Film and Reality (f

An Historical Survey
Pelican Books
Film and Reality

Roy Armes was born in Norwich in 1937 and educated at

the City of Norwich School and at the Universities of
Bristol and Exeter. He taught modern languages for eight
years, and in 1969 began a three-year spell as Research
Fellow in Film and Television Studies at Hornsey College
of Art, where he has recently been co-opted to oversee the
transformation of the Hornsey Film Unit into a 'viable
educational response to the questionable realities of the
polytechnic and electronic age'. He has lectured
occasionally at various colleges and universities and has
organized courses in film study at the University of Surrey.
He has written articles for a number of magazines,
including film reviews for London Magazine and book
reviews for the Times Educational Supplement. His own
books have been a deliberately varied exploration of
possibilities oflEered within the confines of film criticism:
the historical study {French Cinema since 1946), the
director monograph (The Cinema of Alain Resnais), the
pictorial survey {French Film) and the definition of a
specific film movement (Italian neo-realism in Patterns of
Realism). The present volume and his current project of
an analysis of narrative structure in the modern cinema
over the past decade {The Ambiguous Image) derive from
the same impulse. Roy Armes is married with three
children.
 ROY ARMES

Film and Reality

An Historical Survey

PENGUIN BOOKS
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England
Penguin Books Inc., 7110 Ambassador Road,
Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd,
41 Steelcase Road West, Markham, Ontario, Canada
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd,
182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

First published in Pelican Books 1974

Reprinted 1975

Copyright © Roy Armes. 1974

Made and printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, London. Reading and Fakenham
Set in Intertype Lectura

This book is sold subject to die condition that

it shall by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
not,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without
the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser
 Contents

INTRODUCTION 9

PART ONE FILM REALISM

1. Realism in the Qnema 17
2. Lumiere or Melies? 22
3. Flaherty and the Idea of Documentary 30
4. Vertov and Soviet Cinema 38
5. Sound Documentary 44
6. Stroheim and the Realist Fiction Film 50
7. Renoir's Poetic Realism 56
8. Rossellini and Neo-Realism 64
9. Cinema-Verite 70
10. Realist Film and Television Realism 76

PART TWO FILM ILLUSION

11. The Techniques of Spectacle 85
12. Edison and the Origins of Hollywood 90
13. Griffith and Film Drama 97
14. The Comedians 105
15. The Studio Era 115
16. Disney and Animation 125
17. The Stars 132
18. The Western as a Film Genre 141
19. Hitchcock and Authorship in Hollywood 150
20. Hollywood's Heritage and Influence 159
 PART THREE FILM MODERNISM
21. Film's Space-Time Potential 167
22. Silent Experiment 173
23. Expressionism 179
24. Bufiueland Surrealism 185
25. Post-Disney Animation 191
26. New Narrative Structures 196
27. Resnais and Time 202
28. Film and the Modern Novel 209
29. Godard - The Self-Conscious Film-Maker 215
30. Anger and the Underground 222

Bibliography 229
Index 245
 Introduction

The following pages trace three strands of development through

the eighty or so years of the cinema's history. The aim is to put
the study of film history into some kind and to
of perspective
allow the general reader to find his bearings more easily amid
the voluminous and increasingly fragmentary mass of critical
writings currently available about the cinema. Rather than take
a single aesthetic standpoint, from which the whole of the
cinema's output is to be assessed, this volume adopts a triple
perspective. Film does not have a single unitary potential to
which all of its achievements must be referred, and one of the
main problems of film aesthetics stems from the way in which
the cinema's more influential theorists have usually been
wedded to an exclusive aesthetic approach. One thinks of
Siegfried Kracauer and his concept of the 'redemption of
physical reaUty', or Andr6 Bazin, whose advocacy of the realist
film went hand in hand with a total opposition to the ex-
pressionist film style. The onesidedness deriving from this lack
of academic detachment on the part of film theorists is com-
pounded by the fact that so many of the principal statements
about film's potentialities have come from the film-makers
themselves. The result has been great insight, but a limitation
of perspective: the statements of Vertov or Eisenstein. Rotha
or Zavattini, Pasolini or Robbe-Grillet stand primarily as
justifications of the author's own work and inevitably distort
10 Introduction

alien but equally valid possibilities.The time has come, how-

ever, to attempt to order these divergent points of view and to
see that the cinema's achievements derive not from a single
global premiss, but from a nexus of related but often conflicting
potentialities. This, indeed, is as one might expect, for film-
making is by no means a simple unified activity like photo-
graphy. It has the same possibility of closeness to life, but
possesses in addition a time dimension, new features such
as movement, word and music, and very often a narrative
element as well. It is inevitable therefore that film's potential
should be multiple and that its essence should lie in a synthesis
of many arts and activities. While setting out from possibilities
shared with photography, the cinema ends up closest to a syn-
thetic art form like opera.
For the present analysis we have chosen just three aspects of
this potential for discussion, not because this classification is
seen as being in any way an exhaustive list, but because a tri-
adic model of this kind lets us see clearly the range of the
cinema as an art form. We are concerned with three major
cinematic approaches to reality: the uncovering of the real, the
imitating of the real, and the questioning of the real. From the
first of these stems the evolution of a realist aesthetic and a

whole tradition of works in which the aim is quite simply to

show the world as it is. The artist's prime concern is not to
invent or to imagine, but to place people, objects, settings and
experiences as directly as possible in front of the camera and to
make the audience see. The second tradition - which is almost
as old as the first - discards this direct link with reality and
fastens instead on the fihn's power to offer a resemblance or
imitation of life. The resemblance is used not as an end in itself
but as a means of creating satisfying fictions. It is the cinema's
role as the universal storyteller that gave rise to Hollywood and
prompted the growth of a world-wide entertainment industry.
Since the prime purpose of the cinema is seen here to be the
narrative function, reality in an unmediated form is an irrele-
vance. Verisimilitude is more relevant than realism, but the
power of the medium to sustain an illusion is more important
than either. The third, and perhaps least-developed, tradition is
 Introduction 11

that of using film not to convey surface reality or to sustain a

make-believe but to explore an inner reality beneath the sur-
face. This means using the dreamlike aspects of the film ex-
perience - the darkened room and the bright hypnotic images
- in a way which reduces objects and people to mere ciphers,
deprived of independent existence. Theoretically at least, from
this point of view, the cinema is a most exciting medium for the
expression of modernist ideas: creating its own space-time con-
tinuum, mixing the real and the fictional, objective narration
and subjective viewpoint, and building up a multiple per-
spective in the manner of a cubist painting.
It may be
This triple classification is by no means arbitrary.
argued that it is inherent in the very nature of film as a com-
bination of images and sounds. In his book. Signs and Meaning
in the Cinema, Peter Wollen appHes to the film image as an
element in a system of signs the three categories posited by the
American logician Charles Pierce as the only possible dim-
ensions of a sign: it may be an index, an icon or a symbol. An
index, in this sense, is a sign which is based on a real bond
existing between the object and the sign which represents it

