by Mark Cousins
So complete was Bresson’s rejection of cinema norms that he has a tendency to fall outside film history. However, his uncompromising stance has been extremely influential in some quarters. His films were shown at the Film and Television Film Institute of India in Pune where his anti-expressiveness had a deep impact on the work of 1970s and 1980s Indian director Mani Kaul. The Lodz film school also screened Bresson films and the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski saw them. More recently, the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay claimed that she had Bresson in mind while shooting Ratcatcher (UK, 1999) and Morvern Callar (UK, 2002). His approach is so profoundly contrary to US sensationalist cinema traditions that it is perhaps surprising to find that he has left his most direct mark on American critic, turned director, Paul Schrader. He was so impressed by Pickpocket’s incursion of grace into the physical world that he ended two of his own films, American Gigolo (USA, 1980) and Light Sleeper (USA, 1991) in exactly the same way.
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Writer–director Paul Schrader used visual and thematic ideas from Pickpocket to end his film American Gigolo, in which Richard Gere is the imprisoned Julian Kaye and Lauren Hutton plays girlfriend Michelle Stratton. USA, 1980.
While Bresson was the period’s most stylistically radical French filmmaker, other aspects of French film culture in the 1950s were equally extreme. A particular generation of film critics, writing for the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, advanced arguments that were almost as oppositional as Bresson’s films and had considerably greater effect. In 1956, a protégé of André Bazin, the magazine’s founder, the twenty-four-year-old François Truffaut, wrote, “A Man Escaped seems to me to reduce to nothing a certain number of accepted ideas that governed filmmaking, all the way from script writing to direction.”11 Truffaut (187) was born in Paris, had inattentive parents, left school at fifteen and became obsessed by cinema. He inherited some of the moral force of Bazin’s criticism, but added a new 1950s anger to it. In the same year that France suffered defeat in Indochina, Truffaut wrote a now-famous article, “A Certain tendency in French Cinema” in Cahiers. A series of notes, the piece touched a nerve by denouncing the literary and script-driven prestige films made in his country at that time. Although it mostly focused on the adaptation of French novels to the screen, it pointed an accusing finger at the work of writers Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost and directors Claude Autant-Lara and Jean Delannoy, whose impersonal films were technically glossy, lit in a cold, studio style and represented the cinematic equivalent of the perfectly ironed shirt. These films flew the French flag internationally, won awards, were popular with the middle-classes, but, failed to capture contemporary tension. Unlike Bergman, Fellini or Bresson, they did not ask questions about the nature of human life or cinematic symbolism. Truffaut argued that they had no reason to exist; they were dead.
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François Truffaut on set. His work was to inspire a generation of filmmakers.
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The Red and the Black. France, 1954.
BRITAIN IN THE 1950S
The same criticism could be applied to some of Britain’s films. Out of the more innovative directors, Carol Reed’s 1950s work failed to match the astringency of his earlier movie, The Third Man (1949). This film’s executive producer, Alexander Korda, died in 1956, as had the poetic documentarist, Humphrey Jennings, six years earlier. Powell and Pressburger appeared to have exhausted ideas or subject matter in the late 1940s and dissolved their Archers partnership in 1956. Ealing comedies continued to capture the eccentricity of England and make jibes at the austerity measures of the Attlee government, and Gainsborough studios had scored successes with its melodramas aimed at women. Ealing’s best director, the Scot Alexander Mackendrick, followed in the footsteps of Chaplin and Hitchcock and went to Hollywood, making Sweet Smell of Success (USA) in 1957.
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David Lean, one of the most famous British directors. His work was the antithesis of Truffaut’s.
David Lean’s films were the closest Britain got to the type of filmmaking so detested by Truffaut. He was the dashing English son of an accountant, who climbed cinema’s archetypal career ladder, from tea-boy in 1927 to co-directing his first film fifteen years later. Editing rather than cinematography or scriptwriting was his leg-up into the top job of directing and this may explain his movies’ polish. His black-and-white films from wartime and immediately after, from In Which We Serve (co-directed with playwright, Noël Coward, UK, 1942) to Oliver Twist (UK, 1946) were popular portraits of Englishness on a human scale, uninflected by the expressionism of his colleague, Carol Reed. In 1955, his work began to take a more international perspective, firstly in the moving Summer Madness (USA), about a middle-aged American woman alone in Venice. In the three subsequent decades, his internationalism became something of a trade mark. He directed just five more films, each boldly extending the co-production scale and process which he pioneered: the quintet, The Bridge on the River Kwai ( UK, 1957), Lawrence of Arabia (UK, 1962), Doctor Zhivago (USA, 1965), Ryan’s Daughter (UK, 1970) and A Passage to India (UK, 1984), were grand, expensive productions, proudly upholding the “tradition of quality” in UK filmmaking. Lean was lauded and eventually given a knighthood. He had the most exacting production standards of any British director and inspired two of the most successful 1970s American filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and Francis Coppola.
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In the second phase of his career, David Lean’s cinematic imagination was an epic one. The question remains, however, whether Lawrence of Arabia is as perceptive as his more intimate work. UK, 1962.
