by Mark Cousins
A NEW BEGINNING
During the war, 1,400 cinemas closed in Japan. Immediately after the Allied victory, all films were vetted by the new American authorities. Nationalistic and traditional themes were banned, but some directors, including the central figure in our previous chapter, Yasujiro Ozu, continued as before. His work was too intimate and domestic to offend the new American censors. Ozu’s Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Japan, 1947) was written in only twelve days and told the story of a homeless boy, shunted between families unwilling to shelter him. Eventually a widow, Otane, reluctantly takes him in (137). Their relationship is bittersweet and the scenes in which she looks for him in the empty city streets are among the most beautifully realized by Ozu throughout his career. Only discreetly, at the end, does it engage with the contemporary realities of Japan as the homeless boy gathers cigarette butts to sell and Otane makes a speech about the selfishness of people in modern society.
The situation was very different in Germany. Its most notorious directors, Riefenstahl and Harlan, had conformed so completely to Nazi ideology that a total break from them needed to be made. The Allies took complete control of the West German film industry for four years, as they did to a lesser degree in Japan, in order to enforce this separation. Some directors were prevented from producing work, while others made bland or merely inoffensive films. The most distinctive produced in the immediate post-war years came from the communist Eastern part of the newly divided Germany. Wolfgang Staudte had been an actor and appeared in Jew Süss (Germany, 1940). He had started directing during the war, but his film, Die Mörder sind unter uns/The Murderers are Amongst Us (German Democratic Republic, 1946), was strongly anti-Nazi. Rejecting Riefenstahl’s bravura but aggrandizing style, he turned instead to one of the last credible German film idioms, 1920s Expressionism, to tell his story. This became one of a small group of productions now known as Trümmerfilm or “rubble films”.
In Italy, 1930s cinema had been more escapist than propagandist, but was still tainted by Mussolini’s fascist ideals. Like the Germans, though not suffering the same censure and professional paralysis, Italian filmmakers had to look for new schemata. Searching for new themes and styles to reflect changing realities, they evolved a different language of cinema.
A series of films between Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (Italy, 1945) and Umberto D (Italy, 1952) were central to this new language. They looked different and the experience of watching them was new. They broke open the parallel universe of closed romantic realism and changed cinema’s sense of what constitutes time and the nature of drama. Responding to the shifting realities around them, they had a profound influence on cinema in Latin America and India, creating the possibility for post-colonial world cinema. Their approach was labelled “neo-realism”, the new realism.
It was not only the realities of Mussolini’s defeat that caused these Italians to rethink filmmaking. Some of the facilities which had been making glossy entertainments, such as the “white telephone” films and the work of Mario Camerini and Alessandro Blasetti, had been damaged in the war and the main studio in Rome, Cinecittà, was being used as a barracks, which forced directors to shoot in part on the streets.
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Ozu’s first post-war film was Record of a Tenement Gentleman, a moving tale of an orphaned boy taken in by a widow. Japan, 1947.
Filmmakers with a moral conscience addressed or expressed what was happening on those streets. The groundwork for their innovations had been laid in the previous decade. In 1935 an innovative film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, was opened, and three important film magazines were launched, including Bianco i Nero. These provided Italian cinema with a think tank and opened it up to Jean Renoir’s 1930s realist work, Eisenstein’s experiments and morally serious American films, such as those made by King Vidor. One of the major neo-realist directors, Luchino Visconti, worked as an assistant to Renoir in Rome on Une Partie de campagne/A Day in the Country (France, 1936) and another, Roberto Rossellini, was greatly influenced by the Frenchman.
