by Mark Cousins
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The innovative Polish director Andrzej Wajda employed symbols in his films.
Wajda’s trilogy charted the waning idealism of young Polish anti-Nazis through the onset of communism and its failed promises. The third film’s star, Zbigniew Cybulski (180), became a disoriented symbol of Poland’s disillusioned youth, wearing blue jeans and sunglasses, just as James Dean had done in the US. Like Dean, his premature death (in a train accident in 1967, at the age of forty) increased his iconic power. The 1950s was not the only time Wajda would spearhead Polish film culture. In the 1970s, he was the inspiration for a movement of like-minded Polish directors, “The Cinema of Moral Unrest”. He became a politician in the 1980s and returned to cinema in the 1990s.
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Unlike James Dean, whose image he adapted, Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski’s onscreen rage was not directed against himself. In Ashes and Diamonds he played a Second World War anti-Nazi resistance fighter who questions the reasons for killing. Director: Andrzej Wajda. Poland, 1958.
The Czech animator and puppeteer Jirí Trnka was even more reliant on symbolism than Wajda. His fellow-countryman, J.E. Purkyne, had laid the foundation for the roots of cinema in 1818, arguing that if the human mind perceived still images in rapid succession, they would merge and create a sense of flow between them. Czech and Slovak film production started in 1910 and had some international success in 1919 and 1921. A handful of films were made in 1930 and, after the success of Extase/Ecstasy (Gustav Machaty, Czechoslovakia, 1932) and the construction of the Barrandov studio in 1933, production rose to about forty films by 1939. The Nazi occupation almost ruined the country’s filmmaking, but its national film school, FAMU, was established in Prague after the Second World War and in the wake of the communist takeover in 1948, Czechoslovakia started to specialize in film animation and puppetry; Trnka was the figurehead of this development. He was born in 1912 and, descended from wood carvers on his mother’s side, started his career designing puppets and theatre sets. He made his first feature in 1947. By 1954, he had launched a series of shorts, based on the children’s book The Good Soldier of Schwiek (1921–23) by Jaroslav Hasek (181). Sometimes, Trnka would simply film live puppet movements and at other times he would use the stop-frame methods of the Pole, Wladyslaw Starewicz, whose work contributed to the surrealism detailed in Chapter Three (see page 109). Trnka evolved a dignified way of continuing the Czech folk storytelling tradition when it was considered reactionary by the state. His film Ruka/The Hand (Czechoslovakia, 1965) became one of the most famous symbolic Eastern bloc films. In it, an appealing, unspeaking little puppet (Trnka did not use lip movements in his work) is terrorized by a disembodied hand (182), which clearly represents the oppressive Communist state.
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Czechoslovakia’s leading post-war animator was Jirí Trnka. Above is a scene from his The Good Soldier of Schwiek. 1954.
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Jirí Trnka’s allegorical classic The Hand. Czechoslovakia, 1965.
FOUR ALTERNATIVES TO THE MAINSTREAM: DREYER, BERGMAN, FELLINI AND BRESSON
Most Eastern European directors discussed above used symbols in their films to get round political restrictions, just as their Western forebears, Lubitsch and Hitchcock, had to counteract sexual restrictions. Other 1950s filmmakers followed D.W. Griffith, Von Stroheim, Ozu, Ford, Welles and Kurosawa by using metaphor not necessarily because of political or censorship restrictions, but simply to enrich their work. The Scandinavians Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman were pre-eminent among these.
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Twenty-six years after The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer depicted spirituality even more piously in Ordet (Denmark, 1955). In this scene the standing man orders his sister-in-law to come back from the dead. The subtle halo of white light around the seated man’s head is typical of Dreyer.
