Muybridge took well over a hundred thousand pictures in Pennsylvania in the mid-1880s, and they were published by the university in 1887 in eleven folio volumes as Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Before the official invention of the movies (though many were on that track, and Thomas Edison took note of Muybridge’s work), so many elements of cinema had been identified: time, motion, space, light, skin. And watching.
Don’t forget the skin, or the way sunlight could caress it—as a rule, Muybridge worked in natural light. He was engaged in a project of scientific research, sanctioned by the university and by the Philadelphia Zoo, so he had some license. If the animals he photographed were naked, why not some similar views of those other animals, people? I doubt he could have published all that followed without the umbrella of academe (and he often did series of people opening and closing parasols).
One of the nudes was Muybridge himself—gaunt, stringy, white-haired, and noble. He had to believe in himself—he looks as confident as Julia Roberts did once. He must be the first auteur to go naked in front of his own camera, and he does not have too many rivals in the century or more since. I do not know who the naked women were, though they are usually young, strong, and appealing. Did Muybridge select them for that reason, or were they just Penn students on work study? Did he talk to some of them afterward? Did he…? I don’t know, but you will know what I am wondering if you examine the glory and the naturalness of the pictures.
Of course, these pictures are not loaded or touched with drama or seductiveness. They have no story content—except that of being looked at. But watching is so often the seed of story—that’s what happens with Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (1954), a film that teases him, and us, on account of the link between staring and starting up a line of thought that might become a story. What happens next? But why say “next” unless things follow in what screenwriters call “the arc”?
Aware of an arc, or not, as film and filmmakers watch, so they are led to “improve” what they see. They may alter the light and compose the image to fit the story developing in their mind. This is tricky, too, but you can’t blame anyone for doing it. Watching and thinking are natural companions. It’s only the camera that can do one without the other. But we are so eager to assist its shortcoming.
In Anthony Minghella’s film of Cold Mountain, two lovers, Inman and Ada (Jude Law and Nicole Kidman), are separated for most of the action by the Civil War. At last they are reunited, and in 1864—or in a 2003 movie—it was natural that they might make love. But this was a film that had striven to look and feel like the wild country of North Carolina in the early 1860s, where very likely the real lovemaking would have been in the dark, with bodies roughened by hunger and other privations.
Cold Mountain was a movie that was going to cost $83 million, so it needed a sex scene with movie stars. Minghella knew that, but if he had been in any doubt, Miramax and the Weinstein brothers (the producers) were there to remind him. Alas, in its fond amber light, with the players gracefully exposed and shielded, and with Law and Kidman qualifying as admirable bodies, Cold Mountain felt like a movie. The openness of Muybridge and nature was gone, along with 1864. But even Muybridge’s own pictures do have some elements that signal the melodrama of Cold Mountain: his views are chosen and framed for us, and the men and women in the photographs do not know us or admit that we are watching. The voyeurist privilege had begun, and already its intimation of power and detachment was present. What is not natural is our looking. Yet by today we think we have a right, a human right, to look at anything.
Eadweard Muybridge went back to England and died in Kingston-on-Thames in 1904. He was an inventor, a creator, and a visionary, and nearly every picture he took prompts the inward cry “Oh, look!” That is what this book starts with: we like to look, and in looking we find what we like—or what we are afraid of: it’s a pattern of dread and desire. Of course, by 1904, if he had been so inclined, Muybridge could have gone to some early version of a movie show, run on electricity, and seen the projector’s shining light fall back from a screen on the huddled mass. He might have been pleased, for it would have seemed as if the crowd, buzzing with their sighs, were watching the pictures. They were. We still do. But by now we are challenged by a disconcerting realization—that we are also watching the screen, the process, and our distance from reality. Movie has so often seemed like the gift of reality—sometimes a lustrous, improved version of it—but by now it’s easier to understand how the process let us give up on reality, and use it as a story, a dream, a toy version of life. That can be a worrying privilege, especially if reality threatens to become unmanageable.
This book is an attempt at history, but it leaves many things out, and sometimes moves sideways, despite an overall belief in a steady, forward narrative. From the early days of movies, it cuts forward to events as recent as Pretty Woman or Cold Mountain. In the middle of the book, there is a kind of movie, or a montage. So it’s the story of the movies, but it begins with still photography and comes up to Facebook and all the screens in our lives today. The point in that extension is to say, well, be wary of isolating movies as a discrete or all-important subject. They are about their own imagery, of course, but they should not be separated from our longing to see or from the medium’s ultimate core: a way of realizing desire on the big screen. So it’s a history of moviemaking, its atmosphere as a bittersweet collaboration, and its impact on our larger culture, but it tries to describe a theory of screens, too, which is not as cheerful or carefree as Fred Astaire. We used to believe the screen was there just to help us see the pictures, the story, and the illusion of life. But we are warier now and we guess that all these screens are the real thing, fabulous tools, of course, but subtle barriers between us and life.
