by Mark Cousins
The Crowd encapsulates a lot about cinema between the two World Wars. The theme of the emerging mass society, of everyman, was not only popular with Vidor and found in Mervyn LeRoy’s depression musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (USA, 1933), but was also explored in France in the films of René Clair, Jean Vigo and Marcel Carné. Likewise, the kinetic energy of cities themselves, their rhythms and compositions, seemed a perfect subject for this Western machine – the movie camera. Filmmakers like Fritz Lang and Walter Ruttmann in Germany and Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union10 were at their most creative when taking cities as their subject matter in films such as Metropolis (Germany, 1927), Berlin: Die Symphonie einer Gosstadt/Berlin: Symphony of a City (Germany, 1928) and Man with a Movie Camera (Soviet Union, 1929) respectively.
The last in the line of naturalistic dissident films is only in part like the others – Florián Rey’s La Aldea maldita/The Accursed Village (Spain, 1929). Like Painter’s Indian Shylock it is about a family migrating to the city, celebrating the timelessness of rural values and so touching a national nerve as urbanization scared many people. Right-wing Spanish politicians had used this fear to attack modernity and what they perceived to be society’s moral decline. The film’s rural scenes are shot in a simple, painterly style, but the pace of its editing increases in the second half which is set in the city. However, it is only in a few sequences that Rey stares at the real world with more intensity than was usually permitted by mainstream cinema.
The films of Weber, Flaherty, Sjöström, Micheaux, Master, Painter, Von Stroheim, Vidor and Rey are wildly different in form and content. But in their social awareness or anthropological ambitions, their meticulous commitment to naturalistic detail and their anxiety about capitalism and exclusion, these films indicate how incomplete was the view of the world reflected in closed romantic realism. Most of the directors of these films did not meet each other and they certainly did not represent any kind of cohesive social or intellectual movement, yet their work was sometimes used as a badge of prestige by the same studio whose very world view they challenged. By pushing at the boundaries of closed romantic realism they pointed to a space beyond what most people considered to be the appropriate one for movies. That space would be enlarged by 1930s British filmmakers, Italian filmmakers after 1945, and African and Middle-Eastern directors in the late 1960s and 1970s. To the extent that the work of this ragbag of formal and social naturalists outlasted more escapist films, they had the last laugh.
In 1920s France, industrial cinema was in crisis. Hollywood was flooding the market and in 1926 produced 725 films, Germany made over 200, but France produced only 55, many made by small companies. As would be the pattern throughout the course of film history, successful national films tended to be the smaller and more distinctive ones which attempted to challenge romantic cinema. However, in the case of 1920s France, naturalism was not the most important means of attack. Influenced by the Impressionist painting of Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and the writings of Charles Baudelaire, filmmakers such as Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and Marcel L’Herbier tried to capture the complexity of people’s perception of the real world and the way in which mental images repeat and flash before our eyes.
61
The Smiling Madame Beudet used camera manipulations and visual distortions to reflect the main character’s emotions. Director: Louis Dulac. France, 1921.
Dulac was an intellectual like Vidor. Born into a rich family, she became involved in films such as Les Soeurs enemies/The Enemy Sisters (France, 1916) and, met her collaborator, the film theorist Louis Delluc in 1917. Together they evolved one of the first self-consciously innovative cinematic movements in the world, the first movie avant-garde. Louis was the first theorist to notice that psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s ideas could influence film. After screening one of her movies Germaine said “I want to shout: ‘Keep cinema to itself; movement without literature”.11 In Dulac’s seminal Madame Bovary-like tale, La Souriante Madame Beudet/The Smiling Madame Beudet (France, 1921), the passionate Beudet lives in a provincial town and is married to a workaholic salesman. Dulac expresses her main character’s erotic daydreams and bottled rage not only through acting and incident, but also by placing netting in front of the lens and by manipulating the camera (61). When Beudet is light-headed, a gauze makes her viewpoint look dreamy. This is very different to Griffith’s use of gauzes, which were intended to make actresses look beautiful and ethereal to the audience. When Beudet spies a handsome man in a magazine, slow-motion photography pictures her reverie, as if the audience were looking at the world through Beudet’s eyes. Visual distortions express her anger.
La Roue/The Wheel (France, 1923), made the year after The Smiling Madame Beudet, extended Dulac’s impressionism in certain sequences. It was written, directed and edited by the driven Parisian filmmaker Abel Gance, whose first significant work in cinema was for the company Film d’Art, responsible for The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (France, 1908). Gance had already directed a three-hour meditation on pacifism, J’Accuse (France, 1919), inspired by several months he had spent in the army during the First World War, but La Roue was more innovative. The film’s story is a complex love triangle between a railway worker, Sisif, his son, Elie, and Sisif’s adopted daughter, Norma. After a fight in the Alps between Elie and Norma’s husband, Elie is left hanging over the edge of a cliff. To represent Elie’s life flashing before his eyes, Gance edited together a series of single frame images from earlier moments within his relationship with Norma. These single frames were just one twenty-fourth of a second in length. When viewed on the cinema screen in real time, they rush past in a disorienting blur. Gance knew that each could not be seen clearly by the audience, but wanted to give the impression of panic in his main character, the sense of perception and feeling accelerating intolerably. The scene was revolutionary and caused artist, poet and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau to say, “There is cinema before and after La Roue, just as there is painting before and after Picasso.”