However, a comparison with another director who influ-enced these American directors reveals Lean’s shortcomings. Lean was Kurosawa’s contemporary and was born two years before the Japanese director, in 1908. He started directing in 1942, Kurosawa the following year. Both were meticulous craftsmen and liked working on a grand scale and both adapted celebrated English writers, such as Dickens, Shakespeare and E.M. Forster, and were considered great editors. Both went out of fashion in the 1970s. But from The Bridge on the River Kwai onwards, Lean seemed to make landscape shots central to his schema, whereas Kurosawa’s visual starting points were buildings or communities. Both directors were interested in loneliness, but in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, his eponymous hero’s inner life is dwarfed by the vastness of the imagery (190). Kurosawa connected his characters more to his time, by broadening their isolation into the question of self-sacrifice. Though it has been cogently argued that Lean helped rescue widescreen from its “washing line” aesthetic, his imagery became depopulated,12 more like a travelogue and, although Kurosawa also retreated from his central humanism, even when he seemed to have nothing more to say about the human condition he remained interested in pushing cinematic boundaries, experimenting with colour in Kagemusha (Japan, 1980) (see pages 401–2) and on his latest works.
Among the critics who attacked the conformism of Lean’s commercial revival of British cinema were the quartet behind the foundation of a UK film magazine, Sequence (1947–52), which predated Cahiers by four years. These were Lindsay Anderson, Gavin Lambert, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson who studied, unlike Truffaut, at the most famous universities in the land. They railed against middlebrow films such as Lean’s Brief Encounter (UK, 1945) in the mode of Truffaut and the French critics, and found more worth in previously undervalued American filmmakers. Where Bazin, Truffaut and their film critic colleagues Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette celebrated Wyler, Welles, Hawks and Hitchcock, the caustic Anderson focused on the Western director John Ford. Ford was as laconic as Anderson was verbose and in contrast to the American, who was an outdoorsy man’s man, the Englishman was bookish and gay. Yet Anderson understood Ford’s poetics, his nostalgia and feeling for landscape, better than any other critic.
Truffaut, like Rivette and Rohmer, became one of the most significant directors of the 1960s (discussed in Chapter Seven). Anderson in the UK beat them to it by making fierce, socially penetrating documentaries, such as O Dreamland
(UK, 1953) set in an English working-class amusement arcade, and reinventing Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (France, 1933) as a scathing attack on the English public school system in If… (UK, 1968). Lambert also blurred the lines between commentator and filmmaker, assisting and then becoming the lover of Nicholas Ray, director of Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause.
MATURE AMERICAN DIRECTORS
In America, Ford, Welles, Hitchcock and Hawks, the masters who had inspired the French and British critics’ best writing, made their most mature films within a few years of each other. The industry these directors had known from the 1930s was changing fast. Humphrey Bogart, comedian Oliver Hardy and Greed’s director, Von Stroheim died in 1957. There were six thousand drive-in cinemas in the country in 1957, the staples of which were rather tame rock’n’roll, sci-fi and beach movies. No less than sixty-five percent of US films made in 1958 were produced by independent companies and, with the turn of the decade, the subject matter of these became more daring. Drugs, sex and race became the hot new topics in respectable cinema as well as the exploitation pictures of Roger Corman and Russ Meyer. Television threatened cinema and at the same time provided it with new talents and styles. Minnelli, Nicholas Ray and Sirk were making melodramas which captured the rage and tension of these Eisenhower years.
Against this cultural background in which family life defined social norms, The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) concerned isolated middle-aged men and their complex attachments to women. In this era of American history where families were central, not one of these men belonged to one. Anderson did not consider The Searchers to be Ford’s best work, but this is countered by many other critics. The film’s central character, Ethan Edwards, played by the director’s iconic leading man, John Wayne, is so detached from society that he is more associated with the Western landscape or what the film calls “the turning of the earth” (191). He has been alone too long and has almost become inhuman. His search for a niece, kidnapped by Indians, is fired by rage and racism. Ford invented no new schema in The Searchers, but refined his classical style and, influenced by the more troubled psychology of director Anthony Mann’s newer Westerns, deepened the characterization in his work.
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The great scene in John Ford’s The Searchers where, after years of looking for his niece who has been kidnapped by the Comanches and as snow starts to fall, John Wayne’s character says that his search is like “the turning of the earth”. USA, 1956.
Touch of Evil’s lonely man, Hank Quinlan, was played by the now corpulent Welles himself. Quinlan is a lawman on the US–Mexican border but, like Edwards, he takes the law into his own hands, crossing ethnic boundaries. Whereas Ford had pared down his style, Welles, who was still only forty-three when he made Touch of Evil, elaborated his techniques, using innovative and unprecedented longer takes, hand-held cameras, depth staging, zoom lenses and extreme wide-angle filming, which distorted imagery (192). Both directors were portraying civilized society, when things are past their best, the law is rotten and people have lost hope, but Welles chose to overwhelm his audience with a sonic and visual density, almost unique in American cinema. The Searchers ends with Edwards staring out into the timeless landscape, which has become a metaphor for his inner life. Touch of Evil closes with an abject Quinlan lying dead in a dirty canal, casually eulogized by the gypsy prostitute who recalls a time when he was alive.
