by Mark Cousins
The film is driven by Holly’s love for his friend Harry. The similarity of these names confuses several characters, allowing the filmmakers to point up the moral differences between them. However, Holly transfers this love to Anna. Greene envisaged a happy ending in which Anna takes Holly’s arm, but Reed wasn’t having this. In one of the most daring final moments in mainstream film history, he directed a deeply staged shot, with Anna walking from the distance towards Holly, who is placed near the camera position (150). When she finally reaches him, she simply walks out of shot, preferring the memory of the rogue Harry to the weak, decent man. This unromantic finale concluded a film which was as rich a conjunction of stylistic schema as its setting was a conjunction of political systems.
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One of the most daring endings in mainstream cinema: a deep-staged shot of Alida Valli walking toward the cinema in The Third Man. UK, 1949.
Reed’s insistence on filming Anna’s final walk in real time, without truncating it, bore the marks of Italian neo-realism. This idea of capturing the texture of life by de-dramatizing it was spreading rapidly. The Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos was born in São Paulo in 1928 and he saw the films of Rossellini and De Sica while studying in Paris in the late 1940s. Their influence was seminal. His first feature, Rio 40 Degrees (Brazil, 1955) (151), combined neo-realist storytelling with slum locations and focused on working-class rather than middle-class people. It was also populist, portraying everyday events, such as football matches and samba classes. Pereira dos Santos can be seen as the father of the Cinema Nôvo or New Cinema movement in Brazil in the 1960s. He said later on in his career that neo-realism was a breakthrough for him because it allowed directors to bypass the main studio-based commercial industry in Brazil and make their own films, “without taking heed of the whole material and economic apparatus”.13 Brazilian New Cinema (see pages 311–13) would join movements in France, Italy, Japan, Eastern Europe, Sweden, Argentina, North Africa, America and India to mount the most profound challenge yet to the studio cinema’s housestyle – closed romantic realism.
India was more prepared for storytelling’s neo-realist revolution. Around its filmmakers lay a vast country, parts of it just as devastated as Italy. The British had withdrawn in 1947 and the country had split between a Hindu central section still named India and two separate Islamic territories to its north-east and north-west, known collectively as Pakistan. Ten million people migrated between the newly-formed countries and an estimated one million people died in the ensuing fighting and hardships. Anti-colonial peace campaigner, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, landlord exploitation was rife and the Indian government’s modernizing aims were clashing with the traditional caste system.
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Pereira dos Santos’ Rio 40 Degrees was a popularist film which featured everyday working-class scenarios. Brazil, 1955.
The Indian People’s Theatre Project had galvanized political leftists and social reformers (see pages 181) and its first film, Dharti Ke Lal/Children of the Earth (K.A. Abbas, 1946) was highly significant. It tells the story of a Bengali family forced from their land, who migrate to Calcutta (152). The father, Ramu, tries and fails to find work and the mother resorts to prostitution. Finally, Ramu’s father challenges the city’s magnetic pull and the Bengali farmers collectivize. Unsurprisingly, Children of the Earth was the first Indian film to attract a large audience in the Soviet Union. It was committed to social change and, in a similar way to contemporaneous Mexican cinema, married this to melodramatic storylines and potent symbols of hope and despair. It was, of course, a musical and was written and directed by Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association founder member Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, India’s equivalent of the Italian neo-realist writer, Zavattini. Five years later, he wrote Awara/The Tramp (1951), which is one of the most famous Indian films of all time. The film’s title is no accident: its director, lead actor and producer, Raj Kapoor, modelled himself on Chaplin’s tramp and, like Chaplin, attempted to marry entertainment and social themes (153). The tramp is accused of murdering a wealthy and famous judge, but is defended in court by the judge’s ward, a young lawyer, Rita. She was played by the twenty-three-year-old Nargis, who would soon become the most famous actress in Indian cinema. The Tramp’s epic love story was nearly three hours long, which is the norm for Indian films. Its utopian musical numbers alternated with scenes which caustically contrasted the lives rich and poor. Initially it was a modest success in India but, like Children of the Earth, it was extremely popular in the Soviet Union, which sent film prints to its troops stationed in the Arctic. Its social idealism even impressed Chairman Mao, whose favourite film it became.