The most significant of the neo-realist screenwriters was Cesare Zavattini, a novelist, theoretician and journalist who wrote three of the era’s most influential films, Sciuscia/Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946), Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, Italy 1948) and Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1952). In a 1953 interview Zavattini said, “Before this, if one was thinking over the idea of a film on, say, a strike, one would immediately invent a plot. And the strike itself became only the background to the film. Today … we would describe the strike itself … we have an unlimited trust in things, facts and people.”1 Even allowing for some exaggeration on Zavattini’s part, demolition of the plot was the revolutionary change the neo-realists effected. This is illustrated in Bicycle Thieves, about an unemployed man who has his bicycle, his only chance of getting casual work, stolen (138). Together with his son, he looks for it all over Rome. Eventually, worn out by the search and afraid of not finding even basic work without a bicycle, he tries to steal another for himself. His son witnesses this and the indignity of his father is exposed in this moment. The film’s slide into despair is very moving, but it is not a story in the tradition of mainstream filmmaking, which outlines a tight chain of cause and effect, in which the action of each scene makes the following one inevitable. It is, rather, a string of incidents. At one point the man’s son is nearly run over while crossing a street, an event his father does not see. In a mooted Hollywood remake, David O. Selznick suggested at one point, that Cary Grant might play the role of the father in the film, it is tempting to consider how Hollywood might have dealt with the story: the father would probably have seen the boy’s near injury or found out about it later. He would then have realized how much he loved his son or how he was putting him at risk by taking him to look for the bike in such a busy and dangerous city. In Bicycle Thieves, the incident does not play back into the plot. It is a loose end in pure storytelling terms, but it is in the film because these things happen in real life. It belongs to the world of real people rather than the parallel world of cinema. Zavattini and De Sica were using the opposite of Hitchcock’s condensed approach to story, instead they expanded their narratives to create space within them, a technique described by Thompson and Bordwell as “de-dramatizing” the film.2
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The moment where the theft takes place in Vittorio De Sica’s influential Bicycle Thieves. Italy, 1948.
This is the sea change that neo-realism brought about, and it is not always understood. Conventional film historians argue that the films of De Sica, Visconti and Rossellini (who all started their careers in the Fascist era) used natural lighting extensively and were visually gritty, but Shoeshine or neo-realism’s great precursor, Osessione/Obsession (Visconti, Italy, 1943) are full of stylized lighting. In addition, these films were not always shot on real streets or with non-professional actors as is sometimes claimed. However, the attitude at this moment in cinema was new. Zavattini said “when we have thought out a scene, we feel the need to ‘remain’ in it, because … it can contain so many echoes and reverberations.”3 In a well-known sequence in Umberto D (139), a young housemaid (Maria Pia Casilio) lights a fire in the kitchen, sweeps the floor, relights the fire, looks outside, sprays some ants and starts to make coffee, all in silence. We watch her ordinary chores, of no consequence to the story, while she is alone with her thoughts and routines. The camera remains in the scene. In mainstream Hollywood cinema, such extraneous details would have been rigorously removed, creating “life with the dull bits cut out”, as Hitchcock reputedly said. In many of these Italian films, the apparently dull bits remain and, consequently, time is expanded in them.
A thirty-nine-year-old Roman architect’s son extended Zavattini’s and De Sica’s de-dramatizing ideas to express what he would term, “the pain of our times”. In Rome, Open City, in Paisà/Paisan (Italy, 1946) and in Germania anno zero/Germany Year Zero (Italy–France–Germany, 1947) Roberto R
ossellini told disturbing stories of what Zavattini called “today, today, today”4 (274, see page 186). Resistance fighters are brutally killed by the German occupying forces in Rome; Italian civilians and American soldiers have difficulties living together in Italy after liberation; a young boy poisons himself and his father under the influence of the Nazis. Not only was the human drama shocking, but Rossellini challenged standards of taste in mainstream cinema by showing, almost for the first time, a shot of a toilet. He purposefully failed to show key dramatic moments of high emotion, which flattened the amplitude of his stories. He wrote, “If I mistakenly make a beautiful shot, I cut it out”,5 and by doing so, he removed the reasons, such as drama and visual gloss, why the public bought movie tickets. Rossellini turned 1920s dissident cinema into a national and political film movement although — perhaps unsurprisingly — the rigour of his techniques did not find favour at the box office. He would go on to marry the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman in 1950, and make a series of influential films with her in the 1950s, such as Viaggio in Italia/Voyage to Italy (Italy, 1953), then turn his attention to documentary and historical films.
