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Monday, June 23
FLESH AND THE DEVIL
by
Lloydville
on Mon 23 Jun 2008 12:19 AM PDT
This legendary film has a set-up that promises a rattling good yarn --
two lifelong friends pitted against each other in mortal combat by a
callow but irresistible woman. It is directed in bravura style, with
flashes of cinematic brilliance, by a master of film narrative,
Clarence Brown, and it features two of the silent screen's most
appealing actors, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. The result is
watchable, even entertaining -- but deeply unsatisfying on almost every
level.
We see in this film what the 20th-Century, and the studio system in
Hollywood, did to the melodrama -- perverting it meretriciously,
heartlessly, systematically, fatally.
The melodrama of the Victorian stage, of Griffith and Pickford and even
Murnau, was a stylized form in which a glamorized virtue was beset by
crude though recognizable obstacles which seemed invincible but which
virtue could vanquish, though often only by self-sacrifice and in death.
We may laugh at the form today, or find it charmingly quaint, but it
represented a sophisticated dramatic tradition capable of conveying
deep emotion and serious moral reflection. It is hardly more laughable
or quaint than modern forms, in which a superior display of aptitude
with firearms can right any wrong, in which glamor or cuteness alone
can resolve any romantic complication, in which material or
professional success signals the triumph of the good.
Melodrama only becomes grotesque and artificial when those who make it
lose faith, consciously or unconsciously, in virtue, especially in
self-sacrificial virtue. In our self-obsessed age, at least before 11
September 2001, virtue became suspect -- a sucker's game -- and sacrifice
unthinkable. Not being able to have it all seemed a crime against a
basic entitlement of humanity -- or at least that part of it lucky
enough to be born into Western middle-class comfort.
This is why modern intellectual sophisticates laughed at the melodrama
of Titanic, though its moral complexity far exceeded the dime-store
nihilism, or self-referential fantasy, delivered by the hip filmmakers
of the 90's. It was taken seriously, however, by ordinary people -- and
especially by teenage women, who knew on some level that the nihilism
and fantasy of their parents' generation had come to a dead end, had
not prepared them for the world they saw before them, the world of
Columbine and Osama bin Laden.
Flesh and the Devil represents a first step in the destruction of
melodrama as a viable form -- as Titanic may represent a first step
in its rehabilitation. In Flesh and the Devil, virtue is dessicated
-- evil lush and ripe. Though the story tells us again and again that
Barbara Kent is the good girl and Greta Garbo the bad girl, every
single act of craft and genius on display in the film struggles to
persuade us otherwise.
We are far from Griffith and Pickford here, whose great heroines showed
us how appealing, energetic, sexy and even seductive virtue could be.
Greta Garbo becomes, in essence, the auteur of Flesh and the Devil,
because all its narrative ploys, all its moral stances, collapse into
worship of her mysterious presence, her oddly luminous flesh.
In strictly narrative terms, there has rarely been a more extreme
example of misogyny on film. Garbo's character is unremittingly evil --
her heartlessness, until the last unconvincing moments of the role, is
absolute, her greed and selfishness both repellent and unmitigated. But
Brown's camera and Brown's casting and Brown's staging worship at her
feet. All the other characters are perfunctorily drawn, wooden in
presentation, with two exceptions. One is the kindly old priest who is
roused to an almost sexual excitement by his hatred of the Garbo
character -- a hatred which the narrative invites us to share. The
other is Gilbert . . . who struggles manfully to discover a complexity,
a moral gravity in his character. In his final scenes he almost
succeeds, but the odds are against him, the game was rigged from the
start. The film believes in nothing but Garbo -- virtue has no defense
against her, can reassert itself only by killing her.
One thinks of what the film could have been if those who made it were
aware of this -- had some sense of the moral questions it raises. If
Garbo's character had been granted a soul, instead of stripped of it,
if Barbara Kent's character had been given even a hint of Gish's or
Pickford's complexity and will and sensuality, the delicious
possibilities of the tale could have unfolded into real melodrama --
which is to say, real drama.
But this film is an early demonstration of the use of a star to avoid
drama, to avoid moral questions, to parade unfelt clichés and
undeveloped characters and irresponsible attitudes before an audience
mesmerized by glamor alone. A melodrama in which virtue has evaporated
is not melodrama anymore -- it's more like Grand Guignol, without the
shameless energy, the giddy frissons, the amoral abandon of a real
Theater of Blood.
I'm not sure we can blame Garbo's collaborators too harshly for this,
though -- she is sui generis. There is really no word for what she does
on screen. It's not acting, it's not even performing -- she is simply a
creature who has her being on film . . . the camera devours her, every
molecule of her. The process leaves nothing behind -- no memory of a
character, or even of a human being caught on film. She paradoxically
incarnates the gossamer moods of certain kinds of passion, certain
kinds of physical enchantment -- and vanishes as mysteriously as they
do. But it's useless to deny how spectacular the phenomenon is, how
strange and pleasurable -- just as it's useless to deny the charm of
falling in love.
Brown and his cameraman and his screenwriters and his actors may have
to be forgiven for losing their heads in her presence, and even for
hating her power to undo them so utterly.
Tuesday, April 29
ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 29 Apr 2008 01:02 AM PDT
Jean-Luc
Godard once observed that, with the passing of time, the fantasy films
of Georges Méliès have become actualities, now that man has in fact
made a voyage to the moon, while the actualities of the Lumière
Brothers have become fantasies, since they record lost worlds to which
we can never return, as mythological now as Oz.
I thought of this while watching Electric Edwardians,
the Milestone DVD of Mitchell & Kenyon actualities of Edwardian
Britain. I must say I was blown away. It's the most
gorgeous collection of cinematic images outside of Intolerance or Sunrise or Welles's Falstaff, lyrical and deeply moving.
With the
possible exception of a few infants who lived to a great age, all the
people in these films are dead. As a commentator on the DVD
observes, the young boys in the films were part of a generation that
would be swept into oblivion long before their time by the mass carnage
of the Great War a decade or so later. The bustling street life
that most attracted Mitchell & Kenyon becomes for us now a memento
mori, incredibly sweet and sad.
I can't imagine
that anyone who loves movies and owns a DVD player wouldn't want to
have this DVD and to watch the films on it over and over again.
They may constitute a kind of unconscious art, but it's art of a very
high order.
