Cinema- Concept & Practice

by Edward Dmytryk

  One of the elements of Mirage that fascinates Siegel and McGehee is that, while the film has a “ridiculously thin plot” and an “awkward story,” the film’s “awesome power” resides in its subtexts and metaphors.4 Somewhat echoing Siegel and McGehee, Martin Scorsese has described how Dmytryk’s remarkable serial killer film The Sniper (1952) has a compelling, documentary-like visual “flatness” and “real sense of place,” co-existing with a screenplay dominated by a rather crude psychological simplicity. The Sniper, to Scorsese, creates a paranoid spectator, the film tapping into collective fears about being “unsafe.”5 Such films as The Sniper and Mirage, for all of the conventions at work in the scenarios, also participate in modernist possibilities of a play with forms, through their often abstract treatment of space, time and light, rather than novelistic density of narrative or characterizations. As with so much of Dmytryk’s cinema, these are films that reflect worlds in a process of change. Such a claim might surprise a director who writes here that “the film must not be pompous, pretentious, pedantic, or overbearing—and it must entertain” or that films made for other filmmakers and film theorists are a “waste of time.” But it should not surprise the critic, theorist or historian of cinema, who is far more accustomed to such apparent contradictions between an artist’s stated intent and the nature of the final result.

  Taking this relationship between image and word a step further, Dmytryk argues that camera set-ups themselves may become a type of language. They are “often the paragraphs, on rare occasions even the chapters, that make up the body of any and every film,” even if such a “language” must still take its cue from the screenplay at hand. However, he will just as quickly retreat from the implications of this strong argument by writing that the shot is “determined by the substance of the scene” and should not overwhelm what is implied in the writing. “It may be an advantage if the shot is also beautiful,” he declares, “but more often than not beauty befogs the essence of reality.” He objects, for example, to Elia Kazan’s framing ideas for the dinner table confrontation between father and son in East of Eden (1955) as “an artful experiment gone wrong,” the canted angles “arbitrary and apparently unmotivated.” One might respond to this objection that the framing in East of Eden, far from being unmotivated, is tied to two closely linked ideas: conveying a shared, tense subjectivity between father and son at this precise moment, while also serving as a rhetorical device on Kazan’s part. Such objections are indications of Dmytryk as a conscientious Hollywood craftsman in which “the mark of a true artist, whether tailor, architect, or filmmaker, is that ‘the seams don’t show.’” On the other hand, he will argue that the limitation of such directors as Frank Capra, George Stevens, or Wyler was their limited interest in the camera’s “versatility.” It was not until the arrival of Orson Welles, for Dmytryk, that the style of the film director began to strongly assert itself. However questionable this might be as historical poetics it is indicative of Dmytryk’s classical/modernist push-and-pull throughout both Cinema: Concept and Practice and throughout his own body of work.6 In the case of the latter, the “seams” often do show and this, as much as their adherence to certain prevailing norms of filmic construction, provides much of their great interest. For example, he will write of film noir lighting (so central to the visual power of Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire) that “one of its greatest advantages is its liberation from any obligation to a realistic on-screen light source, an obligation that can severely limit creative lighting.” The opening sequence of Mirage, set in a Manhattan office skyscraper in which the power has suddenly been shut off, is arguably the most striking (and certainly most extreme) use of this kind of low-key lighting. Described by Siegel and McGehee as “one of the most inspired film openings any of us can remember,” the lighting here is plausibly located in relation to the story situation but, in its expressivity, also exceeds this. It sets the film up for becoming a “Freudian landscape within which the drama will unfold, and turns the city itself into a kind of oversized model of pathological psychology.”7

  If the camera set-up (and its attendant effects in lighting and use of the actor) is one fundamental way in which a film “speaks” to the viewer it is the succession of these shots—the editing of them—that completes the journey for this director who began as an editor. The manipulation of time through editing determines much of Dmytryk’s thinking. He is largely opposed to the sequence shot (long take scenes) because it restricts the “freedom to manipulate space and time.” Concerns with “temporal realism” found in the sequence shot constitute a “reactionary point of view,” particularly since they also involve a “spatial realism.” Alfred Hitchcock’s experiments with the long take in Rope (1948), for example, or Welles’s opening crane shot for Touch of Evil (1958), the latter “showing off the director’s conceptual skill,” hold little interest for Dmytryk. Even as one might counter these arguments of Dmytryk’s by noting that, far from being reactionary, the long take has historically been tied to modernist concerns with duration, these arguments do point the way towards other possibilities for shaping temporality and movement. Instead of the sequence shot, or the conventional, static master shot (“useful for scenes which are completely dominated by dialogue and in which reactions are relatively unimportant”) Dmytryk proposes the “moving master shot.” Such a shot (Crossfire contains a number of these) “achieves movement of the mind through movement of ideas, movement of the film’s characters, and the movement of the xxiii camera.” This is a “powerfully sensory movement which borders on the physical” but which nevertheless allows for options in terms of editing, in particular “when the characters are quite motionless.” Time and again, Dmytryk will insist upon mobility as being central to the very nature of cinema, in contrast to much of what he sees in film criticism and scholarship that draw upon other non-mobile art forms for their theories. In Dmytryk, the cut is often determined by movement within the moving master shot or the cut on movement within otherwise static frames. “In short,” he writes, “cutting demands are imposed by the story, the attendant situation, the complexity of the particular sequence, the characters, the mood, and the pace, not by some esoteric theory.”

