by Mark Cousins
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Boris Barnet’s The Girl with the Hat Box (Soviet Union, 1927), a rare Soviet comedy in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch.
Middle-class salons, sophisticated clubs and great ballrooms became the places in which Lubitsch staged his stories of love triangles and extramarital relations. His films were, rather daringly, about the delights of desire in stark contrast to the coy Victorian portrayal of sexuality in American cinema as practised by D.W. Griffith. In Lubitsch’s very successful The Marriage Circle (USA, 1924), a psychiatrist and his wife are at breakfast. A close-up of an egg, then of a coffee cup is revealed. The psychiatrist’s hand cuts the top off the egg and his wife stirs the coffee. Suddenly his hand disappears and then hers. A more urgent desire than eating has overtaken them and though Lubitsch does not film their lovemaking, his use of objects, of implication, is masterly.
The films of the undervalued Moscow-born Boris Barnet were similar in tone to those of Lubitsch. Barnet was a former boxer and was directing from 1926 onwards, like Bauer and Protazanov a decade earlier, contributing to the naturalization of acting in Russian and Soviet cinema. In contrast to their tragedies, his The Girl with a Hat Box (Soviet Union, 1927) is a jaunty and irreverent story about a country girl, Natasha, who makes hats and sells them to a Moscow milliner (52). She fakes marriage to a student in order that they can rent a room together. The scenes in the rented room portray the couple’s flirtations with particular invention, especially when the landlady becomes suspicious of their marital status and removes everything from their living space, including the carpet. The hints that they are sleeping with one another could have been directed by Lubitsch or Chaplin, but Barnet raises the chutzpah further than either.
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Writer-director Lois Weber, pictured here at her typewriter, was one of the highest-paid film directors in the world. Her background in social work influenced the realism of her stories.
The last of our non-American comedy directors was the son of a Parisian soap-seller. Fascinated by poetry and theatre, René Clair made one of the most influential silent comedies, Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie/An Italian Straw Hat (France, 1927). In this, a gentleman is on his way to his wedding and en route his horse accidentally eats the straw hat of a married lady on a excursion with her lover. Fantastical incidents ensue as the fiancé tries to find an exact replacement for the hat to cover up the woman’s dalliance. Clair would go on to be one of the screen’s wittiest fantasists and much of his later visual skills, his interest in farce and parody, his enchantment, was introduced in An Italian Straw Hat.
In the 1920s, a disparate range of internation-al filmakers with diverse methods and subjects, who were dissatisfied with the escapism of mainstream filmaking in America, Britain, India and France and who wanted to make films about ignored aspects of human life, found themselves separately exploring the possibilities of cinematic naturalism. Lois Weber (53) was one of the most highly paid directors in the world and certainly, in 1918, the highest paid female director. A former social worker in deprived areas of Pittsburgh and New York, she acted in and then wrote, produced and directed films which she pronounced, “will have an influence for good in the public mind.”22 Despite her celebrity, from her earliest films she addressed themes beyond the conventional reach of closed romantic realism. The Jew’s Christmas (USA, 1913) and Hypocrites (USA, 1914) attacked religious prejudice and The People vs. Joe Doe (USA, 1916) campaigned against capital punishment. Like Alice Guy-Blaché (see Chapter One), her role in film history is seldom acknowledged.
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The documentary Nanook of the North. Director Robert Flaherty used Eskimo drawings (bottom) to help him compose the scenes (top). USA, 1921.