Tuesday, April 22
EDWIN S. PORTER
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 Apr 2008 02:21 AM PDT
Check out The Art and Culture Of Movies,
a great blog by filmmaker and writer Matt Barry, for some interesting
thoughts about film pioneer Edwin S. Porter (director of the The Great Train Robbery from 1903.) The post is illustrated with terrific screen shots from Porter's films. (The frame above is from It Happened On 23rd Street -- shot in 1901 on a block, between 5th and 6th Avenues, which looks almost the same today, architecturally speaking.)
Saturday, April 19
MÉLIÈS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 19 Apr 2008 12:48 AM PDT
From
a strictly historical, generic perspective, the work of Georges Méliès
was a kind of magical dead end. Although his films are commonly
spoken of as the precursors of science fiction and all forms of film
fantasy involving special effects, they are in fact so peculiarly
original in form, so deeply rooted in the traditions of the stage, that
they presaged nothing.
Méliès
was a magician and the operator of a theater dedicated to stage
magic. He used cinema as an extension of the sort of acts he
performed and presented in his Théatre Robert-Houdin, built as a
showcase for his own art by Robert-Houdin, the great 19th-Century conjurer, the
legendary pioneer of modern theatrical magic (and the man after whom
his masterful successor Houdini named himself.)
Méliès
saw cinema as a way of presenting stage magic and amplifying its
effects by the use of in-camera tricks like stop motion and
super-imposition. His images evoked the stage precisely, with
strict proscenium framing and frankly theatrical painted flats and
props. He used many practical tricks from the stage, like flying
people and objects on wires or making them appear and disappear
through traps. He added his camera tricks on top of these
time-worn effects.
The problem was that camera trickery is not the same as live trickery
in the presence of the trickster -- the novelty of camera tricks
dissipates quickly, once you become familiar with them. Méliès's
films were wildly popular for a while and then, with the rise of the
narrative form in movies, suddenly went out of fashion -- to a degree
that live magic shows never have. In great live magic shows, you
know you're being tricked, but you can't for the life of you figure out
how. You may not know exactly how a camera trick works, but you
know it has to do with some fundamentally technical resource of the
medium -- and so can't
be real magic. As early as 1905 people began to get wise to the
mechanical tricks of movies, as this postcard, part of a series, shows:
In movies, if the tricks are not done in the service of a story, or at
the very least in the service of creating a convincingly unified
alternate reality, they grow stale. Méliès
never tried to create a convincingly unified alternate reality -- his
reality was always the reality of the stage, without the excitement of
the live presence of the performers. His magical stop-motion
substitutions were charming as ideas but could never take the breath
away like the "impossible" substitutions of the live magician.
Méliès
could not, in short, enlist the magic of the camera as an extension of
the magic of live stage performance. He created a vision of a
theater where anything was possible but in the process he lost the core
of the theatrical experience -- the tangible presence of its spectacle.
Méliès influenced other filmmakers, like Edwin S. Porter, in the area of narrative. Méliès's
films occasionally have simple narrative structures, but these are
always just the armature for his tricks. He called his scenes
tableaux -- they were self contained, and he was perfectly happy to
sell individual scenes as stand-alone attractions to the fairgrounds
showmen who constituted the initial market for his films. Each
scene had a gag, after all, and he saw the gags as the principal element of his
art.
When story films began to dominate the market he lost interest in the
industry, even as his audience lost interest in him. Storytelling wasn't at the heart of his ambition.
This is all speaking to the formal side of Méliès's work, but of course it had qualities which transcended its formal side. Méliès
had a sweet, antic, energetic, whimsical imagination which comes across
excitingly in his films, even today. It reminds one of the
imagination of the great Warner Brothers cartoonists of the 1940s,
silly, flip and surreal. But cartoon animation was of a piece and
so created an alternate universe that was of a piece, that audiences
could surrender to wholly. Méliès,
who never could leave the imaginative precincts of his beloved stage,
doesn't allow that kind of identification -- we are always reminded
that we are, and are not, in a theater.
Méliès
was, in one sense, a great artist who made ephemeral art, in a form
that had no future. But his irresistible sensibility often soars
above the contradictions of his formal means. His films will
always be fun to watch, simply because it's so clear that he was having
an incredible amount of fun making them. He communicates his joy in stage magic and his
joy in camera magic, even if he never quite finds a way to reconcile
the two practices aesthetically.
In the history of cinema, his only legacy is joy -- but there are many more important formal pioneers who left us less.
Thursday, April 3
LEAP YEAR
by
Lloydville
on Thu 03 Apr 2008 01:32 AM PDT
In
1920, Roscoe Arbuckle became the first great comedian of the silent
screen to make a full-on transition from shorts to feature films.
Chaplin had appeared in the feature comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance
as early as 1914, but under Mack Sennett's direction and as a second
lead. Chaplin wouldn't release his own first feature until 1921. Buster
Keaton starred in The Saphead in 1920 but he continued to make
shorts after that until 1923, when his feature career began in earnest
with Three Ages.
Arbuckle
made nine feature films in the two years before scandal interrupted
his career, and never appeared in another. I believe that all but three
of them are lost, and the last two were never released in America, due
to the scandal. One of these, Leap Year, survives and is included on
the magnificent DVD set The Forgotten Films Of Fatty Arbuckle. It's
absolutely fascinating.
In
the earlier shorts offered in the collection we can see Arbuckle
transition slowly from the comic actor of the Sennett farces to the
full-blown silent clown of the Comiques. Chaplin and Keaton seemed to
have intuited almost from the moment they stepped in front of a camera
that the silent cinema was perfectly adapted to a fixed clown persona
-- a character who could migrate from film to film yet still stay
essentially the same, with a way of moving, of being in space, that,
along with a few clothing props, singled him out as a distinct,
slightly hyper-real being, much like a circus clown or a figure from
the Commedia dell' Arte.
Roscoe
moved slowly from being a comic actor who did funny physical bits to
incarnating "Fatty", the slapstick clown, and all along the journey he
was pulled back to the former mode. In the films he did with Mabel
Normand, character, especially as embodied in their relationship, took
precedence over slapstick -- at least until the trademark Sennett
mayhem of the climax. In one of the Sennett films Roscoe directed, He
Did and He Didn't, he takes this mode even further, edging into the
realm of upper-class drawing-room comedy, with very sophisticated
lighting and photography.
Until
I saw Leap Year I would have seen this mode as a detour in Arbuckle's
development as a comedian -- a detour on the road to the Comiques,
where Arbuckle takes his place with Keaton and Chaplin as a classic
slapstick clown. Leap Year, though, totally altered my sense of what
Arbuckle was about. It's as far from the universe of the Comiques as
it's possible to get.
