by Mark Cousins
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Boris Kaufman’s striking cinematography: the pillow-fight scene from Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite. France, 1933.
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Top left: Mario Peixoto’s Limite. Brazil, 1930.
Elsewhere in the world, underdeveloped film industries found that low-budget avant-garde films were the most productive way to impact on international film culture. For example, in 1930 a Brazilian director made not only that country’s first avant-garde film but also one of the first significant films made in Latin America. Movies had been distributed there from the mid-1890s and the first Brazilian feature was made in 1906, but none of the 100 or so full-length films produced seems to have been distinctive. This changed with Mario Peixoto’s Limite (1930). Made when the director was just nineteen, its portrait of two men’s and a woman’s vision while lost at sea was described as “very beautiful” by Sergei Eisenstein. Peixoto was not only influenced by Eisenstein, but by the subjective camera work of Abel Gance. Three years later, a diminutive Portuguese actress, Carmen Miranda, would make her first films in Brazil before heading to Hollywood, where she worked with Busby Berkeley. It was not until the early 1950s that Brazil would again begin to make stylistically innovative films, but when they did they would be splendid.
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Bottom left: Europa by Franciszka and Stefam Themerson. Poland, 1932.
The pattern was repeated in Poland where an avant-garde film, Europa (1932), by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, was the country’s first sig-nificant production. There had been some filmmaking before this and the country’s first studio was established in Warsaw in 1920, but the Themersons were the first filmmakers to gain attention. Europa (109) was a vivid collage of film styles and a bold and successful adaptation of a poem by Anatol Stern. Its directors were the core members of SAF, one of the world’s first filmmaking co-operatives. They developed Richter’s abstract ideas of painting and scratching film, which they applied to Europa. Poland’s next significant modernist film was Eugeniusz Cekalski and Stanislaw Wohl’s Three Chopin Studies (Poland, 1937) and it would not be until the mid-1950s that this country would again come to the fore cinematically.28 Its most celebrated director, Roman Polanski, is said to have been influenced by the Themersons.
Within two years of Three Chopin Studies’ release, Poland would be invaded by its neighbour, Germany. In 1933 Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor and his party, the National Socialists (Nazis), enacted restrictive laws which banned Jews from working in the film industry. Twenty thousand books with Jewish or modern themes were burned publicly and curtailment of Jews’ civil rights increased throughout the 1930s. Most filmmakers and artists fled to France, the UK or straight to the US. Among those who left Germany were some discussed in this story: cinematographers Karl Freund and Eugene Schüfftan, and director E.A. Dupont. There were also filmmakers who will play important roles in subsequent chapters: Max Ophüls, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmark. Fritz Lang went to Hollywood in 1934 and Ernst Lubitsch had gone eleven years before that.
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Elements of Busby Berkeley’s regimented, overhead aesthetic in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Germany, 1936.
The Nazis took complete control of the German film industry in 1934 and in the mid–1930s the most prodigiously gifted filmmaker associated with them, Leni Riefenstahl, made two astounding films, which were as important and troubling as The Birth of a Nation had been two decades earlier. Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympische Spiele/Olympia (1936) (110) were both quasi-documentaries. The former was a bombastic record of a 1934 Nazi party rally, the latter an account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in which she was assisted by former avant-garde filmmaker, Walter Ruttmann. Riefenstahl was a thirty-four-year-old former dancer and actress who directed her first film only three years before (Das Blaue Licht/The Blue Light) in 1931, and yet on these two films she was provided with resources similar to those available to Griffith on Intolerance or Gance on Napoleon. The result was a film technique with all the bravura of Gance or Berkeley. Cameras were attached to balloons, dug into the earth or tracked alongside the action (111). Zoom lenses, which simulated a move toward or away from a distant point as their focal lengths were changed, became available from 1932 and Riefenstahl used them to pick out details in crowds. For Olympia’s striking high diving sequence, she photographed an athlete soaring and arcing through the air, then, before he hit the water, cut to an endless succession of divers. These were human beings in flight, a dream only previously dreamt of in musicals.
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Like Abel Gance, Riefenstahl (centre)
devised elaborate ways of creating camera moves and visual compositions.
