Author Archives: Lloydville

HAROLD LLOYD

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The recent Harold Lloyd box set is both a miraculous treasure and a
daunting challenge.

Like most people of a certain age I got to know the work of Chaplin and
Keaton slowly, in bits and pieces, over the course of many years,
starting with the 8mm Blackhawk versions of the Chaplin Mutuals my
friends and I collected in high school, continuing through occasional
college campus screenings and the theatrical reissues of the 60s and
70s.

This gave one time to absorb the bewildering genius of these two great
artists.

Lloyd’s most important films were much harder, in many cases
impossible, to find.  Before the release of the Lloyd box set I think
I’d only seen Haunted Spooks and Safety Last — enough to know that
Lloyd was a force to be reckoned with but hardly enough to appreciate
the full measure of his achievement.

Now, getting so much of Lloyd’s work all at once, in the fine transfers
on the new set, I find myself a bit overwhelmed — it’s really too much
to react to in detail — but my first impressions of it go something
like this . . .

Having watched each film in the set at least
once, it’s clear to me that Lloyd was not only a filmmaker of equal rank with
Chaplin and Keaton, but of equal rank with any filmmaker in the history
of movies.  With such an artist, it makes almost no sense to
compare and contrast him point for point with his peers — one loves
him for his unique genius.

The center of that genius was Lloyd’s instinctive love for and
understanding of the film medium.  He didn’t comment on it as part of
his method, the way Keaton did, but he used it with unabashed joy and
energy, and with a supreme mastery that’s still dazzling.

There is hardly any film in the new set that doesn’t have its
exhilarating moments, though this is not to say that all the films
succeed equally as unified works.  What distinguishes one from the
other is a central problem Lloyd seemed to wrestle with creatively
throughout his career — the nature of the character he’s playing and
its place in the particular story he’s telling.



The “glasses character” is an everyman in the sense that he presents
himself, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, as a fellow of ordinary
capacities who is impelled at some point to do extraordinary things.
These “extraordinary things” were clearly what inspired Lloyd the
filmmaker most centrally.  He usually thought up the final chase or
thrill climax for his films first, and then worked backwards to create
a narrative rationale for the action in that last reel.

Lloyd’s last reels are almost always brilliant — the narrative rationales vary greatly in kind and quality and determine the success or failure of the films as stories, as whole works.

As a general rule I would say that the films in which the glass
character is motivated primarily by a desire for success, financial or
social, are the least satisfying, even when that desire for success is
linked to the character’s desire to win the approval of a girl.  These
films of course reflected the values of a different time, the Roaring
Twenties, in which unbridled material ambition was seen as a primary
American virtue, but the attitude struck even some observers of the
time as shallow and disturbing, and it hasn’t aged well.



The “romantic” premise of both Safety Last and Girl Shy is that the
glass character must achieve financial success in order to win the hand
of his beloved.  This tends to undercut the “romance” angle
considerably — can’t true love rise above a concern for cold hard
cash? — and turns the “hero’s journey” into the hustler’s
progress.  (In these films we see the genesis of James Agee’s brilliant
observation about Lloyd — he “wore glasses, smiled a great deal, and
looked like the sort of eager young man who might have quit divinity
school to hustle brushes.”)  The last reels of both these films are so
exciting cinematically that we hardly remember what got us to them, but
the excitement is curiously unemotional, like a ride on a
roller-coaster.

Similarly, the desire of the freshman in the film of that name to be
liked by people who are frankly presented as jerks strikes an odd
note.  Lloyd knew that social embarrassment, and even social
humiliation, are good material for gags, but how can one be seriously
embarrassed or humiliated by jerks unless one is a bit of a jerk
oneself?  At best this tends to undercut our sympathy for the freshman
— at worst it puts us squarely in the camp of the jerks who are laughing at him,
too.  The emotional set-up is off-kilter in The Freshman, as is the
emotional pay-off.  We’re told that the protagonist needs to be
himself, stop trying to gain his self-esteem from the opinions of
others — but then he impersonates a football player and achieves
spectacular success on the field as thousands cheer.  The episode is
wonderful, hilarious, magical even — but it doesn’t jibe emotionally
or thematically with the rest of the film.