It
inhabits, in fact, the universe of P. G. Wodehouse, whose gentle,
kindly satires of the young and well-heeled beautiful people of his
time were immensely popular in 1920. Leap Year perfectly captures the
sweetly daft world of Wodehouse's slightly nutty, vaguely dimwitted but
immensely lovable trust-fund kids of the jazz age.
The
miracle of it is that Arbuckle, knockabout comedian extraordinaire,
funny slapstick fat guy, fits so perfectly into this world. He does it
by simply behaving as though he's Cary Grant in a romantic comedy, Fred
Astaire in a romantic musical -- and because he doesn't doubt it for a
moment, neither do we.
Roscoe
plays the feckless nephew of a rich man, presumably the heir to a vast
fortune. This could explain part of the reason he's so irresistible to
the women in the film -- but not all of it. He's a genuinely romantic
leading man. His sweetness and his physical grace sell us on that. He
just dances through the role.
The
film doesn't allow for much slapstick, but Arbuckle finds ways of
slipping it in delightfully -- most notably in a scene in which he's
trying to convince his would-be brides that he's having fits. The fits
are little masterpieces of physical comedy, as fine as anything Chaplin
and Keaton were capable of at their best.
But
the performance doesn't depend on these things, and the film remains a
frothy drawing-room farce. The farce becomes strained at times,
particularly towards the end, and the froth congeals a bit, but the
overall effect is of lightness and joy. It reminded me a little of
Murnau's The Finances Of the Archduke from 1924 -- particularly in
its use of the sunny Catalina settings of the film's middle section, in
which the landscape seems to conspire in the fun, as the Dalmatian
coast did in Murnau's film..
Was
this really the sort of film that the mad surreal clown of the Comiques
wanted to make? He certainly seems to be fully committed to the work
and having a hell of a good time. Were the other Arbuckle features
anything like this? If Arbuckle's career had continued on its natural
course, and he'd taken greater command over his films as a director --
where on earth would he have ended up?
This
film expanded my appreciation of Arbuckle's range and genius and
altered my sense of the comic landscape of films in 1920. It's easy to
think of Arbuckle as an actor whose journey towards becoming another
Chaplin, another Keaton, was tragically diverted. But maybe he would
have become something else entirely -- something we can't even imagine,
because he wasn't able to show it to us.
Monday, March 24
LOST PARADISE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 24 Mar 2008 07:20 AM PDT
[Photo © 1960 William Klein]
An excerpt from a 2000 profile of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody in The New Yorker:
During our interview, Godard referred
to the New Wave not only as "liberating" but also as
"conservative." On the one hand, he and his friends saw
themselves as a resistance movement against "the occupation of the
cinema by people who had no business there." On the other, this
movement had been born in a museum, the Cinémathèque: Godard and his
peers were steeping themselves in a cinematic tradition -- that of
silent films -- that had disappeared almost everywhere else.
Thus, from the beginning, Godard saw the cinema as a lost paradise that
had to be reclaimed.
If love of the silent cinema doesn't point the way to new, revolutionary
work -- as love of ancient Greek art sparked the innovations of the
Renaissance -- then it's just hobbyism.
In other words, silent cinema can be alive as a cultural force, as it
was for the young French cinéastes of the Fifties, just as ancient Greek
art was alive for the artists of the Renaissance.
The parade has not gone by.
Thursday, December 13
HANGMAN'S HOUSE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 13 Dec 2007 08:12 AM PST
Hangman's House is the last, and least, of the five silent films included in the new Ford At Fox box set. It's not a bad film, exactly, just sort of respectably mediocre.
Ford here abandons his effort to out-Murnau Murnau. He moves his
camera very little, and only once or twice with any real effect or
beauty. Generally he returns to his more characteristic style of
fixed camera positions looking into deep spaces with lots of
choreographed movement within them. There is some moody lighting
here and there, and some fog effects on studio "exterior" sets,
reminiscent of those in Sunrise -- but the film rarely comes alive visually.
You get a feeling that Ford simply wasn't all that inspired by this
somewhat creaky melodrama -- entertaining enough, but just
barely. Viewers who only know Victor McLaglen's work as a comic Irish drunk in later Ford films will be surprised by his easy, restrained performance here. It makes you wish he were the
romantic lead in the film, instead of the limp Larry Kent. And there's one
really powerful camera move -- in on the villain as he appears suddenly
in an apparently deserted house. It's spooky and unsettling -- like the push-in on Ethan's face in The Searchers as he registers the horror of the condition of the female captives just freed from the Indians. It's markedly different from the longer, Murnau-esque camera moves in Four Sons, which are typically about exploring locations or expressing high spirits.
In his book on Ford, Andrew Sarris said that if Ford's career had ended
with the coming of sound, he wouldn't be recognized as a major
director. Even Joseph McBride, in his notes for this new set,
says that Pilgrimage, a talkie from 1933, is Ford's first great film. Having seen just the five silent films in this set, along with Kentucky Pride a few years ago, I must say I find these judgements puzzling. 3 Bad Men and Four Sons are hardly lesser works than Pilgrimage, The Iron Horse is a masterful film with elements of greatness, and Four Sons is one of the finest achievements of the silent cinema.
Ford would go on to make finer films, but he was "major" well before the coming of sound, at least in my book.
Wednesday, December 12
FOUR SONS
by
Lloydville
on Wed 12 Dec 2007 12:26 AM PST
Four Sons,
from 1928, is one of the greatest works of German expressionist cinema
-- even though it was made by the Irish-American John Ford in
Hollywood, U. S. A. Ford doesn't just seem to be working under
the influence of Murnau here -- he seems to be channeling Murnau.
If the film had somehow been misattributed to Murnau, it would be very
difficult to correct the mistake by means of a stylistic
analysis. Ford even, at one point, seems to be following in
Murnau's missteps -- Four Sons, like The Last Laugh,
has an odd extended epilogue which violates the tone of the rest of the
film but somehow seems to work in spite of that, lightening the mood
in a strange, surreal way without diminishing the power of the work as a whole.
In Four Sons Ford moves his
camera as elegantly and expressively as any director ever has -- and
the plastic invention involved is ravishing. The lighting is
typical of Murnau, employing soft, glowing, complex chiaroscuro
effects as opposed to the stark contrast of light and shadow often
associated with expressionist cinema (and which Ford himself came
to favor in his later "expressionist" films, from The Informer to The Fugitive.)