The American explorer and son of a mining prospector, Robert Flaherty, also challenged mainstream filmmaking from a campaigning standpoint, but with a profoundly different approach. Like Louis Le Prince, the Lumiere agents and the cameramen who filmed the Mexican revolutionary war, he did not use actors. The result was his celebrated documentary, Nanook of the North (USA, 1921) which was the longest of its type to date. It centred on Nanook, famous hunter in the Itivinuit tribe of Alaskan Eskimos. Flaherty filmed as early as 1913 in the frozen landscapes of the arctic north, but discovered that without a storyline or themes, his footage lacked tension and drama. Returning in 1920, he took a more classical – in the true sense – approach to the filming and focused on one man, Nanook, and his family. Flaherty wanted to show, “the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible, before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well.” He semi-staged and then filmed the Itivinuits hunting walrus and constructing igloos using methods which had in some cases become obsolete. This type of reconstruction was not without precedent: as already discussed on page 47, American filmmakers had semi-staged the battles of Pancho Villa. Flaherty derived some of his compositions from the imagery of Eskimo drawings (54 bottom) and the edited results were one of silent cinema’s greatest thematic explorations of man’s struggle against the elements. The film was an international success, ice cream bars were named after Nanook and his death of starvation two years later made headlines around the world. Flaherty continued to make films into the late 1940s, and lived long enough to see the flowering of the documentary filmmaking genre, which Nanook of the North’s success helped establish. Documentary would not be funded properly or exhibited adequately in subsequent years, but would produce some of the most dignified and visceral films in world cinema: John Huston’s Let There be Light (USA, 1945), Farough Farrokhzad’s This House is Black (Iran, 1962), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (France, 1985), Kazuo Hara’s The Emperors Naked Army Marches On (Japan, 1987), Maximilian Schell’s Marlene (Germany, 1983), Tapan Bose’s Bhopal (India, 1991), Juris Podnieks’ Is it Easy to be Young (Latvia, 1987) and Viktor Kossokovsky’s Sreda/Wednesday (Russia, 1997). The shallow seductions of most fiction cinema pale before these.
In Sweden in the late teens and 1920s, Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller continued to make great naturalistic films. From 1919, the majority of American films had been shot in artificially lit dark interior spaces. However, in Scandinavia, they did not fully adopt this black box approach and preferred to use diffused or bounced natur-al daylight. In later years these techniques produced more realistic and often more delicate photography, and were advocated with near-moral fervour by world-class cinematographers such as Sven Nykvist and Nestor Almendros.
The mutilated two-hour version of Stiller’s The Saga of Gosta Berlings (Sweden, 1924) contains individual scenes which suggest a stately photographic realism (101) in its flowing adaptation of Selma Lagerlof’s novel. A young Greta Garbo became a star in the part of Elizabeth and was to become one of the most enigmatic figures of the silent screen. Sjöström’s adaptation of the same novelist’s The Phantom Chariot (Sweden, 1921) in which he also plays the lead, has moments of such power that it is no wonder that some consider him the best director of this period. The film advances the structure of Intolerance (USA, 1916) and Souls on The Road (Japan, 1921) and begins with David Holm in a graveyard at New Year’s Eve, laughing drunkenly at a phantom chariot driven by Death (102), which is coming to take him to the underworld. David’s lifetime of mis-demeanours are shown in a series of five interlocking storylines and time frames. The long flashback which reflects these is sometimes interrupted by “flash forwards” – which take place after David has been visited by the chariot in the graveyard. So we see him superimposed over and watching his wife deciding to kill herself and their children. This prompted one critic to write about this complex time structure, “the total effect is remarkable and, in its own way, unmatched in world cinema before the 1960s.” 25 Sjöström and his cinematographer, Julius Jaenzon, capture the bleak natural beauty of the landscape and contrast it, as in other contemporaneous Swedish films such as Ingeborg Holm/Love’s Conflicts (Sjöström, Sweden, 1913) and Ven Domer/His Loves’s Crucible aka Mortal Clay (Sjöström, Sweden, 1922 ) t
o the society within which David is struggling. The bleak religious power of Sjöström’s work has remained influential on subsequent filmmakers, including the Dane Lars von Trier, particularly his depiction of the Scottish island of Skye in Breaking the Waves (Denmark, 1998).
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A young Greta Garbo as Elizabeth in The Saga of Gosta Berlings. The naturalism of the lighting in this scene was typical of Swedish films at the time. Director: Mauritz Stiller. Sweden, 1924.
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Above: Adaption of Selma Lagerlof’s novel The Phantom Chariot. Director: Victor Sjöström. Sweden, 1921.