Nothing quite like this had been done before and La Roue became one of the most influential films of the silent era. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, who was to work after the Second World War, said that it was the first important film he saw. The Soviet directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, studied it in Moscow and D.W. Griffith considered its techniques to be exciting. During the following four years Gance would write, direct and edit a four-hour film about the early life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French revolutionary, national leader and militarist, whose life straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, portraying its main character as a tragic hero. Gance rethought the camera’s relationship to movement to capture the dynamism of the man, his fist fights and horse rides, grand society dances, battle charges and storms at sea. The camera did not merely witness the speeding, swinging, lunging events, but it rolled and lurched, swung and sped in the same way as Napoleon’s life had. The Los Angeles Times described the results as “The measure for all other films, ever.”
62
Abel Gance combined images from three adjacent cameras to produce the famous panoramic scenes in Napoleon. The overlaps between each image are just visible. France, 1927.
Napoleon (France, 1927) opens with a prologue showing Napoleon as a boy in a military academy. The sequence features boys punching right up to the screen; the actors were able to do this because Gance had ingeniously mounted a fur-covered sponge around the lens to absorb any blows hitting the camera. This is a clear advance on Gary Cooper sword fencing to the lens in the still from Beau Sabreur on page 65. Gance reused the technique from the climax of La Roue for the denouement of the sequence, as a single frame of Napoleon’s boyish smiling face is edited into the action, six times n a single second of twenty-four frames. Gance also attached a compressed air-powered camera to the saddle of a horse (63) during an equestrian chase in the early Corsican scenes. One of the most famous sections in the film intercut Napoleon in a small boat during a raging sto
rm, with shots of the assembled Revolutionary Convention. The shots of the storm were realized by flanking the boat with huge sluices in a studio tank, down which water was hurled. Gance’s intercutting made the point that as the Revolutionary Convention was also at sea, buffeted by huge political forces. In order to emphasize this fact visually, Gance had a platform suspended from a vast pendulum. The camera was attached to this platform and the apparatus swung through an arc. The film’s climax was Naploeon’s entry into Italy. In this sequence Gance surpassed the epic imagery of Cabiria and Intolerance by filming with three cameras mounted on top of each other (the black box to the right is a motor). Each camera pointed in a slightly different direction and filmed adjacent parts of a battle scene which, when projected together, combined into one vast horizontal panorama (62). Nothing like it, since the aborted panorama at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, had been seen in the cinema and audiences had to turn their heads to take in the whole spectacle. The three-screen technique was later to inspire Cinerama, an ultra widescreen multi-projector process, whose first fiction feature was How the West Was Won (USA, 1962).
Napoleon was shown infrequently to great acclaim in its original format, but the film’s enormous budget undermined Gance’s independence. Despite being the leader of the vanguard of French filmmaking, he ended up working for French studios and modifying his style like others in the impressionist film movement. Various versions of Napoleon appeared in the 1950s but it wasn’t until the results of a major restoration of the negative by British historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow were screened at the 1979 Telluride Film Festival in Colorado that it was seen in something like its former glory. Gance, aged eighty-nine, travelled to the festival; many who saw it in Telluride or at its subsequent premieres in London and New York felt that it was among the greatest films ever made. Gance died aged ninety-two, two weeks after Napoleon’s New York première, which was sponsored by Francis Ford Coppola. His Apocalypse Now (USA, 1979) was as a similar study in power on the scale and in the manner of Napoleon.
63
Techniques, such as attaching the camera to the back of a horse, created the ground-breaking cinematography in Napoleon. Director: Abel Gance. France, 1927.
Two years before Napoleon, a Franco-German film critic turned director, E.A. Dupont, made a movie in Germany which, despite its country of origin, has many of the qualities of French impres-sionism. Variety (Germany, 1925) begins and ends in a prison in which an acrobat, played by the powerful German actor Emil Jannings, recalls events from his life. He eloped with a trapeze artiste, watched her fall in love with a younger man, killed that man, then surrendered himself to the police. The film was photographed by Karl Freund, an Austrian cinematographer who shot some of the most significant films of the 1920s, directed the extraordinary, expressionist The Mummy (USA, 1930) and ended his career shooting 1950s American television comedy. He uses the camera almost as subjectively as Gance. When Jannings looks jealously at his girl with another man, a close-up of Jannings’ eyes is shown as the lighting changes. Then the camera cuts to her with an out-of-focus background. Within the same shot, the focus shifts to reveal her suitor beside her. This is one of many sequences which illustrate this kind of intricate geometry of looking and longing. The camera is later mounted on a trapeze as it swings over the audience in a way which echoes the pendulum movement in Napoleon’s convention scene. The spectators below do not stare or gasp, but look on casually, chat and smile: the effect is brilliantly modern. The trapeze artists swing luminously through the air high above as if they are clothed in reflective material, an almost abstract effect. Variety was seen more widely in the US than other impressionist films and, as a result, influenced cinematographers there to move their cameras more.
