which, in substance, was merely the analysis mechanism made possible by the camera.

of

optical



Of course, movement in the movies is already largely owing to the requirements of the commercial product a monotonous, by no means sufficiently aes-



thetic, cult.

insisting

Yet one

finds serious theorists of the film almost automatically

on the value of movement as such: on broad panoramas and swift

changes of the centers of action. conditioned reflexes of a extent to which

one

side, the

it

still

To

young

be sure, this art,

an art

is

still

only one of the aesthetic naively inflamed by the

surpasses stage action in narrative scope and significance.

movies challenge the novel

in this scope

and

On

significance, while

on the other they have the literal vision of the stage (and of painting) and at

last

143

the three faces of the film

have assimilated the stage’s oral dialogue. But

ments of the movies as a “great” synthetic

fatal to dwell

it is

art.

Among

on the achieve-

the manifold attempts

reproduce famous novels and “expand” famous plays on the screen, merely

to

a handful have lacked the most disastrous flaws, and even with these,

would

it

be dangerous to try to prove they deserve to be compared with the originals.

My object here is not to exalt specimens of aesthetic force

which has

the film but to hail the movies as

human image

the probable savior of the classic

academic painting had shown as overrefined and present as crude

convey so immediate a sensation of time tive shifts, as the movies.

mirror (something

man

it is

And

certainly, as

of that image.

life

No

fluid.

in its changes, its

an

What

movies began to

static, the

and as notably

refinable nature

if



in our age

specifically “prolonged” the

medium can

art

whims and provoca-

because basically photography remains a

yet,

very hard for

it

not to remain), the world of man, with

as the chief actor, is incontestably the abiding subject of this sensationally

mirrored

flux.

To

exclude

man and

nature as organic surfaces, as the actual

contexture of the social world, would be, for the movies, simply to give move-

ment not on

to life as such, but to the

life; to

man

not his

is

canon which non-objective art has bestowed

the non-mirroring wall-decor of extreme abstractionism

own

spectacle

.

.

where

.

and where the only “recognizable” elements are

atmosphere and geometric form. Shall it be asked, now, whether it is necessary jor man to be his own spectacle? Maybe human self-consciousness, for all its supposed glories, is actually a handicap; maybe it is not only unnecessary, maybe it is undesirable! Do not the moral

disquisitions of the

Maybe human that

is

new

existence

existentialist schools of

the bad conscience of idealism

ible being. I

philosophy hint as much?

was a pretentious and arrogant itself



of

man

error.

Maybe,

too, all

as consciously the perfect-

wish to suggest, nevertheless, that in failing to report

man

in the

man, non-objectivism has created a gap in the texture of consciousness itself, which only the absolute withdrawal of the individual from the world can adequately mend. This is doubtless a prejudiced, though not necessarily an inflexible, view of the values of non-objective paintfluid grip of his historic fate as

ing.

Possibly there should be, as there are and have been,

as well as individual self-negation.

function of thought itself?

supply

Maybe

it

aside from

the “gap”

is

all

But

is its

human

inherent in consciousness. But objectively, blank walls and

many

and oftener than one may

portraits of the void in its fluid

But such a “portrait art” the whole of

of

—and does not the crude experience of the world

traditional antidote, art its traditional mirror.

paintings are so

moments

not such self-negation always the

reaching toward aesthetic feelings and artistic creation?

the void have always supplied this gap,

phy

is

—a mirror

of its

own

all,

and

—would seem,

human experience, both narrow and

that the lowly movies are, after

Maybe

like; philoso-

non-objective

static

in

moods.

.

.

.

comparison with

tending to barrenness. I suggest

a positive antidote to

this

extreme con-

vention of modern painting; that even the banes of commercial films, the superspectacle

and the mad melodrama, are

image continues to prove

its eligibility

where the classic human Olympiad of the art forms.

athletic fields in the

index

A Abstract art, 61, 68, 140, 143 actualites, 25, 26

Bicycle Thief, 60, 62, 115, 118 Bioscope, 37 Blackboard Jungle, The, 127

Alcatraz, 33

Black Friendship, 27 Blake, William, 73 Blonde Venus, The, 50 Blood of a Poet, The, Blue Angel, The, 83

Alcestis, 131

Body and Soul,

Adam, 118 agoraphobia, 19 Albright, Ivan, 51

Alcibiades, 133

Alcoholics

Anonymous, 125

Alexander Nevsky, 28 Alexandrianism, 19, 20 Amerika, 94-101, 134 Anemic Cinema, 68 Anger, Kenneth, 48, 62