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A housemaid in Umberto D performs every-day domestic tasks which are not strictly relevant to the plot of the film, but which add to its realism. Such de-dramatization found favour with other serious filmmakers, but was less popular with audiences. Director: Vittorio D Sica. Italy, 1952.
The achievements of Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti and Zavattini seemed like an exciting new start for cinema, but when they were reconsidered at the 1974 Pesaro conference in Italy more than twenty years afterwards, their challenges to the mainstream looked less original. Critics such as Lino Micciche commented that Mussolini was not mentioned in their work and that the films’ music was often operatic, like 1930s Italian cinema. Some critics said that neo-realism continued fascist melodramatic cinema in a different guise and it did not challenge popular beliefs or suggest how society could improve. Luis Buñuel, now working in Mexico, said that “neo-realist reality is partial, official, above all reasonable; but poetry and mystery are lacking in it.”6 Although some of these revaluations carry weight, they do not challenge the fact of neo-realism’s profound worldwide influence, an influence that took several years to manifest itself.
The tone of post-war cinema becomes more varied as it moves further away from the vanquished countries. Many French films told stories of resistance: La Bataille du rail/The Battle of the Rails (France, 1945) was close in spirit to Germany Year Zero. Directed by documentary filmmaker René Clement, it was a detailed recreation of real events, in which resistance members derailed a German troop train. Clement was technical consultant on a stylistically very different film, La Belle et la bête/Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, France, 1946). Cocteau, who was notable among those tolerant of France’s pro-Nazi Vichy regime, had made Le Sang d’un poète/The Blood of a Poet in 1930 and, despite the sixteen-year interval, his new film was as singular and Méliès-like as his first.
After four years with no film releases from Hollywood, Parisian audiences gorged on an influx of American movies. After Gone with the Wind (USA, 1939) there came, in July 1946 alone, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (USA, 1941), John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (USA, 1941), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (USA, 1944), William Wyler’s The Little Foxes (USA, 1941) and his The Best Years of our Lives (USA, 1946). This feast of deep-staged films was a revelation, even in the homeland of Jean Renoir. The critic André Bazin argued that deep staging in such films enabled them to express the real world’s complex realities. He detested what he perceived as naively stylized films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, 1919) and as a Christian and a profoundly moral critic, he likened deep space almost to an act of worship or a genuflection before a transcendentally designed universe. It seemed that Hollywood cinema had begun to gain intellectual credibility in Europe and certain French filmmakers soon used deep staging themselves. For example, a scene from director Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la mer/The Silence of the Sea (France, 1949) was closely modelled on a scene in Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (USA, 1942) which was released in Paris at this time.
Meanwhile in America, one of the implications of deep staging started to be explored – the long-duration shot or long take. This allowed a filmmaker to run shots long enough for the audience to understand the full dramatic geometry of the scene and to stage action at various distances from the lens. The earliest post-war long takes came from an unlikely source, The Clock (USA, 1945), which featured Judy Garland, the star of The Wizard of Oz (USA, 1939). She insisted that her lover (and, from 1945, husband), Vincent Minnelli, with whom she had made the nostalgic musical Meet Me in St Louis, the year before, direct her in this, her first film in which she did not sing. Minnelli, like Mamoulian, had begun his career staging musical theatre on Broadway and wanted the city to be a vivid backdrop to The Clock’s foreground story of a GI romance. He used wider shots, some deeper staging and most significantly, shots of an average duration of nineteen seconds.7 There was more than a touch of Mizoguchi in Minnelli’s flowing style, but it could not compete with Hitchcock’s Rope (USA, 1948) and Under Capricorn (USA, 1949).
