Cinema- Concept & Practice

by Edward Dmytryk

  After the split with Kramer, Dmytryk’s career took a varied, but no less prolific, path. The End of the Affair (1955), shot in England and released by Columbia, was a simplified version of Graham Greene’s great novel of Catholic salvation. This “small” black and white film stands in contrast to his other films of the decade that find him embracing new developments in widescreen technology. Between 1954 and 1959, he shot six films in CinemaScope for 20th Century Fox, including two melodramas from 1955, both set in post-War China. The Left Hand of God (1955), reunited Dmytryk with Bogart, and Soldier of Fortune (1955) with Clark Gable and Susan Hayward. There was a remake of The Blue Angel (1959). There were also two “adult” westerns, Broken Lance (1954), the first of two films with Spencer Tracy and first of three with Richard Widmark, and Warlock (1959), also with Widmark, which are standouts from this period. Whereas Broken Lance (a remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1949 gangster melodrama House of Strangers transposed to a western setting) was the more financially and critically successful of the two westerns from this period, Warlock, a box office failure, when seen today is arguably the stronger film.

  Dmytryk had already received producing credit on The Mountain (1956), but he began work on that film fairly late in its pre-production schedule. Warlock, on the other hand, was the first film in which he exercised his production duties from the very beginning of the process, and his firm control over the project is evident. Adapted from Oakley Hall’s 1958 novel of the same name, Warlock eliminates a crucial aspect of Hall’s novel that focused on the labor disputes of silver miners (had it been retained, this could have given the film some suggestive links with So Well Remembered) and instead focuses on the tensions between an ironically positioned “civilized” community and the outlaw forces that threaten to disrupt it. The moral ambiguities in the film are, typically for Dmytryk, played out through a tense conception of exterior and interior spaces and of the tortured movements of the psychologically and physically damaged characters within these spaces.

  The late 1950s are otherwise dominated by two films starring Montgomery Clift, Raintree County (1957), Dmytryk’s only film for MGM, shot by Robert Surtees in the MGM Camera 65 format (the first film to be shot in this process, which later became Ultra Panavision 70), and one of Dmytryk’s favorites, The Young Lions (1958), shot in black and white CinemaScope for Fox. Both were based on long novels, the first by Ross Lockridge, Jr. and the second by Irwin Shaw, and both were published in 1948. If Till the End of Time has unfairly lived in the shadow of The Best Years of Our Lives, Raintree County has suffered a similar fate in relation to another Hollywood Civil War roadshow epic, Gone with the Wind. But the films are quite different in intent, the romantic and often impulsive behavior of the protagonists of Gone with the Wind is replaced in Raintree County by characters either more philosophical (and thus hesitant to take action), or marked by trauma and internalized racial anxiety. The result is a rather more somber epic, where images of fire and burning are central, and shots are dominated by Dmytryk’s use of crowded, widescreen frames, with numerous primary and secondary points of interest. The Young Lions made changes to Shaw’s World War II novel that displeased the author. The most fundamental change was in relation to the German protagonist, a ski instructor (played by Marlon Brando), who in the novel gradually transforms into a Nazi whereas in the film he is a member of the Nazi Party from the very beginning but ethically torn and ambivalent. But such a change is consistent with Dmytryk’s recurring interest in characters facing ethical struggles that are often tied to specific political and historical situations, such struggles ultimately enacted through punishing physical action and confrontations with individuals who embody the forces of oppression.

