by Judy Jones
Joke 1: “Do you have any idea how many economists you have to kill just to get a pound of brains?”
Joke 2: “Who do you think was responsible for creating all this chaos in the first place?”
Joke 3: “The economist says, ‘First, assume the existence of a can opener.’”
Joke 4: “The good news is that the bus just went over the edge of the cliff. The bad news is that there were three empty seats on it.”
Remedial Watching
for Chucky Fans
It’s one thing when they try to get you on opera: You really can simply wave your passport in their faces and announce that that isn’t what we do here. It’s quite another when they hit you with movies, which are as American in spirit and allure as you are—or aren’t. Birth of a Nation got you down? Or Potemkin? Or Citizen Kane? This’ll help. THE BIRTH OF A NATION
(American, 1915)
Director
D. W. (for David Wark) Griffith. The original and still, to some, the greatest. Newcomers to Griffith (and, obviously, to film history, in which he is always a long Chapter 3, right after “The Movies Are Born” and “The Movies Find a Public”) may, however, appreciate a couple of touchstones. The first: Thomas Edison. Like him, Griffith was a practical genius, a boy-scientist type who wanted to solve the problem, not promulgate the theory. The second: Charles Dickens. Like him, Griffith was sentimental, melodramatic, and hopelessly Victorian. A reactionary in terms of his subject matter (big moments in history, American rural and domestic life, moral-religious allegories) and a philistine when it came to “art,” he nevertheless single-handedly propelled movies out of the realm of stage-bound theatricality and into that of the cinematic. He also realized, a full decade before anybody else even got around to thinking about it, the possibilities of the new medium, and contributed its two most basic techniques: the cross-cut (in which we watch a little of one scene, then a little of another, then back to the first, etc., in a way that suggests simultaneous action) and the close-up (in which we get to feel we know, and are maybe not so very different from, the characters up there on the screen). Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (1916, an interweaving of stories of cruelty from four different civilizations, from Babylonian times to Griffith’s own) are the “core” Griffith; cultists, by contrast, dote on Broken Blossoms (1919). Ironical note: Griffith lived too long, with industry honchos first stripping him of his creative freedom, then forcing him to edit the botched efforts of other directors, and finally refusing even to take his phone calls. He died, forgotten, of alcoholism, in a Hollywood hotel room.
Story
Nation—in the form of two families, the abolitionist Stonemans of Pennsylvania and the plantationist Camerons of North Carolina, who are, despite their differences, great friends—is torn apart by Civil War. Reconstruction proves even worse: Negroes are uppity; Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh)—a.k.a. the Little Sister—jumps off a cliff to avoid being raped by Gus, an emancipated house slave, and it takes the Ku Klux Klan, led by Ben Cameron—a.k.a. the Little Colonel— who, by the way, is in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), to set things right. Stay put for the climax: cross-cuts between two simultaneous Klan rescues, one of Elsie, whom a mulatto with a heavy black-supremacy rap wants to make “queen” of an all-black empire, the other of the entire Cameron family, with a Stoneman thrown in for good measure, from a cabin being besieged by Negroes and carpetbaggers.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Nobody had ever seen anything remotely like this: a three-and-a-half-hour epic, with a coherent plot, persuasive performances, chase scenes, lots of camera movement, brimming over with emotion and what appeared to be ideas; plus, it had been budgeted at an unheard of $100,000 and cost an equally unheard of $2 a head to see. Without warning, movies emerged from the penny arcades into respectability. The era of the feature film was born and with it the pattern for the blockbuster, in which huge sums of money are invested in the hopes of even huger returns at the box office. Needless to say, not all the East Coast reviewers thought much of the movie’s bathetic story, simple-minded thesis, and overwritten title cards (e.g., “Bitter memories will not allow the poor bruised heart of the South to forget”). And the racism riled black and liberal viewers. There were riots in New York, Boston, and Chicago; city fathers demanded cuts; and Jane Addams and the president of Harvard, among others, wrote chiding letters. All the brouhaha did, though, was (1) incite Griffith, himself the son of a Kentucky colonel, to counterattack, first with pamphlets and then with Intolerance—in his opinion proof positive that he, at least, was free from prejudice; (2) suggest to anybody who’d managed to keep his cool just how inflammatory this new medium could be; and (3) fuel the movie’s publicity and box-office operations. Not that Birth needed a shot in the arm; it was an immediate hit. As President Wilson said, “It is like writing history with lightning.”
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Some people are still stuck on the racism, but most of us have moved on to Griffith as fashioner of the “grammar and rhetoric” of film, from his stockpiling of technical devices to his discovery that the emotional content of a scene, rather than its physical setup, determined where to place the camera and when to cut. Then there was his overall success with actors—how he got them to function as an ensemble as well as to underact (well, for the times it was underacting)—and his particular success with those contrasting types of womanhood, Lillian Gish (idealized femininity, purity, frailty) and Mae Marsh (the girl next door). Birth is also a valid historical document, not of Civil War days, but of the country fifty years later, still in reaction to that war. None of which makes for easy viewing: Birth (ditto Intolerance) has most modern audiences checking the minute hands of their wristwatches. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI
(German, 1919)
Director
Robert Wiene, but don’t give him another thought: He was a one-shot and he got the job only because Fritz Lang was tied up making something called The Spiders. Instead, be mindful of the screenwriters, a Czech named Hans Janowitz, who’d happened to witness a sex murder in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, and an Austrian named Carl Mayer, who’d been examined once too often by army psychiatrists during World War I; the set designers, a four-man contingent headed by Hermann Warm, who used expressionist principles and techniques to create the movie’s warped, angular look, going so far as to paint in, rather than throw, those eerie lights and shadows; and even the producer, Erich Pommer, who financed the whole crazy package and hoped the public would bite.