Riefenstahl used symmetry, scale, slow-motion, low-angle shooting, suspense and mystery to aggrandize her subjects. These films worshipped the physical perfection of athletes and soldiers alike, picturing each as the other. Like Berkeley, she explored the discipline of military manoeuvre, its absence of individuality or doubt, and eroticized it. She filmed her subjects as if they were Greek gods, apparently approving of, or oblivious to, the politics of her paymasters. Next to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Riefenstahl was the most technically talented Western filmmaker considered in this section, yet her inflexibility, her inability to doubt her aesthetic, damns her. She was commissioned to film the invasion of Poland and, although she disputed this to the end of her life, she seems to have used people from a concentration camp as extras in her film Tiefland (1954). In life she seemed indestructible, surviving car accidents, trekking through Africa to photograph the Nuba and scuba-diving well into her nineties. She died in 2003, a few weeks after her 101st birthday.
Other, less talented German directors emerged. Their films, such as Jew Süss (1940) by Veit Harlan, were vile slurs and devoid of human content, though such outright propaganda was rare at the time. The Nazis behaved with uncharacteristic modesty about the most extreme product of their imagination – the homicidal gas chambers at Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau: not a single foot of exposed film captured their methodical killing.
Filmmaking had gone somewhat quiet in 1920s Britain. Pioneers such as R.W. Paul and G.A. Smith were still alive (they died in 1943 and 1959 respectively), but they witnessed the overtaking of their innovations by other countries’ advances. Only five per cent of films shown in the UK in the mid-1920s were indigenously produced and in an attempt to reverse this decline the British government passed the Quota Act, which stipulated a minimum amount of screen time to be devoted to native product. Production quadrupled, and a country with one-seventh of the US population attempted, as it would do several times in later decades, to emulate the American studio system. The majority of its output was very low budget, but eventually the 1930s became the most creative period in the UK’s cinema history. The careers of three major figures are at the core of this achievement: director Alfred Hitchcock, producer Alexander Korda and documentary maker John Grierson.
Hitchcock’s formative experiences in the film world were in Germany and, as discussed in Chapter Three, his silent film The Lodger (UK, 1926) bears the marks of 1920s German expressionism. From the start of his career, this precisely spoken, rotund son of a London fruit and poultry dealer was exceptionally talented. Few, however, would have guessed that by the 1960s he would be a visual artist to rank with the painter Pablo Picasso. Those who have never seen an Alfred Hitchcock film should close this book now and watch The Man who Knew too Much (UK, 1934), The 39 Steps (UK, 1935), Rebecca (USA, 1940), Notorious (USA, 1946), Strangers on a Train (USA, 1951), Vertigo (USA, 1958), North by Northwest (USA, 1959), Psycho (USA, 1960) and Marnie (USA, 1964). In these nine films you will find everything you need to know about Western sound movies. They speak the technical language of cinema more gracefully than any other body of work of this period, have more erotic precision, are lessons in cinema’s pleasure and dread of looking and are metaphysical. Hitchcock is as great as Ozu, but his films begin where the Japanese director’s end. Ozu’s
are about the essential repose of ordinary life, whereas in Hitchcock’s, Western society may have acquired the appearance of such order, but this only fuels their characters’ sex and death drives.
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The famous concert scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much where the mother of a kidnapped child realizes that an ambassador is about to be shot, so stands up and screams. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. UK, 1934.
Hitchcock’s British films established the combination of suspense, sexuality and comedy which would become known as Hitchcockian, but did not have the psychological depth of his American work. The Man who Knew too Much (UK, 1934) concerns an ordinary couple who accidentally hear about a plot to murder a diplomat and whose daughter is kidnapped to buy their silence. The film starts in the Swiss Alps and moves location to London. The visual contrast is very Hitchcockian, as is the climax: the assassination is to take place during a grand concert. Hitchcock had seen a magazine cartoon in which a man gets up, goes to work, takes his seat in an orchestra, plays a single note and then goes home. What, thought Hitchcock, if the shooting of the ambassador was timed to take place at the moment of such a single note, such as the crashing of cymbals? This was what he staged. The kidnapped child’s mother is present at the concert and gradually realizing the scenario, lets out a piercing scream just before the crash of the cymbals, which interrupts the carefully planned assassination attempt and saves the ambassador (112).
