StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

  ill-fated quarters and lives. This process was defined by the familiar and transnational aesthetic of the picturesque, which in New York acquired ostensibly American features.

  Today the term “picturesque,” mainly used as an adjective and generally signifying a quaint, scenic landscape (or a curious, striking individual), masks rather than reveals its rich formal and ideological history. Emerging in the seventeenth century as a painterly style, but soon also encompassing practices of garden-making, landscape design, and theater scenery, the picturesque was associated with the representation of “a landscape that to the experienced viewer seemed either to have been composed after a painting or was designed to be the subject of one” (Hunt 6). Its new effects of irregularity, variety, and roughness of design strikingly contrasted with the har-monic symmetry traditionally sought out by pictorial representations. The picturesque achieved broader international popularity in the eighteenth century, when it developed into the dominant pictorial style that northern

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  European elites adopted to transfix their cultural experience of Mediter-ranean regions—Italy, in particular, but also Europe’s many marginal provinces—into imaginative and comforting views of distant landscapes and exotic characters. In widely circulating paintings, prints, and illustrations about Italy, for instance, the violent wilderness of volcanoes became a charming spectacle of primeval force; a ruin-dotted countryside appeared as a mythical and pastoral heaven; and notoriously vicious bandits, or banditti, as they were known, came into view as romantic and colorful outlaws.

  Picturesque representations’ formal and thematic cast, centered on the liminality of natural landscapes with urban views and historical ruins, visualized places and characters perceived to be distant in both space and time, and became influential and pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, the picturesque traveled to the United States, where it became “the first American aesthetic” (Conron xvii). Projected onto the country’s unspoiled prairies and its soon-to-be tamed wilderness, beginning with the Hudson River Valley and then the Wild West, the picturesque style codified and popularized a set of alluring and reassuring national scenes of immac-ulate landscapes, traversed by explorers and, soon, the railway, amidst peaceful natives. Picturesque renderings of Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite became staple images in the catalogs of traveling lecturers and tourist promoters who, along with the ubiquitous slogan “See America first!,” made consumption of the domesticated American landscape the ritual of American citizenship. In between Wild West reenactments and such filmed travelogues as Picturesque Yosemite (1902) and Picturesque Colorado (1911), American filmmakers recognized the paradigmatic setting of romantic national narratives in the western landscape of pristine forests and wild but tameable Indians, as in D. W. Griffith’s Ramona (1910) and Thomas Ince’s The Invaders (1912).

  In late-nineteenth-century America, the rise of urban culture enabled another formulation of the picturesque. At its center was New York City, which, as the most visible social and economic locus of American progress, industrialization, and social interest, prompted impressive aesthetic effects.

  The city’s unique aesthetic aura rested on two defining features: its earth-bound low-end tenements and its skyward high-rise buildings, and their aesthetic and ideological relationship. If mass migrations and immigrant quarters were readily recognized as emblems of America’s multinational fabric, then a unique architectural structure—the high office building—

  identified the city’s skyline as “American.” Although in theory high office buildings could not appear more distant from the natural wonders of the American West, they were nonetheless absorbed into the picturesque aes-

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  thetic. In his work for Scribner’s Monthly and Century, the renowned illustrator Joseph Pennell, who also illustrated the volumes of the Italian journeys of William Dean Howells and Henry James, aligned the city’s skyscrapers with the mighty canyons of the Far West, one of the most emblematic symbols of the American natural landscape. His extension of the picturesque framework was not a solitary enterprise.