64
Cinematographer Karl Freund’s semi-abstract imagery in E.A. Dupont’s Variety. Germany, 1925.
The 1920s naturalists introduced lasting aspects of realism to the cinema, whereas the innovations of the French impressionists had died out by 1928. Why was this the case? Perhaps because the phenomena the latter explored – the rapidity of perception, the film image as it approximates human vision – were fleeting experiences. Their most important influence – mainly through the work of Gance – was on the work of Soviet directors such as Eisenstein, and it could be argued that their fast cutting (The Smiling Madame Beudet’s average shot duration was just five seconds, shorter than the average American film of the time) anticipated the music-video-influenced style of 1980s American cinema, where momentary slow motion and whip panning were popular again.
Across the border, their German colleagues were attempting to use film for deeper purposes. Dulac and Gance may have tried to capture fleeting and hidden feelings in their work, but Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau were interested in still more repressed and primitive aspects of human beings. Influenced by so-called Expressionist painters and theatre designers, whose jagged and shard-like work was the antithesis of delicacy, they began making expressionist films. Less than thirty were produced, but these were among the most influential films of the decade 1918–28, exported widely and seen all over the world. Germany had just been defeated in an appalling war, its economy was in freefall and yet, unlike that of France, the German film industry was expanding. At the start of the war, there had been about twenty-five production companies but this had increased to 130 by 1918. Germany had closed its borders to foreign films in 1916 and this ban wasn’t lifted until 1920, so in the interim there was a protected market for indigenous filmmakers, which stimulated production considerably. The rampant inflation of the crippled post-war economy and its weakened currency, meant that German films were very cheap to buy to show abroad, although it was expensive for Germany to import goods, and this encouraged film exports over import. The German film industry was also bolstered by the government, who despite the hardtimes, prioritized film and supported it.12
This is the background against which a film, which not only launched the German expressionist film movement, but was also one of the first landmark films in the West to challenge closed romantic realism, was made. Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, 1920), directed by Robert Wiene, was produced before Chaplin’s first feature, before the world had heard of Mickey Mouse, before the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, before the death of Lenin or the accession of Japan’s Emperor, Hirohito. Image 125 shows how controversial Caligari was. While studio filmmakers in America, Britain and France took a black box approach, excluding all daylight, and Scandinavians did the opposite, Wiene and his designers Hermann Warm, Walter Reiman and Walter Rohrig found a third way. They flooded their set with flat light and then painted shadows directly onto the walls and floor. The effect was to stylize the look of naturalistic film lighting, almost to ridicule it.
65
Shadows and light beams painted directly onto the set in Robert Wiene’s influential The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Germany, 1920.
The story was structured like Chinese boxes. A student, Francis, tells of a sleepwalker Cesare, who is on show at a fairground and who, at night, murders the enemies of his master, Dr. Caligari, including one of Francis’s friends, Alan. In the process of abducting a beautiful young woman, Cesare dies and Francis goes to a local mental hospital whose director, he discovers, is Caligari. The film’s writers, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, had considered their story in political terms. Caligari represented the malign and controlling German state, Cesare represented ordinary people manipulated by it. The thirty-eight-year old Wiene and his producer, Erich Pommer, removed the film’s political edge by adding not only an opening sequence, but a coda in which Francis completes his tale but on returning to the asylum, discovers that Cesare is not, in fact, dead after all. This revelation terrifies Francis, who is then straight-jacketed and whom Dr. Caligari – now, apparently, a benign physician – insists he can help. The whole film becomes the dream of the deranged Francis. Wiene’s own father, a famous German actor, had become mentally unbalanc
ed towards the end of his life and perhaps as a result of this, his son showed more interest in this aspect of Caligari than its social bite.
This low-budget film took less than three weeks to shoot. Most of the sets were constructed from painted canvas and the costumes were cheaply made. The extreme expressionism of the imagery raised one of the most fundamental questions in cinema. Whose point of view does the imagery of a film represent? If it is that of the audience, the behaviour of the characters may continue to be dreamlike or insane, but the settings will be naturalistic, because the audience is not insane. If it represents some kind of objective, all-seeing storyteller, similar to the narrator in nineteenth-century novels, then this storyteller will not see the whole world as distorted. Perhaps the director is showing how he himself sees circuses and somnabulists, but Wiene was not mentally ill and not until the explosion of cinematic style in the late 1950s would the audience see the world explicitly as the director saw it. The answer to this question seems to lie in Pommer and Wiene’s new beginning and ending, which show that the film is told by the madman, Francis. Caligari’s imagery, sliced spaces, jagged lighting, twisted lines, emphatic movements, heavy pauses, are the expression of Francis’s extreme mental state. However, in the last scenes, when the audience has withdrawn from Francis’s distorted view of the world and he is observed from the perspective of normal life, the imagery remains unconventional. The idea that a film solely reflects its characters’ mental states is not enough to explain such ambiguities; the suggestion is that the film itself is somewhat unstable too.