(examples are such signs as weather cocks, sundials, footprints

or, in medical terms, pulse rates). An icon, by contrast, is a sign
which works by virtue of its resemblance, just as a portrait
resembles its sitter, a map the terrain it covers, or a diagram the
function it explains. The third category, the symbol, denotes a
link which is purely conventional. The obvious example of this
is verbal language, where there need be no link in reality or
resemblance between say, the word - dog, Hund, chien - and
the object it The relevance to the cinema of these
represents.
categorizations, which are to be seen as overlapping entities
rather than as watertight compartments, is immediately appar-
ent. The three categories of sign can all be found in a virtually
pure state in certain types of cinematic images. The indexical
mode underlies the reality-bound images of the documentary;
the studio-built exteriors of a Hollywood gangster film have an
iconic dimension; while in a work like Luis Buiiuers Un
Chien andalou the whole imagery has that lack of direct con-
nection with reality (by transcription or resemblance) that is
12 Introduction

characteristic of the symbol. Though Wollen does not go into

this, the same holds sound track. At one ex-
true for the film
treme we have the indexical dimension of the tinema-v6rit&
track recorded live and unscripted, at the other the purely sym-
bolic use of musical accompaniment, while in between lies the
studio-contrived track using real elements artificially blended
to create an iconic resemblance.
Wollen refers briefly to directors whose work as a whole
exempUfies the three types of code: the neo-reahst Roberto
Rossellini (indexical). Hollywood's master of light, Joseph von
Sternberg (iconic) and the greatest theorist of film editing,
Sergei Eisenstein (symboUc). But in fact the categorization can
be taken much farther than this, and the whole development of
the cinema can be seen in terms of a realization of these basic
quaUties of image and sound. If this is so, then an aesthetic is
needed that is flexible enough to apply the appropriate criteria
to each type of film. In each of the three main sections of the
present book we shall therefore be adopting a different stand-
point and examining the relevance of varying critical ap-
proaches. The tradition of realism in the cinema treated in Part
One derives its vaHdity from the uniquely close Unk between
the film image and the reality which it records. The personality
of the film-maker is subordinate to what Kracauer has aptly
termed his permeability to events, and the films produced in
this mode can be measured by the extent to which they con-
form to the requirements of an indexical code. By contrast it is
on the iconic level of resemblance that most of the Hollywood
tradition of film-making - which forms the subject of Part Two
- must be judged. In a narrative film style which demands that
a film-maker should use studio sets to represent his locations,
should embody his characters by means of well-known actors
and deal with stories that may be plausible but are certainly
not true, judgement by such a standard as fidelity to reality
would be absurd. The fihn-maker's vision can only be realized
with the help of a whole team of artificers and the real ques-
tion is whether a film can be powerful while still remaining a
charade or make-believe. In a similar way there are fresh re-
quirements made on the films in Part Three, which are divorced
 Introduction 13

from the claims of realism and resemblance and which set out
to use the cinema to question everyday reality and normal
assumptions about logic and sequence. Here what must be
called into question is the force and coherence of the alterna-
tive reaUty which the film-maker constructs, and his own cre-
ative individuaUty is given far more weight (he is, that is to say,
more of an artist in the traditional, pre-cinematic sense). By
means of this threefold investigation it is hoped to demon-
strate the wealth of the cinema as a medium of expression, a
wealth which lies in its capacity to cope with the contradictory
demands of reality, fiction and modernist ideals.
 PART ONE

Film Realism
 I

Realism in the Cinema

Today, when we are accustomed to the idea of television

images being sent back to us Kve from the surface of the moon,
it is difficult to imagine a world without moving pictures. Yet
even the pre-history of the cinema really goes back no farther
than the latter part of the nineteenth century. The discovery
that the human eye can be deceived into seeing connections
between quite separate images, provided that these follow
each other with sufficient speed, had, it is true, been made
much earUer than this. Revolving toys, such as the zoetrope,
which exploited this persistence of vision had long been popu-
lar. But it was only with the improvement of photography in the

1870s after the introduction of the dry plate process that it

became possible to obtain by photographic means a series of
images suitable for the creation of such an illusion of move-
ment. This is a crucial development, because if we leave aside
the rather special case of the cartoon or animated film, the
cinema as an art of movement is indissolubly linked to the
camera as a means of obtaining the basic images. The cinema
has a potential for realism because, though film projection is a
process of illusion, relying on a defect of the eye (the inability to
differentiate images which follow one another at a rate of six-
teen or twenty-four frames a second), the camera itself does
not cheat. The images it gives are those which record the suc-
cessive stages of a movement as they occurred in real life. For
18 Film Realism

this reason, among the scientists and engineers, showmen and

cranks, businessmen and conjurors who collectively made the
cinema possible in the nineteenth century, a special place of
honour must be reserved for those who used cameras to record
and analyse movement.
One such pioneer was Eadweard Muybridge, a professional
photographer born in Kingston-upon-Thames, who became one
of the nineteenth century's leading authorities on animal loco-
motion. It was in 1877 that he attracted attention by solving
the problem of how a galloping horse places its feet on the
ground. The issue had been debated for centuries but before
Muybridge no one knew the answer, for the movement is too
quick for the human eye to detect unaided. Muybridge himself
needed years of experiment and a complicated battery of
twenty-four still cameras to come up with his answer. Inspired
by Muybridge's example, a French physiologist, Etienne
Marey, developed his own means of recording animal and bird
movement. In the 1880s he developed his 'photographic gun'
which had most of the ingredients of a successful motion-
picture camera. Muybridge and Marey were both concerned
with analysing movement and had no thought of creating a
means of mass entertainment, but through their contact with
the American inventor Thomas Edison both can claim a
considerable influence on the creation of the cinema.
From the very earliest days - beginning with Louis Lumiere
himself - the desire to use the camera to probe and record
aspects of reality has been a constant preoccupation of film-
makers. There is a twofold tradition - with factual documen-
tary and fictional realism running side by side - that extends up
to the present, and those whose work shows a concern with such
problems of film and reaHty are among the very greatest of film
artists. The documentary looks back for its origins to the
period of the First World War and the debuts of the American-
born Robert Flaherty and the Russian Dziga Vertov. The Hnking
of realism and fiction under the influence of the nineteenth cen-
tury naturalist novel occupied much of the energies of D. W.
and Erich von Stroheim, while in the sound era realism
Griffith
became a dominant mode in Europe with the films of Jean
 Realism in the Cinema 19