I would argue that Lloyd’s greatest films, his masterpieces, are the
ones in which the glass character has something more interior to do
than gain wealth or status — who has some inner weakness or
selfishness to overcome before he can win the day and be worthy of his
girl.


These masterpieces would include Why Worry? and For Heaven’s Sake,
in both of which Lloyd plays a character who’s already rich but lacks
inner grit and empathy until spurred on to them by the leading lady.
They would include The Kid Brother, in which the protagonist needs to
grow up and establish his own identity in the face of obstacles both
domestic and foreign.  None of these films has a last reel as awesome
as the ones mentioned above, but they’re awesome enough, and to me more
satisfying, because they reflect deeper emotional transformations in
the film’s central characters.

Because the glasses character isn’t a clown, doesn’t have a clown persona
that migrates more or less intact from film to film, Lloyd always had
to ask who his protagonist was, what he wanted, this time out.  The
nature of the answers he came up with ultimately determined the overall
quality of the films as satisfying stories, as unified works of art.

Watching the business on the building in Safety Last or the
race-to-the-rescue to end all races-to-the-rescue in Girl Shy, you won’t be troubled with
such reflections — they become, for the moment, quite irrelevant.  But the
next time you come back to the films — and Lloyd’s films are films
that can be watched with profit over and over again, if only for their
sublime cinematic inventiveness — you may feel differently, and long
for the more modest but more moving pleasures of Why Worry?, For
Heaven’s Sake and The Kid Brother.

THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO

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The great historians of the 19th Century established
the practice of history as a science, one which had to be founded on a
massive, exhaustive research into primary sources.  The industry they
displayed in this pursuit, given the difficulties of travel and
communication in their time (not to mention the lack of photocopying
machines), is almost incredible.

But their devotion to documented facts did not divert
them from their duties as storytellers and moral guides.  They felt
perfectly free to interpolate fanciful speculations into their texts,
often in the guise of exposing them as such, and to share their
personal opinions about any subject that came under their eyes —
revealing nationalistic, religious and racial prejudices which later
generations of historians would shudder to confess.

And they always kept in mind their duty to literature
as well, their obligation to write in learned but entertaining prose
that could be comprehended with ease, as well as with pleasure, by any
educated person.

The general result is that these 19th-Century
historians are a hoot to read — and none is more of a hoot than
William H. Prescott, of Boston, whose History Of the Conquest Of
Mexico, from 1843, while still accepted, with reservations, as a
pioneering work of history, is almost universally admired as a work of art.


The voice of the writer is confidential but assured,
as he mocks his less rigorous peers, pronounces moral judgments on
whole civilizations, damns the scoundrels and praises the heroes who
people his epic, and parades his learning with circumspect but
unmistakable pride.  He allows himself to be known.

Modern historical practice finds this sort of personal
interjection deplorable, but it might be argued that it has its own
corrective built into it.  A frank confession of prejudice on the part
of a historian makes it easier to form our own judgment of his or her
conclusions than a pretense of absolute objectivity which we know is
quite beyond human achievement.

Be that as it may, William Prescott is good company,
and his great history of Cortes and the subjugation of the Aztecs fires
the imagination in such a way as to impress the results of its vast
erudition on the mind indelibly.  We can correct his bias by consulting
later, more “disinterested” historians of the events in question — but
they will never make us care about them the way Prescott does.

VITORIO STORARO

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When Bernardo Bertolucci and his cinematographer
Vitorio Storaro began preparing The Conformist, Storaro suggested a
visual style that would emphasize bold contrasts between light and
shadow, to reflect the conflicted nature of the film’s protagonist.  He
said he thought immediately of the painting above by Caravaggio, with
its strange, not quite naturalistic lighting scheme, and tried whenever
possible to introduce similar hard edges between the dark and light
areas of his images in The Conformist.