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Potent symbols of hope and despair in the leftist Dharti Ke Lai, which became Chairman Mao’s favourite film. Director: K.A. Abbas. India, 1946.
Abbas was interested in the economics of inequality in India, but Kapoor “blended a western-style romance with the theme of social revolt, and the result was that the unkempt inherited the Earth.”14 Chaplin had achieved this in muted form, but what makes Indian cinema of this period so complex and interesting is how Italian neo-realism further influenced an already potent mix of social and cinematic ideas. In 1952, the year of The Tramp’s release, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Miracolo in Milano/Miracle in Milan (Italy, 1950) were shown at the first International Film Festival of India in Bombay and many of the major directors such as Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen saw them. Ray, India’s most literary and famous director, whose career will be considered in the next chapter, said that Bicycle Thieves “exercised a definitive influence” on his work. If Abbas’ own films, as well as those he wrote for Kapoor and others, showed how affected he was by these, the work of India’s most experimental director to date, Ritwik Ghatak, explicity asserted their influence.
Ghatak came from the radical IPTA heartland of Bengal in north-east India, became the organization’s playwright and then entered the film industry in 1950. Influenced by the neo-realists, he made his first film, Nagarik/The Citizen (1952), about a family forced to move to Calcutta after Bengal’s partition (154). His use of wide-angle lenses was developed in his erratic, brilliant career. Ghatak left work unfinished, bartered film rights for alcohol, hated his producers, raged against the partition of his beloved Bengal and spent bouts in a sanatorium. He said that he was living in a “deceived age” and described partition as India’s “original sin”15. His Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-capped Star (India, 1960) is a major work and the autobiographical Jukti Takko Aar Gappo/Reason, Debate and a Story (India, 1975), in which he plays as an alcoholic intellectual, is one of India’s most stylistically inventive films. Ghatak died aged fifty-one.
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One of the most famous Indian films of all time, Awara was written by Dharti Ke Lal’s Abbas, influenced by Chaplin and produced by its leading actor Raj Kapoor. 1951.
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Above: Nagarik, the first feature by India’s maverick director Ritwik Ghatak, was inspired by the Italian neo-realist films. 1952.
Cuban cinema found – like Brazil and, to a lesser extent, India – that the conditions of its society were better expressed by using neo-realist techniques. Its most famous director, Tomás Guittérez Alea, studied at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in the early 1950s and absorbed neo-realism. His fellow filmmaker Humberto Solas also came under its spell. Brazil, India and Cuba all had governments on the left of the political spectrum. How then did neo-realism fare in a country such as Spain, which had been on the far right since General Franco took power in 1939? It did indeed contribute to filmmaking there, which perhaps underlines the later Pesaro conference’s point that neo-realism wasn’t an inherently leftist film movement. Surcos/Furrows (Spain, 1951), was the first neo-realist film made in Spain. It was set in a slum on the edge of a city, a locale straight out of De Sica. But what was less predictable, was that its director, José Antonia Nieves Conde, was a conservative. His film portrayed the living
conditions of the slums with acute sympathy, but its near-Francoist message was that it was the rush to modernize Spain that caused such social problems. Conde argues that if the peasant family at the centre of the story (155) could hold on to its religious and male-centred values, then so could the rest of Spain. When Bicycle Thieves was released in Madrid, censors forced the following commentary over the bleak closing scene between father and son: “But Antonio wasn’t alone. His little son, Bruno, squeezing his hand, assured him that his future was bright with hope.” Two sentences reverse the film’s message.
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Surcos showed that realist films were not only products of leftist countries such as Brazil, Cuba and India, but could also be made in Franco’s Spain. Director: José Antonio Nieves Conde. 1951.