Ford had two great masters in his formative years, first Griffith and
then Murnau. What's astonishing is how totally he was able to
absorb each man's style -- he didn't seem to be imitating it so much as
working within it naturally and unselfconsciously. Maybe even
more astonishing is that Ford absorbed Murnau so quickly. We know
how powerfully Sunrise
affected him -- just from viewing the rushes he declared it the
greatest film ever made. Less than a year later he was working
with full confidence and mastery in the Murnau style -- and even shot
parts of Four Sons on sets from Sunrise that were still standing.
Apart from its lack of a strong female lead, Ford's Just Pals
could have been directed by Griffith and would rank among Griffith's more
enjoyable minor films. The epic visual poetry of Ford's The Iron Horse bears favorable comparison with the epic visual poetry of The Birth Of A Nation -- which is saying a lot. If Four Sons had been directed by Murnau, it would rank among the German director's most important works -- and that may be saying even more.
Tuesday, December 11
3 BAD MEN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 11 Dec 2007 12:40 AM PST
[Caution -- this post contains plot spoilers.]
In
modern-day Hollywood it's fashionable to analyze drama in terms of
"character arc". A character starts off a tale with a problem
which he or she must then develop the skills and inner resources to
solve, and this development follows a chartable arc. I think
corporate executives are drawn to this model of storytelling because it
reminds them of the charts and case studies they used in business
school -- it reduces human experience to something resembling the
problem of growing a business or maximizing profits.
The model is useless, of course, for understanding the actual life
experiences of human beings or the great stories and dramas in the art
of the past. Achilles has no character arc, neither does
Hamlet. They both undergo various experiences which sometimes
reveal their characters, and sometimes make their characters seem
hopelessly mysterious. Neither of them "solves" anything.
The character arc model is particularly useless for analyzing the films
of John Ford, which are full of characters who suddenly do complete
turnarounds, often without the slightest explicit motivation -- the
most famous case in point being Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
Their "arcs" are unchartable, mysterious -- they raise more questions
than they answer, but the questions are ones of profound interest . . .
they provoke moral thought in audiences.
In 3 Bad Men, a silent film by
Ford from 1926, three criminals are suddenly converted into saints by a
young woman who mistakes them for heroes, and from that moment on they
behave like heroes, and in the end sacrifice their lives for her.
Such a tale would never make it past the first story conference in
Hollywood today. The film would have to spend most of its length
working up to that moment of conversion, showing the conflict within
the men as they struggled with the decision to be good.
Instead, Ford presents us with a mystery up front, and lets us spend
the rest of the film wondering what it means. For Ford, the
answer lies somewhere in the realm of the moral, the spiritual, the
religious. This is a realm not studied in business schools, not
relevant to ordinary business practice, and thus meaningless to the
corporate executives who run Hollywood today. In modern corporate
culture, which is Hollywood's culture, moral issues are covered by
charitable contributions, perhaps by a dedication to ethical behavior
or to worthy political causes. The issue of saving souls does not
arise.
But the saving of souls is what Ford's films most often concern, which
involves positing the existence of souls in the first place. 3 Bad Men
suggests that the worst of men have souls and are just waiting for a
chance to save them -- just waiting for a call to goodness. And
it further suggests that goodness is not always approached on paths
with chartable arcs. Sometimes goodness descends on men like a
dove and changes them in an instant.
We may cheer when the hapless nerd grows his business or maximizes his
profits against all odds -- but the bad men in Ford's movies,
unaccountably redeemed, make us cry. It can be argued that they
also make us wise in the actual ways of the human heart.
[With thanks to the Silents Are Golden web site for the images above.]
Monday, December 10
THE IRON HORSE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 10 Dec 2007 07:05 AM PST
You can look at John Ford's The Iron Horse
in two ways -- as a silent melodrama set against the epic backdrop of
the building of the transcontinental railroad, or as an epic poem about
the building of that railroad with some melodrama woven through it to
give it a more coherent structure.
In truth the film is both these things, simultaneously or alternately
-- the two halves of its nature are never entirely reconciled.
The melodrama isn't at all bad -- it's entertaining and sometimes
moving -- though it has one of the lamest lovers' misunderstandings in
all of movies. (Interestingly, the international version of the
film tries, through rewritten intertitles, to make the misunderstanding
more plausible but just succeeds in making even lamer than it already was.) The real
problem is that the epic poem which hosts
the melodramatic narrative is one of the most sublime achievements of
the silent cinema. It's hard to imagine any melodrama which could
holds its own with such poetry. (It should be noted that Griffith
faced the same dilemma with The Birth Of A Nation, and similarly failed to solve it.)
The epic poem within The Iron Horse
has themes and developments peculiar to itself. Ford is
interested, as he often was, in the process of things, which in this
case centers on the land, the physical fact of the land, which
determined the challenge the road builders faced. Ford is also
interested in the moral development this challenge prompted --
specifically the uniting of diverse peoples in a national consciousness.
The inclusiveness of the film is notable, and notably modern.
Building the railroad unites former antagonists in the civil war
between
North and South. It unites Eastern engineers with Western scouts
and hunters. It unites ethnic groups -- most specifically the
Irish
and the Italians, though there are a few scenes demonstrating
good-natured camaraderie between Europeans and Chinese. It unites
women and men, who at one point take
up arms together to rescue some besieged track layers . . . and in the
climax of that scene, a band of light cavalry rides to the rescue --
not U. S. soldiers but Pawnee Indians, allies of the train
workers. The only people conspicuously absent from this American
mosaic are blacks -- probably to avoid alienating white Southern
audiences of the time.
The epic poem of America that's at the heart of The Iron Horse unfolds
at a stately pace, even though it's brimful of incident and exquisite
lyrical images. (There's enough pure cinema in this picture to
supply a dozen ordinary movies) Unless you surrender to its
rhythms, are willing
to just sit back and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it, you are likely to
find The Iron Horse tough going. If you're primarily interested in the
melodrama, wanting Ford to get on with it already, you'll find it even
tougher going.
On the other hand, if you let Ford take you at his own pace, show you
want he wants you to see, you'll be deeply rewarded. Here is the
vernacular lyricism of Leaves Of Grass
applied to a truly epic subject and translated into visual terms that
transcend its melodramatic armature. It's an imperfect but genuinely awesome work.
The film is part of the new Ford At Fox
box set, where it's presented in two versions -- the American release
and the somewhat abridged international release, derived from a
separate negative made up of second-camera shots and alternate
takes. The American version is far superior but apparently better
print material survives from the international version. You
really need to be familiar with both to appreciate the film fully.
The international version on the set has a first-rate commentary by
Robert Birchard, filled with a wealth of information about the
personalities involved in the making of the film and about the
production.
