by Mark Cousins
Seen in its recent tinted print, Caligari remains among the most beautiful of all silent films. It had a sensational premiere in Berlin, but also had huge impact in France and later in the US. Although Wiene was the only famous German director who did not to go to Hollywood, it is impossible to imagine the later dark Hollywood thrillers made by European directors such as Lang, Wilder, Curtiz and Siodmak without Caligari’s formative lesson: that the view point of film imagery can be ambiguous, both outside looking into its characters’ neuroses, and inside them. Movies were becoming more complex as their form and content danced around each other.
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Alfred Hitchcock imported some of the shadowplay he saw in Germany for The Lodger. UK, 1926.
The expressionist movement in Europe, to which Caligari was the most striking cinematic addition, would colour the films of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau and beyond. Alfred Hitchcock, who had been working in Germany in 1924 and 1925, made his first distinctive film, The Lodger (UK, 1926, 66) under its influence. Japanese cinema, which continued to use un-Western flattened visuals and benshi narrators throughout the 1920s, felt its strong influence. Teinosuke Kinugasa began his film career in 1918, in the traditional Japanese manner – as a female impersonator. By 1922, he was one of the few Japanese directors who wanted to adopt Western filmmaking and express himself, in Gombrichian terms, individually. This was something that even Murata had not achieved in his Intolerance-influenced Souls on The Road. The historian of Japanese cinema, Noël Burch, underlines this point, “Although the Japanese cinema has known … independent artists who correspond to the Western image of the original creative temperament, Kinugasa was undoubtedly the first of these.”13
After having seen both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and La Roue, Kinugasa made A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926),14 about an old man who takes a job in an asylum which houses his wife, who has drowned their baby and attempted suicide. He thinks he can help her by working there, but his mental state deteriorates. As the image to the right shows, it was not as formally designed as Caligari. What links the two films is Kinugasa’s jumbled imagery of the asylum, its visual overlays, flashbacks and symbols which cannot be ascribed solely to the husband’s deteriorating mental state. When he sees events through windows, they are as likely to be flashbacks to his former life, as they are to be what occur outside, but the film as a whole, not just its characters, becomes disorientated and ambiguous. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and A Page of Madness challenge the clarity of mainstream studio filmmaking by telling their stories from the outside and inside concurrently. This film was for many years considered lost, until Kinugasa discovered a print of it in his garden shed in 1971. When he struck a new print, commissioned a new score and re-released the film around the world, many considered it the most personal Japanese film of the 1920s.
The theme of madness was rife in innovative 1920s cinema. Back in Germany, the son of a Viennese architect, Fritz Lang, created another doctor in the mode of Dr. Caligari, Lang’s own doctor, Dr. Mabuse. Lang’s wildly exotic and successful adventure-drama Die Spinnen/The Spiders (Germany, 1919/ 1920), now on video, led producer Pommer to ask him to direct Caligari, on which he could only manage some preparatory work. Dr. Mabuse der Spieler/Dr. Mabuse the Gambler reached the screen in 1921 and depicts a character who starts the film sane, but criminal. He abducts a countess and bankrupts her millionaire husband through gambling. He then hypnotizes the prosecutor who charges him and convinces him that he must kill himself. Finally, the forces of law close around Dr. Mabuse and he goes insane. Like Caligari, Mabuse was intended as a critique of the lawlessness and moral decline of 1920s Germany, although its visuals were less stylized than in the former film. Instead, as had been suggested in The Spiders, it was the details of Lang’s narrative that were expressionist. Mabuse’s instincts are excessive and underneath the rich and decadent surface of the characters’ lives lie primitive urges. Lang emphasized the tension in society’s structure rather than the false ease of its surface, as he would later do in the American films produced after he left his home country, partly in retreat from the Nazis, having declined a key post in the new German industry.15
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Another asylum film: An old man working in the home where is she has been incarcerated in Tein. A Page of Madness. Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa. Japan, 1926.