Anna Christie, 88 anti-Semitism, 106

Aphrodite, 83 Arensburg, Walter, 142 Art, 14,27,71,128

B Bacchus, 45 Balia,

Giacomo, 37

Ballet Mtchanique, 68

Bankhead, Tallulah, 132 Baroque, 141 Barrymore, John, 14, 83, 85-89, 132

20, 21, 47, 52, 61, 69

106

Bombshell, 90 Boomerang, 30-33 Bosch, H., 44, 45 Bouchard, Thomas, 46 Boultenhouse, Charles, 62,72 Boyd, Bill, 124 Brackett, Charles, 91

Brakhage, Stan, 62, 72 Brando, Marlon, 127, 128 Breton, Andre, 141 Bride Denuded, etc., The, 142 Bride of Frankenstein, 130 Brief Encounter, 83 British film style, 30 Brod, Max, 94, 99 Broken Blossoms, 22 Brothers Karamazov, The, 126 Broughton, James, 72 Byrne, 67

C

Bayreuth, 22

Beau Brummel,

85, 86, 132

Beckett, Samuel, 131, 133

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 20 22, 61, 67, 68

Alexander Graham, 84, 106 Bennett, Arnold, 29

Cabiria, 60, 62

Bergman, Ingrid, 52

Camus, Albert, 134

Bell,

Berlin:

Symphony

Bernhardt, Sarah,

of a City, 61 18,

58

Camille, 83, 87, 88, 132

Cantos, The, 19, 20 Passage, 123

Canyon

145

5

the three faces of the film Castle, The, 94, 99, 134 Castle, Vernon,

Dickens, Charles, 53, 94

Mr. and Mrs., 106

Cavalcade, 30 Cease Fire, 124 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 115 Chaplin, Charles, 14, 94-101, 116, 117 Charlie and the Umbrella, 96 Chien Andalou ( Andalusian Dog), 20, 62, 69 Chirico, Giorgio de, 141 Christopher Crumpet, 47

CinemaScope, 58, 120, 125 Cinematheque Franchise, 17,

Dietrich, Marlene, 50, 125, 129, 132

Disney, Walt, 45 Disney Studio, 70 Disorder and Early Sorrow, 87 Documentary film, 23-35, 73 Don Juan, 85, 87

Donne, John, 73

Down to Earth, dream,

Dreams 18,

20

cine-poem, 67, 68 Cinerama, 58, 120, 122

74 75-77, 82, 89

14, 71, 73,

that

Money Can Buy,

52

Dressier, Marie, 98

Dreyer, Carl, 48, 50, 62

Duchamp, Marcel,

Citizen Kane, 30, 31, 98 City, The, 68

68, 141, 142

Durante, Jimmie, 107

City Lights, 96

E

city-symphony, 67, 68 claustrophobia, 19 Cocteau, Jean, 20, 21, 47, 52, 61, 62, 69, 72, 132

Cohan, George M., 106 Colette, 54

Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 29 controlled spectatorship, 45 Corneille, Pierre, 84, 127

Coward, Noel, 30

Eagle with two Heads, The, 62 East of Eden, 127 Easter Island, 127 Eisenstein, Sergei M., 12, 13, 20, 27-29, 45, 58,67,70,75 El Greco, 139 Eliot, T. S., 19, 115 End of St. Petersburg, The, 23

Envy, 54 Max,

Craft of Fiction, The, 56 Crain, Jeanne, 113

Ernst,

37, 52 eroticism, 129-133

Crawford, Joan, 18 Crosby, Bing, 126

Euripides, 131

Eve, 118 Expressionism, 61, 143

Crossfire, 34, 107, 108

Crowther, Bosley, 60 Cubism, 61, 142, 143

Experimental film, 13, 56-63, 67-73 eyewitness camera, 28, 30, 31

Cult, 14

Cult of the Divine Robot,

1

14

F

Cummings, E. E., 139 Cummings, Homer, 32 F. B.