Sunday, December 9
JUST PALS
by
Lloydville
on Sun 09 Dec 2007 06:35 AM PST
Just Pals, the first film John Ford made for Fox, makes an
illuminating pendant to another silent film also recently released on
DVD, D. W. Griffith's True Heart Susie. They could have been made by
the same director -- which is to say that Ford, the younger of the two
and the one newer to the business, obviously studied hard at his
master's feet.
Both films fall into the American Pastoral genre, both feature plots
that are outrageously melodramatic, unashamedly sentimental -- and both
are visual masterpieces.
We forget it sometimes, but American culture is in love with virtue -- a
love tempered only by the desire not to be taken for a fool. We like
our virtue delivered sidewise. In less cynical times than the present,
this sidewise delivery could be only slightly oblique. So we have
Griffith's gentle teasing of the innocent protagonists of his tale, and
Ford's cursing urchin in his. But simple decency is the theme of each
film -- as it is of Huckleberry Finn, from an earlier age, and of Casablanca, from a later one. The differences in attitude mainly
involve how cynical the narrator or protagonist has to pretend to be
before getting down to doing or celebrating the right thing.
The message of most works of art can be boiled down to a platitude, if
one is so inclined. The message of Huckleberry Finn is "blacks are
human, too, and anyone who thinks otherwise risks losing his or her own
humanity." But art is not about messages. It's about creating psychic
movement within the audience -- about internalizing the wisdom
trivialized in a platitude.
In silent movies, this process of internalization happens visually --
not in the plot or in the intertitles. In Just Pals, Ford convinces
us that he loves his protagonists not by making them narrative agents of
good but by the way he situates them in space, in the settings of the
story. The cursing urchin is revealed as plucky and independent and
admirable not by his curses but by the way he rides a moving train.
Bim's moral authority in foiling the express office robbery is conveyed
not by his statements of resolve but by the way he commandeers and rides
a horse in the execution of his resolve.
Just Pals is a celebration of sacrifice -- of the mechanics of
sacrifice -- not a sermon about sacrifice. It makes sacrifice seem
beautiful by making the mechanics of sacrifice beautiful.
Just Pals is part of the recently released Ford At Fox DVD box set. It can't be said often enough that the release of
this set is one of the most important cultural events of
recent times.
Monday, November 5
GLORIA SWANSON'S SADIE THOMPSON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 05 Nov 2007 12:54 AM PST
In
1947, an old, bitter, alcoholic has-been named D. W. Griffith
complained to a journalist that movies had lost something -- "the
beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful
blowing on the blossoms in the trees" is how he summed it up. It's sort
of an odd thing to say, since movies never stopped moving, and when
there are trees on screen you can often see the wind moving their
leaves.
But of
course Griffith was talking about something more profound -- harking
back to his own heyday as a filmmaker, when those moving blossoms were
not just a grace note, an accident of location, which might possibly
affect the taking of live sound, but in some real sense what movies
were about . . . movement, the illusion of movement in space, the
transformation of that illusory space, drawing us into it
imaginatively, investing it with emotional drama.
Griffith
was bemoaning the loss of the discursive style of cinematic narrative,
in which the accumulation of passages of plastic transformation were
not simply the accouterments of style but the very method of
storytelling, of emotional communication, in film. He was bemoaning the
terrible efficiency of the studio method, in which those moving
blossoms became incidental decoration, garlands gracing the elegant,
ruthless machinery of narrative exposition.
Those
of us who love Westerns love them in part because the Western genre
alone for many years after the coming of sound preserved that
discursive style -- in which they way people and horses and things
moved and penetrated and transformed the spaces of a room or a street
or a landscape carried the burden of the drama, the narrative
exposition being pretty much formulaic and predictable.
Raoul
Walsh, a Griffith protege, became a brilliant craftsman of the studio
style in the sound era, with an eye for plastic values which lifts most
of his work above the ordinary. But not far above the ordinary. His Sadie Thompson, from 1928, is a masterpiece, however -- and a film
that in many ways defines the crossroads movies had come to in
Hollywood on the eve of sound.
Sadie
Thompson is a very slick film, of great narrative economy -- a studio
picture in that sense. But in scene after scene the narrative momentum
is suspended dreamily as we are invited to appreciate, to inhabit
intimate spaces and moments -- to linger in them languorously. Swanson
plays a hardboiled dame, but we can sense the girlishness and innocence
that has survived her smarmy past -- and Walsh takes time to let us
inside that quality of hers . . . not with a line of thought-balloon
dialogue, but in a rapturously lit scene at her window with O'Hara, in
which the way she looks at him illuminates her face from within,
absolutely breaks your heart. It's like a movie within a movie, and
when you're watching it, it seems as though this is what the whole
story is about.
Walsh
doesn't have a soundtrack to deliver the incessant noise of rain, so he
lingers on moments of transition between the wet outdoors and the dry
interiors, physical business with umbrellas and ponchos and damp
clothes. He luxuriates in exploring the fabulously atmospheric and
spatially intriguing inn set designed by William Cameron Menzies. He
rarely moves the camera, but when he does it has an emotional purpose
-- Sadie being drawn into the interior of the island after she gets off
the ship, surrounded by the marines, O'Hara trying to carry her away
from Davidson and his creepy spell.
One of
the most powerful moments is also one of the most subtle. Just before
the climax, Davidson looks down at the redeemed Sadie, slumped in a
wicker chair. She's removed her make-up and straightened out her hair,
but still looks beautiful, in a severe way. Then Walsh pans down very
slightly from a close-up of Swanson's face -- just enough to let us see
her upper chest moving as she breathes. There's no skin -- we don't
even see the curve of her breast under her dress -- but the very
subtlety of the shift of attention is wildly suggestive and erotic. We
know exactly what Davidson is thinking.
Lionel
Barrymore, as Davidson, looking gaunt and somewhat terrifying, plays an
extreme character, but his performance is beautifully nuanced,
particularly at the beginning. We feel the sensual pleasure he takes in
tormenting sinners, which prepares us for his surrender to another kind
of sensuality at the end. It's far more effective than Walter Huston's
more tasteful and buttoned-up take on the character in the 1932 sound
remake.
The simplicity and reserve of Walsh's performance as O'Hara (above) serves the role well -- he used his very inexperience as an
actor to sell O'Hara's shy, straightforward decency.