In general, Bertolucci’s films draw on effects from painting, especially
from painting that has marked stereometric qualities.  Many of the
beautiful compositions involving the urban spaces of Paris in The
Conformist seem to reference the urban landscapes of Caillebotte, an
Impressionist who incorporated the spatial dramatics of academic
painting into his work to a far greater degree than his peers in the
Impressionist movement.

Much of 1900 seems to reference the treatment of pastoral scenes in
19th-Century academic painting.


It’s hard to know how conscious the references to
19th-Century academic painting were for Bertolucci and Storaro, since
this influence had already been absorbed in the visual styles of the
great silent filmmakers like Griffith and Vidor and Murnau, who in turn
clearly influenced Bertolucci.  Bertolucci
and Storaro might have tapped into the tradition at any point along the
line of its transmission.  But Storaro has made clear his
indebtedness to Caravaggio, and that should lead us logically into an
investigation of other painterly influences on his work, especially his
work for Bertolucci.

I’m not sure how much such an investigation contributes to the experience
of the films, since these sorts of visual strategies and references must
work first on a subliminal level if they are to be genuinely effective,
but it’s certainly fascinating . . . and perhaps of use to other
filmmakers.

FROM POE TO BAUDELAIRE TO CHAPLIN

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Here’s Walter Benjamin on Poe’s description of “the crowd” — an image
of great importance to Baudelaire:

“We may assume that the crowd as it appears in Poe, with its abrupt and
intermittent movements, is described quite realistically.  In itself,
the description has a higher truth.  These are less the movements of
people going about their business than the movements of the machines
they operate.  With uncanny foresight, Poe seems to have modeled the
gestures and reactions of the crowd on the rhythm of these machines.
The flaneur, at any rate, has no part in such behavior.  Instead, he
forms an obstacle in its path.  His nonchalance would therefore be
nothing other than an unconscious protest against the tempo of the
production process.”

The Parisian flaneur was a type of 19th-Century dandy whose pleasure it
was to wander, and to be seen to wander, the boulevards with no
apparent purpose.  This pose was a conscious endorsement of pure
sensibility over practical endeavor and, as Benjamin suggests, perhaps
an unconscious protest against an increasingly mechanized and
regimented industrial society.

Chaplin’s Little Fellow is a flaneur.  His dandyism has become a bit
shabby but abides in his fastidiousness about his dress and its
pretension to style — well-exemplified in the Tramp’s delicacy in
removing and replacing the detached finger of his glove in one of the
opening sequences of City Lights.  The pretension involved is not
about class, but about dignity.  Like a true flaneur, the Tramp wanders
through the world in a state of detachment from it, observing,
sometimes mocking, sometimes hustling what he wants from it, but never
seeking its endorsement.  Another remark by Benjamin on Baudelaire is
relevant here:

“Baudelaire was obliged to lay claim to the dignity of the poet in a
society that had no more dignity of any kind to confer.  Hence the
bouffonnerie of his public appearances.”

Chaplin’s flaneur, like Baudelaire’s scandalous poet, had to be a comic
figure in the context of his time — his insistence on dignity in an
undignified world had to be ironical.  But it is still sincere, and
heroic.  The buffoonery of Baudelaire and the Tramp becomes an
accusation, and the dignity they insist on is real, if absurd in the
context of their times.

In Modern Times the flaneur is diverted from his strolling about and,
inside the factory, his movements become subsumed by the movements of
the machines, which eventually overpower and consume him.  Contrast
this with Buster Keaton’s battle against a mechanized universe.  Keaton
becomes a kind of uber-machine — a machine with soul and purpose and
courage, more intricate and ingenious and lyrical than the machines
he’s fighting.  He bests the machines on their own terms and in that
way restores the primacy and the dignity of the human being.

But the flaneur doesn’t have this capacity, or this option.  His
triumph is just to wander on, dusting the dirt off his tattered finery,
setting his hat at a rakish angle, flexing his cane, untouched by the
more profound shabbiness of the world around him — a hero not of deeds
but of example.