D

29

Farrebique, 46 Fauves, 61, 141

Dadaism, 141 Daisy Mae, 122

Ferrer, Jos6, 49

Dali, Salvador, 20, 37, 72

Film Sense, The,

Daumier, Honore, 133 David, Jacques-Louis, 141

Fischinger, Oskar, 46

Fellini, Federico, 62

Dawn to Dawn, 67

146

I.,

fantasy, 133

7

Fitch, Clyde, 86

Flaherty, Robert, 19, 23, 27, 31, 69, 70

Day of W rath, 48, 50 De Mille, Cecil B., 91 De Sica, Vittorio, 62,

Four Horsemen

Dead

Fourcade, Christian, 126

of Night, 11,

115-119 75-82

Flaubert, Gustave, 29 Forster, E. M., 121 of the Apocalypse, The, 83

Dean, James, 127, 128 Delaunay, Robert, 140

Fragment of Seeking, 72

Delsarte, 19

Frazer, Sir James, 19 French Academy, 21 French Revolution, 83, 126 Futurism, 18, 37, 41, 142, 143

Deren, Maya, 47, 48, 62, 71, 72 detective-camera, 32 Dexter, Anthony, 87, 88

Frankenstein’s monster, 82, 130

index

G

71, 126

Huston, John, 48, 60,

Hyde, 85,107,129 Gabo, Naum, 140 I

Galatea, SO

Gance, Abel, 121 Gandhi, Mahatma, 119 Garbo, Greta, 14, 83, 86-89, 129, 132 Garden of Delights, The, 44 Garfield, John, 106-108

Live in Fear, 135 Married a Witch, 75 Impressionism, 141 In Which We Serve, 30

Gaslight, 79

Ingres, J. A. D., 143

Gauguin, Paul,

SO, SI

Geltzer, Catherine, 19

Gentleman’s Agreement, 107, 109, 110 Gershwin, George, 106

I

I

Intimate Scenes of Convict Life, 24 Intolerance, 44 Ionesco, Eugene, 131 It

Happened Tomorrow,

Ivan the Terrible,

Giant, 127

.

74

28, 45

Giotto, 45 Girl Before Mirror, 37, 41

Gold Rush, The, 97 Golden Age of Comedy, The, 132 Goldwyn, Samuel, 17, 113

Goodman,

Paul, 98

Grammar of the Film, ^4, S6 Grand Babylon Hotel, The, 29 Great Dictator, The, 100, 117 Greed, 60 Grierson, John, 23-25, 27, 28, 30, 34

Grierson on Documentary, 24 Griffith, D. W., 19, 44, 45 Guernica, 43

J

Jacobs, Lewis, 67 Jekyll, 85, 129 Jest, The, 83 Jesus, 116, 126

Jolson, Al, 106

Jones, Jennifer, 109, 123

Joyce, James, 12,

19,

Julius Caesar, 125 juvenile delinquency, 127, 128

Gulliver’s Travels, 119

K

Guthrie, Tyrone, 59

H

K., 94-101, 134, 136

Kafka, Franz, 14, 62, 94-101, 134-137 Kandinsky, Wassily, 45, 140

HiO, 68

Karl, 94-101, 134

hallucination, 70, 71, 73, 89, 143

Hamlet, 125 Harlow, Jean, 90 Harrington, Curtis, 48, 62, 72 Hayworth, Rita, 74, 82, 87 Hearst, William Randolph, 97 Helen, 131

Herald-Tribune,

Karloff, Boris, 130

Kaye, Danny, 74, Keats, John, 26

81, 82

Kid, The, 99 Kid from Brooklyn, The, 107 Kilroy, 140 Kiss, The, 129

Henry IV, 77 Henry V, 125 High Noon,

62

Juliet, 83

New

York, 71

123, 127

Hitchcock, Alfred, 46, 73 Hitler Gang, The ,28 Hollywood Hallucination, The, 11 Home of the Brave, 107, 109-111

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 73 Hopkins, Miriam, 129 Hopper, Hedda, 90 Horatii, 127

Hotel Berlin, 29 House on 92nd Street, The, 29

Humoresque, 106

Kiss of Death, 30, 33 Knights of the Round Table, The, 125 Korda, Alexander, 49, 50

L La Strada, 62 Lady in the Dark, 89 Lady in the Lake, The, 31, 32, 34 L’Age d’Or, 62 Lanchester, Elsa, 130 Lang, Fritz, 54 Langdon, Harry, 116 Last Judgment, The, 44

147

the three faces of the film

Moment, The, 67 Lawes, Warden, 33 Laughton, Charles, SI Le Fantastique au Cinema, 129-133 Lead Shoes, The, 61 Leger, Fernand, 46, 52 Leonardo, 45 L’Erotisme au Cinema, 129-133 Levene, Sam, 108 Life, 90 L’il Abner, 91, 122 Last

Max, 100

Linder,

Boy

Dick, 132

Modern Times,

97, 100

Mondrian, Piet, 140 Monroe, Marilyn, 125, 129 Monsieur Beaucaire, 53, 86 Monsieur Verdoux, 99, 100 montage, 20, 48, 68