  Beginning in the late nineteenth century, bohemian critics, newspaper illustrators, Ashcan school painters, photographers, and early filmmakers highlighted the city’s visual appeal by fostering a notion of “urban picturesqueness.” In their works the picturesque meant much more than a pleasing compositional organization. Following and extending the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward J. Steichen, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, who had all photographed the city amidst winter fog, through tree branches, or on windy days, New York–based American cinema devoted a number of films to the city’s architectural monuments (the Statue of Liberty, the Flatiron Building, and the Brooklyn Bridge), to spectacular squares (Union and Herald Squares), and to hectic traffic. The stylistic recurrences involved in such urban travelogues as The Blizzard (AM&B, 1899), At the Foot of the Flatiron (AM&B, 1903), and New York City “Ghetto” Fish Market (Edison, 1903), or fiction films such as In Little Italy (Biograph, 1909) and A Child of the Ghetto (Biograph, 1910), are revealing. These films display the protocol of the picturesque mode at work: the literal or metaphoric insertion of the spectacle of nature into the city’s rational landscape, from the “natural island” of Central Park to the uncultured migrants barely surviving in the tenement-house districts.

  Overall, the picturesque presented two overlapping, yet also distinct, modes of signification. Whether evoked in the impressionistic style of paintings, etchings, and films or echoed in critics’ writings, on the one hand picturesqueness was repeatedly understood as expressing pictorial suggestiveness through endless contrasts. “The essence of picturesqueness is variety,” wrote art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer in an 1892 essay symptomatically entitled “Picturesque New York” ( Century Magazine, December 1892, 164). “Variety” referred to the striking juxtaposition of the fren-zied vertical development of new office buildings and the folkloric and horizontal scenes of immigrants’ life. Yet, on the other hand, such urban variety also had an unmistakable ethnographic quality. “We cannot appreciate the picturesqueness which New York wears to both mind and eye,” Van Rensselaer added in the same essay, “unless we go immediately from the stately commercialism of its down-town streets to the adjacent tenement-house districts” (172). What appeared particularly striking was the colorful

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  diversity of the immigrant population, both destitute and restless, whom art critic John C. Van Dyke described as showing, with reference to a familiar picturesque subject, “as little repose in its streets as in the lava stream of a volcano” ( The New New York, 11). It was within this ideological and aesthetic condescension that the illustrator William Allen Rogers conceived his popular drawings of immigrants’ daily plight, caught against the towering backdrop of the city’s skyscrapers, and that made him “Harper’s specialist on the picturesqueness of poverty” (Hales 185). Writing about the “Hebrew quarter,” cultural critic Allan Sidney (a pseudonym for Carl Sadakichi Hartmann) championed this aestheticization of destitution in even more explicit terms. The ghetto’s “very dinginess and squalor . . . ,” he noted, “is the great harmonizer in the pictorial arts, the wizard who can render every scene and object—even the humblest one—picturesque” (“Picturesque New York in Four Papers: The Esthetic Side of Jewtown,” Camera Notes vol. 6, 1903, 145). That immigrants’ squalid living conditions were described in purely visual terms reveals a conservative political stance: social inequalities are reduced to decorative elements and thus expunged from any politics of social change.

  In the 1890s, just before the inception of American cinema, Jacob A.

  Riis and William Dean Howells propelled the notion of the picturesque into the mainstream of American visual and literary culture. By looking at, and writing about, New York ghettoes as a foreign country populated by exotic subjects, Riis and Howells endeavored to
soothe the perception of immigrants as frightening foreigners and thus transmuted the distressing topic of immigrants’ lives into a subject of romantic cultural interest. The appreciation of racial diversity for entertainment purposes was also a staple of the New York–based American vaudeville. Vaudeville instituted a “national currency” of heavily stereotyped characters that included beer-guzzling Germans, dimwitted yet amusing African Americans, gesticulating Jews, pigtailed and wily John Chinamen, inebriated and carefree Irish Pats and Bridgets, and emotional and aggressive Italians. A whole corpus of manuals of jokes and songs were published in the late 1800s. In them, the character of the “Eyetalian wid big whiskers” speaks an almost incomprehensible ver-nacular, is both naïve and cunning, and is always quick with insults and his stiletto ( Italian Dialect Joke Book [Baltimore: I. & M. Ottenheiimer, 1909], 74).