THE OYSTER PRINCESS

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The first thing to be said about The Oyster Princess, from 1919, one
of the films recently released in Kino's “Lubitsch In Berlin” series, is
that there's little evidence in it of “the Lubitsch touch” — that
gossamer comedy of suggestion and indirection that came to characterize
the director's mature style.




The Oyster Princess is very broad farce, verging on slapstick at
times.  That said, though, the film, for all its aggressive silliness,
has remarkable stylistic assurance and consistency — it's witty,
charming and often very funny.  What it resembles most closely are the
operettas of Offenbach, or rather of his librettists Henri Meilhac and
Ludovic Halevy, which manage to combine delirious frivolity with an edgy
satire of aristocratic pretensions.  The style is frothy and subversive
at the same time.




The Oyster Princess has a preposterous plot, involving a marriage
under false pretenses, and equally preposterous depictions of
aristocratic dementia that often veer into the realms of the surreal.
(In some ways they are lighter-hearted versions of Von Stroheim's dark
and grotesque portrayals of these same aristocratic circles.)  But
there's more to it than that, just as there's more to Offenbach than his
farcical plots — there's Lubitsch's extraordinary cinematic
imagination, which at times causes the film to soar into the same
ethereal realms that Offenbach's music inhabits.




The wedding scene, for example, involves the sublime choreography of an
army of servants in action, and an even more delirious set-piece in
which the guests, and even the servants, break out in an hysterical
episode of fox-trotting — travesties of actual behavior organized with
exhilarating plastic grace.  The film transcends itself in these
moments, just as Offenbach's melodies transcend their dramatic vehicles.




So if “the Lubitsch touch” isn't on display here, except in a few stray
scenes, the Lubitsch genius explodes often enough to make us realize we
are in the company of a master of the medium, even if he's a master
still in search of a distinctive personal style.

BEYOND COOL

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Some toys just are.  Above is the Sideshow 12-inch action figure of Lon Chaney in his Masque Of the Red Death costume from The Phantom Of the Opera.  I still can’t quite believe that somebody made this extraordinary thing, and that I own one.

BABY FACE

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In the days before its Production Code got really strict (around 1934)
Hollywood had extraordinary latitude in the subjects and attitudes it
could address.  Turner Classic Movies has just released a set of three
pre-code films, under the title Forbidden Hollywood, that gives some
startling examples of the freedom that was lost.

Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck, presents a world-view of
jaw-dropping cynicism — a case study of bimbo feminism that would be
shocking even in a Hollywood film of today.  Stanwyck plays Lily, a
girl who’s been hooking since she was 14, pimped out by her own
father.  She meets an eccentric Nieztsche fan who tells her to use her
power over men ruthlessly, without sentiment or conscience, to get what
she wants.  And this she does — fucking her way to the big city, and
up the ladder of success, until she’s the filthy rich mistress of a
pathetic old banker.

The passion and jealousy Lily arouses in the men she uses eventually erupt in violence, and set up a nifty blackmail opportunity for her, but also throw her into the orbit of a different sort of man than she’s used to, a man who knows all about her past but loves her anyway . . . and she finds a kind of redemption in his arms.

All the men Lily encounters, except for the last one, are slimeballs
and pushovers, and Lily never shows even a flicker of remorse about
exploiting them and destroying them.  The really shocking thing is
that the film doesn’t condemn her for this, any more than her last lover
does — she’s been dealt a bad hand in life, as a woman, and she’s
played it the best way she could.

This is all dizzyingly surreal.  Seeing Hollywood stars and Hollywood
production values deployed in the service of a story like this makes
one feel one has entered an alternate universe — except of course that
it’s closer to the universe we actually inhabit than to the post-code
Hollywood version of reality.

Baby Face is lurid pulp melodrama at its most entertaining, and it’s
something more, too — a vision of what movies might have been if
corporate hypocrisy and totalitarian concepts of social hygiene hadn’t
put them in an artistic straightjacket.