Many saw something architectural in these films, but Metropolis (Germany, 1927) was more literally about the structure of complex societies and became the most iconic film of the silent era. Set in the year 2000, it tells the story of clashes between workers and an authoritarian industrialist in a giant city. The workers’ anger is regularly quelled by the strange influence of a saintly young woman, Maria. The industrialist, a Mabuse-like figure, hopes to spark revolt among the workers by building a robot that resembles Maria (see page 60, 39). The robot does fool the populace and incites anarchy, but eventually Maria and the industrialist’s son save the city, and the workers and owners are united. Metropolis took almost eighteen months to shoot, used two million feet (650,000 metres) of film and 36,000 extras. It was photographed by Karl Freund, who had also shot Dupont’s Variety. Its special effects technician, Eugen Schufftan, invented a mirror process, the “Schufftan process”, where a miniature set is reflected into the lens at the same time as characters in its foreground are filmed. He later became a cinematographer and shot key films such as Quai des brumes/Port of Shadows (France, 1938) and The Hustler (USA, 1961).
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Futurism meets Art Deco in a poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The success of the film popularized linear design and cityscape imagery. Germany, 1923.
The themes of control, and descent into madness are central to German film of this period. Its cityscapes and robotics, its iconography of the underworld, its interest in exploitation and in urban paradise, had a profound influence on subsequent science fiction films. Vidor was impressed by Metropolis, whose expressionist echoes can be seen in The Crowd. The film has been restored and re-released several times in recent decades, once with high energy dance music on its soundtrack. The explosion of American pop culture, which started in the late 1970s, drew on it as a source. The robot, C3PO in Star Wars (George Lucas, USA, 1976) and the look of the futuristic cities in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, USA, 1976) and Batman (Tim Burton, USA, 1989) derived from Metropolis, as did 1990s American director David Fincher’s video for Madonna’s song, Express Yourself. Adolf Hitler also liked Metropolis and its epic set design appealed to his architect, Albert Speer. In 1943, when inmates of the Mathausen Nazi concentration camp were forced by their captors to build a gigantic ramp, they compared it to Metropolis.16
The last great movie of German silent cinema, voted the best film of all time by French film critics,17 was made in America. Sunrise (USA, 1927) was directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, perhaps the most talented director of the whole silent period, who studied art and literature and then established himself with a dreamy vampire film, Nosferatu (Germany 1922) and an ironic drama about a doorman, Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (Germany, 1924). Sunrise, was like many 1920s films including those by Master, Vidor and Rey already considered, about the contrasting values of country and the city. Its love triangle storyline was also typical of the decade which produced Gance’s La Roue and Dupont’s Variety. A country man, happily married, is seduced by a city woman who convinces him to drown his wife. He cannot bring himself to do this and instead travels with his wife across a lake to the city, where they have a joyful day together. Returning to the country she seems to drown during a storm. Grief-stricken, he tries to strangle the city woman.
This skeletal outline describes the elemental nature of Sunrise, but does not capture its poetic force (69). Murnau planned the production in Germany and, almost uniquely, Hollywood promised him free rein, allowing him gigantic city sets and complex lighting set-ups. In keeping with Caligari’s expressionism, the interiors were built with slanted walls and sloping ceilings to reflect the characters’ distorted pers
pectives. In fact, it is difficult to categorize Murnau’s filmmaking ethos: he was soon collaborating with Robert Flaherty on the quasi-documentary Tabu (USA, 1931) and the 1930s French poetic realists considered him their master. Sunrise also helped prepare the way for some expressionist American films in subsequent years, including Foursome (USA, 1928) and The Informer (USA, 1935) by director John Ford.
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The contrast with Metropolis could hardly be more pronounced. Naturalistic sets and romantic lighting in Sunrise. Director: F.W. Murnau. USA, 1927.