Renoir in the 1930s and the Italian neo-realist directors - Rob-

erto RosselHni, Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti - in the
1940s. Since then the concern with reaHsm has been an inter-
national one: Akira Kurosawa and Yashiro Ozu in Japan and
Satyajit Ray in India are names that spring immediately to
mind. With new developments in the 1960s which have led to
the manufacture of lightweight, portable equipment for both
filming and sound-recording, we find film-makers evolving
fresh relationships of images and sounds, of documentary and
fiction, as are shown by such forms as cinema-verite and tele-
vision reportage. Accompanying all this creative activity has
been an intense theoretical concern with the problem of the
relationship of the film image and reaUty. If early silent film
theory was chiefly concerned with the dream potential of the
film, the advent of sound in the late 1920s led to more and
more stress being placed on the realist aspect of the cinema.
The documentary film-makers and theorists in Great Britain,
Paul Rotha and John Grierson at their head, stressed the edu-
cative and positively propagandist functions of the documen-
tary film, as opposed to the alleged frivolities of Hollywood.
Italian critics and film-makers - particularly de Sica's in-
separable script- writer, Cesare Zavattini - laid the foundations
of neo-realism in the early 1940s and drew the lessons to be
learned from it in the 1950s. In France, Andre Bazin questioned
the view inherited from the silent theorists that the essence of
the cinema as an art form lies in the editing or montage, and
showed that Renoir and Rossellini, Orson Welles and William
Wyler were all part of the same realist tradition. In the USA
Siegfried Kracauer attempted in his book. Theory of Film, to
deduce a whole aesthetic of the cinema from the realist func-
tions shared by film and photography.
It is easy to see whythe cinema concerns itself with being
realistic. The camera is a unique instrument for capturing the
surface detail of life. It can show faces, streets, landscapes,
human groups and activities as well as tiny quirks of behaviour,
all with great power. Life itself is so engrossing on this level
that the material can never be exhausted. Film-makers will
continue to be born who want to show life as it is, just as there
20 FUm Realism

will no doubt always be painters who are totally absorbed in

painting the human face or the rural landscape.
Yet as a way of looking at life realism in this sense does have
its Umitations. The surface of life is fascinating but all sorts of
things which are equally important happen in secret, in our
minds and imaginings. The best realist films tend to be made
when there natural drama in the happenings of the time - in
is

Italy at the end of the Second World War, for example, or in

Soviet Russia after the Revolution.If this natural drama is pre-

sent, enough for the fibn-maker to record it honestly and

it is

directly. But this cannot be regarded as the sole aim of the

dnema, which can fulfil other equally important functions too.
Life needs to be interpreted as well as simply recorded
and means that other elements may, and indeed must, be
this
brought into play: spectacle and irony, dream and imagination.
The cinema is an entertainment that takes us out of ourselves
just as much as it is a factual record of our lives; it can concern
itself with our dreams as well as it can portray our social prob-
lems. Audiences certainly feel this, and they turn out in greater
numbers to watch a musical or a western than to see a realistic
film about workers or fishermen. The realist film-maker or
documentarist continually finds himself at odds with the audi-
ence he wishes to meet, and directors who make studies of
social problems in their own countries frequently achieve a
greater success with audiences abroad. It is not that such audi-
ences have a greater interest in realism. It is simply that there
is an added exotic element in the sight of a Sicilian fisherman

or an Indian peasant for a spectator who has not visited those

countries.
ReaUsm in the cinema is just one way of looking at life, one
style among several. The discipUne the film-maker imposes on
himself and the social issues his films inevitably raise make it a
very valuable form, but a western or a musical is just as much a
part of the cinema as a whole. On the other hand, realism is
perhaps the most lasting of all trends in the dnema. The prob-
lem of the realist fictional film - how to link the recording of
life (which is not art) with the creation of a story (which is

not real) - is one that can never be exhausted and will always
 Realism in the Cinema 21

provoke new ideas. Certainly, it is true to say that many a

modest little film that is honest and straightforward has a

better chance of survival than big spectacles made with a great

deal of money and world-famous stars. Realism suits the
cinema because the camera is merciless at exposing pretence
and fraud. If you wish to put on film actors in seventeenth-
century costumes and settings supposed to be the palaces of
the king of France, then you need to be very skilful indeed.
Otherwise, in a few years, when the gloss has worn off, audi-
ences looking at your film will see not what you pretend - that
this is the court of Louis XIV - but what you actually show -
actors in wigs and funny costumes gesticulating in front of
cardboard sets.
 2

Lumiere or Melies

The cinema differs from all the older arts in the amount we
know about its origins. To investigate the origins of the cinema
and the twin impulses of realism and spectacle we do not need
to look into antiquity or ponder the sayings of Greek phil-
osophers. We have only to look at the work and careers of
two Frenchmen, both sons of well-to-do manufacturers, who
together laid the basis of the French cinema and, in a very real
sense, of film as we know it today. The two men are Louis
Lumiere and Georges Melies. It was Lumiere who in the 1890s
drew on the work of pioneer inventors and scientists to perfect
his own device which he called the cinematograph. He was the
man behind the first showing of projected films to a paying
public on 28 December 1895 at the so-called 'Indian Room',
situated below the Grand Cafe at No. 14 Boulevard des Cap-
ucines in Paris. Though today we look back on this date as that
of the birth of the cinema, it hardly seemed that important at
the time. There was no prior advertising in the press and
Lumiere himself did not even bother to attend the first show-
ing. He remained behind in Lyon, attending to what at the time
seemed more vital, namely the large factory producing photo-
graphic materials which he ran with his elder brother, Auguste.
Louis Lumiere's contribution to the engineering side of the
cinema is quite small- he merely devised a way of synchron-
izing the shutter movement of the camera with the movement
 "^-^7^

Lumiere or Mdits 23

of the strip of photographic film - and if he had done no more

than this, he would merit little more than a footnote in the
books of film history. His real importance lies elsewhere and is
twofold. In the first place, he established the cinema as an
industry. His cinematograph was tough, precise and reliable
and he had the business sense needed to exploit it inter-
nationally for ten years. The second reason for his importance
is that from the beginning he saw the cinema as a way of

recording real life in movement, so that his films constitute the

very first examples of realism in the cinema.
The programme which so excited audiences in 1895 lasted
about half-an-hour and comprised a dozen or so little films, all
shot, developed and printed by Louis Lumiere himself, who was
much too shrewd to allow his invention to get into other hands
before he had had time to exploit it himself. Each film lasted
only a minute, the length being determined by the size of the
reel of film with which the cinematograph (used as both
camera and projector) could cope. By the time of the first
showing in December 1895 Lumiere had made about fifty tiny
films and, as no records were kept, we do not know which of
these were shown in that initial programme. But we can get a
very clear idea of the possibilities which he saw in the device
he had invented. From the beginning the keynote was the
recording of everyday occurrences. The very first film he made
showed workers leaving the Lumiere factory in Lyon and was
shot from the window of the house opposite. The workers who
stream through the gates are totally unaware of the fact that
they are being photographed (the first 'candid camera' shots in
fact) and the film ends with the gates being shut. Many of
Lumiere's films showed official or public events: a congress of
photographers disembarking after an excursion on the river, a
prince or head of state arriving for a reception, street enter-
tainers performing, or trams and carriages moving to and fro.
Other early films showed scenes of family life: Lumiere's father
playing cards with friends and his brother Auguste helping his
wife to feed the baby. These impressed spectators by the
details which to us seem trivial - the wind moving the leaves in
the trees or figures in the background of a street scene bustling
24 Film Realism