The Danish filmmaker Dreyer last appeared in our story in 1929, when his The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1927) represented the apogee of stylistic expansion at that time (see pages 111–112). This austere and religiously intense director made just four feature films in the intervening twenty-six years, but re-enters our narrative with Ordet/The Word (Denmark, 1955), one of the most daring films ever made. Based on a Kaj Munk play, which Dreyer immediately praised for its “astonishing courage”, it tells a tale of a family whose mentally unstable middle son orders his brother’s wife back from the dead and consequently regains his sanity (183). Cinema had seldom been so transcendental. Whereas closed romantic realism assumes its characters to be mundane human beings, similar to its audience but more glamorous, Dreyer’s live in a universe in which a divine spirit is accessible to those with grace or insight. Mehboob’s Mother India is another portrait of a godly world, but its exhilaratingly expressive and colourful qualities contrast with Dreyer’s purity and minimalism. The latter’s camera moves between characters and scenes in a way which implies that it can see the spiritual truth behind everyday events. Like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dreyer’s style is not reducible to an individual, humanistic point of view. But, unlike Wiene’s film, it seems to represent an ideal consciousness, an overseer. This opposed the mid-1950s secular society trends, but influenced the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, and cinema’s other great metaphysicians, Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr and Dreyer’s fellow-Dane, Lars Von Trier. At the end of the latter’s supposedly secular and modern film, Breaking the Waves (Denmark, 1999), heavenly bells appear just as Ordet sees a final incursion of the spirit. Von Trier’s simple comment that such scenes are shot with a “God’s-eye view” could be applied as easily to Dreyer’s film. Examples of such pure expressions of Protestant Christian faith are rare in cinema and often dismissed by critics.
The seminal Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, hit his stride in the mid-1950s. He was born in 1918 into a strict, Lutheran family and his father was pastor to Sweden’s Royal Family. Like other masters of cinematic claustrophobia, such as Hitchcock and Polanski, the young Bergman was sometimes punished by being locked in a closet. Just as Orson Welles had been, he became entranced by theatre aged five, writing plays and mounting puppet shows. He doctored and wrote screenplays in the early 1940s, started directing in 1944, exploring themes of Sweden’s post-war generation gap. Gycklarnas Afton/Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) was his first work to adopt the profound moral seriousness which was to become his signature. It was set in a circus and treated it characters as psychologically driven individuals, almost like marionettes manipulated from above, subject to superhuman forces of fate and spiritual destiny. It was a big hit at home, but it was the international success of his subsequent Sommarnattens Leende/Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) at the Cannes film festival, which established its director as an artist of world cinema.
Bergman’s broader philosophical concerns will be discussed in the next chapter, but mention must be made of Det Sjunde Inseglet/The Seventh Seal (1957) and its place in the emergence of symbolism in 1950s cinema. The film’s origins were unusual and stemmed from Bergman’s boyhood memories of being taken by his father to small countryside churches. Left to explore, he would look at the churches’ medieval paintings, saying later of The Seventh Seal, “My intention has been to portray in the manner of these frescoes. My characters laugh, weep, mourn, are afraid, speak, reply, question. They dread the Plague and Last Judgment. Our anguish is of a different kind, but the words remain the same.” The director conjured up this fearful mediaeval world by telling a story of a Swedish knight who returns from the crusades at the time of the Black Death, meets Death, plays chess with him and eventually succumbs (184). The film starts with shots of a cloudy sky and a quotation from the Book of Revelations, which talks of a time when God was silent for half an hour and when an angel “took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar and cast it into the Earth. And there were voices and thunderings and lightnings and an earthquake.” These images symbolized the threat of nuclear war for Bergman and, like many intellectuals of the period, he had been influenced by the French existent
ial writers of the late 1940s and early 1950s, who had argued that it was no longer possible to believe in God after the Nazi death camps and the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What, The Seventh Seal argued, if God did not exist? Or what if he was “silent for half an hour”? What apocalypse would ensue? Neo-realism was cinema’s sober moral response to the calamities of the Second World War, but a film had never before used extended metaphors to debate the philosophical implications of those calamities. Consequently Bergman, more than any other director since the 1920s, convinced intellectuals around the world that cinema was the equal of literature or theatre.6
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Death (Bengt Ekerot) and the Knight (Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow) play an allegorical game of chess as the Black Death rages around them in Ingmar Bergman’s influential meditation on mortality. The Seventh Seal. Sweden, 1957.