Vertigo’s main protagonist, Scottie, is as obsessed as Edwards and Quinlan and this leads him also to transgress. He falls in love with a woman who apparently dies, sees another who resembles her and cannot stop himself slowly remaking the second in the image of the first. As discussed in Chapter Five, Hitchcock had been influenced by Freud and surrealism since the 1940s and he based Vertigo on Freud’s theory of socophilia, the sexual desire of looking. Scottie follows the second woman obsessively, the director’s trademark dreamy tracking shots move with him and reflect his snatched glimpses, wonderment and desire. The film is structurally similar to Keaton’s The General (USA, 1926) with its repeated storyline, but whereas Keaton used this structure for comic effect, Hitchcock’s strategy engenders dread. Will Scottie dare ask her to change her hair to look like the first woman’s? Have a grey suit made like hers? Scottie, in effect, wants to sleep with a dead person. Hitchcock had his film designed in pastel colours. Even the make-up and the blue eyes of James Stewart (Scottie) are over-emphasized in a 1950s, artificial way (193). A dream sequence takes this connection between colour and desire about as far as it can go. In the film’s climax Hitchcock tracked forward but zoomed back to ensure that the image stayed constant, so stretching the perspective to approximate Scottie’s own vertigo. This was one of the first times this technique had been used and thereafter it became a staple for depicting disoriented consciousness, in films like Jaws (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1975).
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Curls on the edges of the frame and expressionist lighting – an image as Baroque as those in Lubitsch’s The Mountain Cat. Orson Welles plays Hank Quinlan in his film Touch of Evil. USA, 1958.
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The third of 1950s American cinema’s isolated middle-aged men who are obsessed by women. James Stewart plays Scottie in Alfred Hitchcock’s dreamlike Vertigo. USA, 1958.
John Wayne also played the main character, John Chance, in Rio Bravo – a rather different character from Ethan, Hank or Scottie. Chance is an aimless sheriff holding a town against bandits and, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, he reluctantly assembles a motley crew to help him in his quest. This consists of a drunken sidekick, a toothless old man who fusses like a mother hen and a cocky young singer-gunslinger. The films endures because of the tenderness and good humour expressed between these men and the team’s one woman, Angie Dickinson’s bar room girl. When his drunken sidekick’s hands are too shaky to roll a cigarette, Chance does it for him. In the era that produced Sirk’s melodramas, this bizarre collection of men in a frontier town at the end of the nineteenth century was the closest mature American cinema got to portraying a family. Hawks remained closed romantic realism’s greatest exponent and although it is set in the West, the studio qualities of Rio Bravo are as intact as that of his screwball comedies such as Bringing Up Baby (USA, 1938) or To Have and Have Not (USA, 1944). The world might have changed, but closed romantic realism remained. Hawks even had Dickinson repeat some of Lauren Bacall’s lines from To Have and Have Not. In the Hawksian parallel universe, men and women always spar entertainingly and professionalism, decency and slowness to anger remain the law of the land.
TURBULENCE IN FRANCE
In France, critics continued to agitate at the gates of “tradition of quality” filmmaking. Truffaut wrote, “The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession or a diary. The filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening … The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.”13 It is a sign of how complex film culture had become in the 1950s that these words conjure up Fellini perhaps, or Nichoas Ray or Dutt, but certainly not Truffaut’s other heroes, Bresson or Dreyer. Not even Bergman fulfils this vision of cinema’s future, which, taken literally, would be an impossible task for any filmmaker. French moviemaking reflected the multiplicity of emergent new trends, with its personal and philosophical cinema from outside the mainstream and melodramas swollen with tension from within. In addition to Bresson, Renoir, Cocteau and Carné, there were the thrillers of Henri-Georges Clouzot, such as The Wages of Fear (France, 1953), which would influence Hitchcock, and there were the comedies of Jacques Tati, whose increasing interest in architecture derived from Buster Keaton.
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A former courtesan’s tale is staged as a circus spectacle in Max Ophuls’ dazzling Lola Montes. France–Germany, 1955.
M
ax Ophüls, the German director who had pioneered sensuous tracking shots in a similar vein to Japan’s Mizoguchi and who had influenced Vincente Minnelli in America, made his most significant film, Lola Montes (France, Germany), in 1955. It tells the story of a nineteenth-century courtesan’s long liaison with King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Her story is recounted and orchestrated by a circus ringmaster. The film was shot in widescreen with colour as delicate as Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (Japan) of the previous year. Lola Montes is one of the greatest films in cinema’s history because it adroitly avoids all the traps of vacuity and voyeurism inherent in its subject. It is a grand and sumptuous statement about heartlessness, morally detached from the pathetic life it encircles. Peter Ustinov, who played the film’s circus ringmaster, compared Ophüls’ approach to that of climbing the facade of a great cathedral on which a wristwatch is mounted to help spectators tell the time. The film’s abstract quality impresses in the same way as Hitchcock’s ten-minute takes in Rope (USA, 1948).