  By the 1960s though, the dramatic changes in the funding, production and distribution of films in Hollywood were making themselves felt on xiii the nature of Dmytryk’s output. Such films as Walk on the Wild Side (1962), Alvarez Kelly (1966), Anzio (1968), and Shalako (1968), produced under chaotic circumstances, were less-than-happy creative experiences for Dmytryk, although all contain elements (and individual sequences) of interest. In 1964, Dmytryk directed two films produced by Joseph E. Levine for Paramount, both adapted from Harold Robbins novels, Where Love Has Gone (reuniting Dmytryk with Susan Hayward) and The Carpetbaggers. The latter of these, a fictional imagining of the life of Howard Hughes, while critically derided, was a huge commercial success and inspired the ambivalent admiration of Andy Warhol who, reveling in the film’s “plastic” falseness, claimed to have seen The Carpetbaggers multiple times. Two films from this decade, though, stand apart. The first of these is The Reluctant Saint (1962), made for Columbia. A partially fictionalized version of the life of the sixteenth century saint, Joseph of Cupertino, this small, black and white film, shot in Italy and seen by very few people on its initial release, is one of Dmytryk’s most unusual achievements. If in so many other Dmytryk films, the male protagonist uncertainly stumbles through treacherous, dimly lit, and often hostile environments, here he is a childlike innocent whose literal stumbling achieves a saintly comic dimension, culminating in his metaphysical act of levitating, and in which the film ends in a vision of the blinding white light of God.

  The second major film of the decade is Mirage (1965). Working with an original screenplay by Peter Stone, two years after Stone had written Charade for director Stanley Donen, both films are self-conscious attempts to produce a Hitchcockian film, minus the still active Hitchcock. (Mirage was, like all of Hitchcock’s films of this period, made for Universal.) If Charade attempts this exercise by referring to Hitchcock’s lighter, more romantic escapades, such as North by Northwest (1959), Mirage draws upon Hitchcock’s more somber films, in particular Vertigo (1958). Both Vertigo and Mirage link the male protagonist’s trauma to the witnessing of a man falling from a tall building. (Albert Whitlock, who did the special effects for Vertigo, executed the recurring image of a falling man that was very similar to the one he had done for Hitchcock) Particularly memorable in the film is its opening sequence, with its striking use of light and shadow, of a New York skyscraper in which the electricity has suddenly been cut off. The cinematographer, working in black and white, was Joe MacDonald, who had shot numerous films for Dmytryk up to this point and would go on to shoot Alvarez Kelly.

  In the 1970s, Dmytryk’s output dwindled to one final theatrical film, The “Human” Factor (1975) and a TV movie, He Is My Brother (1976). Bluebeard (1972), though, an R-rated sex romp with Richard Burton as the title character, updated to a post-World War I setting, is marked by a tongue-in-cheek humor rare in Dmytryk and by its spirited absorption of various formal tendencies of the period in its use of zooms and fast, elliptical montage. Dmytryk once stated that editing is “the only film craft that is entirely indigenous to the cinema” and in Bluebeard, with its non-linear organization, he seems to be giving it his all in one final (almost) valiant effort in the midst of a rapidly changing cinematic and social landscape. For the remainder of his career, Dmytryk worked in academia teaching film production at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California. In the 1980s, he wrote several textbooks on the art of filmmaking. In 1984 he published On Film Editing, On Screen Directing and On Screen Acting; in 1985 On Screen Writing was published; and in 1988, Cinema: Concept and Practice. During this later phase of his life and career, he also authored two memoirs, It’s a Hell of a Life, But Not a Bad Living (1978) and Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (1996) that chronicles his experiences during the Hollywood Black List era. Edward Dmytryk died in 1999, at the age of 90.

  Introduction

  Cinema: Concept and Practice, published in 1988, was the last of a series of books written by Edward Dmytryk that addressed various fundamentals of filmmaking. Five books preceded it: On Film Editing, On Screen Directing and On Screen Acting in 1984 and On Screen Writing in 1985. In sheer volume, this is an astounding achievement from an American filmmaker, in particular one whose career—first as a film edit
or, then as a director—originates in the traditional Hollywood studio system. The history of cinema has given us numerous examples of filmmakers explicating, in prose form, the nature of their own filmmaking practice and theorizing about the cinema as a whole. Prior to Dmytryk, we have the notable examples of Soviet cinema after the Bolshevik Revolution and of French cinema almost immediately after the emergence of projected motion pictures. Such continuities are notably in short supply in Hollywood during the same period. The ties between commercial filmmaking and industrial modes of production create for the Hollywood that shaped Dmytryk a very different creative atmosphere. Pragmatism (however imaginatively articulated) reigned and major statements from directors on the nature of their craft (if any) were largely confined to the occasional article in a trade journal or in a newspaper or magazine designed for general readers.1 “Before the advent of film schools,” Dmytryk writes in Cinema: Concept and Practice, “most of the terms used by theorists and academicians were quite unknown to the great majority of Hollywood filmmakers.”