Moving from Protestant Sweden to Catholic Italy, a near-contemporary of Bergman’s was using filmmaking in an equally ambitious way. Federico Fellini was born in north-east Italy in 1920 and whereas Bergman’s first symbolic world was the theatre, Fellini’s inspiration was the circus, running away to one around the age of seven. Where Bergman found in puppetry his core thematic idea that human beings are worked by greater forces, Fellini found in the circus something more aesthetic – visual extravagance, display and larger-than-lifeness. He became a cartoonist and opened a shop in Rome, which was visited by Roberto Rossellini, who was planning a realist film about the city, Roma città aperta/Rome, Open City (Italy, 1945). Fellini collaborated somewhat on this film’s script – as he had done on others in the previous five years – and his first successful work as director, the delightful I Vitelloni/The Loafers (Italy, 1953) is marked by Rossellini’s sense of detail. Based on his early years in Rimini, he followed it with another autobiographical work, La Strada/Road (Italy 1954), which concerned the relationship between a circus strong man and a shy young woman. La Strada shared Bicycle Thieves’ (Italy, 1948) delicate and mythic qualities and was a huge international success.
Fellini cast La Strada’s leading actress, Giulietta Masina (who became his wife), in La Notti di Cabiria/Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1957). For the second time, she plays a lonely, warm-hearted young woman, modelled after Charlie Chaplin’s tramp. She is a prostitute from Rome’s dirt-poor outskirts. The film’s first half is a lively portrait of Masina’s interaction with the other prostitutes, but Fellini’s greatness becomes apparent in the film’s second half. Massina goes to a Catholic shrine, where all around her people are shrieking. Among this frenzy, women climb steps on their knees. Massina asks for the Virgin Mary’s grace, but nothing happens (185). The Seventh Seal portrayed a world in which godliness was on hold while Nights of Cabiria reflected a society in which religion had disappeared and only its kitsch images remained. Three years later, in India, Satyajit Ray would make Devi, which was fuelled by the same anti-religious rage.
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Giulietta Masina (centre) as the prostitute seeking answers in Nights of Cabiria. In this scene where she visits a religious shrine, director Federico Fellini used non-actors (the three women to the right and the two men to the left). Italy, 1957.
After this spiritual disappointment, Massina goes to a cheap theatre on the edge of town in which a magician performs. While being hypnotized she imagines being eighteen again and in love. A man in the audience befriends her. From frenzy to delicatesse. He proposes and takes her to a cliff top, where the crisp, bright Roman light changes and becomes reminiscent of an early movie by Victor Sjöström (see image 69 on page 102). Beads of sweat appear on the man’s head and the audience ask themselves, does he want to push her off? Instead, he takes her money and runs. On the road and alone again, mascara runs down Massina’s cheek. Teenage musicians appear out of nowhere and she smiles slightly. These late scenes, which burst with feeling, have been compared to Chaplin, but Fellini shows more intuition, considering film’s adventurous potential rather than its structure or the limits of closed romantic realism. The directions in which Nights of Cabiria’s last twenty minutes might lead him are unpredictable. The Introduction to this book referred to Fellini’s description of his creativity in the Greek sense of something coming into and taking him over like another human being and Nights of Cabiria’s last sections freewheel as if the director has indeed, been “taken over”. The film was remade as the musical Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, USA, 1969).
La Strada and Nights of Cabiria were not as theoretical as Bergman’s films, but they also explored the human condition and for the time being, used the language of cinema more joyously than his Swedish counterpart. Federico Fellini had even better things to come. His later work would become intensely personal, extravagant representations of his erotic and dream life. So great was his influence on directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, that the term “Fellini-esque” became a staple of film criticism.
Cinema was booming in 1950s France and the most popular films were comedies and big-budget period pieces by directors René Clement, Claude Autant-Lara and Jacques Becker. Jean Renoir was still working, as were Marcel Carné and Jean Cocteau, but eclipsing them all in stylistic rigour was the reclusive director, Robert Bresson, who had started directing in the early 1940s, but whose 1950s films were as austere as those of Dreyer.