Continuing our move eastwards through the 1920s, we reach the last great national film movement of the decade, and the one most clearly opposed to closed romantic realism – that of Soviet Russia. In 1924–30 a group of young Marxist filmmakers became fascinated by the power of editing to create intellectual responses in viewers. Rejecting the continuity and angle/reverse-angle cutting methods evolved in the first two decades of industrial cinema, they began to juxtapose shots which had little to do with each other in the conventional terms of story or flow of action. Their theory was that viewers would be jolted by such apparently unrelated images and forced, instead, to search for another connection between them, perhaps at a political or metaphorical level. This connection would activate audiences’ thought processes and thereby make cinema an ideal way of enlightening the working classes about the nature of their subjection.
We have already encountered three Russian directors, Yevgeni Bauer, Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet (see pages 48–49 and 81). Bauer died in 1917 while scouting locations for a new film. Protazanov’s first instinct after the 1917 revolutions was to flee the country and, like many other such exiles, find work in France. However, he was persuaded to return and, from 1924–43, made a series of accomplished melodramas such as Besprid’annitsa/Without a Dowry (Soviet Union, 1936) and comedies such as Zakroishchikiz Torzhka/The Tailor from Torzhuk (Soviet Union, 1926) which are rarely seen today, but which are highly regarded. Barnet didn’t enter the industry until the time of the revolution and The Girl with a Hat Box, already discussed in the 1920s comedy section, would be his best film of this decade. In the 1950s and 1960s he failed to make movies which satisfied the regime, film critics or himself. In 1965, he committed suicide.
The Bolsheviks attempted to reorder the life of a whole country, establishing the “dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Cinema did not become a state industry under the new regime immediately, but its leader, Lenin, famously declared in 1922 that “Of all the Arts, for us cinema is the most important.” Not even in Germany, where it was state-assisted, was cinema promised such a formative role in society. In the ensuing years, and especially after 1924, the Soviet film world took on the experimental and cohesive elements of a think tank. Its base was a Moscow film school headed by a former fashion designer, Lev Kuleshov, whose aim was to undertake filmmaking experiments to match the new social order. Kuleshov talked about “engineering” new film techniques and the central metaphor was the machine. Filmmakers from other states such as the Ukraine humanized some of this mechanized philosophy, but world cinema’s greatest innovations occurred when this group of filmmakers coalesced under one roof and attempted not only to vary the schema, but to smash them to pieces.
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Soviet agitprop trains – movie theatres in train carriages.
The speed of events is exciting to consider. In 1919, one year after the ending of the First World War, agitprop (agitation and propaganda) trains, with theatres and cinemas in their carriages, departed from Moscow (70). They distributed leaflets, performed theatre shows and projected films to promote Leninist reforms, the new governmental programmes, which included literacy, hygiene information and anti-alcoholism initiatives. Their film section was headed by a wiry, twenty-one-year-old Swedish cameraman, Edward Tissé, who would go on to photograph the most famous film of the Soviet montage era. One of the remits of agitprop trains was to shoot documentary footage as well as show it and in charge of the editing of Tissé’s work was a twenty-year-old poet and musician, Denis Kaufman, who extrav-agantly changed his name to Dziga Vertov, which, combining both Ukrainian and Russian, translates as “spinning top”. The following year, a key international influence came to bear on the evolution of Vertov and the others’ methodology. A print of Intolerance found its way through the blockade of foreign goods. When Lenin saw it, he cabled D.W. Griffith immediately, asking him to head up the new Soviet Film Industry, which was nationalized in August of that year. Film historian Jay Leyda wrote, “No Soviet film of importance made within the following ten years was to be completely outside Intolerance’s sphere of influence.” 41 In 1920, the twenty-two year old Latvian, Sergei Eisenstein, who was studying engineering, switched to theatre and became a student of Kuleshov. In 1923, Kuleshov edited together scenes of Moscow and Washington which suggested that a famous Moscow monument to Gogol was sited in front of the White House. Continuing in this experimental vein, he filmed the face of an actor first instructed to imagine that, having been imprisoned and starving, he is brought a bowl of soup. The actor’s face attempted to register hunger and anticipation. After this, Kuleshov filmed the same actor’s face, asked to imagine he has been released from prison and is looking at birds and clouds. He asked people to look at the two faces and no-one could distinguish between them. This opacity, this inability of acting alone to distinguish between bread and freedom, led directly to the idea that if the actor cannot show a thought, editing must.
