by Mark Cousins
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Two startled shots of actress Vera Baranovskaya in Pudovkin’s Mother. A great performance built out of such short bursts of expression. Soviet Union, 1926.
Another student of Kuleshov, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, directed Mother (Soviet Union, 1926), aged twenty-seven. Set during a strike, it tells the story of a woman who betrays her striking son by telling the police where his hideout is and the location of his comrades’ armoury. The son is imprisoned, she realizes her mistake, he escapes, and they are united in a demonstration against military brutality. Mother was almost as influential as Potemkin. There was rivalry between Pudovkin and Eisenstein, so the former devised a musical structure for the film – allegro – adagio – allegro – which was very different to the intercutting of Eisenstein. Mother is dominated by close-ups, some of which, such as those in a bar scene with a band, are vivid portraits of real human beings. When the son reaches for his gun to begin to fight back against the authorities who are trying to put down the strike, the mother, in a series of half-second dissolves, imagines his death. She rises and two short shots show her panic-stricken shriek (73 top). Pudovkin tracks along the length of the apparently dead son’s body. At the end of the film, before the mother is killed by the passing Tsarist cavalry, her terrified face appears again, but for just sixteen frames. While Vera Baranovskaya delivers a great, stoical performance in the lead role of the mother, the film’s moments of humanity are undercut by its brutal literalness. When the mother is filmed from a high viewpoint, Pudovkin signals her pathos and when she is filmed from below, she appears noble (73 bottom). This ideological smugness, which also taints much of 1920s Soviet cinema, weakens Pudovkin’s work.
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Arsenal. Director: Alexander Dovzhenko. Soviet Union, 1930.
The same criticism cannot be applied to the Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko, the son of an illiterate peasant, whose lyrical films did not have the immediate dramatic impact of the work of Eisenstein or Pudovkin, but which influenced Russian cinema in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Dovzhenko was not part of Kuleshov’s think tank and had not even seen many films before he started directing. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were at the premiere of his first significant film, Zvenigora (Soviet Union, 1928), and Eisenstein wrote of the occasion, “Onto the [screen] Zvenigora leaps! Mama! What goes on here?!” 49 No other filmmaker at the time was producing such dreamlike images. In comparison to Dovzhenko’s free play of tone and association, much of Soviet cinema in the 1920s seems intellectually strait-jacketed.
Dovzhenko’s next film, Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1930), answers the questions of why he was so good. The complex plot follows the emergence of a Ukrainian political movement after the First World War up to a disastrous strike in Kiev in January 1918. The film starts with captions printed onto shot footage, “There was a mother”, “There was a war”. Timeless scenes of Ukrainian women standing motionless in the sunshine in lifeless villages are intercut with bombings and the chaos of killing. A title card for a horse speaks after he has been flogged by a man: “You’re wasting blows on me, old man, I’m not what you need to strike.” At the site of the bombing, as a German soldier reels with the effects of laughing gas, reads another title card, “This gas is so gay”. There follows an astonishing image of a dead soldier, half-buried, but with a fixed smile (74 third image). Later in the film, a factory owner confused by the strike and indecisively looks at the camera and there are nine jump cuts to that same face, a moment later (74 bottom). He looks left, right, then straight on, then a closer shot and another closer still. This is three decades before the acclaimed jump cuts in Jean Luc Godard’s A Bout de souffle/Breathless (France, 1959). Toward the end of the film, a soldier is rushed magically through the snow on horses in fulfilment of his desire to be buried at home. (One almost expects the horses to take off into the sky as the boys’ bikes do in ET [Spielberg, USA, 1982].) His mother stands waiting at an empty grave. Dovzhenko described Arsenal as “100 per cent political”. It is also about travelling on a train, about speed, about landscapes and about sunlight.
Cinema became intellectually fashionable in this period and artists and thinkers were drawn to it. Painters and sculptors started to see it as equal, if not superior, to their own media and it was all the rage in art schools. The result of all this intense interest was the final category of dissident 1920s cinema, experimental films.
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The first abstract animation. Opus 1, Die Sieger. Director: Walter Ruttman. Germany, 1923.