The 1920s work of American writer-director-producer Oscar Micheaux engaged with reality in ways which studio films did not. Micheaux was born in 1884, the black son of freed slaves. He raised money for the forty or so films he made between 1919–48, by selling shares in his work to communities and taking advance bookings from black specialist cinemas. His films were often bawdy and technically crude, but are said to have portrayed slavery and lynching themes, although few survive. Within our Gates (USA, 1920) shows the terrible results of a young black woman attempting to run a school for black children with the assistance of a northern, white patron. Its frank depiction of the racist backlash may have been Micheaux’s response to The Birth of a Nation five years earlier. His Body and Soul (USA, 1924) features distinguished black actor and singer Paul Robeson in the role of a priest who exploits the piety of black churchgoers (57). One wonders how black American cinema would have developed if Micheaux had been admitted into and been trained by one of the studios, such as Warner Bros.
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One of pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s few surviving films: Paul Robeson in Body and Soul. USA, 1924.
Indian cinema in the 1920s continued producing portraits of the lives of saints and developed what would later be called “All India Films”, big fantasy movies, unmarked by specifics of creed or geography, intended to appeal to the diverse regions, religions, communities and castes of the continent. Much later, dissatisfied filmmakers would reverse this trend and, as early as 1924, socially committed directors were moving in that direction. Homi Master, one of the most successful Indian directors of the 1920s, went to Europe a few years before to market Phalke’s earliest films (see page 46). In 1924, he made Twentieth Century, which created the genre of the reformist melodrama arguing for social change through the portrayal of gripping human problems. In the film, a street seller makes a fortune in Bombay, becomes an exploitative employer and cosies up to the colonial British.
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A scene from one of India’s first social reform films – Indian Shylock. Director: Baburao Painter. India, 1925.
Former craftsman and painter Baburao Painter had more impact on the themes of Indian cinema than Master, especially in the central and western region of Maharashtra. Like Master, he was inspired by Phalke’s King Harishchandra (India, 1913) and instigated the historical and social genres in Indian cinema. He used painted backdrops and coloured filters over the lens to control his film’s tonal range of greys and blacks. India’s first social genre film was Indian Shylock (India, 1925), which charts the story of a peasant (R.V. Shanataram) whose land is stolen by a money lender and then is forced to move to, and experience the harsh life of, the city. The film’s performances were melodramatic but its reformist aim to draw attention to social problems place it outside the norms of conventional studio filmmaking of the time.
Back in America, a gigantic film with similar intentions had just been completed. Its title alone, Greed (USA, 1923–25), makes this plain. Its writer-director, Erich Von Stroheim, expressed a hope shared by every dissident Naturalist: “It is possible to tell a great story in motion pictures … in such a way that the spectator … will come to believe that what he is looking at is real.”
Von Stroheim was a Prussian-Viennese former straw hat factory worker with aristocratic pretensions. Emigrating to the US in 1909, he became an actor and was rapidly typecast as a sadistic Prussian officer, particularly during the First World War. His first films as director reflected his fascination with providing authentic detail and exploring the decadence and moral corruption of rich and civilized people. Though Von Sternberg’s style involved symbolism and expressionism as well as naturalism, he filmed every scene of American writer Frank Norris’s naturalistic novel, McTeague, on which Greed is based, meticulously. The film’s nine-month filming schedule was budgeted at $1.5 million and ran in its first cut for nearly ten hours. Its story was classic Von Stroheim in that it dealt with a bitter and loveless marriage. The wife of a dentist in San Francisco wins the lottery and as she gets obsessively greedy, her husband becomes drunken and penniless. Eventually he murders her and, in an infamous climax filmed in Death Valley, also kills a rival who put him out of business, but is left handcuffed helplessly to the corpse. This was American cinema without hope; many commentators have compared Von Stroheim’s vision to that of nineteenth-century Russian literature, with which Greed shares a determination to reveal the unvarnished truth about human beings. In one startling scene, McTeague’s wife writhes as she rubs gold coins on her naked body (59); originally all the gold in the film, including the coins, picture frames, gold teeth, even a canary, was hand-tinted yellow. In another scene, he beats her after she has served him rotten meat.