Bresson was perhaps the most artistically ambitious of any of the international directors who hit their stride in the mid-1950s. His 1959 film, Pickpocket, contains a sequence where the actor, Martin Lassalle, is filmed in a plain, unadorned manner. The lens used to film the sequence was 50mm (2in), which approximates human vision and its lighting corresponds to flat daylight. The costume is contemporary, exactly what this character might wear on the street. Lassalle’s looks are not those of a matinée idol and there is no expression on his face. The composition is not de-centred, nor does it make use of any emphatic geometry. If Bergman and Fellini filmed life as if it was a theatre and circus respectively, Bresson’s microcosm was that of a prison. Born in France in 1907, he studied Greek, Latin, painting and philosophy, getting his first job in cinema in 1933 and working with Clair in 1939. Between 1950 and 1961, he made four films, each about imprisonment. A young curate reflects on his life, grows ill and dies in Le Journal d’un curé de campagne/Diary of a Country Priest (1950); a Resistance worker escapes a German prison in Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé/A Man Escaped (1956); an unemployed man starts stealing, becomes addicted to it and is imprisoned in Pickpocket; in Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc/The Trial of Joan of Arc (1961), he films the martyr’s captivity, thirty-three years after Dreyer’s adaptation.
As this quartet of prison films is so central to Bresson’s whole career, it is tempting to highlight Bresson’s imprisonment by the Germans during the Second World War. It would, however, be wrong to do so as his work is not driven by the claustrophobia or mental scarring that could result from such an experience. Like Ozu, his films are expressive of no inner chaos or fire. They are the opposite of Fellini, being autobiographically detached and his methods, which result in images like the one in Pickpocket can be explained by this very idea of detachment. Directly echoing Ozu’s sentiments from the early 1930s he said, “I try more and more in my films to suppress what people call plot. Plot is a novelist’s idea.”7 The first sentence in his short book of cinematic commandments, Notes Sur le cinématographe/Notes on Cinematography reads, “Rid myself of the accumulated errors.”8 At the bottom of the same first page, he added, “No actors. No parts. No Staging.” He rejected all the glossy razzmatazz of the Hollywood studios, the sensation and technical thrill of the early years and the subsequent move towards narrative. He rejected cinema’s accumulated achievements and refused all its schemas, except perhaps those of the documentary.
What appalled Bresson so much about cinema’s advances that made him want to burn them off with acid? He hated its attempt to photograph actor’s thoughts and believed that it was wrong to imply that it could capture them on camera. This is plain everywhere in his
films. The character’s lack of facial expression and blankness in Pickpocket was achieved by repetition. Bresson made Lassalle do a scene again and again, until he would reach such a level of boredom that he would perform like a robot. The director also saw this as a process of detachment. “Your models”, he wrote, referring to his actors, “will get used to gestures they have repeated twenty times. The words they have learned with their lips will find, without their minds taking part in this, the inflections and the lilt proper to their true natures.”9 These are Bresson’s italics not mine and make up the simplest and most challenging sentence in his book. It is impossible to know the thoughts of Carl Laemmle’s first movie star, Florence Lawrence; those of Elsie Stoneman in The Birth of a Nation); Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Madame Beudet in Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet; Willy Mckay in Our Hospitality; the brothers in Ozu’s I Was Born But… ; Laurel and Hardy; Chinese star Ruan Lingyu; Snow White; Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind; Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane; Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz; the father in Bicycle Thieves; the boy in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali or Radhu in Mother India.
Not all these films promised direct access to their characters’ feelings and some were more psychologically sophisticated than others, but Bresson wrote that each one was playing it too low and easy with the audience. He not only avoided Hollywood’s heightened emotions and its closed romantic realism, but also distanced himself from them even more than Ozu. The latter had found a classical balance between his characters’ inner lives and a world-view not centred on humans. Bresson stripped away Ozu’s intimate human details, but in so doing, wanted to avoid a technically austere cinema, peopled by unfeeling robots. He aimed to portray the “invisible hand … directing what happens” as Dreyer had done in Ordet. This is where the prison metaphor in Bresson reveals its full richness. According to Bresson, human beings were locked in their own bodies and cinema was the best art form to capture this outward fact. Its very outwardness captured this imprisonment magnificently. Some Christian critics have argued that it is only at Pickpocket’s end and at the imprisonment of Lassalle for his crimes, that he breaks out into “a state of grace” and a full acceptance of the power of God. Imprisoned for his serial thieving, he finally has a moment of insight. He looks at his girlfriend, Jeanne, touches her face with his and then says, “What a strange road I had to take to reach you.” At the time of Pickpocket’s release Bresson explained this: “There must, at a certain point, be a transformation. If not, there is no art.”10