We are all of us our own screens: we let the imagery of the world play on us, just as large theatrical screens carried every movie with impartiality. I have always been intrigued by the idea of screens retaining something of the spirit of all their films, of their all being there at the same time—it’s a version of consciousness. In that mood, imagine the Fernando Rey from The French Connection (1971) becoming the Rey in Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) on the same white sheet. The films are only a year apart, and it’s positively the same man.
So this book has a lot of information and film titles, a lot of movies you might want to see, or see again. But it is personal and reflective. It tries to uncover the secret nature of film and the way it aids our dreaming. The book goes into raptures and it turns frosty: it has opinions, none of which is meant to be authoritative or decisive. They are there to urge you into your own. I hope it is useful and entertaining. But its chief purpose is just to make us think what movies have done to us and wonder how we feel about that. It’s a love story, but you have to wait for the ending.
Part I
The Shining Light and the Huddled Masses
Lillian Gish in The Birth of a Nation
A Cheap Form of Amusement
In 1911, William de Mille heard that a promising Canadian stage actress lately seen in The Warrens of Virginia (1907) was making the mistake of her life. He told the impresario David Belasco, “The poor kid is actually thinking of taking up moving pictures seriously…I remember what faith you had in her future…and now she’s throwing her whole career in the ash-can and burying herself in a cheap form of amusement.”
The actress was eighteen, and for the moment she was Gladys Smith—but the name Mary Pickford awaited her, along with perhaps the greatest success and fortune any woman has yet achieved in the movies. William was the older brother of Cecil B. DeMille and as disapproving as possible of Cecil’s own urge to give up theater for this new, trashy sensation. Fraternal superiority seldom works. C.B. was on his way as not just an epic figure in the business being made but also, he hoped, an immense force for good and improvement. (The de Milles were the sons of a preacher who had become a playwright
. Around the turn of that century, there were so many new technologies winning the minds of people.)
The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse—it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium’s essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film’s emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.
At one of their first film screenings in Paris, in the 1890s, the Lumière brothers told Georges Méliès, a stage magician captivated by what the cinematograph might do for him, to put away his money: “It is an invention without a future.” Yet Thomas Edison, a businessman to be sure, wrote in Moving Picture World, a trade paper, in 1907, that “nothing is of greater importance to the success of the motion picture interests than films of good moral tone.” But Dr. Anna Shaw, a “feminist reformer,” believed that a policeman should be posted everywhere movies were shown because “These places are the recruiting stations of vice.” In Boston, a girl, Irene Mayer, realized that her father, Louis B. Mayer, was in the picture business and doing so well that they were about to move to California! But years later she was still asking herself, “How could a man of my father’s innate conservatism have chosen show business?”
Her answer was that Pop was “as emotional as he was”—a simple statement that requires constant examination. My experience with movie people is that nothing is more pressing or perilous in their lives than their headstrong identification with the emotion in the stories they tell. Other people in Mayer’s life might have put it differently. Louis B. Mayer, once known as Lazar Meir, and born outside Kiev in 1885, was a small bull of a man who had grown strong heaving scrap iron. He was barely educated, yet he would be a shaper of minds. He was conservative but outrageous, high-minded and given to low blows, a pirate and a prison guard. As the dominant power at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for over twenty-five years, Mr. Mayer felt he owned the souls of his stars as well as their moving photographs on seven-year contracts. He had a cruel side, a violent temper, an unbridled ego. In urging his own properties to be “good,” to respect their mothers, their Americanness, and his advice, he could move himself to tears. His daughter Irene admitted that she regularly confused him with God, and hardly noticed that she didn’t believe in a god. Some observers decided Mayer was a fraud, the “greatest actor on the M-G-M lot.” This misses a more disarming truth: he cried real tears; he was moved by his own dreams. There are still people who think they run the media who are swept away by that great hope.
When Mayer was an infant still, his father, Jacob, took the family to England simply to escape pogroms and poverty. That setting forth showed some means as well as the courage that every emigrant requires. Jacob was in the scrap business, but he could not prosper in England. So in 1892 they all moved on to St. John, New Brunswick, the town where Louis Mayer was raised.
Similar stories could be told about most of the founding fathers in the picture business. Adolph Zukor (the future chairman of Paramount) was born in Hungary in 1873. Samuel Goldwyn was from Poland, born in 1879. Carl Laemmle (the founder of Universal) was born in Germany in 1867. William Fox was born in Hungary in 1879. The eventual Warner brothers (Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack) had their family origins in Poland. Harry Cohn’s father, Joseph, was born in Russia—and Cohn and a brother would form Columbia, the company that employed the logo of the famous statue holding a torch up for those huddled masses, beckoning them into movie houses.
They were all Jewish. The only native-born Americans among the movie pioneers were Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille, and maybe that’s why that pair worked together to make The Squaw Man (1914), allegedly the first feature-length picture produced in Hollywood. The Jewishness cannot be underestimated. The people who established the business were outsiders, anxious to be regarded as Americans, as well as people who had suffered every kind of ethnic prejudice from disdain to pogrom. When Victor Fleming (born in Pasadena) took over the directing of Gone With the Wind in 1939, he barely disguised his dislike of Jews (such as David O. Selznick, who produced the picture). So movies were made into a business by people who had recently escaped their own huddled masses, from families that did not always speak English. Against that set of anxieties, these early moviemakers were accustomed to storytelling, sentimental narrative theater, broad comedy, and the miracle of wondrous things never seen before: the dream that comes true. California was the embodiment of that change in life, the steady sunshine that followed European overcast.