Swanson
is brilliant -- and brilliantly inconsistent. Her tough-girl swagger is
charming, and not entirely convincing, which makes her sweetness with
O'Hara, her innocent faith in his love, believable, and her sudden
breakdown in front of Davidson plausible as well . . . she was never as
hard and self-possessed as she seemed to be, and her first look into
the face of irrecoverable loss unhinges her completely. Joan Crawford's
Sadie in the 1932 remake is a one-note impersonation by comparison, and
could have been played almost as well by a man in drag, which is what
Crawford sometimes suggests.
It's a shame the last reel of the film has been lost -- though the reconstruction of it on the Kino release is well-done
and as satisfying as possible under the circumstances.
It's a wonderful movie, with a foot in two different eras of Hollywood filmmaking, but with its heart and soul in Griffith's.
Monday, October 29
AMARILLY OF CLOTHESLINE ALLEY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Oct 2007 02:24 AM PDT
I
fell in love with Mary Pickford when I watched this film a few years ago. I know you're
probably thinking, "What took you so long?", but I really hadn't seen
much of her work before -- some of the Biograph shorts she made for D.
W. Griffith and Sparrows, one of her later silents. I liked Sparrows a lot, thought it was a very well-made film, and admired
Pickford's craft extravagantly . . . but there was something
self-conscious about it, something built into the idea of a masterful
artist playing a child, which had the flavor of a brilliant (a really
brilliant) stunt.
But
when I watched Amarilly Of Clothesline Alley all my resistance
melted. First of all, Pickford plays a sexually mature female, innocent
by choice but well aware of her options -- and she's very sexy, very
self-possessed and powerful, which makes her goodness all the more
vexing. The whole film is permeated with a strong aura of female power,
expressed most poignantly and convincingly in the easy camaraderie
between Amarilly and her mother -- you get a sense that there's no
problem on earth these two can't solve . . . and haven't solved, in a
sense, keeping a fatherless family together in crushing poverty. (You
also get a clear echo of Pickford's actual early life, growing up too
fast, more of a peer than a daughter to her own mother.)
The
wry eye they throw on the rest of the world, especially the world of
men, delightfully underlined in the snappy intertitles by Frances
Marion, their exuberant enjoyment of each other's company, and of life
itself, exactly as it is, suggest a whole universe of female
self-sufficiency and dominion which our culture has managed to
eradicate almost entirely from the mainstream of popular art. (I begin
to think that the national euphoria over Pickford's marriage to Douglas
Fairbanks may have reflected America's pride, and perhaps relief, that
the country managed to produce a man worthy of her.)
The
style of the film as a whole, and Pickford's performance in particular,
is shockingly casual, fast-paced, breezy and naturalistic -- Amarilly
seems to have a whole and real and complicated inner self which she
chooses to share with others, and with us, out of sheer generosity and
goodwill. Virtue has never seemed so alive, so glamorous.
Well, I'm not the first person this has happened to, and thanks to the miracle of DVDs, I won't be the last.
Saturday, September 22
STAGE AND SCREEN
by
Lloydville
on Sat 22 Sep 2007 01:14 AM PDT
If you look at narrative films made in the first decade of the 20th
Century you'll be struck by a very odd aesthetic anomally. Scenes shot
out of doors will often be dynamically composed, emphasizing spatial
depth in the image -- they look modern and can be extraordinarily
beautiful. Scenes shot on interior sets will, by contrast, be framed
head-on, creating the impression of a shallow space -- this, combined
with the obviously painted sets, mostly using flats, looks decidedly
cheesy to modern eyes.
Why did audiences accept this violent contrast of cinematic practices
within the same film?
One reason, of course, is that the interior sets reminded audiences of
the stage, where painted sets and proscenium framing were familiar.
They could think of these scenes as filmed stage-plays, which is how
story-based movies were often defined and sold. The exterior scenes,
on the other hand, reminded viewers of pre-narrative cinema -- the
"actualities", short scenes of picturesque places and real events,
which were the primary content of movies presented as novelty
attractions.
These actualities tended to be agressively "cinematic",
emphasizing the illusion of spatial depth to show off the magic of
movies -- their ability to create the convincing illusion of a real
place on the other side of the screen.
Novelty-attraction actualities were often part of a theatrical
presentation
which featured live performers as part of a variety bill -- so viewers
were accustomed to an alternation of cinematic actualities with
theatrical stage-bound scenes.
The narrative structure of early story films was apparently enough to
knit the two types of cinematic practice into an aesthetic whole for
viewers of the time. Indeed there's a curious Edison film from
around 1904, not part of the regular Edison release schedule, which
shows a
group of people making its way by various means of transport from one
end of Manhattan Island to the other. There's no connecting narrative
-- the shots just seem to be a series of "actualities" linked only by
the presence of the same characters in each sequence. It's been
suggested by film scholars that these sequences may have been shot as
"entr' acts" for a stage play, showing the play's characters moving
from location to location in the story -- something to pass the time
and amuse an audience while the stagehands shifted sets behind the
projected images.
If in such a production you just replaced the scenes on the stage sets
with filmed interiors, shot head-on against painted theatrical
backdrops,
you'd have a pretty fair paradigm for an early narrative film.
Even imagining how such anomalous cinematic approaches could have been
reconciled for viewers within the same film, it's hard not to see the
results as crude. But such anomalous approaches have almost always
been a part of cinematic practice -- and the momentum of narrative has
always been able to reconcile them.
Look at John Ford's Stagecoach
again and see how stunningly photographed images of real locations
alternate with studio work (above) in which sets and back-projections stand in
for exterior locales. It's objectively weird, aesthetically
inconsistent, but our eyes, accustomed
to back-projections in films of this era, don't read it as such.
The conventions are always shifting, of course. The studio-built
interior sets of Stagecoach (above) are fully three-dimensional and
convincing as actual locations -- a far cry from Edison's patently
two-dimensional interior sets painted on flats. But Ford's
back-projection exteriors are convincing only to the degree that we
choose to be
convinced by them, as Edison's audiences chose to be convinced by his
artificial interior sets.
The history of the shift from "theatrical" to fully dimensional interiors in movies would be fascinating to chart.
One of Griffith's main formal concerns in the Biograph years was
developing a way of staging and photographing interiors on sets in
spatially interesting ways, to create a stronger illusion of being in
real rooms -- but he never totally abandoned proscenium framing.
Why?
I'm beginning to think that proscenium framing for interiors continued
to have a degree of glamor for filmmakers throughout the silent era, by
evoking the prestige of the stage.