  Dmytryk’s entry into academia did not take place until after he had effectively retired from film directing. Whereas Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov could, in the midst of their own productions, find themselves teaching at the Moscow Film School, Dmytryk did not extensively explore similar options in the United States, nor would he have been expected to. The University of Southern California had formed a School of Cinematography as early as 1926, but as Robert Parrish (like Dmytryk, an editor turned director) would later claim, the class he attended there was “taught in a sub-basement at the university” by a “gentle, long-since retired cameraman” of no particular note.2 In Dmytryk’s autobiography, It’s a Hell of a Life, But Not a Bad Living (1978), he writes of his unsalaried chairmanship in an orientation class in film directing at The People’s Educational Center in Los Angeles in the 1940s to which he invited various guest lecturers from the film industry such as George Cukor (for whom he had previously served as a film editor) and Lewis Milestone. This was something of an anomaly for him, though, and he otherwise devoted himself to directing. By the late 1970s, however, the study of cinema in the U.S., both theoretical and practical, had become widespread and courses in editing or directing were part of regular curriculums in a way that would have been unimaginable during the period when Dmytryk began his Hollywood career. Such skills were acquired “on the job” and not through classroom instruction or refined through theoretical essays. One of the great values of Cinema: Concept and Practice is that it shows an artist who now finds himself transitioning from one mode of thought, apprenticeship, and practice of the cinema to another. There are several reasons why this should be of interest.

  By the time of his retirement, Dmytryk had been directing films for over 40 years and some of these, such as Crossfire (1947), The Caine Mutiny (1954), and The Young Lions (1958) were great critical and financial successes. Also by this time, the ongoing fascination with film noir had led to Murder, My Sweet (1944), his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, becoming an essential contribution to the crime and detective genre. Even so, in the critical literature, Dmytryk’s own creative interventions on such projects tended to be downplayed. Dmytryk was not considered to be an auteur. When Andrew Sarris’s influential early text of American auteurism, The American Cinema, was published in 1968, Hollywood directors were ranked by Sarris within various categories relative to their aesthetic value. But Dmytryk did not even receive an entry, let alone a ranking. In 1972, the auteurist British magazine Movie published its own ranking of American and British filmmakers and here Dmytryk was consigned to the fifth category from the top, “Competent or Ambitious.” (It should be noted that Dmytryk is in impressive company here, sharing this ostensibly dubious category with such diverse figures as John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder and William Wyler.)

  Cinema: Concept and Practice can be taken as a final declaration by Dmytryk of his own importance as a filmmaker, articulating a vision that is at once expressive and practical while also displaying a breadth of knowledge about the cinema and its various critical and theoretical figures. Dmytryk cites, among others, Sarris, Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer while also brandishing names of wider cultural significance, such as Henri Matisse and Alfred Loos, Henry Moore and Allan Bloom. Such citations are related to Dmytryk’s concerns about an over -specialization in current cinema practice whereas filmmaking, he feels, should remain focused on a “continuing study of intellectual disciplines that are in no way related to filmmaking techniques.”

  In the current scarcity of significant literature on Dmytryk, Cinema: Concept and Practice provides some insight into not only his own general approach to filmmaking but also into an ethics of filmmaking and one that is not solely tied to the content generated by story material. Dmytryk’s progressive, if not leftist, political views (leading to a brief membership in the Communist party in the 1940s that would eventually contribute to his being interrogated by the House Un-American Activ -ities Committee) are sometimes evident in the scenarios to his films, many of those scenarios written by men whose leftist views also came under investigation by HUAC. But such views are not markedly on display in this book, which more immediately concerns itself with practical matters. “A film,” he declares, “more closely resembles a symphony—which also has a director.” This director presides over (but does not single-handedly create) the film. For example, lighting is “the responsibility of the cinematographer, not the director.” It is up to the director merely to “have a concept of the mood he wishes the film to project,” this concept is then communicated to the cinematographer who “creates.” Nevertheless, the director’s sensibility dominates and that sensibility is articulated through a careful attention to various questions of cinematic form, to craftsmanship. However, the films Dmytryk cites in this book as exemplary are not simply “well made” but are those in which subject matter of great historical and political consequence is tied to meticulous formal construction: Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), Curtiz’s Casablanca (1943), Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982), and Doctor Zhivago (1965), directed by another one-time film editor, David Lean.