Rush out and get this set, and prepare to be seriously discombobulated.

WHAT SONG THE SYRENS SANG

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A quote from Urn-Burial, a strange book by the 17th-Century author Thomas Browne:

“What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture . . .”

The painting above is by Herbert Draper, a good example of Victorian soft-core pornography.  They were better at it than we are.

The example below is by John William Waterhouse.  The Victorians knew that marrying restraint and indirection to perversity produced a more delirious kind of eroticism.

1900

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It’s hard to imagine that there will ever be another movie like 1900.  The sheer size of its physical production (as opposed to the CGI resources it deploys) and the care and imagination
lavished on almost every scene, every set-up, every shot, seem beyond the resources and the ambitions of modern filmmakers.

When it came out, in 1977, Pauline Kael said it made every other movie released that year look like “something on the end of a toothpick”.  It makes most movies ever released look that small.

Which is not to say that it’s a grandly satisfying film, that it doesn’t fail on many levels — but it really is a hell of thing to look at and experience.

Bertolucci’s initial cut of the film clocked in at something over five hours — and that’s the only length at which the film makes sense.  There’s no urgent narrative at the heart of it that
emerges when it’s pared down — abridgment just violates the leisurely pace of the film, which asks us to immerse ourselves in images, in recreated eras, in the slow meandering of history.

If you can surrender to its pace, relish its imagery without hurry or anticipation, you are treated to an orgy of cinematic beauty — a pure and joyous celebration of the possibilities of the medium.

You can forget, or set aside, what’s wrong with the film — its programmatic characters, who sometimes come to dramatic life but just as often stayed fixed in their roles as
political archetypes, its naive celebration of the romance of Communism, its cartoonish reduction of history into icons and slogans.

What you will remember are places, times of day, the play of light, the choreography of peasant dances and cavalry charges and duck hunting from small boats.

Afterwards you’ll find yourself wishing the film had been better — but while you’re inside its rapturous, disjointed visions, it’s hard to imagine anyplace you’d rather be.

[A DVD with Bertolucci’s original cut, in an excellent transfer on two discs, has just been released, and it’s well worth owning — it may be the only five-hour-plus film you’ll want to look at again and again.]



The picture above — showing Bertolucci, in the checked cap, setting up a shot on 1900 — is from a web log that regularly posts great images from film and popular culture.  Check it out here:

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

BEN KATCHOR, REAL ESTATE PHOTOGRAPHER

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This past November I was delighted to read a notice in the newspaper
that Ben Katchor was going to be appearing in Las Vegas as part of the
Las Vegas Valley Book Festival. Katchor is one of the great fiction
writers at work today, and he happens to work in the medium of the
comic strip, or picture stories as he likes to call what he makes.



His
signature creation is Julius Knipl, real estate photographer, who
wanders the back streets of a disappearing New York, the New York of
the small-time merchants and manufacturers and wholesalers who used to
be the life's blood of the city's economy but are now being moved out
to the fringes of things by the inexorable yuppification of the city,
or at least of Manhattan.



The
disappearance of the small-time manufacturers in Manhattan made
possible my own residency in the city, starting in 1972, when artists
and various other undesirables started renting (illegally) the lofts
vacated by the small enterprises that were becoming economically
unfeasible. Back then, we lived among the remnants and the ghosts of
these vanishing concerns, businesses that made flags and coat hangars,
fur coats and uniforms.



We
were, alas, only the pilot fish for a new influx of urban professionals
who turned the loft districts into fashionable residential areas —
eventually the yuppies would drive us out of the city as they
transformed our Bohemia into the capital of Connecticut. Fair enough.
But Katchor remembers the city we Bohemians displaced, just as someday
someone will remember the city we remade. No one will care to remember
the new city of the yuppies.



The New York I miss most these days is the New York Katchor memorializes — but I missed it even when I was living in
New York. It exists now only in dreams and in art.