MGM hated Von Stroheim’s initial ten-hour edit of Greed and had the film cut to a quarter of its length. The extant version is a little longer and still astonishes, but the original is one of cinema’s greatest lost treasures. When Von Stroheim watched the mutilated version in 1950 in Paris, he cried and said, “This was like an exhumation for me. In a tiny coffin, I found a lot of dust, a terrible smell, a little backbone and a shoulder bone.”9 In the same year, Von Stroheim gave an iconic performance in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (USA, 1950) as the butler and former director of a faded movie star. So artificial is their world that he forges fan letters to her and when her pet monkey dies, he buries it with full ceremony. “$troheim”, as the studio dubbed him because of his extravagance, attempted to make cinema more realistic by exploring the base instincts of people and by describing situations with the same amount of detail as the novels of Zola or Dostoyevsky.
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Actress ZaSu Pitts as the wife driven mad by averice in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. The coins she is writhing with in this scene were tinted gold in early prints. USA, 1923–25.
Three years after Greed another MGM film portrayed contemporary America with more honesty than closed romantic realism and became the greatest pre-Wall Street crash social problem picture of its time. The Crowd (USA, 1928), directed by King Vidor, tells the story of an ordinary couple, John, an office clerk, and his wife, two of the multitude who throng the streets of New York. The couple get married and have a baby girl, who dies. John cannot accept this tragedy and in a heartbreaking scene tries to hush the noise of the city so that it won’t disturb her slumber, not realizing that the baby is dead. As his hope wanes, he almost kills himself but instead takes a job as a sandwich board man. The film’s profound naturalism dares tell the life story of a man without much talent or drive, who thinks he can get to the top but who will never achieve this. The American dream is a delusion; the people John meets everyday are ruining their lives because of this fixation.
Born into a rich Texan family in 1894, Vidor saw and adored Intolerance and wanted to make a film which, like it, tackled the human condition head on. He was one of cinema’s first intellectual directors, meeting writers such as Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce in Paris and, at the end of a lengthy career, giving to a 1964 film the subtitle “An Introduction to Metaphysics”. His movies are unique in many ways. They never feature villains, and two-thirds of those not written by himself were penned by women. Perhaps, as a result, he excelled both at what were considered men’s films — The Texas Rangers (USA, 1936), Northwest Passage (USA, 1940), Man without a Star (USA, 1955) — and women’s movies, Stella Dallas (USA, 1937) and Duel in the Sun (USA
, 1947).
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One visual idea developed by three filmmakers and their designers: impersonal office spaces in The Crowd, King Vidor, 1928; The Apartment, Billy Wilder, 1960; and The Trial, Orson Welles, 1961.
Vidor experimented with film throughout his career. The Crowd was one of the first to use New York extensively as a location; its director used hidden cameras to capture the reality of street life. He cast an unknown extra, James Murray, as the film’s lead. Influenced by the German filmmakers discussed later in this chapter, Vidor designed a complex opening shot. Here, the camera, mounted on a crane, tilts up from people entering and exiting an office block, cranes skywards before stopping, moving through the window of one floor into a room with hundreds of desks (60, top), and finally dollying forward to one desk in particular, that of John. This sequence was so successful at capturing the faceless city life of an anonymous clerk that Wilder repeated it in The Apartment (USA, 1960) (60, middle), his bitter-sweet reworking of Vidor’s film. Orson Welles exaggerated it in his film The Trial (France, 1962) (60, bottom). The Crowd was also very influential outside Western cinema. The Soviets saw it as an innovative attack on capitalism from within (as they had done with Chaplin’s films). Indian filmmakers like Chetan Anand used it as a starting point for populist working-class Hindi films like Taxi Driver (India, 1955). MGM was so uneasy with it that it insisted that Vidor shoot seven different optimistic endings. The one that was finally chosen shows John and his wife in a theatre, laughing at a clown dressed as an out-of-work, down-at-heel man. As they laugh at their own predicament being performed on stage, the camera pulls back to lose them in the multitude.