Story
Check out the frame-tale setup: Patient in mental hospital tells elaborate and horrifying story of weird, heavily bespectacled carnival-circuit hypnotist (Werner Krauss), who controls lurching somnambulist, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), inducing him to commit series of murders. His story told, patient freaks out and is taken to office of mental hospital’s benign director, who, in the course of examination, puts on pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and …
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
German intellectuals liked the sick settings, the way a madman’s fantasy life had been translated into visual terms; French intellectuals went one step further and coined the term caligarisme, which they used to describe cinema that was abstract, like a “painting in motion,” rather than realistic narrative of natural events in natural settings—a useful enough idea in a postwar world that was striking almost everyone as sinister and unworkable. This sort of distortion was not unknown in the theater, of course. The amazing thing was that now a movie camera was eschewing reality, apparently no longer interested in recording the “look” of things, the very purpose it had been devised for. But apart from getting the intellectuals going and setting a certain standard for future “art” films, Caligari would not seriously influence the course of movies.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
For horror-movie aficionados, this is the granddaddy, happily fleshed out with mental illness (persecution, hallucination, breakdown) and the chill
ing ambiguities generated by the tale-within-a-tale format. More than mere horror, however, Caligari purveys the kind of weirdness that fuels cultism: Here’s a way to get the jump on friends who are still gaga over Kafka or, what’s worse, Twin Peaks. Then there’s the movie’s inherent appeal for painters and set designers: Unlike other classics of the cinema, this is one in which stagecraft and painted flats, rather than camera movement and dynamic editing, do the job—and get the credit. Finally, it’s a traditional favorite of sociologists and portent readers: German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, sees in it the beginnings of a “cortège of monsters and tyrants” that would eventually culminate in Hitler. NANOOK OF THE NORTH
(American, 1922)
Director
Robert J. Flaherty. Boy with a camera (and a Jean-Jacques Rousseau streak), intent on revealing the essence and the quality of life as it was then being lived in such exotic outposts as the frozen Arctic (Nanook), the South Seas (Moana), the barren, storm-tossed islands off Ireland’s west coast (Men of Aran), and the bayous of Louisiana (The Louisiana Story). The first—and most legendary—of the documentary filmmakers, he sidestepped studios and story lines for what he could observe out there on his own. Intense and gentle; paragon of integrity; like Renoir (whom he helped smuggle out of France and into America during the war), a “poet” among directors.
Story
Eskimo family—stalwart Nanook, jolly wife, Nyla, two small children, plus infant in pouch of Nyla’s sealskin parka—survives elements and sculpts nature as best it can on the shores of Hudson Bay. Very cold, the shores of Hudson Bay. And crawling with seals. Sequences to note: Family emerges from kayak, one by one, like circus midgets from a tiny car; Nanook, at trading post, goes wild over phonograph and tries to eat phonograph record; Nanook, on big ice floe, stands alone at edge, spearing fish; Nanook builds igloo, from (just as you’d always suspected) blocks of compacted snow. But we bet you didn’t know he was going to install a chunk of frozen river as a window.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Unpredictably, a big commercial as well as critical hit. Of course, it helped that the picture opened in New York in the middle of one of the hottest Junes on record, but beyond that, viewers couldn’t get over the way they were invited not only to travel to a distant clime, but to look into somebody else’s mind and heart. Plus, everybody wanted to know how Flaherty had done it, had lived for months in subzero temperatures—a thousand miles from the nearest restaurant, photographic supply store, oral surgeon, whatever—and had gotten all these Eskimos not only to trust him, but to take direction (a matter that bothered some critics so much that they charged Flaherty with misusing “facts”). Then there was Nanook himself: the bright eyes, the continual smile, the weather-beaten face. Within a matter of months, Eskimo pies were being sold on both sides of the Atlantic, and words like “igloo,” “kayak,” and “anorak,” formerly known only to anthropologists, were popping up in grade-school civics tests and sporting-goods store windows. Too bad Nanook couldn’t have basked in his new fame: He died of starvation, out there on the ice, shortly after the film was released.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
Three things. First, the documentary tradition, of which Flaherty is held to be the father; how it was discovered that dramatic content could be derived from the depiction of fact, how documentary is both more “real” and more “respectable” than the fiction film. Second, Flaherty as counterpoint to Hollywood, as the great director who, unlike Griffith and Stroheim, wasn’t crushed by it; and who, unlike Sternberg, didn’t collaborate with it; but who simply abandoned it for places where he couldn’t be reached by phone. Third, the final product, a triumph of structure, editing, and sympathy, even if he did force all those Eskimos to wear skins and furs that were more Eskimoish than anything they’d ever have picked out for themselves. THE LAST LAUGH
(German, 1924)
Director
F. W. (Friedrich Wilhelm) Murnau. Most revered director of Germany’s Golden Age, which was conceived in the rubble of World War I, thrived through the heady days of the Weimar Republic, and withered away in the early Thirties, the result either of Hitler’s crackdown on creative types or of Hollywood’s buying them all up, or both. A pupil of Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theater impresario, Murnau jettisoned the expressionism and eerieness of Caligari days and began serving up bratwurst-and-boiled-potatoes realism. (Even his 1922 Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, used everyday, business-as-usual, port-city-of-Bremen settings.) Hollywood got its hands on Murnau, too: He made Sunrise, about a young wife threatened by her unbalanced husband, for Fox in 1927, then collaborated with Flaherty on a quasi-documentary South Seas drama called Tabu (1931). Only forty-three, he died in a car crash a week before Tabu’s premiere, thereby affording film historians a favorite example of directorial careers nipped in the bud.