Hitchcock remade the film in America in 1954, and what is striking about both versions is how carefully he spells out the exact sequence of events leading up to the shooting. He repeats the piece of music so that the audience will know its structure and have their expectations heightened, as Keaton had done similarly for comic purposes in The General. When discussing the scene, Hitchcock said, “The reason why the cantata record is played twice is to prevent any confusion in the viewer’s mind about the events that are to follow.”29 The Man who Knew Too Much was a huge success in the UK and America. Hitchcock’s next, The 39 Steps (UK, 1935), took his cinematic ideas further by turning each scene into a self-contained short story. Rigorously planned as a series of set pieces, it is the story of a Canadian, Richard Hannay, travelling to Scotland to track down those who killed a woman in his London flat. A Murnau-like scene in a Scottish Crofter’s cottage was based, for example, on a story about a South African man with a young, sexually starved wife. In the famous finale of the film, a character based on an old music hall figure blurts out the secret of the spy ring, The Thirty Nine Steps, and just as he does so is shot by one of its members. Each set piece is crafted with the same clarity as the cantata climax of The Man Who Knew too Much, but Hitchcock was so eager to segue into the next dramatically and tonally rich self-contained section that he made the transitions between them as brief as possible. He had no time for the humdrum. He would continue to remove the undramatic events from his scenarios, distilling them over the years until every moment, object and shot was part of his system of desire and anxiety. He went to work in the US at the end of the 1930s and he became the most famous director in the world; his American films will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
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Charles Laughton as the title character in The Private Life of Henry VIII. This scene so impressed Rod Steiger that in the 1990s he cited it as one of the greatest pieces of acting he had ever seen. Director: Alexander Korda. UK, 1933.
Alexander Korda was one of Western cinema’s nomadic talents. Born in Hungary in 1893, he was directing by the age of eighteen, helped nationalize Hungary’s film industry, worked in Hollywood and France before settling in Britain and establishing London Film Productions in 1932. The next year he produced and directed The Private Life of Henry VIII (UK, 1933), Britain’s first internationally successful film. It, together with London Film’s Rembrandt (Alexander Korda, UK, 1936), is still remembered for actor Charles Laughton’s performance in the title role, the first of which won him an Oscar for best actor. Both films influenced a generation of 1950s actors, including the significant US figure Rod Steiger, who said later that Laughton eating a chicken leg (113) was the best piece of acting he had ever seen. Korda built the UK’s biggest studio, Denham, in 1936 and his success encouraged J. Arthur Rank, who had set up British National Film in 1934 and built Pinewood Studios, which were to be home to many of the 1960s and 1970s James Bond movies. Korda went on to produce films by British directors Carol Reed and David Lean and was executive producer on The Third Man (Carol Reed, UK, 1949). His productions established the international perception that British cinema was prestigious, which remains to the present day.
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Dramatic compositions such as this one, together with a poetic sound-track and a vivid portrayal of a mail train’s journey from London to Scotland made Night Mail a hugely influential documentary. Directors: Basil Wright and Harry Watt. UK, 1936.
The producer and some time director John Grierson brought a very different kind of film to the fore. Grierson studied philosophy in Scotland and communication in America, before returning to Britain in 1927 where he won government support for films in the mould of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (USA, 1922). He named these films, “documentaries”, and pro-duced them at the Empire Marketing Board from 1928 and at the General Post Office from 1933. As well as directing some of these himself, he also fostered the careers of a raft of socially conscious, poetically inclined young men, including Basil Wright and Paul Rotha. Wright and Harry Watt made Night Mail (UK, 1936), an impressionistic account of the journey of a postal train from London to Scotland (203), with major artistic collaborators. The music was by the celebrated composer Benjamin Britten, the commentary was by the poet W.H. Auden and the evocative sound was designed by Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti.