Moon and Sixpence, The, 50 Moore, Marianne, 19 Moses, 117

M other’s Day,

72, 73

Motion Picture Code, 87 Moulin Rouge, 45, 48, 126 Murphy, Audie, 124

Lipchitz, Jacques, 141 Little

Moby

Lost, 126

Little Fugitive, 124

Lloyd, Harold, 107 Lone Ranger, The, 124, 127 Lost Boundaries, 107, 109-113 Louisiana Story, 69, 73 Louys, Pierre, 53

Museum of Modern Art, The, 17-19 Museum of Natural History, The, 18 “Museum Without Walls, The,” 17 Mussolini, Benito, 119

Muybridge, 38

Lubbock, Percy, 56

N

M Maas, Willard,

Madame

Naked City, 34 Nanook of the North,

62, 72

Tussaud’s, 133

McLaren, Norman, 46, 61 Magic Mountain, The, 87 Magnani, Anna, 131 Magoo, 48 Malevich, Kasimir, 140

Andre Malraux, 17

Man of Aran, 29 Man Who Could Work

Miracles, The. 74

Neo-Classicism, 141, 142 Neo-Realism, 60 Newsreelism, 23 Newton, Robert, 53 Night Mail, 24

Ninotchka, 87, 88 No. 9613, etc., 67

Mann, Klaus, 97 Mann, Thomas, 77, 87 March, Fredric,

March

23, 29

Napoleon, 121 Narcissus, 86 Natural Vision, 121

O

106, 129

of Time, The, 26, 29

Oboler, Arch, 121

Mario and the Magician, 77 Markopoulos, Gregory J., 73

Odd Man Out, 23, 53 Oedipus, 100

Marx brothers,

Oklahoma, 94, 98, 101 Oklahoma!, 125

132

Marx, Karl, 18 Massacre of the Innocents, 45 Matisse, Henri, 46

Maugham, Somerset,

51

Old Vic, The, 59 O’Neil, Eugene, 88

Orphan Annie,

Melies, George, 20

Orpheus,

91

21

Memphis Belle, The, 29 of Good Will, 29

Othello, 125, 126

Men

Outlaw, The, 127

Mercutio, 87 Merezhkovski, D., 51

Overlanders, The, 23

P

Metamorphosis, 134, 136

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 90 Michelangelo, 44, 45, 52 Mickey Mouse, 44, 46 Miracle, The, 59

Paramount, 90-92, 126

Miracle in Milan, 115-1 19

Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 61, 62 Pasteur, 84, 106

Moana,

23, 27, 31

Parnassus, 54 Parrhasios, 53

index Pavlova, Anna, 19 Peck, Gregory, 52, 107, 108

S

Peterson, Sidney, 48, 61, 62, 72 Pevsner, Antoine, 140

Philadelphia

Museum

of Art, The, 142

Picasso, Pablo, 17, 37, 41-43

11, 112

Pirandello, Luigi, 14, 42, 76, 115

Poe, Edgar Allan, 67 Pollock, Jackson, 17

Potemkin, 22-25, 27, 34, Pound, Ezra, 19, 20

67,

68

Poussin, Nicholas, 139, 141

problem pictures, Prometheus, 53

Samson and Delilah, Savo, Jimmy, 116

91

Scarlet Street, 53

Pictura, 45 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 51

Pinky, 107,

Salome, 87

105, 128

Proust, Marcel, 19, 29, 134, 136, 137

Schapiro Meyer, 41 Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The, 74 Sennett, Mack, 95

Seven Deadly Sins, The, 54 Seventh Veil, The, 110 Shakespeare, 59, 84, 121, 125 Shane, 124 Shaw, Bernard, 107 Sheik, The, 84, 85 Shock, 34 simultaneous montage, 48

Smithsonian Institute, 18 Pit, The, 73, 110

Snake

Pudovkin, Vladimir, 12 Pygmalion, 50

Society of Cinematologists, 22

Song of Ceylon,

Q Que Viva Mexico l, 27, Queen Elizabeth 1, 18 Quentin Durward, 125

28, 45,

70

Quiet One, The, 69, 73

R

24, 27, 28 Spellbound, 34, 73, 1 10 Spoilers, The, 123 Spottiswoode, Raymond, 56 Stairway to Heaven, 74 Star Is Born, A, 90 Statue of Liberty, 95, 96