Hitchcock went to America in 1939 and made no less than ten films there between 1940 and 1948. He extended the tentative interest, which he had already shown in Britain, in the gulf between the looker and the looked at, the erotic power of objects and the unreliability of the visible world, in Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Spellbound (1945). In this quartet, everyday things such as a painting, a glass of milk, black smoke and creases in a fabric become monsters from deep within the characters’ minds. Parallel to his new psychological investigations, Hitchcock began exploring the formal limits of narrative filmmaking, and Rope was the extreme example of this. He extended Minnelli’s shot durations to the limit of what was technically possible. Rope contained just eleven shots whereas an average film of the time would have had 600–800. Average shot durations were approximately ten seconds, but his lasted ten minutes, the length of a full roll of film, so were sixty times longer. He would later reject this radical approach, calling it “nonsensical”8 as it violated his belief that editing together precisely chosen images is the core technique of empathic cinema. Hitchcock called Rope “pre-edited”, by which he meant that by moving the camera around the film’s single set, he was varying Eisenstein’s idea of editing within the shot.9 This not only satisfied Hitchcock’s need to play with his medium’s techniques, but it also raised the question of what was the suspense effect of longer-held shots. It is not always the case and most people do not notice it explicitly, but as a general rule, the longer a shot is held without a cut, the longer the actors are doing it “for real” without a break, the more absorbing it becomes. Like building a pyramid of playing cards, we can see accumulated achievement and drama in longer shots. Hitchcock’s profound interest in suspense made him a natural for such experiments whereas subsequent filmmakers like Béla Tarr in Hungary and Alexandr Sokurov in Russia would use long takes for more philosophical purposes.
A second offshoot of deep staging were “films noirs”, literally dark films. The stylistic and thematic roots of these are particularly complex and their birth consitutes an intersection in film history – different filmmakers arriving at the same point at a similar time. At least 350 of them were made between 1941 and 1959, the majority produced in the ten years after the Second World War. The image below is from one of the earliest and most influential films noirs, Double Indemnity (USA, 1944).10 The actress and the wall at the far end of the corridor are both in focus. The 1930s deep staging of Renoir, Mizoguchi, Ford, Toland and Welles is the antecedent of this image. The film’s plot has Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance man (centre), falling for Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the attractive wife (left) of one of his clients. Gradually, she convinces him to help her murder her husband and share the life insurance pay-out with her. Meanwhile
, MacMurray’s boss, Barton Keys (Edward G. Robinson), starts to suspect that Stanwyck is the murderess and goes to MacMurray’s apartment to pass on his hunch. If he had witnessed Stanwyck in the apartment this would have implicated MacMurray and clinched the case. So, in this highly suspenseful moment, Stanwyck hides behind MacMurray’s outward-opening door.
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A femme fatale, a weak insurance man and his suspicious boss: Billy Wilder’s staging of a suspenseful moment in one of the first films noirs, Double Indemnity. USA, 1944.
At least six different schemas – including national film styles, literary and visual traditions and individual sensibilities – can be seen in a scene like this. The film’s director, Billy Wilder, was an Austrian-Jewish former gigolo and screenwriter who spent his formative years in Berlin, fled the Nazis in 1933, co-wrote Ninotchka (USA, 1939) for Lubitsch and became one of the most celebrated American directors. Like many émigrés who made important films noirs, such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz and Jacques Tourneur, he loved the freedom and unpretentiousness of America, but was bitterly cynical about its worship of money, and his films expressed an astringent view of his host nation. One important critic calls the attitude of these directors “double estrangement”,11 implying that they are at home neither in Europe nor in the Californian sun. Most films noirs are about such estrangement. Whereas 1930s movies were often sunny in outlook, they picture America as a troubled and ambiguous place. They feature men whose lust for money or women take them beyond the borders of the so-called civilized world. Double Indemnity defines this classically. It begins with MacMurray, an American once holding down a regular job, now bloody and dying, describing his fall from grace with something akin to relish.