about. Still more spectacular - for audiences

other films were
of 1895 at least. Lumiere impressed those who had never seen
the sea by filming boats leaving harbour and waves breaking
on the shore. Even more striking were the films of trains enter-
ing a station. So powerful was the impact of such scenes that
many members of the audience are said to have dived beneath
the seats for safety.
Some opened up new and unexpected pos-
of Lumiere's films
sibilities which were to explore. For instance, he
his successors
filmed a very innocuous scene of workmen knocking down a
wall. A not particularly exciting occurrence. But as soon as this
happened to be projected in reverse, the illusion of something
totally magical was given. A wall rose up from the dust and
pieced itself together in a way that defied all the natural laws
as we know them, a seeming miracle. Another early film
showed a gardener watering plants. A naughty boy creeps up
behind him, steps on the hose, and then releases his foot at just
the right moment to drench the gardener. Here is the origin of
all those comedy films which delighted spectators of the silent

cinema - there is even a remote ancestor of the classic chase

sequence, as the gardener pursues and punishes the boy. This
was obviously among the most popular of the Lumiere films,
for it was illustrated on one of the first cinematograph posters.
But Lumiere himself saw little interest in the possibilities of
magic and story-telling which proved so vital to the growth of
the cinema as an art and an industry.
For ten years, from 1895 to 1905, the Lumiere brothers ex-
ploited Louis's invention all over the world. Representatives
were sent to the major cities of Europe and to some Eastern
countries to arrange showings of the Lumiere programmes and
also to send back to Paris shots of typical scenes. In this way
Lumiere built up a catalogue of well over a thousand items,
with subjects ranging from bull-fighters entering the arena in
Spain to negro dancers entertaining the crowds in London,
from coolies toiling in Saigon to processions in Rome or Stock-
holm. For us today, the Lumiere collection of films, which he
gave to the French film museum, the Cinematheque, two years
before his death in 1948, serves as a fascinating storehouse of
 Lumxhre or Milits 25

history. It gives us the exact look of hfe at the turn of the

century, the fashions of dress and the forms of transport. It
adds to what we can learn from books or still photographs the
very rhythm of life in those early days when the horse had not
yet been replaced by the motorcar and when a man's job and
place in society were inmiediately apparent from the clothes
he wore.
Limii^re's work has strict limitations. He was content with
films lasting no more than a minute, taken with a camera
rigidly fixed at some appropriate point. The camera rarely
moves in films shot by LumiSre or by one of his employees, and
then only when it has been placed in some moving vehicle - a
gondola floating down the Grand Canal in Venice or a train
entering Brussels station. Otherwise the camera remains quite
still and only the Ufe around it is animated. Lumifere seems

never to have considered whether greater impact could be

achieved by joining several shots together to make a more
complicated work, and the simpUcity of his films is both their
strength and weakness. They are superbly photographed but
fragmentary, tiny but absolutely true. But, in contrast to the
peepshows that preceded them, Lumiere's films gave the
images their real dimension and a sense of vitality. His human
figures were more than hfe-size, and he could capture the flow
of life, crowds and busy streets, trains and rivers. In the form
that Lumi^re gave it, die film camera could easily be carried
around, and the operator could work with the same freedom as
the still photographer, going out to meet life and to investigate
the people and scenes around him.
We can put the LumiSre style of realism into perspective if
we contrast his work with that of his contemporary, Georges
M61i6s^ who was one of those invited to the first demonstration
of the cinematograph. M^li^s - magician, illusionist and direc-
tor of the Robert Houdin theatre - offered to buy Lumiere's
camera for ten thousand francs that very first night, but his
offer was it cost him ten times
naturally refused. In the event,
that sum was in a position to go into business as a
before he
film-maker. His work on the stage, which had involved the use
of magic lanterns and special lighting effects, put him in a
26 Film Realism

position to see quite different potentialities in the cinemato-

graph - ones undreamed of by the sober businessman Lumiere
- and he it was who first added the dimension of spectacle. He
began, like all the first film-makers, by simply imitating
Lumiere, but filming real life in this way could not satisfy a
conjuror for long. The legend - fostered by Melies himself - is
that one day while he was filming on the Place de TOpera in
jammed in his rather primitive camera. It took
Paris, the film
him a few minutes to get the machine working again and then
he carried on filming. When he developed this film he found
that something marvellous had happened: a bus was suddenly
transformed into a hearse, and men into women, as if by magic.
Whether this is merely a legend is impossible to say. What is
certain, however, is that Melius soon made himself familiar
with a wide variety of trick effects. In 1897 too, in the grounds
of his property at Montreuil-sous-Bois, he built the first genuine
film studio, a building some twenty feet by fifty. This was no
doubt for him the equivalent of the special stage of the Robert
Houdin theatre, where he had everything needed to help him
devise his tricks and spectacles for the public. The construction
of such a studio at a time when filming was customarily carried
out in the open air typifies Melies's concern to create a world
that obeyed his own rules, not those of everyday hfe.
Melies made films of every possible kind. In his Montreuil
studio he happily imitated real-life events - Indian mutinies,
American intervention in the Philippines, a volcanic eruption in
Martinique. There was no real attempt to cheat the pubhc, for
the day of the on-the-spot eye-witness reporter had not yet
arrived. For Melius, and no doubt his audience, such films -
best known of which were The Dreyfus Affair and The Corona-
tion of Edward Vll - were merely the extension of the drawings
and engravings that regularly appeared in newspapers to illus-
trate current events. Melies also made advertising films on sub-
jects ranging from mustard to corsets. All were gay, burlesque
little films. To sell hats, he showed live rabbits put into a ma-

chine which promptly turned out a vast quantity of new hats.