Story
Dignified old man (Emil Jannings) at top-drawer hotel is exalted by braided and epauletted uniform that is part and parcel of job. One morning arrives at work to find that new, young doorman is hailing cabs, lugging suitcases, etc., and that he has been demoted to washroom attendant and must wear simple white smock. More humiliation follows, especially at home, where old man, formerly treated like grand duke, is now treated like dirt. Not to worry: Tacked-on happy ending has him inheriting fortune of rich American hotel guest and dining sumptuously in hotel dining room.
What All the Fuss Was About at the Time
Hailed by American critics as “the best film in the world,” Laugh was also a big popular success. Jannings’ performance, if broad, was a great crowd-pleaser; besides, the world on screen looked real again, instead of like some crazy—and probably subversive—artist’s nightmare. But the biggest impact was technical, and Hollywood felt it more deeply than that from any other foreign film: Suddenly, the movie camera was actually moving, up and down, forward and back, through the lobby of the hotel and out onto the street—even in simulation of the shakiness of a hangover, tracking and tilting and swinging and twirling. Freed from its fixed tripod (though not yet provided with cranes and dollies), it had become flexible and aggressive, had become—as the film historians like to observe—an actor.
What All the Fuss Is About Today
The situation’s been in hand for a while now—unless you’re stranded in a roomful of NYU film students, all of whom will be noting, in addition to the moving cameras and the realism, the fact that said realism is subjective (i.e., filtered through the consciousness of the central character) and that a great deal of attention is being paid to his emotional and psychological state. Even nonstudents, though, tend to marvel at how easy this movie is to watch, how modern in its narrative flow. Moreover, the story is told without so much as a title card, so efficient and eloquent are the visuals—until, that is, a series of cards announce (and apologize for) the tacked-on, trumped-up ending. Poignant oddity: the signs in the washroom, which are printed in Esperanto, a token of Murnau’s conviction that cinema (at the time still silent) was destined to level the linguistic barriers between nations. GREED (American, 1924)
Director
Erich von Stroheim. More precisely, either Erich Oswald Hans Carl Marie Stroheim von Nordenwald, son of a colonel on the Austrian general staff and himself a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, or Erich Oswald Stroheim, son of a Prussian-Jewish hatter who’d emigrated to Vienna and himself a former frustrated foreman in his father’s straw-hat factory—depending on whether you believe Stroheim’s own publicity or its subsequent debunkers. Either way, the man who, as director and genius, suffered more than anybody else at the hands of Hollywood. A meticulous craftsman who exceeded budgets and audience attention spans as a matter of course, he met his nemesis in profit-minded Irving Thalberg. Of the eight and a half films he managed to turn out in over fifteen years of directing, all but the first two were mutilated by studio cutters, one was taken away from him in midproduction, and a couple weren’t even re
leased. Even so, he remains, after Griffith, the most influential director Hollywood turned out in the years before talkies. (The other bottom-line Stroheim: Foolish Wives, 1922, and The Wedding March, 1928.) Also an actor, both in the Teens (when he invariably portrayed nasty, stiff-backed Huns and was billed as “the man you love to hate”) and, following the asphyxiation of his directing career, in such classics as Renoir’s Grand Illusion (as the aristocratic Colonel von Rauffenstein) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (as Norma Desmond’s butler and playmate).
Story
From Frank Norris’ turn-of-the-century naturalistic novel McTeague. San Francisco dentist (that’s McTeague), practicing without a license, fixes tooth of, then courts and marries, sweet young thing (Zasu Pitts), who, at their engagement party, learns she’s won $5,000 in lottery: the beginning of the end. A long and elaborate wedding banquet (a scene in which, among other things, a funeral cortège can be glimpsed through an open window) follows, along with boredom, estrangement, blackmail, penury, murder, and a Death Valley climax, in which ex-dentist and blackmailer fight and die like dogs. Interspersed with above: shot of long bony arms, belonging to no one in particular, clutching at pile of gold coins.