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Editing as metaphor: intercutting police charges with the slaughter of an ox in Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike. Soviet Union, 1925.
Lenin died in 1924 and in the same year, the whirling Vertov and his brother started making Kino-Eye newsreels, by filming life on the streets, often with hidden cameras mounted in police vehicles, the forerunner of many twenty-first century American television shows. Eisenstein began filming Strike (Soviet Union, 1925) which starts with a worker’s suicide42. A strike follows and in the climactic attack at the end of the film, police brutality is intercut with the bloody slaughter of an ox, whose tongue is pulled through the gash in its throat. Strike was the first notable film to demonstrate the think tank’s radical new ideas. D.W. Griffith’s thesis that intercuts could suggest thoughts in Intolerance combined with Kuleshov’s bread-and-freedom editing experiments, created Strike’s rapid style of cutting, creating the idea that the police are slaughterers. The main Soviet newspaper called it, “The first revolutionary creation of our cinema.”18
Then, in 1925, came Battleship Potemkin (Soviet Union, 1925). Eisenstein wanted to make a film that began with the war between Russia and Japan in 1904–05 and climaxed with the St. Petersburg uprising, covering dozens of events in the interim. However, when he saw a set of steps in the coastal town of Odessa, he realized their cinematic potential. Odessa had been the location of a shoot-out between the military and mutinous sailers from a battleship moored nearby in the Black Sea. Eisenstein decided to restage the mutiny on the steps, using them like a tilted stage set for a grand opera. The uprising took up a single page in the screenplay, but gradually became the whole film’s focus. The director would later write “When can a particular episode take the place of the whole logically and completely? Only in the cases where the detail … is typical. In other words, when it reflects the whole like a piece of broken mirror.”19 The mutiny in Odessa would be the splintered piece of mirror reflecting the oppression of the Tsarist regimes.
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Below: Elements of the Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. Director: Sergei Eisenstein. Soviet Union, 1925.
The film’s cameraman, Tissé, laid tracks to the left of the steps and used multiple dolly shots, which was rare in Soviet cinema, and attached another camera to the body brace of his assistant as Gance was doing concurrently in France. The Odessa steps sequence (72) begins with the first firing of the soldiers’ shots; the killing of a child; marching boots on the steps (top); a bespectacled old lady, wounded in the face; a p
ram bumping down the steps (middle); a mother climbing the steps with her dead son outstretched across her arms (bottom). By shooting the same action frequently and repeating it in the edit, Eisenstein multiplied the location’s scale. He cut rhythmically to the beat of shooting, stepping and marching. Eventually Potemkin would contain over 1,300 shots, unlike a typical American film of the time of the same length, which would have about 700 and a comparable German film which would have only 430. Potemkin’s average shot duration was three seconds, whereas the French impressionists, and American average was about five seconds and Germany’s nine seconds. The film had a huge critical impact when it was screened in Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam and London.20 In 1948 and 1958 it was voted the best film ever made according to a jury of historians from twenty-six countries. James Joyce and Albert Einstein spoke in praise of it; it influenced the 1930s British documentary movement, and John Grierson liked the film so much that he helped prepare its US version. Alfred Hitchcock described Eisenstein’s montage theory of editing in an article on film production for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and his art director, Robert Boyle, claims that Hitchcock discussed Potemkin. The American star, Douglas Fairbanks, brought it back to America in 1926, where it was acclaimed. David O. Selznick, at the time a junior executive at the MGM studio who would later go on to produce one of the most popular films of all time, Gone with the Wind (USA, 1939), recommended its viewing to all MGM staff as they would “a Rubens or a Raphael”. Aspects of Battleship Potemkin might appear hectoring today, especially in the light of the collapse of Soviet ideals, but it seemed vastly humane as well as brilliantly innovative in 1925.