  Cinema: Concept and Practice, then, is the product of Dmytryk’s own paradoxical relationship to, on the one hand, commercial film production and, on the other, more recent exposure to theories about the cinema that were produced under radically different circumstances from those that gave birth to his own films. In many ways, though, Dmytryk’s films have been foreshadowing this moment all along, in which a dialogue between the practical and the philosophical are often literally enacted and held in a tense relationship with one another. We may see this with a particular clarity in his underrated Civil War epic Raintree County (1957) with its sharply defined struggles between the world of the intellect and the world of lived, physical experience. The ethical issues at stake in Dmytryk’s cinema are often tied to getting the job done efficiently, even if, as in The Caine Mutiny, such a devotion becomes a paranoid obsession. In Cinema: Concept and Practice, Dmytryk displays his theoretical erudition even as he periodically reminds us that, like Captain Finlay (Robert Young) in Crossfire, he must keep his sights on more practical matters. “I’m not interested in philosophy,” Finlay states. “I’m trying to solve a murder.”

  Joe McElhaney

  Dept. of Film & Media Studies

  Hunter College of the City University of New York

  Notes

  1 See, for example, Richard Koszarski, ed., Hollywood Directors, 1914–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Koszarski assembles a variety of articles written by various directors of the period that address the nature of their craft.

  2 Robert Parrish, “University of Southern California Film School, Hollywood 1926–50,” Projections 4 1/2, John Boorman and Walter Donohue, eds., (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 143.

  3 David Siegel and Scott McGehee, “Mirage,” Boorman and Donohue, p. 272.

  4 Siegel
and McGehee, p. 273.

  5 “Martin Scorsese on The Sniper,” Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I: The Big Heat/5 Against the House/The Lineup/Murder by Contract/The Sniper, DVD, (Sony Pictures, 2009).

  6 Bill Nichols writes: “In many of his films Dmytryk displays much the same sensibility informing the work of Frank Capra: a belief in the virtues of working together, a deep reverence for traditional American ideals and heroes, and a strongly utopian bent that tends to see evil as a localized aberration capable of correction {.} Dmytryk directs with an essentially serious tone that minimizes comedy and seldom romanticizes the agrarian or non-urban ethos so dear to Capra. He also tends to work with more interiorized states of personal feeling that run counter to Capra’s tendency to play conflicts out in public among a diverse, somewhat stereotyped range of characters. But, like Capra, Dmytryk dwells upon the issue of faith—the need for it and the tests it is subjected to.” Bill Nichols, “Edward Dmytryk,” The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume II, Christopher Lyon, ed. (New York: Perigee Books. 1984), p. 143.

  7 Siegel, and McGehee, p. 274.

  1

  The The Collective Collective Noun

  The author and his crew on location for Alvarez Kelly. A successful film is a collaborative effort; sharing the load makes the difficult times easier. Photograph courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

  The more I see of the performing arts the more firmly I am convinced that a precise definition of the ideal “Film” would differentiate it from any of its cousins. With the sole exception of film, the performing arts are appropriately named; in all instances the visible artists in this branch of the arts are performers. Whether they stand before an audience or a television camera to deliver one-liners, “read” a fine author’s golden words, dance a noted choreographer’s pas de deux, or sing an operatic aria or one of tin-pan alley’s clever ditties, they are performing. And in these areas a fine performance can be a gratifying experience. The viewer watches, and listens, and usually appreciates the performer more wholeheartedly than he does those who created the material performed.

  But in films a “performance,” so recognized, rings falsely* As we have already seen, most definitions of film include the words “life” or “reality.” Regardless of whether the filmic technique stems from Eisenstein or Godard or Hollywood, the actors on the screen must “be” the human beings the viewers watch, human beings who, if the film is skillfully made, soon become familiars, and the viewers’ emotional response should increase along with their involvement with those who live on the screen, whose joys and sorrows they feel as their own, whose existence they pity or envy or dream of sharing. Only after the vicarious experience of being part of such lives begins to dissolve into reality will analysis and appreciation of the film’s separate elements, including the art of the actors and the skills of the technicians who made the film, begin to encroach upon the viewers’ attention. At least, that’s how it should be.