  The emergence of an “urban picturesque” speaks not of the oft-cited shocks of modernity, but of minor jolts, expected surprises filtered through a reassuring touristic paradigm that aestheticized and depoliticized immigrants’

  destitution and alleged racial inadequacy as a pleasurable exoticism. As an aesthetic and sociological currency, the “urban picturesque” helped to make

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  sense of and manage the diversity of urban immigrants and, in the process, in Carrie Tirado Bramen’s words, “helped to equate ethnic variety and urbanism with modern Americanism” (Bramen 446). The New York–based American cinema readily embraced this aesthetic possibility as a unique commercial opportunity. While striving for national representativeness against competing foreign films, the U.S. film industry emplotted the drama of the city’s immigrants—which constituted its most numerous and regular audience—into respectable, and distinctively American, narratives.

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  ✩ Italians in American Cinema

  Italian immigrants’ widely emphasized Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrian origins divorced them from Italy’s traditional association with glorious antiquity and artistic excellence. Their southern background, instead, contributed to a racial typecasting predicated upon alleged terms of incongruous physicality, violent and hyperemotional regimes, and thus the tenuous state of a spurious citizenship. A frequently recurring measure of racial underscoring was the law, with its sets of rules and regulations defining a social contract that Italians were depicted as naturally breaching. At times benevolently rendered in folkloric and picturesque terms, this “racial dissonance” signified Italian immigrants’ racial unsuitability and “unfitness”

  for American citizenship.

  Particularly newsworthy was Italians’ allegedly “normal” affiliation with criminal organizations, usually identified as Black Hand societies (that is, Mafia and Camorra), regularly presented in vaudeville sketches, newspaper articles, and cartoons. Beginning with the mass production of fiction films in 1905–1906 and duplicating the yellow press sensationalist reports about kidnappings and other brutalities taking place in Little Italy, early American cinema magnified (and fictionalized) what many Americans imagined about the inner circuits of the metropolis but which they were too afraid to explore. Beginning in 1906, with the trend-setting film The Black Hand, cinema identified Italian characters (more than Chinese and Jewish ones) with the criminal outgrowth of seedy urban ghettoes located just a few blocks away from ordinary city life.

  To be sure, gangster films did not cast all Italians as Mafia criminals.

  Often the story line divided immigrant characters into two clear-cut groups, or created a space of moral indecision within a single character. The distinction between “good” and “bad” Italians was a profitable narrative compro-mise. Embodying the Italian community’s racial difference in the figure of the Latin criminal, these films reaffirmed mainstream middle-class cultural

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  prejudices and granted cinema the high moral ground of documenting and denouncing real delinquency. Simultaneously, by exhibiting Italian characters’ honesty and frequent victimization and integrity, they pleased the self-contention of Italian and, generally, immigrant spectators. Films could do so by exhibiting characters whose outfit, customs, and literacy signified their abandonment of past traditions and embracing of American ideals of justice and ways of life. The emergence of films devoted to the real figure of Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, head of the New York City police force’s anti-Mafia squad, from The Detectives of the Italian Bureau (Kalem, 1909) to The Adventure of Lieutenant Petrosino (Feature Photoplay Co., 1912), provided a model for the reformed Italian. Petrosino’s actual and fictional figure counterbalanced the recurring figure of the gangster and hoodlum, whose defiant dwelling in the city’s narrow and dark alleys communicated a linguistic and cultural isolation and an abiding racial disjunction within mainstream “white” society.1