Katchor
spoke in a gallery at the Holsum Lofts, a converted bread factory
that is part of a valiant and almost certainly doomed effort to create a new Bohemia in Las Vegas.
It's located downtown, on Charleston Boulevard, near the few places in
the area which still retain the flavor of the dirty old city — places
like Johnny Tocco's, a classic and legendary boxing gym unchanged for
decades.



Katchor
read some of his strips, with the panels projected onto a screen. It
was interesting to see how well they played with the small audience,
which was often, like myself, laughing out loud. Katchor's tone in his
strips is generally wistful and melancholy, but there's a dark humor to
them that makes his visions bearable, and a quiet anger that gives them
great energy. All this could be heard in his voice.



Katchor
was kind enough to sign one of my Knipl books with an illustration of
Mr. Knipl, and to add the date and place of the inscription. Julius
Knipl in Las Vegas — now there's a surreal image. The yuppification of
Las Vegas proceeds apace, and it will soon have the smug bourgeois
vapidity of modern-day New York, but the process will leave
deep secrets buried here, secrets that would certainly reveal
themselves to a dogged,
mystical real estate photographer.



Here's a link to Katchor's site, where you can buy books and cards and prints, and see what he's up to:



Ben Katchor's Web Site



[Click on the image above for a bigger version]

THE CONFORMIST

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Perhaps the most exciting cinematic event of 2006 was
the release on DVD earlier this month — finally, and in a terrific
transfer — of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

Few films of the post-WWII era have been as
influential as this one — few films of any era have been as ravishing,
as sensually exciting.

In the freewheeling atmosphere of the time, and with
the final collapse of the old studio system, Hollywood in the late
Sixties was in an experimental mood, though the experimentation often
involved only superficial stylistic gimmicks — the hand-held camera,
promiscuous zooming, elliptical editing, split-screen images.

At the same time a new generation of filmmakers was
coming into prominence which had been schooled in, and deeply loved,
the classic Hollywood films — among this generation were
Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas . . . all of them, except for
Spielberg, the products of film schools rather than of apprenticeship
in the industry.

They were tackling new subjects and ones that were often more challenging
than the old studio system could embrace but they were
developing a style that owed much to the formal elegance of the
cinema of the studio era.

Then, in 1970, The Conformist burst onto the scene,
the work of a young Italian filmmaker who had not only mastered the
formal elegance of the old studio style but was taking it into new
realms of expressiveness and invention.  Indeed, The Conformist had
something of the visual eloquence of the highest achievements of the
silent era, of Murnau’s and Vidor’s films, whose
extravagant poetic imagery had been lost with the coming of sound.

The effect was electric — confirming all the creative
instincts of the American film-school avant garde.  The movie was so
important to Coppola that he, along with a number of other American
directors, personally lobbied its distributor to release the film in
the United States.  He used one of its actors in The Godfather, Part
II, and its visual style influenced every frame of Coppola’s
masterpiece.

Bertolucci never made another film quite like it.
His visual imagination, his gift for dynamic plastic composition and
choreography within the frame stayed fresh, but was often lavished on
unworthy material and degenerated into mere mannerism.

The Conformist was of a piece because its story and
its visual style reinforced each other.  Bertolucci was, in the film,
breaking dramatically from the severe aesthetic strategies and rigorous
intellectualism of his mentor Godard, indulging himself frankly in the
cinema’s power for sensual seduction — all the while telling the tale
of a promising student who betrays the political ideals of his old
professor and eventually collaborates in the professor’s murder.

The Conformist remains alive with the allure of forbidden
pleasures, tense with the guilt of giving in to them.  The film is
erotic but disturbing — a dynamic that Bertolucci would explore
more explicitly in Last Tango In Paris, but without the organic
emotional coherence of the earlier film.

The Conformist also marked the emergence of its
cinematographer Vitorio Storaro as an artist of international
stature — but that’s a subject for a future post . . .

FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

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[Miranda, the Tempest, by John William Waterhouse]

Of all the primal bonds, that between father and daughter has been perhaps the least examined by psychologists and by artists . . . with the notable exception of Shakespeare, himself the father of two daughters, one of them the twin of his only son Hamnet who died in childhood.