Steinbeck, John, 127 Stroheim, Erich von, 19, 60, 91, 92

Study

in

Sullivan,

race prejudice, 107

Choreography for Camera, A, 47 John L., 106

Racine, Jean, 84

Sunset Boulevard, 90-93

Rashomon,

Surrealism, 17, 20, 62, 69, 72, 132, 141, 142 Swanson, Gloria, 91, 92

36-43 Rebel Without a Cause, 127, 128 Red Badge of Courage, The, 60 Red Garters, 124-126 Reed, Carol, 53 Reinhardt, Ad, 140 Reinhardt, Max, 59

Rembrandt, Rembrandt,

14,

Tarzan, 85 Tchelitchew, Pavel, 42

48, 50, 51

Ten Days

49, 50

terpsichore, 74, 82

Remembrance

of Things Past, 29

Renaissance, 84, 143 Richter, Hans, 52

Robinson, Edward G., 54 Rochemont, Louis de, 29 Rodin, Auguste, 52 Rogers, Roy, 124, 126

Romains, J ules, 29, 115 of Leonardo da Vinci, The, 51 Romanticism, 141, 142

Romance Romeo,

T

59, 83

Rope, 46

Rose Tattoo, The,

that

Shook the World, 23

Theosophists, 76 Thersites, 59 13 rue Madeleine, 29 This Happy Breed, 30

3-D’sl3,14, 120-122, 124, 125 Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 100 Titan, The, 44, 45,52

Todd-A-O, 59 Tolstoy, Leo, 22, 29 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 126

The, 94, 99, 100, 134 Trip to the Moon, A, 129 Trial,

131, 132

Ross, Lillian, 60

Troilus

Rothko, Mark, 140 Russian School, 19 Ryan, Robert, 108

Twentieth Century, 87

and Cressida, 59

Twenty-Four Dollar Island, 68 Two-Faced Woman, 87, 132

149

the three faces of the film

U

Webber, Melville, 69

Wedding at Palo, 27 Weekend at the Waldorf, 29

Ulysses, 12, 19

United Nations, 127

Welles, Orson, 30, 31, 97, 125

Universal Church of Hollywood, 112, 113

Wells,

Up in Arms,

West, Mae, 129, 132 Whitney, John and James, 46 Wiene, Robert, 67 Wild One, The, 127 Wilde, Oscar, 51

107

UPA, 47, 48

V Valentino, Rudolph, 14, 52, 53, 83-89 141

Van Gogh, Vincent,

H.

G., 75

Wilder, Billy, 91

World War

I,

25

Vermeer, 50

Y

Verne, Jules, 24 Vertes, Marcel, 49

Vorkapich, Slavko, 67

Yearling, The, 69

W Wagner, Richard, 22, 84 War and Peace, 22, 29 Waste Land, The, 19, 20, 115 Watson, J. S., 69

150

Z Zanuck, Darryl, 113 Zavattini, Cesare, 62,11 5-1 17,119

Ziegfeld Girl, 106 Zola, Emile, 29, 106

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

3 9999

0322 955 4

threefacesoffilmOOtyle threefacesoffilmOOtyle

\

Boston Public Library

COPLEY

S(

PH 994 II

GENERAL L

.

T9

b76

i

86

1

2"

C

1

^e^ocEe^ncIT™ rhe Date Due Card in tho date on or before which this Library. book should be returned to the from this Please do not remove cards pocket.

Photograph by Wilbur Pippin

PARKER TYLER was born adult

life

fine arts.

and

for

New

in

Orleans

he has been a foremost influence and

He was an

critic in

the following three years wrote film

contributor to Art His writings

magazines.

to

1959 he was

News, and Managing

poet as well,

in

in

and

since the

appearance

in

the world has received so

many accolades

also, for

many

New

Tyler's other

two of

many

its

literary

of his

first

in

Annuals.

and

art

film

the field

>

book. The

1944, probably no other film

years, lectured

York

The

and

work has been

Hollywood Hallucination,

mentator for the

chronicles for

1958 he received a Longview Award

for poetry. But Mr. Tyler's most important

of film criticism,

to 1947,

Editorial Associate

Editor for

have appvbred frequently

A

his

the field of

View Magazine from 1942

editor of

Kenyon Review. From 1954

He has

1907. During most of

in

critic

in

or been quoted so often.

and been a program comCinema 16. Among Mr.

society,

books are: Magic and Myth of the Movies, Chaplin, and

Yesterday's Children.

thoma£ yoseloff NEW YORK • LONDON

_