Twice in Erotikon, from
1920 (above), which has elaborately constructed and
convincing interior sets, such a set is introduced by a wide, head-on
proscenium type shot -- before Stiller moves in and starts shooting the
room as though it were a practical location, sometimes even shooting in
mirrors that reflect the wall behind the camera, utterly abolishing the
theatrical mode by showing us the "fourth wall".
In Peter Pan, Herbert Brenon (above, with camerman James Wong Howe and Betty Bronson) does something similar with the opening sequence
in the nursery -- which he starts out showing only from angles that
would have been available to members of an audience seated in front of
his set, but then proceeds to penetrate from angles only available to
performers inside the set.
Both Erotikon and Peter Pan were adaptations of popular stage
plays, and the filmmaker in each case may have wanted to remind viewers
of the film's prestigious theatrical provenance.
Von Stroheim seems to have been the first film artist to abolish the
theatrical mode for interiors as a matter of basic aesthetic principal,
and he was followed in this approach fairly consistently by Murnau as
well. From them derive the dynamic spatial interiors of Renoir
and Welles.
[With thanks to shahn of sixmatinis and the seventh art for a recent post which got me thinking about this subject again.]
Friday, September 7
THE SLAPSTICK ENCYCLOPEDIA
by
Lloydville
on Fri 07 Sep 2007 11:52 AM PDT
In
case there's anyone out there who doesn't know it, The Slapstick
Encyclopedia is awesome -- offering about eighteen hours worth of
silent comedy shorts on five DVDs. It's an education in silent comedy,
and the first lesson it teaches is that silent comedy could accommodate
a stunning range of talent and tone, from the subtle sophistication of
Sidney Drew to the certifiable madness of Charlie Bowers.
The
pantheon isn't seriously challenged, however -- the work of Chaplin,
Keaton and Lloyd shines with a special radiance, as you'd expect -- but
there are pleasant surprises at every turn.
Harry Langdon remains a
puzzlement to me, based on the two shorts included here, from his
Sennett days. I can't decide if his art is sublime or boring or, by
some mysterious alchemy, both at once. Langdon moves so beautifully
that you simply can't take your eyes off of him, even though you
desperately want to.
The
Charley Chase vehicle Fluttering Hearts, directed by Leo McCarey, has
a light but sure comic tone that never falters, and a short directed by
Roscoe Arbuckle after the scandal, The Iron Mule, is proof positive
of Arbuckle's exquisite plastic imagination.
The
collection is organized logically but flexibly, with shorts grouped
sometimes by studio, where there was a strong studio style at work (in
the cases of Sennett and Roach,) sometimes by artists noted for their
collaboration, sometimes by theme.
Chaplin appears in a volume devoted
to the influence of the English music hall, and it's fascinating to see
how much he took from its traditions, and also how magically he
transformed them. Lesser artists working from the same traditions --
even the wondrous Stan Laurel -- simply inhabit another, more
circumscribed realm of cinematic possibility.
The Slapstick Encyclopedia ends with a grab bag called The Anarchic Fringe, which
presents several shorts of outright lunacy verging on the incoherent,
but the
collection actually climaxes in the penultimate volume, The Race Is On,
which offers comedies involving various mad chases. Chasing Choo
Choos, with Monty Banks, cut down into a short from the climax of a
feature, includes the God-damnedest train sequence ever put on film.
Delirious, relentless, impossibly beautiful and beautifully impossible,
it's one of the most glorious passages in all of movies, and is as
close to a religious experience as one can have by purely cinematic
means.
The
DVD set is marred by one irritation. There is no single listing by
volume and disc of all the shorts included. This will only bother you
when you decide to revisit one of the many treasures included -- but
then again that's something you'll probably end up doing a lot. The
Silent Era website offers a complete listing of the films which is
worth printing and keeping with the box.
Here's a link to the list:
The Silent Era Web Site
Check out other posts in the Slapstick Blog-A-Thon here.
Friday, June 1
FROM CANVAS TO SCREEN
by
Lloydville
on Fri 01 Jun 2007 12:15 AM PDT
Here
is Anders Zorn at his most academic. The composition offers a
dramatic illusion of deep space, with an optical integrity which evokes
the photograph -- but it's all inflected with the suggestion of
narrative, as we're invited into the darkened area just off the
ballroom where private intercourse is taking place.
And yet for all this we still have Zorn's delightful treatment of the
surface of the canvas, with its sensual strokes reminiscent of the
Impressionist style, its magical ability to render the subtlest play of light.
The total effect can only be described as cinematic -- and wouldn't it
be nice if cinema offered more images as exciting as this one, visually
and plastically?
I think it's possible that this image was in the back of D. W. Griffith's mind when he composed the shot below from Intolerance, with its own darkened area just off a ballroom that opens up brightly behind it:
As I've written before, we tend to see early film as a medium emerging
from the Victorian stage, but Griffith himself wrote this about Intolerance:
"You will see the world's greatest paintings come to life and move and have their being before your eyes."
The important thing to remember is that painting itself, even before
the invention of movies, was aspiring to the condition of cinema.
The spatial depth of Zorn's image, its desire to evoke movement in
space, found a kind of fulfillment in the cinema, especially in the
cinema of D. W. Griffith.
Sunday, May 27
PETER PAN (1924)
by
Lloydville
on Sun 27 May 2007 12:03 AM PDT
The first half hour of Herbert Brennon's Peter Pan is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, masterful in a delicate
and unusual way.
Almost
all of it takes place in the Darling nursery, on a set that is shot
from basically one angle and seems designed to suggest a theatrical
stage. I'm guessing that this was a deliberate strategy, meant to
associate the film with the celebrated stage productions of Barrie's
play, even though it was somewhat anachronistic for a film from 1924. Brennon,
however, has taken this limitation as a challenge, and in his own
subtle way has mastered it.
The
long shots of the set, with a frame that seems to mimic a proscenium
arch, are lit with extraordinary care by James Wong Howe. He achieves a
stunning impression of depth in the way his lights define discrete
spaces within the room and sculpt individual figures within those
spaces. Brennon's choreography of movement within the constricted
location reinforces the stereometric nature of Howe's lighting.
Slowly,
and with great subtlety, Brennon allows his camera to tentatively
explore this space from slightly different angles -- almost like a
tease. We never feel that our general sense of watching a stage play is
challenged -- but seem suddenly, briefly transported up onto the stage
for a privileged view of the action, as in a dream.
The
lighting shifts progressively throughout the sequence in a decidedly
expressionistic way -- from the high illumination of the opening to the
more atmospheric shadows of the room lit by the nightlights. Then Peter
appears, and the gears shift radically. Wendy sews Peter's shadow back
on in a gorgeous half-silhouette downstage, then Peter dances with his
shadow in a circle of light, shot from slightly above, that seems to
have no logical source.