By 1899, Louis Mayer was in St. John still, and Canadian (his father had taken citizenship), a teenager in the scrap business. It was in 1904 that he crossed the border and went to Boston. His purpose was to observe the familial duty of getting married. The Mayers had learned of a Margaret Shenberg, the daughter of a kosher butcher in Boston ready to be wed—letters and photographs had been the means of courtship (you can marry a photograph; at the movies you can fall in love with it). Margaret, according to their daughter, was “astonished by his single-mindedness and ardor.” But others reckoned Mayer simply wanted to get to America.
This ardor, ambition, and naïveté fell on moving pictures. In 1907, Mayer learned he could purchase a six hundred-seat burlesque house in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the Gem (known locally as the Germ), for $600. He moved his family from Boston to Haverhill, refurbished the house, called it the Orpheum, and opened for business at Thanksgiving, with “clean, wholesome, healthy amusement.” On Christmas Eve he ran a double bill, two-reeler films (twenty to thirty minutes each) of The Passion Play and Bluebeard—Christian salvation and mass murder.
He had two daughters by then, and a rapidly growing business. “Never mind now,” he told his family, “this is short. It is the future that counts; the future is long.” He bought other theaters. He had an orchestra at the Orpheum. He hired live acts, too, and even a little bit of opera. The family moved back to Boston, and in March 1912, Louis Burrill Mayer took American citizenship. He elected to move into distribution, and for $4,000 he got the New England rights to DeMille’s The Squaw Man. Then, in 1915, with money acquired from a syndicate, he put up $20,000 to get the New England rights to The Birth of a Nation. For everyone in moving pictures it was the turning point.
With Mayer, we are talking about a businessman, albeit one obsessed with the value of content. David Wark Griffith, who conceived of The Birth of a Nation, and made it, deserves to be considered an artist, even if the thing his film gave birth to was more a business than anything else. He was also someone who developed a future technology that would restore the past.
Griffith was born on a farm near La Grange, Kentucky, in 1875, the son of man who had fought all through the Civil War for the Confederacy and been wounded twice. David was a country boy, in awe of a father who had difficulty expressing love. He was wistful and dreamy, and in his autobiography he recalled this childhood feeling about media to come: “I have thought what a grand invention it would be if someone could make a magic box in which we could store the precious moments of our lives and keep them with us, and later on, in dark hours, could open this box and receive for at least a few moments, a breath of its stored memory.” He was in love with nostalgia, and blind to the astonishing dynamics of the future he helped create.
The father died when Griffith was ten, and the family was left poor. The boy grew up tall and handsome, albeit with a soulful expression, and in Louisville he took up acting and singing. He joined a theatrical company; he had parts, and for a few years he was a touring actor—who never seems to have impressed anyone who saw him. He wrote stories, poetry, and plays—one of them, A Fool and a Girl, was produced, and flopped. He applied to the Biograph movie company in New York as an actor, and when they deemed him an unimpressive performer, they asked was he prepared to “direct.”
In 1908, directing was still a stooge’s job. In the mass
of very short, sensationalist movies (many of them just ten minutes, few more than twenty), the stress was on getting an adequate camera exposure (catching the light), having enough action (to avoid boredom), showcasing prettiness in its human forms (the embryonic age of stardom), and being wholesome. If you feel there’s a contradiction between sensationalism and wholesomeness, don’t let any glib argument dissuade you. Without any understanding of how it worked, or where it might go, the medium had let loose the alchemy of the real and of fantasy. A director presided over the shooting, without truly analyzing, let alone controlling it. He called “Action” and “Cut,” or their equivalents, and he may have guided the actors. (Sometimes actors did the directing.) But scenarists, actors, and bosses had louder voices, and the cameraman was a small god with a machine no one else understood. A part of us now regards this condition as primitive, or unformed. If film is going to be an art—and some of us have longed for that—don’t we need an artist? But time and again over the years the director’s authority and glamour have receded. Ask yourself who directed which episode of The Sopranos.
In his five years at Biograph, Griffith directed more than four hundred short films, torn between the possibilities of a twentieth-century medium and the sentiments of popular Victorian theater. It’s not that he alone invented every fresh way of looking or the grammar of cutting shots together. Mauritz Stiller in Sweden and Louis Feuillade in France were two men working out the same problems, and as creative figures they often seem more interesting now. In a few years, in Russia and Germany, explosive attitudes would change everyone’s mind about what this medium could be. But these ideas were not American, and American business power was determining the character of the new show (and promoting America to the rest of the world). Movies had access to the most available and eager crowd, the new city people crying out for escape and amusement.
The Big Screen Page 2