  These films’ narrative and ideological framework relied on the idea that for Italians assimilation was a challenging, but not impossible, process of moral domestication and adjustment. Although allegations of natural criminal inclinations remained a constant narrative subplot, other films of the period found different ways to accentuate Italians’ racial and cultural diversity. In a combination of ethnographic realism and curiosity, for instance, they emphasized Italians’ widely admired artistic talents or intense family bonds. Other films emphasized such estranging traits of pathological jealousy and impetuous anger, as in Griffith’s The Italian Blood (Biograph, 1911), the story of how an Italian wife tries to revive her husband’s love through artifices of jealousy only to risk losing her own children. In other instances, Italians’ temper, passions, and inclinations for vendetta were ambiguously justified in the face of dreadful adversities and coupled with their allegedly intense attachment to family bonds. In The Wop (IMP, 1913), a widowed father named Luigi, after being unfairly jailed, seeks a violent revenge. Only the sight of his own daughter stops his fury. Overall, the emphasis on Italians’ disproportionate reactions and emotional outbursts was commonly rendered by the acting style of Anglo American actors playing Italian characters—as would be the case for George Beban. Within the melodramatic genre, a favorite in American cinema, the difference between operatic stock figures and psychologized individuals marked a crucial separation, charged with racialized connotations. Melodrama exhibited the divergence between clear-cut narratives whose racialized characters’ “realistic” behavior was shown as reactive, instinctual, or perfunctory, and psychological story lines emphasizing Anglo American characters’ inner turmoil and motivation (Bertellini, “Black Hands”).

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  ✩ Picturesque Pathos

  Beban’s films grew out of these aesthetic, theatrical, and cinematic practices. Before examining the aforementioned The Alien, however, we must turn to another film, The Italian, which was also released in 1915

  but produced a year earlier. The Italian initiated Beban into cinema and specifically into representations of Italian characters defined by melodramatic pathos rather than criminal association.2

  In 1914, at the invitation of Thomas Ince, Beban took part in the Los Angeles and San Francisco filming of what today is generally considered his most famous film. Written by the veteran C. Gardner Sullivan, who had scripted The Wop, and directed by the often-uncredited Reginald Barker, The Italian was a sentimental melodrama of love and revenge set in Italy and New York’s Lower East Side. Beban insisted on changing the film’s title from the original, The Dago, into The Italian, apparently not out of sensitivity. Given the film’s feature length and commercial ambitions, Beban desired to be associated with a Special Feature, for which the neutral title was more appropriate ( Motion Picture Magazine, April 1916, 141). As the New York Dramatic Mirror emphasized, Ince’s film was a notable example of “plot expansion.” As a P
aramount release, the six-reel film belonged to a “pro-gramme confessedly aimed at a more cultivated public than has been reached by that useful trinity, bathos, sentimentality and melodrama” (30

  December 1914, 26).

  The Italian starts, as it will end, with a theatrically rendered framework that reveals the ideological positioning and the aesthetic ambitions of Beban’s work. In the film’s opening image, curtains open onto the library room of a private residence. Sporting an elegant evening robe, Beban appears as an upper-middle-class book lover, quietly sitting in his book-filled studio, reading a novel entitled The Italian. The first part of the film is set in Old Italy, amid romantic monasteries, lush countrysides, and Venet-ian canals. Here, the title character, picturesque gondolier Beppo Donnetti, is in love with Annette, but he cannot yet afford to marry her. He then decides to emigrate to America. Landing in New York’s Lower East Side, he finds work as a bootblack, saves his money, and a year later sends for Annette, whom he immediately marries. The birth of his first child, Tony, becomes an occasion for histrionic outbursts of happiness and communal celebrations. One intolerably hot summer, little Tony becomes sick and threatens to die without pasteurized milk. Beppo begs everybody for help, including Mr. Corrigan, a heartless local boss who feels disrespected and has him beaten and incarcerated. Lacking appropriate nutrition, his child dies.

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  Beppo (George Beban, right, raising glass) spiritedly celebrates the birth of his first child.

  The Italian (1915) Courtesy of Kevin Brownlow.

  Plotting revenge, a deranged Beppo enters Corrigan’s home with a strata-gem: he intends to kill the boss’s daughter. His posture, movements, and facial expressions are beast-like, but not utterly atypical of his character’s racial background. A visual regime of dramatic close-ups reveals a threatening physiognomy of primitive violence. He repents only after noticing that the little girl sleeps with the same baby-like posture he had loved in his own child. The last image is that of Beppo at his son’s grave while the intertitle reads: “At the eternal bedside of his baby where hate, revenge and bitterness melt to nothing in the crucible of sorrow.” Despite his earlier rage, the humanity of his inner character ultimately prevails.