by Mark Cousins
Those who knew Welles, and to whom I have spoken at length about him, use a word to describe him that has not yet appeared in this book – “genius”. Certainly he seems to have had more talent than most directors and this talent developed and matured much earlier than in most cases. It has been well-argued elsewhere35 that the genius label applied from an early age made the anti-intellectual Hollywood film world wary of him from the outset of his career. He should have been the D.W. Griffith of the sound era, extending cinema’s parameters and taking others with him. In fact, in a career that lasted nearly fifty years, he did not direct a single foot of film for any of the four major Hollywood studios.
The perplexing achievements of, and motivations behind, Welles’s work are extra-cinematic. His interest in playing with visual space is like that of an Italian Renaissance painter. His interest in people at the top of power structures – kings, business tycoons and inventors – is akin to Shakespeare’s. Welles often looked to the past in his work, to times before democracy and liberalism in order to find a template for the gigantic, power-crazed characters he would inhabit. Citizen Kane, Welles’ first feature film, is about a newspaper magnate, Charles Foster Kane, who thinks of himself as a Medici at the time of the Italian Renaissance, a Mughal Emperor in India or a Turkish prince in Istanbul’s Topkapi palace. Lustful for power but devoid of taste, he attempts to use his newspapers to influence world events and builds himself a mon-strous, palatial house on an inhuman scale, buying and shipping works of art and installing whole rooms from classical Europe (131). The film was a powerful denunciation of the egomania and spiritual emptiness of a real tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, who had built a similarly extravagant house in California called Hearst Castle akin to Griffith’s Intolerance sets or Pastrone’s Cabiria designs.
Hearst’s regal aspirations were fuelled by the unchecked epic imagination of early 1920s Hollywood and when he fulfilled them, Hollywood stars such as Chaplin flattered him, visited his palace and came to lounge at his gold swimming pools. Enter the boy-wonder Welles, who has travelled the world in his childhood, lived in Shanghai, visited the grand crumbling palaces of faded emperors, studied Shakespeare and knows the story of power. What does he do? He decides to apply cinema, the medium with its attendant social world that bloated Hearst’s imagination in the first place and that now fires his ego, to the multilayered construct that is Hearst. The parallel world of Citizen Kane was far removed from the more glamorous and perfect world of closed romantic realism. The rooms of Xanadu had to be vast and empty because Kane’s ideas were colossal and vacuous. So Welles watched Stagecoach thirty times, was drawn to the deep-focus imagery and hired Toland, the best and most innovative Hollywood director of photography, and together they extended the dimension of the screen to its limits.
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Charles Foster Kane’s storeroom of treasures – an image whose deep space is expressive of Orson Welles’ aesthetic and his character’s megalomania. Citizen Kane. USA, 1941.
The power of Welles’s visual and human ideas cannot be ascribed only to his source material: Shakespeare and the Medicis, the Mughals, the Ottomans and Stagecoach. It also derives from his striking body and voice. His parents were both Anglo-Saxon, but Welles did not look it. His head was big, his eyes were far apart and deeper and older than expected. It was impossible for him to play a young person or a twentieth-century everyman. Repeatedly throughout his career, Welles would position himself close to a camera fitted with a 28mm lens to emphasize how gigantic he was and, correspondingly, the weightiness of the themes he was exploring, but he did so particularly in Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1966). He imported the idea of sonic space from radio, using whispers in close-up and distant echoes as well as sonic shocks, such as a squawking parrot in Citizen Kane. He extended the overlapping dialogue of Howard Hawks’ comedies to fill a whole film.
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The visual style of deep staging and deep focus spread through Hollywood. John Huson had The Maltese Falcon (above) photographed in this way.
The visual ideas of Toland and Welles started to influence directors such as John Huston and William Wyler. The image above (132 top) from The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, USA, 1941) was photographed in the same year as Citizen Kane. Wyler, who had already worked with Toland in the late 1930s, made The Little Foxes (USA, 1941) and, like Welles, staged his actors at varying distances from the lens, but changed focus to emphasize the speaker. Toland was to photograph such deep-focus scenes for the same director in The Best Years of our Lives (USA, 1946) on a set that had to be flooded with light. For example, the image below (132 bottom) appears to be about the foregrounded people at the piano, if you do not know the story of the film. However, Dana Andrews’ telephone conversation, which occurs in the tiny booth in the extreme background is the important action. Welles’s radical perspective distortions for dramatic emphasis and Eisenstein’s conception of editing within a shot were here taken to still further extremes.
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As did William Wyler in this moment in The Best Years of our Lives (below): the key action is not the piano in the foreground but the telephone booth conversation in the background.
Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes and other deep-staged films (films in which action takes place clsoe to and far from the camera, regardless of whether or not the action is in focus) had, after their post-war release in France, a significant effect on French directors and gave birth to a new theory of the film image. Deep staging and deep-focus filmmaking would continue to be used, especially in dramatically and thematically intense movies: some of world cinema’s landmark films such as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Sweden, 1966), Jacques Tati’s later comedies, the Taiwanese films of Hou Hsiao Hsien, Michael Haneke’s Austrian work, the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr (133) and many more would build on these visual ideas. Deep staging would become less fashionable again in 1950s American cinema as the new colour, widescreen film stocks were not usually fast enough to achieve this deep-focus effect. In the 1960s and 1970s, very long focal-length lenses, which flattened imagery and made focus shallow, were to open up formal possibilities at the opposite end of the visual spectrum. The newest types of such lenses, combined with the shooting style of music videos, created another period of ultra-shallow focus in the 1990s (134).36 The depth of the film image is centrally important to the history of cinema, because it not only provides information about the lenses, lighting and the sensitivity of film stock available to a director, but also points to the visual schema of the time.
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The technique of deep staging continued to be used by filmmakers, often the more serious ones, such as Béla Tarr in his mammoth Satantango (above). Hungary, 1994.
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In later decades there was a return to the flattening and shallow focus effect of longer lenses. The image from Heat shows how director Michael Mann and his cinematographer Dante Spinotti used the technique to direct attention to the intensity of actor Al Pacino’s stare. USA, 1995.
The most innovative filmmakers who continued to work through and beyond The Second World War – Clair, Mamoulian, Eisenstein, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Lubitsch, Renoir, Ford, Hitchcock and Welles – had pushed out the bound-aries of film sound and imagery and their achievements would affect post-war cinema. Others working at this time such as Dorothy Arzner, P.C. Barua, Marcel Carné, George Cukor, Curtiz, Dovzhenko, Fleming, Alexander Korda, Mikio Naruse, Preston Sturges, James Whale and William Wyler had made their best films by the end of the war, Minnelli, Siodmak and Wilder were already directors. War became the backdrop for hugely entertaining Western films such as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1942), about an American café owner in Morocco who abandons his cynicism to help a former lover evade the Nazis. Musicals became so escapist and dramas so sentimental, that their glitzy, religious, patriotic or comforting stories can only be properly understood and excused against the backdrop of war, soldiers abroad and national uncertainty.
There were two
other cases where innovation continued throughout the Second World War. Maya Deren, a Russian Jew whose parents had emigrated to New York in 1922, made such a powerful experimental film, Meshes in the Afternoon (USA, 1943), that it helped move to the centre of avant-garde filmmaking from Europe to America. It is about a young woman having a dream. But unlike The Wizard of Oz, there are no certainties, nor a secure return to a familiar world. The dream is a lonely experience, her memories float through it. Deren said, “The protagonist does not suffer some subjective delusion of which the world outside remains independent … she is, in actuality, destroyed by an imaginative action.” The spatial dislocations of Meshes in the Afternoon prefigured the French films of Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda and her visual style influenced mainstream cinematographers such as Nestor Almendros.
On another continent, the Indian People’s Theatre Project was also more experimental. It was launched in 1943 and was a deliberately radical theatre movement related to the Indian Communist Party, Working across the country, but particularly in Bengal in the north-east and Kerala in the south-west, it married traditional culture to modern ideas about political activism and experimentalism. It was not only widely influential in the theatre world, but also in literature and film and its impact, especially in Bengal, can be seen in the work of one of India’s most important oppositional filmmakers, Ritwik Ghatak (see pages 208–09).
The first American film to be shown in newly liberated Paris in August 1944 was Gone with the Wind. In 1945, one of the film’s actresses, Olivia de Havilland, won a three-year courtroom battle against Warner Bros. Her employer’s habit of extending her contract if she refused a film part which did not interest her was disallowed. This precedent meant that actors could not be contracted for more than seven years and thereby gave performers more control over their careers. It was a setback for the studios, which had by this date also suffered other challenges to their production-distribution system and heralded their unravelling in subsequent years.
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The soft colour and the actors’ horizon gaze in this image capture the optimism of A Matter of Life and Death, but the film also dealt, more adroitly than most, with the complexities of war. Kim Hunter and David Niven starred, the director was Michael Powell. UK, 1945.
One unique body of work married cinematic experimentation with gripping narrative during the Second World War in a way that defies description. The British company, The Archers, was formed in 1942 and combined the talents of English director Michael Powell, and Hungarian screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger, who had escaped the Nazis and then worked for Alexander Korda. They began their partnership as writers, producers and directors with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (UK, 1943) and continued with A Canterbury Tale (UK, 1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (UK, 1945) a series of films about the mythic qualities of Britain. They avoided outright propaganda and portrayed their perception of the enduring values of the UK, such as fair play and a wariness of political extremism, in stories often laced with mysticism and pastoralism. A Matter of Life and Death switches between colour and black and white, as did The Wizard of Oz, to tell the story of a bomber pilot, brain-damaged during a Second World War mission, whose case for more time on earth is pleaded for him in heaven, because he is in love with a girl he has never met (240). Only a few times in this chapter – with Gold Diggers of 1933 in America and Devdas in India, perhaps – do films perform such high-wire dramatics, mixing formal audacity with social relevance. A seismic shift was approaching world cinema, which would make The Archers films look vulgar to many critics, but Powell and Pressburger’s high romantic rejection of realism was influential in later years.