  Alas, how often are things the way they ought to be? Ninety-five percent of all film made does not even come close to meeting the standards of an ideal motion picture. But to avoid any possible misunderstanding, let us first exclude all filmmaking which lies outside the scope of this discussion. There are a number of fields that lend themselves to filming; a rather extensive one covers industrial subjects and techniques in their different phases, from explication of manufacturing processes to the selling of the products to agents and dealers. For the consumers of those products and nearly everything else, there are the ubiquitous commercials, without which neither our economy nor our society could now survive. Rock video, designed to sell or display “pop” music, and styled to interest and excite the youthful fans, is a fast-growing newcomer in the television and home VCR fields.

  There are the documentaries, which inform the viewer on the states and activities of society and the environment, and docudramas, which do the same thing with less fact and more fiction, and sometimes do it better. There are children’s cartoons, full length narrative cartoons, puppet films, educational films, “art” or experimental films which range through all the genres known to painting, and a few others, such as film vérité, which the more static media cannot accommodate.

  Then there is the self-defining “narrative” film, a genre which has sired a large family of overlapping subgenres, but which I will separate roughly and arbitrarily into “theatrical” and “cinematic” films.

  Of all the foregoing classifications, excluding only commercials, the public is acquainted primarily with the documentary and the narrative film. Today, the documentary belongs exclusively to television. Although documentarians like Flaherty, Schoedsack, Lorenz, and others have been acknowledged as superior artists whose work attracted sizable audiences, the narrative film unquestionably overshadows documentaries and all the other classifications by a very wide margin. It is primarily this “Film,” whether shot on film, tape, or a combination of both, and shown on a television set or on a theater screen, which will be discussed in the following pages.

  Sixty-five years ago, Jacques Feyder, a French film director, wrote, “Everything can be transferred to the screen, everything expressed through the image. It is possible to adapt an engaging and humane film from the tenth chapter of Montesquieu’s UEspiit des Lois, as well as Nietzsche’s Zoroaster.” This somewhat optimistic analysis was written in the days of the “silents,” but now that the screen speaks it is both much easier and much more difficult to realize Feyder’s dream.

  It is easier because the marriage of sound and image makes it possible to achieve a certain depth of meaning even when dealing with a difficult concept. When dramatizing a complex human emotion, condition, or conflict, words are often too specialized or ambiguous and the rhetoric too literary for the person of average education and understanding.* And isn’t it this person we should be most concerned to reach?

  The versatility of film permits the use of a relatively straightforward verbal language while the accompanying images serve (broadly speaking) to “diagram” the scene’s intellectual or dramatic richness, and to eliminate sources of ambivalence, thus making it accessible to nearly all levels of understanding.

  This aspect of film was brought home to me quite dramatically a few years ago at the California Institute of Technology. Following an annual custom, on Alumni Day a number of scientific lectures were presented on campus, all with the aid of specially made films. The combination of nontechnical language and filmed demonstrations clarified some very abstract scientific concepts and activities for audiences that contained many persons with no scientific background whatever. Not exactly new, but a great advance over the magic-lantem slide show.

  Closer to home, a number of successful narrative films support this point of view. The film Amadeus, beyond its excellent dramatization of character and situation, beyond its presentation of eighteenth century customs, costumes, and behavior, brought the beauty of Mozart’s music and more than a glimpse of some of the technical aspects of his art to millions of viewers, most of them with little knowledge of, or previous interest in, music at this level. The film even impressed a respectable number of those who consider anything beyond punk rock a total waste of time.

  The truth is that this happy combination of words, images, and sounds in the interest of deeper content is not often realized, but that is due to the scanty supply of talented filmmakers rather than to the medium’s inability to deliver. As has frequently been pointed out in the world of computers, theorists excepted, a viewer gets no more out of a medium than that medium’s manipulator puts into it.

  However, Feyder’s dream has also become more difficult of realization because words have once more largely taken the place of effective imagery. Narrative film has been engaged in a tug-of-war with the theater that the theater, through an almost “Chinese” process of absorption, seems to be winning. Although purists continue to maintain that the cinema should be only a medium for images, most of today’s films are no more than richly ill
ustrated plays. Any argument on this point has been made moot by the reality. And though I will try to make a case for the modified cinematic film as the truest and best art of the screen, only the tunnel-minded will rule out any narrative form which adapts itself to film and succeeds in interesting and entertaining the viewer.

  At this point there must be an unambiguous understanding of the word entertainment. The expression is equivocal, but in theatrical terms most people think of it as “something which amuses.” I will always use it in the following senses of the word.