Then the procedure was reversed and the hats were put in to
produce .live rabbits. Today, when we are so concerned with
. .
 Lumihre or Mdies 27

the morality of advertising, it is amusing to learn that mustard

consumed with such relish by MeHes's characters (and their
dog) was in fact chocolate cream.
M61ies's better-known short trick films use the processes of
acceleration and slow motion. These effects were easy to
obtain then, when the camera was cranked by hand. The
camera operator just had to turn the handle more slowly or
more quickly during the shooting for the opposite effect to be
given during projection. He also used photographic tricks like
substitution (stopping the camera, making a change and then
carrying on with the shooting), superimposition (printing two
or more shots one on top of the other) and dissolves (fading
one scene out and bringing another into view), as well as the
whole gadgetry of the theatre of illusion. Films like The Con-
juring Away of a Lady at Robert Houdin Theatre (1896), the re-
production of a stage illusion, show his evident delight in the
trickery of film. Even more striking are the films such as The
Man with the Heads (1898), The One-Man Orchestra (1900) or
The Melomaniac (1903) in which he duplicates himself or
juggles with hisown head. But perhaps the most famous trick of
this type is The Man with the India-Rubber Head (1902), in
which a mad scientist removes his head and amuses himself by
blowing it up like a balloon. Then his assistant takes over, but
he blows too hard and the film ends with an explosion. Tricks
like these involve skilful manipulation of film and, in some
cases, complicated machinery. But, strangely enough, Melies
never makes his camera move - to enlarge the head, he brought
ittowards the camera, instead of moving the camera in to it.
These films show clearly Meli^s's inventiveness, but the full
range of his imagination is best seen in his longer fantasies
where he makes a unique personal blend of elements drawn
from the Brothers Grimm, Jules Verne and pantomime. He
made versions of fairy tales like Cinderella, Bluebeard, Aladdin
and many others. He also achieved world fame with his films of
fantastic journeys: A Trip to theMoon (1902), TheVoy age across
the Impossible (1904) and The Conquest of the Pole (1912).
These films are crammed with all the creatures of his imagina-
tion - mad professors and gesticulating scientists, comic snakes
28 Film Realism

and friendly monsters, prandng acrobatic devils who appear

from nowhere and vanish again in a puff of smoke, and rows
of plump chorus girls continually marching to and fro in
unison, like Edwardian postcards brought to life. The moon is
depicted as a smiUng face (until the space ship lands in one eye)
and the stars are pretty girls from the Chatelet theatre swinging
on ropes or peering through holes in the backcloth of a painted
sky.
Melies's films have a great warmth and a humour quite with-
out vulgarity. There is a bustling sense of life in them and the
tricks and fantasies are still more striking in the hand-coloured
versions which Melies also prepared (at double the price of
black and white). Though he planned his films in great detail,
he told his stories without need for titles giving dialogue or
explanation. For a while he maintained an enormous success
but ultimately, as with all the great pioneers, the limitations of
a style that had once been original, even revolutionary, became
clear as the cinema progressed. The very theatrical quality that
had made his films such an advance on Lumi^re's quickly
dated, and a style that had introduced spectacle to the cinema
no longer seemed spectacular. For the space which M61ies used
in all his films was the tiny set in the Montreuil studio, from
which he hardly budged in his later years. In front of this set -
in the equivalent of the best seat in the stalls - was planted the
camera, a cumbersome device, so noisy that he called it his
'coffee grinder' or 'machine gun'. Except for special effects he
never varied the distance between camera and actors, just as he
always built his stories in a series of complete scenes or
tableaux. The creative use of the camera to take the audience
into a scene and create a new sense of space was quite foreign
to him.
Georges M61i6s was more than just a pioneer overtaken by
developments in an art he helped to create. Louis Lumi^re's
work looks forward, not to the fiction feature film, but to the
documentary. It is linked with contemporary cin^ma-verite.
studies of real happenings -and, in spirit at least, with the 8 mm.
home movies in which an increasing number of people record
the everyday events in their lives and homes. But it is Melies
 Lumvtre or Melius 29

who is the first true artist of the cinema and anticipates the

complex world of screen fiction. In contrast to Lumi^re he saw

the cinema as a kind of blend of all the arts, and if he did not
realize the full power of the camera and the editing process, his
work nevertheless opens the way for Hollywood and the role of
film as a major medium of mass entertainment. If we couple
the names of Lumi^re and M^lies we get an idea of the enor-
mous range of possibilities wWch the cinema offered even as
early as 1900. It is between the two poles of the sober record-
ing of Hfe and the exuberant use of imaginative spectacle that
virtually all film-making has found its place. The emphasis con-
tinually changes, but the duality remains and each new director
has to make his own fusion of Lumi^re and M61ies, of real life
and fantasy.
 3
Flaherty and the Idea of
Documentary

The term documentary is capable of many interpretations for

which deal with facts as opposed
really it covers all those films
to the usually longer films that are works of fiction. This does
not mean that documentary is limited to films with titles like
Housing in Neiv Zealand or Precise Measurements for Engin-
eers. Indeed, nothing could be farther from drab everyday re-
ality than the work of one of the originators of documentary,
Robert Flaherty. Born in Michigan in 1884, the son of a mining
engineer, Flaherty had an untroubled childhood up to the age
of nine, when a slump ruined his family and sparked off a riot
among the workers they employed. This drove his father to
seek his fortune in the North, in Canada, and as a result be-
tween the age of tw^elve and fourteen Flaherty had the sort of
lifemany boys of that age dream of. He stayed in a remote
mining camp and sometimes set foot where no white man had
been before. He also came into contact with the Indians who
gave him presents of mocassins and Indian garb, invited him
into their tepees and taught him how to hunt. He never had
much formal education though at one time he did briefly and
unsuccessfully attend a mining college. What he did acquire
instead during these years was much that was to influence his
work: a respect for primitive ways of life, a taste for
later film
adventure (which was increased by his reading of Fenimore
Cooper and R. M. Ballantyne) and the ability to live rough. He
 Flaherty and the Idea of Documentary 31

had few qualifications for a regular career and spent several

years of prospecting before he was commissioned to undertake
a major expedition. Then, at the age of twenty-six, he was sent
to search for iron ore on the islands off the east coast of Hud-
son Bay.
In the course of the next few years Flaherty made several
expeditions in north-east Canada, and it was on his third trip

that, at the suggestion of his employer, he took with him a film

camera. He took his first shots in Baffin Land in 1913 but it was
not until 1916 that he began filming in earnest. The Eskimos
were more than just a subject for Flaherty. He was deeply
influenced by the experience of living among these people who
were daily confronted by the possibility of death, yet continued
to display great cheerfulness and nobility. He always acknowl-
edged his debt to them, admitting that no white man could
survive without Eskimo help in the North. He always sought to
involve them in his film-making, not just as his assistants
but
as co-authors as it has even been suggested that his
were. It

approach to film-making, which is very different from that of

most feature film-makers, is in fact very like that of the Eskimo
to his art. Eskimo carvers do not try to impose a shape - say
that of a seal - on a piece of ivory. Their aim is to uncover or
reveal the shape that is already within the material. Flaherty
always tried to do something like this in his films, to allow
them to grow naturally out of his experience of the people and
the setting. To begin with, however, Flaherty had to face up to
some disappointment. He returned from the North in 1916
with about seventy thousand feet of film, that is about sev-
enteen-and-a-half hours' viewing at silent speed. This he began
to edit slowly and patiently. Now there was one thing about
early nitrate film that all who used it had to admit was a draw-
back - it was very inflammable. Flaherty knew this as well as
anyone but one day he was careless. He dropped a cigarette
on to the film he was editing and the whole seventy thousand
feet went up in flames.
This sort of disaster would surely have ended the film career of
most people, but not Robert Flaherty. He was not a man to get dis-
couraged. Viewing the one print of the film he still possessed
32 Film Realism

(from which it was not possible at the time to print other

copies) he came to the conclusion that it was really no loss.