The painter Walter Ruttmann was influenced by expressionist painters like Wassily Kandinsky. He painted directly onto glass and would film the result; he would then wipe the still-wet paint, adding more pigment, and then re-film it, to make Opus 1, Die Sieger (Germany, 1923), perhaps the first abstract animation (147). Ruttmann would soon work with a former dancer, Lotte Reiniger, whose The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Germany, 1927) was one of the first animated feature films. Her painstaking technique involved adapting the methods of Victorian silhouette portraiture. She hand-cut each frame and the process took nearly three years.
The animator Wladyslaw Starewicz was born in Wilno, Poland (then Russia, now Lithuania) in 1892 and from 1910 onward started making bizarre childrens’ films, using stop-frame animation technique for the first time in cinema, which involved manipulating the puppets slightly for each filmed or re-filmed frame. Starewicz moved to France in 1920 and made films such as Frogland (France, 1922) based on one of Aesop’s Fables, about a group of frogs who ask their God, Jupiter, for a king. At first he sends them a wooden one, then a stork, which is a bird that eats frogs. Finally, when they insist, they get the monarch of their dreams, but soon regret having done so.
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Dolls with ballooning heads in Entr’acte.
Director: René Clair. France, 1927.
The anarchistic art movement, Dada, entered cinema in 1924. One of its key members, Francis Picabia, was staging a disruptive ballet, Relâche, and hired René Clair, who would later make An Italian Straw Hat, to direct a short film for it. This would be shown in the ballet’s interval and as such was called Entr’acte/Interval (France, 1927). It was the first significant Dadaist film. It featured Picabia and a roster of other Dadaists including Man Ray, Georges Auric and Marcel Duchamp. It was a wild abstract farce involving, among other things, a camel, a cannon and dolls with ballooning heads (76) and was influenced by the chase comedies of Mack Sennett. Picabia said of the result, “It believes in the pleasure of inventing, it respects nothing except the desire to burst out laughing.” One of the film’s actors, Man Ray, would also photograph Le Ballet mécanique/The Mechanical Ballet (France, 1924), influenced by Gance’s La Roue and directed by the French artist, Fernand Léger. The Mechanical Ballet features a series of metal objects and machines photographed abstractly, moving around in a sometimes random, sometimes in a choreographed way.
Several years after his painted glass abstract animations, Ruttmann hired cinematographer, Karl Freund (his third appearance in this chapter) to help him make a film about the pulse of a big city. Berlin-Die Symphonie einer Grosstadt/Berlin, Symphony of a City (Germany, 1927) found its structure in music like Entr’acte and The Mechanical Ballet and was not only one of the most influential experimental films of the period, but also one of the longest. It tells the story of the movements, rhythms and repetitions of Berlin during one spring day, from dawn to dusk. Ruttman’s highly influential film is almost devoid of people, and uses some of the editing techniques of Eisenstein. The Brazilian filmmaker, Alberto Cavalcanti, was to direct Rien que les heures/Only The Hours (France, 1926) about Paris a year later, and the result was strikingly similar.
Perhaps the most notorious experimental film of the 1920s was the astonishing Un Chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog (France, 1928) which is far more shocking than Entr’acte. This was the first significant film influenced by the Surrealist art movement which emphasized dreams and the irrational mind. It was directed by Luis Buñuel, the son of Spanish landowners, who
had established one of the world’s first cinema clubs in Madrid in 1920, aged twenty. Around this time he met Salvador Dalí, later a leading Surrealist painter. Sometime after 1926, Dalí and Buñuel spent three days talking about their dreams and unconscious desires and they then wrote a script loosely about a couple’s split and reconciliation. Buñuel directed and edited the film and the result was the seventeen-minute Un Chien Andalou. The film begins with an image of Buñuel smoking. A woman’s eye is then slit with a razor (77) as a thin knife-like cloud passes across the moon. Later a man’s hand crawls with ants, a severed hand appears followed by naked breasts and buttocks, and two pianos surmounted by dead donkeys. A caption reads “Sixteen Years Earlier”, but the action continues as before. The man with the ants on his hand discovers that his mouth is covered with hair, which is contrasted with the woman’s shaved armpit. Finally, the man and the woman are buried in sand. This absurd film was a direct influence on several subsequent movies including David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (USA, 1986, see pages 394–396), especially in the strangely erotic discovery of an ant-covered ear (78). Buñuel would go on to have one of the most international careers of the major art cinema directors, working in Spain, France, America and Mexico. There would be important experimental film movements in nearly every subsequent decade, but the 1920s work of Ruttmann, Clair, Leger and Buñuel was a foundation on which they all built.