In the 1930s, movies no longer felt that they had to prove their credentials and were in a less serious mood than in the 1920s. At a time when more than a fifth of the world was unemployed, they aimed mostly to entertain and musicals, the only film genre to rely directly on sound, were the newest way in which they did this. However, by 1945 Italian filmmakers were attempting to shake off the taint of this aggressive era and, drawing on cinema’s past naturalism, they aimed to challenge closed romantic realism’s parallel universes of musicals and escapist films. They were more interested in the contemporary world and, by being so, would change filmmaking forever.
1. Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Movie no 24. 1977.
2. Dyer. Ibid.
3. Although “utopian” refers to states or cities, I will continue to use it in its broader sense of “idealized.” Such utopianism pertained not only to Hollywood, but to German musicals, Italian “white telephone” films and even the socialist-realist productions of the Eastern Bloc.
4. Hollywood had been reluctant to introduce sound because of its high investment in the technology of silent filmaking. In addition, its East Coast bankers knew that to record films in the English language would have the devastating, effect of making such films inaccessible to foreign markets. Warners took the gamble, however, because silent cinema was starting to seem arcane to audiences used to radio and gramophone recordings.
5. Other examples of the innovative use of sound in the two years after its mainstream introdu-ction were René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris (France, 1929), and Mamoulian’s own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (USA, 1931). Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (USA, 1930) was one of several films which managed to combine the dynamism of camera movement of the late silent era with the new sonic technology.
6. Milne, Tom. Mamoulian. Thames and Hudson, 1969.
7. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, op. cit., p. 54.
8. Bock, Audie, in Japanese Film Directors. Kodansha International, 1978. She is quoting Ozu in “The Flavour of Cinema, The Flavour of Life. Kinema Jumpo. Feb 10, 1964.
9. Richie, Donald. Ozu: His Life and Films. University of California Press. 1974.
10. Bock, Audie, op. cit., p. 71.
11. That the cinematographer of these films was also the editor is almost unique in film history.
12. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Da Capo Press, 1972.
13. Anderson, Joseph and Richie, Donald. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Grove Press, 1960, p. 364. This was the first important history of Japanese cinema published in the West.
14. As Mizoguchi’s own sister became a geisha in order to help support him, some have argued that is relationship explains the focus on (often suffering) women in his work.
15. Whilst traces of such proto realism can be found in other national cinemas in the 1930s, its manifestation in China is probably the most significant.
16. Ruan Lingyu’s career was portrayed in Stanley Kwan’s 1992 film Centre Stage; Maggie Cheung played the leading role.
17. In 2001, nearly eight decades later, actor Rod Steiger commented that the film community in Hollywood always wanted to make those hills look Tuscan (conversation with the author).
18. One of these is played by Ralph Ince who, nearly twenty years earlier, was ahead of the game as a director when, you might recall, he filmed The Last Fight with a high proportion of reverse-angle shots.
19. Francis Coppola credited himself as Francis Ford Coppola for the Godfather trilogy. He will be referred to as Francis Coppola in this work, unless he was specifically credited otherwise for the relevant film.
20. Mabel Hormand and Marie Dressler are examples of actresses who, in the years before West, Hepburn and Lombard, had shown considerable comic talent.
21. Thomson, David. A Biographical Dictionary of Film. André Deutsch, 1994.
22. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. Da Capo. 1996.
23. Howard Hawks in MacBride, Joseph. Hawks on Hawks. Faber and Faber, p. 71.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. An equally strong influence on Lewis-Martin were the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road to… series of films, which also teamed a comic and a crooner.
28. Other significant central and Eastern European filmmakers of this
period were Czechoslovakia’s Gustav Machaty and Hungary’s Istvan Szots.
29. Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock-Truffaut, Simon and Schuster. 1983.
30. Renoir on Renoir. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
31. Ibid.
32. Source: Top Movies of Each Year at www.the-numbers.co./movies/index.html
33. Durgant, Raymond. Jean Renoir. University of California Press, p. 192.
34. Anderson, Lindsay in the BBC television programme Ford on Omnibus.
35. Sklar, Robert. “Welles Before Kane: The Discourse on a ‘Boy Genius’”. Persistence of Vision no 7. pp. 63–73.
36. David Bordwell’s summary of these changes, “On Staging in Depth”, in On the History of Film Style, Harvard University Press, 1997, is the best of its kind.
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The work of Roberto Rossellini, Germany Year Zero, was one of the first, and most orginal, films of the neo-realist era. Italy–France–Germany, 1947.
THE DEVASTATION OF WAR AND A NEW MOVIE LANGUAGE (1945–52)
The spread of realism in world cinema
5
How did filmmakers react to the devastation left by the Second World War? In Japan, Germany and Italy, they opened their doors in the morning and found that their city streets had turned to rubble. Some took up documentary cameras and filmed what they saw. Even those far removed from the battlegrounds read newspapers, and Hollywood was full of émigrés who would have seen newsreels about their broken homelands. Filmmakers were not detached from the historical events that were taking place around them. This chapter describes to what extent they engaged as artists with these events.