The film would have been disjointed and boring and so he
decided to remake it, this time so as to show a year in the life
of an Eskimo family. It was not until 1920 that he had found a
backer - the fur company of Reveillon Fr^res - and could go
north again. He not only took two cameras, he had also de-
cided to develop, print and project his film during the shooting,
so he needed the material for this too. Filming began at Port
Harrison on the Hudson Bay and Flaherty chose his actors:
Nanook and three younger men together with their wives, chil-
dren and dogs* For them, of course, the whole idea of a film
was unbelievable. We tend to forget that we have to learn to
read a picture or a film just as we have to learn to read a book.
The Eskimos were at first unable to do this. Shown a photo-
graph of themselves they used to look at it v^dthout under-
standing, often holding it upside down initially. Similarly, when
Flaherty showed the first scenes of his film to them, they did
not understand. They looked at the Nanook on the screen and
the Nanook present in the audience; they looked at the screen
but also at the projector, the source of the light. But when
the shots of the walrus hunt began they became involved
and shouted encouragement to Nanook. Flaherty saw the
showing of such scenes as a vital part of the whole project, but
one which caused many difficulties. To print his fihns he had to
use daylight as his light source (because the electricity was too
unreliable) and to wash it he had to have water brought in
barrels from a hole chipped through six feet of ice and con-
tinually cleared of the ice that formed on the top as he
worked.
Though he was concerned to record the real Eskimo life,
what he filmed. Nanook and his com-
Flaherty always staged
panions had been in contact with the trading post and now no
longer wore genuine Eskimo clothes. So Flaherty went to a
great deal of trouble and expense finding for them *real' clothes
of the kind they had discarded. For his film interiors Flaherty
could not use a normal twelve-foot diameter igloo, so Nanook
spent several days building him a special larger one. Similarly,
 Flaherty and the Idea of Documentary 33

the hunting had to be carefully arranged, with the real idea

being not that Nanook should catch a walrus, but that Flaherty
should get an exciting piece of film. For this reason documen-
tary as practised by Flaherty can never mean a scientific and
objective recording, it is rather a sort of game. The Eskimos
pretended they were living their normal lives, but in fact
Flaherty's arrival totally disrupted their way of Uving. Because
so much of their time was taken up with the film, he had to feed
and support them. Perhaps it is because of this disruption that
so many of the Eskimos he came into contact with suffered
later. For instance, at the very time when, two years later, his
face and name were becoming known throughout the world,
Nanook himself died of starvation.
In 1922, when Nanook of the North was complete, Flaherty
had great because it was
difficulty in finding a distributor for it,

so different from anything that had been done before. Eventu-

ally, by packing the preview audience vdth his friends who

applauded the best parts of the fihn, he sold it to Pathe. De-

spite his trick, the film proved to be a big success, particularly
inEurope and from now on Flaherty was not a prospector, but
a film-maker. Jesse M. Lasky of Paramount sent him a tele-
gram: 'I want you to go off somewhere and make me another
Nanook. Go where you will. Do what you like. I'll foot the bills.
The world's your oyster.' He went with his family to Samoa
and set out to make a Polynesian Nanook, but the whole of
life there was as different as could be from the frozen North. In

Samoa there was no struggle for existence, neither land nor

weather was hostile and for a while Flaherty wondered how to
shape his film. He shot thousands of feet without a clear idea
of how the film would turn out. In fact, nothing that he shot in
the whole of the first year was used in the finished film, but in

this time Flaherty did make an important photographic dis-

covery. Up to this time films were made on what was called
orthochromatic stock which gave excellent contrasts of blacks
and whites and was easy to use (it had been ideal for Nanook)
but gave Httle modelling of detail. Flaherty had brought with
him some panchromatic stock for use in a colour camera.
When this broke, Flaherty used the panchromatic film, as an
T-FAR-B
34 Film Realism

experiment, to shoot black and white pictures. The result was a

revelation and the beauty of the final film, Moana (1926), the
first feature to use this film stock, was such that
helped toit

turn all film-makers to panchromatic within a few years. As in

all his films, Flaherty sought to recreate the old ways of life and
his hero had to undergo, for the sole purpose of the film, a very
painful six-week tattooing ceremony which would otherwise
not have taken place. The film was less successful at the box
office than Nanook, despite an attempt by the distributors to
sell it to the public as 'The Love Life of a South Sea Siren'. But

the critics saw the film for what it was, and it was about Moana
that the critic John Grierson first used the word documentary
in the sense that we use it today.
After Moana there came a long period of frustration for
Flaherty during which he shot a couple of short films, worked
briefly on a Hollywood epic set in the South Seas, and tried to
collaborate with the great German director, Friedrich Mumau,
on a film called Tabu. The was a splendid film, but it had
result
very little and his conception of life. So it
to do with Flaherty
was that 1931 Flaherty came to London to make a film
in
called Industrial Britain for John Grierson and the Empire
Marketing Board. This meeting is of great interest because, if
it was Flaherty who had created documentary with Nanook, it

was the British who in the 1930s turned it into a movement. But
the British directors were also deeply influenced by the politi-
cal mood of the period and by the Soviet cinema of the late
1920s, the revolutionary films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and
Dovzhenko. They saw their films as a progressive contribution
to society and were more concerned with education than with
art. Compared to them, Flaherty was a romantic, opposed to
modern ideas and interested chiefly in making films about primi-
tive cultures that were already dying. Where Grierson's docu-
mentarists worked for big organizations (like the Empire
Marketing Board and the GPO) and made *officiar films about
dockers and postmen, telephones and housing problems,
Flaherty tried to work inside the ordinary commercial system
and make personal films that brought to the screen a way of life
threatened by our western civilization.
 Flaherty and the Idea of Documentary 35