The most famous Spanish neo-realist, Luis Berlanga, was thirty when he directed Bienvenido Mister Marshall/Welcome Mr Marshall (Spain, 1952) a spiky critique of America’s post-war financial involvement in Europe. Unlike Conde, Berlanga was a leftist. His films are the among the most significant made in Spain at this time. In the mean-time his fellow countryman Luis Buñuel continued his complex cinematic wanderlust. After his surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dali he went to Hollywood in 1938. Following two implausible stints of mainstream American filmmaking at MGM and a period as a film archivist in New York, he travelled to France and then Mexico, where he made Los Olvidados/The Young and the Damned (1950) (156). Perhaps unsurprisingly, cinema’s most distinguished surrealist used dream sequences in this story of young slum delinquents in Mexico City, as if in defiance of the neo-realism he so distrusted. The novelist Octavio Paz wrote, “Buñuel has constructed a film as precise as clockwork, as hallucinating as a dream, as implacable as the silent march of lava. Reality is impossible to endure. That is why men kill and die, love and create.”16
If Paz was right and if “reality is impossible to endure”, then perhaps that is why Buñuel rejected neo-realism’s long, hard stare at events, its ironing-out of drama. In 1951, the year when neo-realism had its great impact in India and Spain, a forty-one-year-old from a Samurai warrior family, Akira Kurosawa, had his film Rashomon (Japan, 1950) presented at the Venice Film Festival, without his knowledge. The film did not accept the stylistic tenents of neo-realism and questioned the very idea of a single social truth, which underpinned the movement. Rashomon caused a sensation, went on to win an Oscar, and popularized Japanese cinema among sophisticated Western audiences, who had hardly heard of Ozu, Naruse or Mizoguchi. In so doing, it became, after film noir in the US and neo-realism in Italy, the third great step forward in the maturation of post-Second World War cinema.
Kurosawa’s earliest ambitions were to be a painter, but after answering an advert, he entered the film industry, becoming a third assistant director to Naruse and then a first assistant to one of the most successful commercial directors in the country, Kajiro Yamamoto. He was greatly influenced by Western filmmakers John Ford, Howard Hawks and Abel Gance. He started directing in 1943 and his first film, Sanshiro Sugata/Judo Saga (Japan, 1943) concerned the clash between a judo fighter and his wise master. It married dynamic Western editing styles and deep staging to an Eastern martial arts action story and had a significant influence on 1950s Hong Kong action cinema.
Rashomon is a twelfth-century tale about a bandit who kills a Samurai and rapes his wife (157). In the resulting court case, the bandit, wife, dead Samurai speaking through a medium and, finally, a woodcutter who found the husband’s body, each recall their version of the event. Their individual accounts contradict each other and none of the first three expresses regret at what has happened. Rashomon was an intellectual puzzle in the manner of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (USA, 1916) made thirty-five years earlier and a stepping-stone to a more ambiguous film about the nature of memory and truth, L’Année Dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France–Italy, 1961). The bandit was played by Toshiro Mifune, who would become an icon for Kurosawa as John Wayne had been for John Ford. Rashomon’s conceptual game-playing no longer takes the viewer by surprise, but what is still genuinely vivid is the film’s sensuousness. The court case is recalled by the woodcutter and others during a downpour of rain; beads of moisture on the characters’ heads are lit like grapes or glasses in Dutch still lifes; nature and the forest gleam in Kazuo Matsuyama’s rich monocrome photography.
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A film “as hallucinating as a dream” – Luis Buñuel’s challenge to neo-realism, Los Olvidados. Mexico, 1950.
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Akira Kurosawa (wearing a hat, centre-right) directiong his exquisite challenge to neo-realism’s idea that the truth about life is singular. Rashomon caused a sensation at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and popularized Japanese cinema in the West. 1950
The social awareness of Kurosawa’s early films (1943–50) such as Stray Dog (Japan, 1949), which is set in real Tokyo neighbourhoods and directly inspired by the realism of The Naked City, was replaced by the experimentalism of Rashomon and Yojimbo (Japan, 1961). The focus of his films became isolated individuals such as Samurai and lonely men, and he took this further than Ford. Although he did not serve in the war, Kurosawa was marked by the tragedies depicted in the newsreels and newspapers and became more interested in the self-sacrificial strain in human nature than in self-preservation. He said that, “Humanity begins the moment we stop being instinctively selfish and start seeing other points of view.” He took Ford’s rich pastoral, individualist schema and added to it the soul-searching of a defeated nation.