  Given the occasion of this re-issue, a more pressing question is whether Cinema: Concept and Practice has ongoing value for the ways that we think about the cinema. And is the book of interest to, and useful for, contemporary filmmakers? David Siegel and Scott McGehee have written that Dmytryk’s Mirage (1965) was a film that they “looked to for guidance” in relation to their own Suture (1993). What they saw in Mirage was a hybrid approach to cinematic form, clearly influenced by post-war European art cinema while remaining attached to more traditional Hollywood. The result is a film that is “modernist, empty, formalist, polished, timidly abstract.”3 Such a tension between classical “fullness” and modernist abstraction, operating with a particular clarity in Mirage, is one that also informs much of Dmytryk’s work. Cinema: Concept and Practice offers guidance on making accomplished, com -mercial narrative films even as the ideas sometimes being offered here (especially when seen within the context of Dmytryk’s own body of work) imply broader possibilities.

  Dmytryk articulates a number of general arguments about what makes a good film good and a bad film bad. Several issues immediately stand out. One is his interest in not simply offering general advice in matters of production but in defining the essential nature of cinema, what it can do as an art form that is unlike other art forms. Here he can be placed in a long line of film theorists and filmmakers, beginning from the earliest days of cinema, who have been concerned with such questions. As in so much film theory, Dmytryk here is concerned not simply with abstract notions of form divorced from their exhibition context but with the thoughts and emotions of spectators that are generated by the film. “Because without the viewer,” he writes, “no film lives—it is merely a long succession of photographs, carrying no meaning or emotion. Its signific
ance can be brought to life only through the empathetic reactions of a viewer’s involvement.” The close-up, such a fundamental discovery of filmmakers during the silent era, is “essential to engage the viewers.” And the close-ups of faces and objects in Murder, My Sweet, Crossfire, or Christ in Concrete/Give Us This Day (1949) achieve an iconic intensity through Dmytryk’s attention to the details within the shot. But what sort of spectator is being posited here and what sorts of involvements are being solicited? The ideal spec -tator for Dmytryk is “the person of average education and under -standing.” Such a spectator, when faced with a film that is attempting to dramatize “complex human emotion, condition, or conflict” may find that “words are often too specialized or ambiguous and the rhetoric too literary.” Such an attitude is indicative of Dmytryk’s connection to Hollywood and to making films that appeal to the widest possible viewer. But we may also see in this “average” viewer of Dmytryk’s the site of other potentials.

  He tells us that “film is not a literary medium” and that “a good director thinks more of images, metaphor, and reaction than he does of words.” This may seem like a surprising statement from a director who spent much of his career doing adaptations of best-selling novels and working with some of Hollywood’s most important screenwriters. For Dmytryk, though, most screenwriters do not understand the basic nature of cinema, and it then becomes a challenge for the director to transform the written text into motion pictures, otherwise the films become “not more than richly illustrated plays.” The paradoxes of finding within literary language analogies to the film image (an issue that greatly concerned Eisenstein) would not appear to interest Dmytryk. And yet he will also acknowledge how, for example, Herman Wouk’s description in his novel The Caine Mutiny of Captain Queeg handling the steel balls while on the witness stand “lends itself to imagery” that he was able to seize upon in making the film version. Even as Dmytryk notes the importance of the facial close-up and the actors’ use of eyes to “reflect fear or express happiness” it is ultimately “only the body” that is able to “shrink back in terror,” or “tremble with delight.” It is a heavily gestural body that we find in Dmytryk. Written or spoken language are no longer inert matter waiting to be transformed by the director but already contain the potential for cinematic images, often embodied through the actor, regardless of the original context and intent of the source.