This difference is very clear in Flaherty's major fikn in

Britain. Man of Aran (1934). Financed by Gaumont-British,

Flaherty spent two whole years and three times his allotted
budget of £10,000, to end up with a highly successful film that
took £50,000 at the box office in six months. He showed that
he was not interested in the harsh everyday life of the Aran
islanders and their monotonous fight for food and a living. His
real subject was a poem about man's struggle against the sea,
and his film was built around a shark-fishing expedition and a
storm that breaks on the coast. As shown in the film both of
these were partly false: the fishermen did not normally go out
in high seas as they do in the film (only Flaherty's ofler of
money and fame induced them to do this), and the last shark
was caught off the islands fifty years before. For the shark-
fishing episode Flaherty had to have harpoons specially made
in Galloway and had to employ experts to train the islanders in
the use of them. In any case, far from being dangerous as the
film implies, the sun fish shark of the Aran Islands eat only
plankton. Nevertheless, these scenes do convey Flaherty's own
theme of man versus the sea and provide the suspense he uses
in all his films to add drama to what would otherwise be a dull
account of real life. What is most interesting about Flaherty's
way of filming is his attitude to the camera. He used it like a
living thing saying things like: 'We cannot shoot that, the
camera doesn't want to.' Nowadays, when we are less con-
cerned with the real conditions in Aran in 1934, it is easy to see
that the importance of Flaherty lies in his spontaneous use of
the camera. We are less shocked than were Grierson and his
colleagues by the lack of social commitment, and the sheer
beauty of the photography makes up for the lack of a gripping
story and the poor, studio-recorded sound.
In 1935 Flaherty went to India to make a film called Elephant
Boy but, as it was released, this merely used Flaherty's material
as background for a story shot in the Denham studios of Alex-
ander Korda. The film, needless to say, did not benefit from
this mixture and was not a success, and again Flaherty was
faced with a long period of unemployment and frustration.
Then in 1939 he was commissioned by another important
36 Film Realism

documentary producer-director. Pare Lorenz (who had himself

made The River and The Plow that Broke the Plains) to make
The Land, a documentary on the same problems of poverty and
land wastage that John Steinbeck dealt with in his novel. The
Grapes of Wrath, which was filmed around this time by John
Ford. Flaherty was filled with anger at what he saw and filmed,
but found it difficult to piece together a film out of his material.
After another long period of inactivity Flaherty was able to
make his last film in ideal circumstances, forhe persuaded the
Standard Oil Company to finance Louisiana Story, about the
impact of the machine age (in the form of a company drilling
for oil) on a simple rural community. Flaherty as always
worked slowly and without being able to put into words
exactly what he was looking for. After two years and the ex-
penditure of a quarter of a million dollars, work on the film
stopped. Aided by a beautiful musical score by Virgil Thom-
son, Louisiana Story was a prestige success. When it is con-
trasted with Nanook the director's range is at once apparent:
from a factual (if acted) study of real life Flaherty has moved to
a dream of childhood, in which the oil derricks are no more
realthan the werewolves from which the splendidly named boy
hero, Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour, tries to protect
himself with charms.
We have looked in such detail at the career of Robert Flaher-
ty for two reasons. Firstly, because this career contains some
of the major films in cinema history, and secondly, because it
lights up certain of the basic issues of documentary. Now,
twenty years after Flaherty's death, it is easy to see where the
importance of his work lies. While the British documentary
movement was alive, critics like John Grierson and Paul Rotha
looked for their sort of educational propaganda in his work and
were uneasy when they failed to find it. Today it is more natu-
ral for us to look at a body of films and ask ourselves how far
they are the expression of a man's mind and beliefs. If we look
at Flaherty in this way his work loses nothing of its import-
ance, but is easier to put into perspective. He made documen-
taries the way he did because he remained at heart an explorer.
Therefore he began with his material, the people and the
 Flaherty and the Idea of Documentary 37

places, and sought his story in them. Often he turned the clock
back - filming tattooing in Samoa and shark-fishing off the
Aran Islands long after these practices had ceased. But always,
for Flaherty, the drama came out of the physical facts of the
existence of his characters. In this way he is very different from
most directors of fiction films who begin with a situation and
then try to locate it appropriately. This difference explains
why Flaherty never used a script and needed two years to com-
plete a film, one year of which would be spent just shooting
As a film-maker he produced a succession of beautiful
'tests'.

and moving films. As a pioneer, he not only invented a new

form of cinema, an alternative to Hollywood, he also managed,
thanks to the force of his personaHty and powers of persuasion,
to impose this on the industry and, with Nanook, to find a world
audience for it. For both reasons the cinema is much in his
debt.
 ••^

4
Vertov and Soviet Cinema

Robert Flaherty's work has the spaciousness and the sense of

connection between past and present which mark the primitive
landscapes in which he preferred to work. The films he directed
contain instinctively felt truths about the human situation, yet
they are far removed from the social and political realities of
their time. Flaherty's vision is so persuasive that it becomes
easy to forget that the years which saw the making of Nanook
of the North witnessed the creation of a new society and set of
political ideals in Soviet Russia, as well as the passing-away of
the Eskimo way of life. In the USSR all the young film-makers
were caught up in a great poHtical and cultural upheaval and,
though their enthusiasm was as great as Flaherty's, it func-
tioned only in a social context. Soviet cinema was created on
27 August 1919 when Lenin ordered the nationalization of the
film industry which had shown comparatively little real creative
excitement or originality in its ten years or so of existence. Five
days later a film school was established, and from the first the
cinema was seen as fulfilling a propagandist function. But,
despite this ideological framework, Soviet filiji-makers worked,
in the aftermath of the First World War, in much the same way
as a pioneer like Flaherty: they lacked money, equipment and
film stock, but were buoyed up by the sheer delight in inno-
vation. Film could be seen by all as having a central role in the
formation of the new society during the early years of the
 Vertov and Soviet Cinema 39

Revolution. Not only was there the prestige conferred by

Lenin's definition of the cinema as the most important of all
the arts, film was also very clearly the perfect example of the
fusion of art and machine which Soviet painters, writers and
theorists, caught up in the spirit of the time, were seeking in
the early 1920s. In the poems and manifestoes of Mayakovsky
and his futurist contemporaries we find frequent equations of
poet and worker, art and industry. Mayakovsky proclaims him-
self a factory or longs for the day when item one on the pol-
itburo'sagenda will be 'Stalin's report on the output of poetry'.
Ifsuch ideas seem, in retrospect, excessive when applied to
the written word, they remain totally apposite to film, which
combines the functions of personal expression and industrial
production.
In this revolutionary context realism was only one of a
number of divergent tendencies. Indeed, throughout the early
years of Soviet cinema reahst and formalist attributes came
alternately to the fore. In the early 1920s the newsreel con-
cerns of Dziga Vertov found a parallel in the editing experi-
ments of Lev Kuleshov, who sought new techniques of
dramatic presentation. Kuleshov is today remembered not
only for films like Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924)
and By the Law (1926) but also for his earlier work at the
experimental film workshop he founded. There he explored
such ideas as the creation of an imaginary geography by editing
varying locations together, and the creation of a synthetic
woman with details derived from a number of real women. His
best known experiment dynamic editing was to cut the same
in
expressionless close-up of the actor Mozhukhin into three sep-
arate dramatic contexts and show that it could convey per-
fectly to the spectator such diverse emotions as hunger,
tenderness and sorrow.
The generation that followed Kuleshov and Vertov and
dominated the last years of silent Soviet cinema was very con-
cerned with the question of how to depict the new society in
terms of revolutionary dramatic construction. Sergei Eisen-
stein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko were all
poets whose love of life went hand in hand with an exuberant
40 Film Realism