This gives the films their strange dignity. “Strange” because Kurosawa made films about action, how and why men fight, for most of his career. His Seven Samurai (Japan, 1954), made three years after Rashomon, was so vividly shot with the most advanced long lenses available, so well edited and its action so brilliantly orchestrated and motivated, that it became one of the most influential films of the 1950s (it was remade in the US as The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges, 1960) and was also a justification for action cinema itself. It was not the only one of his films that was to become a blueprint avidly absorbed by Western directors (it is discussed further on page 221–22). Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as the Italian Western Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars (Italy, 1964) and, more famously, George Lucas adapted many of the elements of The Hidden Fortress (Japan, 1958) for Star Wars (USA, 1977).
Whereas Ozu occupied film’s stylistic classical centre, Kurosawa’s interest in action and loners established him as the most important non-Western director in the Western, hero-centred mode. Despite this, his humanism finally deserted him and as discussed in later chapters, his themes became darker. His films explored themes of despair and he attempted to kill himself. His last works, such as Hachigatsu No Rapusodi/Rhapsody in August (Japan, 1991), seemed thematically exhausted. At the end of his career, Kurosawa turned to the question of the role and effects of colour, like the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet in his last years. He had given up hope about social and human questions, so concentrated on purely aesthetic ones.
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The killing of a samurai by a bandit in Rashomon occasions a court case about the nature of truth in the film. Japan, 1950.
The story now takes us back to Hollywood where it is important to look at a counter-trend to film noir and neo-realism, in some films which were not made by European émigrés. Three epitomize this trend, The Paleface (Norman Z. McLeod, 1948), An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952).
It is no surprise to discover that the Hollywood of Double Indemnity also made effervescent colour comedies with Bob Hope, nor that the same industry that produced the film noir cycle made two of its most escapist musicals, both starring Gene Kelly, at this time. The victors of the Second World War turned away from the rubble, poverty, division and uncertainties of the real world, as well as confronting them, and this was especially the case with its American-born, Anglo-Saxon filmmakers. Danny Kaye in
Wonder Man (Bruce Humberstone, 1945) and Bob Hope in The Paleface (159) are hilariously funny. They are adult versions of Laurel and Hardy, similarly cowardly, unskilled with women and keen to look into the camera. Much of America had not been directly touched by war, so it could happily continue with the business of entertaining itself and, in the case of Hope and Kaye, laughing at the boyishness of men. The latter, who was as graceful and talented a performer as Chaplin, was politically to the left and ended up working for UNICEF. Hope’s routines never took your breath away as Kaye’s did. He was an ordinary Joe with great timing, on the right of the political spectrum.
An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain were the sophisticated colour offspring of Mamoulian’s pioneering early musical, Love Me Tonight (USA, 1932). Both starred an athletic modern dancer and choreographer, the Pittsburgh-born and educated Gene Kelly. Both films were about earlier art forms, French Impressionist painting in the former and silent cinema in the latter. Each one was overseen by Arthur Freed, a classy lyricist and producer who ran a semi-autonomous stable of talents within MGM, not unlike a painter’s atelier. Although producer-led, the Freed Unit was unlike the production sub-sections of some Japanese studios of the 1930s and 1940s. Freed and his team were cosmopolitans and they knew not only Mamoulian’s benchmark film, but also its debt to Réné Clair. They revolutionized the American musical, took it offstage, away from the gothic fantasy world of Love Me Tonight, and in the case of On The Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949) staged some scenes on actual streets in real cities. The huge success of the Archers’ The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1948) in the US, encouraged them to film a ballet finale for An American in Paris costing over half a million dollars17. Singin’ in the Rain was less beholden to other art forms and European ideas. It was American, joyful and infectious.