Wright and Watt were influenced by the Soviet editor-compiler, Esfir Shub, whereas documentary directors Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey, were inspired by the new realism to be seen in socially committed still photography. Housing Problems (UK, 1935) was one of the first films in which real working-class people were interviewed on camera. Although simply photographed, the scenes of Londoners describing their living conditions had great impact on leftism and reformist filmmaking thereafter and helped launch the tradition of interview-based documentary, which has sporadically dominated documentary filmmaking at the expense of Night Mail’s more poetic techniques. Ten years later, director John Huston would film interviews with soldiers traumatized by the Second World War. The rawness of the result, Let There be Light (US, 1946), so disturbed the American military that they banned the film until the 1970s.
Humphrey Jennings, born in England in 1907, and a former surrealist painter, was the most gifted filmmaker in Grierson’s group. His poetic short-and medium-length documentaries were more in the tradition of Night Mail than Housing Problems. Listen to Britain (UK, 1941), Fires were Started (UK, 1943) and A Diary for Timothy (UK, 1945) intercut scenes of British people of different classes and ways of life, in cities and in the countryside, coping with the realities of war. His use of sound was as poetic as Cavalcanti’s in Night Mail and he succeeded in capturing the timeless, civilized qualities of Britain. Jennings’ interest in small over grand gestures and the lack of panic or bombast in his films lends his work an enduring dignity. Those of 1939–45 portrayed the quiet nobility of the British people just as those of Leni Riefenstahl essayed the epic nobility of the Germans.
In the Soviet Union in the early and mid-1930s, musicals and comedies were being made, but realism was the subject of debate. Josef Stalin had succeeded Lenin as head of state in 1924 and soon his collectivization of farms was causing millions of deaths. In the world of art, experiment fell out of favour. Significant musical and comedy films were made in this period by directors such as Yakov Protazanov, who had directed Queen of Spades in 1916, but Stalin wanted cinema to be heroic and optimistic, charting the happy lives of model working citizens. Eisenstein felt uncomfortable working within such clichéd confines and when Stalin started interfering with his
work, in 1930 he took up an offer of four years earlier from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, to go to the US. Dovzhenko followed Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1930) with another more poetic masterpiece, Earth (Soviet Union, 1930), which was attacked by the cultural authorities. Eisenstein soon became disappointed with the creative limitations of the Hollywood studios, but was inspired by meeting Chaplin and documentary filmmaker Flaherty. He would later travel to Mexico in 1930 to shoot the eventually unfinished film Que Viva Mexico! and returned to Moscow in 1932. In 1934, the First Congress of Soviet Writers proclaimed “Socialist Realism” as the only appropriate style for revolutionary art. Heroic model behaviour, an idealistic view of life, work and the state became the norm and policy. Within months Eisenstein’s more experimental and poetic techniques were criticized at the All-Union Conference of Cinematographic Workers. The transcript of this meeting reflects the slide into conformity, and still makes depressing reading today.
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Strange-edge composition and close-to-the-camera placement of actors characterize the stills that are available from Sergei Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow. Soviet Union, 1935–37.
Though curtailed, Eisenstein made inventive films like Alexander Nevsky (Soviet Union, 1938) and the long lost Bezhin Meadow (Soviet Union, 1935–37), whose remaining stills (115) are a tantalizing reminder of the film. Although Alexander Medvedkin’s Happiness (Soviet Union, 1935) was rich and funny, its pro-Stalinist sensibility and pro-collectivisation lends a bitterness to its enjoyment. The same is true of Vertov’s Three Songs For Lenin (Soviet Union, 1934) – literally three songs for the former state leader. The first is “My Face was in a Dark Prison” showing exquisitely photographed Islamic women in the Eastern soviets who after “liberation and enlightenment” no longer had to shroud their heads in burkhas. The second is “We Loved Him” about Lenin’s death: one banner reads “Lenin is our Immortality”. The third, “In a Big City of Stone”, is about construction, dams and people flocking to see Lenin’s body in Red Square. But Vertov’s real interest is in people and his sense of space and drama jar with the political slogans. The triumphant boast of progress contained in the refrain, repeated no less than five times, “If Lenin could only see our country now”, sounds deeply ironic.