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Shock and metaphor in Un Chien Andalou. Director: Luis Buñuel. France, 1928.
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Recent American cinema’s most notable surrealist, David Lynch. Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a Dali-esque ear complete with crawling ants in Blue Velvet. USA, 1986.
The period of 1918–28 was a tumultuous one for world cinema. It became an established industry and its great studios evolved their house styles. These styles were extended, challenged and rejected by a series of unprecedented film movements, which constituted a worldwide expansion in film aesthetics. Cities, love triangles, hubris, machinery and descent into madness were the great obsessions of this expansion.
The image overleaf from La Passion de Jean d’Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1927) (79) amalgamates the internationalism, the technical brilliance and the human ambition of 1920s cinema. It is taken from the second part of the film which depicts the historic story of a fifteenth-century French girl, who is the saviour of her country and is then tried for witchcraft, sentenced and burnt at the stake. It was directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, a Dane who had a strict Protestant upbringing. Maria (also called Renée) Falconetti (Joan of Arc) had not acted in a movie before, nor would she again. Her face has almost no make-up and on big screen her freckles are visible. In the film, her eyelids quiver like butterfly wings, but in other ways her face is immobile, almost expressionless. There is almost no depth to the image, nothing in the background. Although this was a black-and-white film, the walls of the set were painted pink to remove their glare and not to detract from Falconetti’s face. This image was shot by a Krakow cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, who was brought up in Hungary. He worked with Fritz Lang and René Clair before collaborating with many of the great Hollywood directors discussed in the next chapter. The film’s set designer was the German Hermann Warm, who painted the shadows in Caligari. Falconetti had her hair cropped just before this image was made. It was done in silence and such was the atmosphere on the set that some of the electricians cried. In some shots she is framed, at the edge of the image, almost trying to escape it. Not many intertitles explain what is being said, but Falconetti and the other actors move their lips throughout the film, speaking the precise words recorded at Joan of Arc’s trial. This was a premonition of a kind because in the year of The Passion of Joan of Arc’s production, Warner Bros. released a film, The Jazz Singer (USA, 1927), which had a soundtrack. It did not contain much more than a song and a few dialogue sequences but, as a result of it, silent cinema came to an end.
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An example of the purity and off-centred imagery of THE PASSION OF Joan of Arc. Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer. France, 1927.
Cinema’s subsequent rebirth is the subject of the next chapter. One major director, John Ford, called it “A time of near panic in Hollywood.” So momentous were the changes for the industry that other landmarks of these great transitional years are sometimes overlooked – for example, Mickey Mouse débuted in 1928 in the animated short, Steamboat Willie (USA). However, on the other side of the world from Warner Bros. and The Jazz Singer, in a place where benshis still held sway over film’s narrative and where movies were filmed from the front as if they were stage plays, cinema’s true classicism was about to emerge.
1. Among those that did use the war as a subject were Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms and Griffith’s Hearts of the World. Of the few that tackled the political themes, Gance’s J’Accuse was the most powerful.
2. Miller, Henry. The Cosmopolitan Eye, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1939.
3. Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. Da Capo, 1980, p. 98.
4. Louvish, Simon, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mark Sennett, Faber and Faber, pp. 100–101.
5. Mention should be made here of the influence producer-director Hal Roach had on Lloyd’s career. Roach formed the Rolin Film Company and hired Lloyd, who was by then working for Mack Sennett at Keystone. Roach helped Lloyd experiment with his screen persona, removing some of Sennett’s trade-mark slap stick elements from it and moulding it more in his – Roach’s – own taste, emphasizing characterization and strengthening the storylines of Lloyd’s vehicles. Roach was the survivor and chameleon of silent comedy, effortlessly adapting Laurel and Hardy’s slow burn techniques to the requirements of the sound era, diversifying to Westerns and other genres, then having some success in television. He died in 1992, aged 100.