When
Peter teaches the Darling children to fly, our head-on view of the set
is explicitly violated as we see one of the boys flying up towards a
camera placed near the ceiling and shooting in a near-reverse angle to
the one we've mostly been watching from. It's a shocking and magical
shift -- echoing the shock and magic of the child's first flight.
Alas,
the rest of the film, in Never Land, is not as magical as this first
act. The Catalina locations, the studio forest and underground lair,
the actors in animal costumes and the actors in human costumes never
quite cohere into a vision, despite many delightful passages. The final
action sequence on the pirate ship is confused and dull -- until the
wondrously choreographed sword battle between the Lost Boys and the
pirates lifts it all into magic once again.
The
special effects vary in quality, too. Most of the wire-work flying is
well done, but the flight of the pirate ship at the end is
underwhelming, and some of the superimpositions involving Tinkerbell
are poorly executed.
This
is a title-heavy film, but the titles are faithful to Barrie's truly
charming text, tastefully selected and arranged.
The
general result is a very uneven but endlessly fascinating film.
Brennon's vaguely perverse sensibility, always delivered with a
gossamer touch, is evident most especially in his use and appreciation
of Betty Bronson in the title role. She dances the part in a frankly
sensual way, and she is unmistakably and delightfully female -- which
allows Brennon to exploit an unmentionable eroticism in certain
passages.
The half-silhouetted shadow-sewing sequence between Wendy and
Peter has the quality of a sexual encounter, and there is nothing
innocent in the numerous kissing scenes -- between Bronson and Mary Brian,
Bronson and Anna Mae Wong, Bronson and Esther Ralston.
When Peter lies down to sleep on
the leaf bed after Wendy and the Lost Boys have left the underground
lair, Bronson is photographed in a languorous and sensual and purely
feminine pose -- which gives Captain Hook's spying on her a wholly
different spin than the narrative might suggest. Hook's hatred of Peter
reads as thwarted lust, pure and simple. He knows as well as we do that
the creature on that bed is a woman.
Sex in silent movies was a lot more interesting than it is in movies today.
Friday, May 18
INTOLERANCE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 18 May 2007 09:28 AM PDT
In
order to enjoy and appreciate Intolerance you have to watch it the
way you read Dickens -- submitting to its rhythms, surrendering to its
asides and narrative diversions. You simply can't be too
impatient to find out what happens next in the story (or
stories.) Dickens and Griffith are more interested in how things
happen, where things happen, to whom things happen. There's no
shortage of fascinating incident in either artist's work, and much of
it is spectacular -- but sometimes the incidents are very small indeed,
and no less fascinating for that.
I've seen Intolerance many times, and I find I remember small gestures and
glances, brief passages of body language with the same vividness that I
remember great lines of dialogue from talking films. The flirty
and then dismissive looks the girl outside the dance hall gives the
mill owner Jenkins who's come to spy on his workers make for an
indelible moment -- involving a bit player we never see again.
The Mountain Girl's postures of energy and defiance look in retrospect
like a primer on flapper attitude, years before the flapper even
existed.
It takes
Griffith over half an hour to introduce us to all four of the time
periods covered in the film. We start in the modern story,
proceed to the time of Jesus, then to 16th-Century France -- then back
to the modern story before seeing the walls of Babylon for the first
time.
Almost every
image in this first half hour is stunning, worth studying for its
dynamic composition involving movement and deep space. The illusion of
depth draws us emotionally into the film just as surely as the
interwoven narratives and the performances.
This effect is
most powerful on a big screen, of course, but it's effective enough on
a decent-sized TV monitor. When you consider a video screen's
tendency to flatten any image, it's all the more amazing that
Griffith's images retain their stereometric brilliance in that format.
One great
virtue of the DVD format is that it allows one to watch (or, one hopes,
re-watch) a film like Intolerance in segments -- which is the way one
reads those long Victorian novels originally published serially.
The film reveals much when experienced this way. There's almost
no chance in any continuous viewing of the three-plus hours of Intolerance that one could sustain the intensity of attention needed
to fully absorb its torrent of beautiful images in detail.
If you have Intolerance on DVD, go watch just its first half hour -- to the end
of the first Babylonian segment. There's enough cinematic
brilliance in that half hour to justify, by itself, the whole medium of
movies.
[If you don't
have Intolerance on DVD rush out and get it immediately. The
Kino edition is generally considered to have the best image quality.]
Saturday, May 12
MERRY-GO-ROUND
by
Lloydville
on Sat 12 May 2007 05:37 AM PDT
Erich Von Stroheim was above all else a wondrous spinner of tales. His
storytelling mode was, at heart, melodrama, but much modified from its
conventional forms. He embraced all the sensational elements of melodrama, its
reliance on wild coincidence and its stark dynamic of good versus evil
but subverted them to his own ends. He made the erotic subtext of much
melodrama explicit, he used coincidence to serve his own fatalistic
vision of human destiny, and he inverted expectations about protagonist
and antagonist, making the former often weak and foolish and the latter
invariably fascinating and appealing, especially when he himself played
the role.
His
vision of the world was brutal and harsh, but he preserved the romance
and the celebration of virtue at melodrama's core -- in the form of his
faith in a pure and spiritual love which could transcend the vagaries
of fate, even if his version of such love often existed outside the
realms of strict propriety.
He was
a popular artist of his time, speaking to audiences in a language they
could understand, even as he extended the expressive and thematic range
of that language. Of the seven films he completed only three were
released to the public in versions close to what he intended, and all
three made money -- quite a lot of money. Von Stroheim knew his public
and its taste, and we err when we accept too quickly the judgment of
the studio executives who decided that this public would not have
accepted his four mutilated films in the longer versions he originally
prepared. We will never know for sure, of course, but it's an insult to
a popular artist of Von Stroheim's stature and achievement not to give
him the benefit of the doubt on this score and to accept uncritically
the verdict of the creative mediocrities who vandalized his films.
The
tale Von Stroheim concocted for what would have been his fourth film, Merry-Go-Round, is perhaps his most romantic -- inspired as it was by
his nostalgia for the old Vienna he grew up in, the one that vanished
forever in the catastrophe of WWI. Von Stroheim's participation in this
old Vienna was not what he claimed it to have been -- it was part of
his dream world from the start -- but it was at the center of his
imaginative life and he seems to have felt its loss just as keenly as
(perhaps more keenly than) the loss of something real.
In Merry-Go-Round |