Father-daughter relationships figure prominently in 21 of Shakespeare’s surviving plays, and they are examined from almost every angle, most of them problematic. In the comedies the relationship is presented primarily through the eyes of the daughters, in the later magical romances primarily through the eyes of the fathers.

Diane Dreher’s Domination and Defiance, published in 1986, was the first book specifically devoted to the subject of fathers and daughters in Shakespeare, and it’s a fine, illuminating study. It’s central thesis is that Shakespeare’s view of father-daughter relationships was both wise, psychologically speaking, and startlingly progressive, socially and politically speaking. Traditional patriarchal domination of the daughter by the father is always seen as destructive in Shakespeare’s plays, harmful to the psyches of both father and daughter, and to the social order itself.

As with all insights into Shakespeare’s work, the book raises intriguing but always unanswerable questions about Shakespeare’s biography. What real-life family dramas informed the clashes between fathers and daughters in the plays of Shakespeare’s early and middle periods? What epiphanies led to the sublime, almost mystical and always deeply moving reconciliations between fathers and daughters in the late romances?

It’s impossible to believe that there were no such connections between the life and the work — it’s equally impossible not to be vexed that they can never be summoned up into the light, except by way of Prospero’s enchanted, phantasmagorical visions.

ANDREW WYETH AND THE SILENT CINEMA

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[Renee Adoree and John Gilbert in King Vidor’s The Big Parade]

Reading an excerpt from David Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth in an
old Vanity Fair I came across an interesting passage.  Writing about N. C.’s son Andrew, Michaelis says:

“Andy’s conception of army life had been formed by years of soaking up The Big Parade, King Vidor’s silent classic about three enlisted men in WWI, which N. C. had taken him to see as an eight-year old boy. ‘This film,’ Andrew later explained, ‘got into my bloodstream.’
Eventually he came to own a copy and would screen it four or five times a year all through his adult life.  Forever linked to his deepest feelings about his father, certain frames of the film would form, without his realizing it, the basis for some of the most important images in his art.”

As an adult Andrew Wyeth eventually wrote a fan letter to King Vidor and the two men
met towards the end of Vidor’s life.  Vidor made a short film about the encounter, the last film he ever made.  In the film Wyeth remarks that when friends said they didn’t understand why he kept on watching The Big Parade after seeing it 180 times — literally — he replied, “You don’t understand my paintings, either.”

Two things struck me about this.

Firstly, it’s fascinating that a great artist like Wyeth, used to consciously analyzing visual images, should have created works which were unconsciously influenced by shots in a silent film.  I think this speaks to the powerful ways cinematic images, particularly from silent films, can work on all of us unconsciously.

[A scene from Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt by Jean-Leon Gerome]

Secondly, I’ve always been struck by the influence of 19th-Century
academic painting on movies.  The former were centrally concerned with
using spatial effects for dramatic and emotional purposes (again often
experienced in subliminal ways.)  Movies, because they had greater
aesthetic resources in this area — i. e. movement in space by both
subject and camera — almost instantly spelled the end of academic
painting as a popular visual art form, and drove modern painters into
greater and greater abstraction.

The formal connections between 19th-Century academic painting and
movies is a subject that has hardly been hinted at in cinema studies to
date.

[Book illustration by N. C. Wyeth]

N. C. Wyeth kept the “cinematic” narrative-based academic style alive in
his book illustrations (as did Norman Rockwell in his magazine
illustrations) and N. C.’s son Andrew has been almost alone in keeping
elements of this style alive within the circles of modern “high art”, by
making the narrative element more ambiguous and blending the dramatic
representation of space (which is crucial to his work) with a more
pronounced abstraction of design.

In Andrew Wyeth’s obsession with The Big Parade we have a concrete example of the transmission of these oddly overlooked aesthetic connections.

[Trodden Weeds, 1951 tempera — © Andrew Wyeth]