6. Though Ozu doesn’t seem to have mentioned Lloyd in interviews, his films are clearly influenced by the American. Ozu’s earliest films, nansensu (“nonsense”) comedies in the gendai-geki (“contemporary life”) genre, used prop jokes in the Lloyd manner. The latter’s The Freshman (1925) was the model for Ozu’s early college comedies and, as David Bordwell has noted, a poster for Speedy (1928) (Lloyd’s nickname in The Freshman) adorns one wall in I Graduated, But… (Ozu, 1929) (Ozu and the Poetics of Japanese Cinema, D. Bordwell, BFI/Princeton, 1988, p152). Bordwell also, persuasively, argues that Lloyd’s films’ recurrent scenes of embarrass-ment are echoed in the moments of humilation in Ozu’s Tokyo Chorus, Equinox Flower, Early Summer and I Was Born, But….
7. Lorca, Federico Garcia, Buster Keaton Takes a Walk.
8. Weber, Lois. Lecture to the Women’s City Club of Los Angeles, 1913.
9. Quoted in Sadoul, Georges, Dictionary of Films, Editions du Seuil, 1965.
10. Though Lang, Ruttmann and Vertov each saw affinities between cities and the medium of film, they did so in very different ways. Lang’s Metropolis used the production designs of Otte Hunde, Erich Kettlehut and Karl Volbrecht, for example, to imagine the futuristic precipitousness of city architecture and the etiolation of human life therein. Ruttman in Berlin, die Symphonie einer Grossstadt/Berlin, Symphony of a City (Germany, 1927) attempted to capture the mood and time of day of the German capital through montages of observed details. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (USSR, 1922) is more distinctively edited than the other two, as would be expected from its provenance, but its theme is not city spaces but the nature of filming such spaces.
11. A talk given to The Friends of Cinema, Paris 1924. Quoted in Flittermam-Lewis, Sandy, To Desire Differently. Feminism and the French Cinema, University of Illinois Press, 1990, p. 56.
12. The main instrument of the German government’s involvement with the film industry was the film company Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (UFA) which was established in 1917, as a merger of several existing companies, with public funds. At the end of the war, Deutsche Bank bought into it but, despite the taste and vision of production chief Erich Pommer, the company failed to hold its own against
the flooding of the German market with Hollywood product. In 1927, the beleaguered company was bolstered by investment from a Nazi sympathizer, but lost its way artistically after 1933 when Jewish producers such as Pommer fled the country.
13. Burch, Noel, op. cit., p. 127.
14. Burch notes that Kinugasa cannot remember having done so but that most Japanese film historians are convinced that he did.
15. The irony is, that despite Dr Mabuse’s criticisms of contemporary Germany, its co-writer Theo Von Harbou – whom Lang married in 1924 and whom he divorced in 1934 – became an ultra conservative, taking Nazi party membership. A former novelist, Von Marbou also co-wrote Metropolis and worked with F.W. Murnau and Carl Theodor Dreyer.
16. See Sadoul, Georges, op. cit., p. 218.
17. Writers for Cahiers du Cinéma.
18. Mikhail Koltzov in Pravda.
19. Eisenstein, Sergei. Notes of a Film Director. Moscow, 1958.
20. Western Governments’ wariness of the propaganda function of Potemkin meant that its screenings in those countries often took place in cine-clubs or at trades union events.
SOUND
We do not hear the sound of the horse-drawn carriage crossing the Leeds Bridge, the Klan galloping in The Birth of a Nation, Cesare’s madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the distant traffic as Harold Lloyd climbs his building in Safety Last, the ocean the eponymous hero crosses in Napoleon, the pram bumping down the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin or Falconetti’s breathing in The Passion of Joan of Arc. The energy or tenderness of these images have a power to impress, but not as things in the real world do.