use of all If works

the visual possibilities of the silent screen.
like Battleship Potemkin (1925). Mother (1926) and Earth
(1930) pushed the documentary preoccupations of Vertov into
the shade, these film-makers, too, were ignored by a suc-
ceeding generation. The silent documentary, Turksib, made by
Victor Turin in 1929, marked a return to a more straight-
forward approach to reality and propaganda. In the early
sound films of the 1930s it is this new and prosaic approach -
closely in sympathy with the realist novel of the nineteenth
century - which prevailed, while men like Eisenstein were at-
tacked for their ^formalism'.
The cinema of Dziga Vertov, the greatest of Soviet documen-
tarists, has no Hterary roots. It is an outgrowth of the newsreel
camera's ability to report life as it happens. Vertov, whose real
name was Denis Kaufman, wrote poems and sketches in his
youth, but his great love before he turned to the cinema in
1918 was sound. He was fascinated by the possibihty of sound-
recording and transposing natural sounds into words and
letters. His film work includes two remarkable sound films:
Enthusiasm (1930), in which he finally fulfilled this early am-
bition to 'photograph' sounds, and Three Songs of Lenin
(1934), which drew on folk tales and legends to build up a
unique picture of the man whose presence dominated this
whole era of Soviet life. But Vertov is best remembered for his
concern with visuals - his theory of the Kino-eye. Vertov began
as an editor, piecing together the short propaganda films and
newsreel material sent back by the cameramen sent out on the
so-called agit trains which toured the war fronts in 1918 poli-
ticizing the soldiers and the peasants. From this he turned to
editing the Kino Weekly newsreel, producing occasional special
issues. It was with the foundation of Kino-Pravda, designed as
a film equivalent to the official party newspaper Pravda, that
his originality began to become apparent. Here he gradually
evolved new non-narrative ways of editing material together,
and gathered around him a whole group of collaborators and
disciples, who called themselves Kinoki or *cinema-eyes\
Vertov and his group accompanied their practical film-making
 .

Vertov and Soviet Cinema 41

with a vigorous series of pronouncements and manifestoes, all

proclaiming the unique quality of the *Kino-eye'.
Vertov saw film drama and the literary scenario as relics of
the bourgeois past which had to be destroyed if the cinema was
to fulfil its destiny. Whereas Flaherty could use simple nar-
ratives for his studies of the family group in a primi-
tive society, Vertov was driven by the very nature of his
material to more complex methods. He wanted to analyse the
changes (such as industrialization and collectivization)
wrought on all aspects of contemporary life by the revolution,
and to show the essential unity of the vast territory united
under the banner of socialism. His concern was to use the
camera as his means of research into the visual chaos of this
world and, for this to be accomphshed, he felt that it had to be
unfettered from the limitations of the human eye. Where, for
Flaherty, the essence of the documentary lay in the con-
templative power of the single camera, Vertov needed whole
batteries of cameramen to overcome the limitations of space,
and used the device of varying the pace of the images as a way
of outstepping the confines of time. These and similar ideas
Vertov proclaimed with a prophetic fervour:

... I am eye. I am a mechanical eye.

I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I

can see. myself from today and forever from human immo-
I free
biHty. I am in constant movement, I approach and draw away from
objects, I crawl under them, I move alongside the mouth of a run-
ning horse, I cut into a crowd at full speed, I run in front of running
soldiers, I turn on my back, I rise with an aeroplane, I fall and soar
together with falling and rising bodies.
This is I, apparatus, manoeuvring in the chaos of movements,
recording one movement after another in the most complex com-
binations . .

The full realization of these ambitions took all of Vertov's en-

The most famous of his Kino-Pravda,
ergies during the 1920s.
which comprised twenty-three numbers compiled between
1922 and 1925, are those dealing with a contemporary issue
about which he felt most deeply, the death of Lenin in 1924
42 Film Realism

and its aftermath. Here Vertov's skill in using archive material

and piecing it together with newsreel shots is clearly appar-
ent.
Further steps towards the idea of 'cinema truth' were taken
in Vertov's later and longer films. In Stride Soviet (1926) he
told the story of the Moscow Soviet, basing his film on the
contrast of past and present. This was the first which
film for
Vertov composed a script, but in fact this had little effect on his
methods, for the final film turned out to be quite different from
what had been planned. Here Vertov w^as able to demonstrate
the virtues of the candid-camera technique, basing much of his
film on material shot with concealed cameras. His next film, A
Sixth of the World (1926), was the best received of all his films.
It traced the wealth and variety of the USSR with material
shot throughout the country by ten teams of cameramen. Here
Vertovmoved away from the straightforward documentary to
create something more aptly termed a cine-poem, mixing
images and written titles into a hymn of praise of the new
society. In Eleventh (1928), the first of three films shot in the
Ukraine, Vertov examined the eleventh anniversary of the
Revolution, building his film around the construction of a
dam on the Dnieper. The image of Lenin superimposed over
lyrical shots of water flowing through the completed dam
remains the film's most memorable moment.
While these three films had all been concerned with the
creation of a new Soviet society, Vertov's masterpiece. The
Man with the Movie Camera (1929), can only be seen as a study
of the power of the camera. On the eve of sound, and before
beginning the aural experiments of Enthusiasm, Vertov applied
himself to creating a last purely visual work. The real hero is not
Soviet man, but the camera itself, which at one point is ani-
mated so as to move by itself and even to take a bow. Vertov
shows the whole process of movie-making, and follows the
cameraman (his brother and constant collaborator, Mikhail
Kaufman) through the chaos and turmoil of the world. Rhyth-
mic editing, superimposition, multiple exposure, camera move-
ment and variation of the speed of the action are all used to
great effect. In the final analysis the film becomes less a state-
 Vertov and Soviet Cinema 43

ment about the USSR than an illustration of the virtuosity of

Vertov and his Kino-eye team.
In the 1930s the importance of Vertov's work tended to be
obscured in the debate about realism and formahsm, and cer-
tainly a work like The Man with the Movie Camera has moved
a long way from the simple recording of everyday (but
methods had some influence
significant) reahty. Yet his editing
on Eisenstein and sound experiments preceded those of the
his
British documentarists. Thirty years later Vertov found his
rightful position as one of the great film pioneers when his
Kino-Pravda, translated into French, gave its name to the
cinema-verite school of film reporting. As a new generation
of film-makers shed. the desire to make films on the Hollywood
model and set out instead to discover the world with their new
lightweight equipment, the lessons of Vertov became clear. His
example of enthusiasm and ingenuity, commitment to Len-
inism as a poUtical ideal and his passion for cinematic inno-
vation suddenly became alive and meaningful. With this
increasing interest in the use of film to do things other than
simply tell stories, Vertov could be seen as Flaherty's equal and
as the embodiment of ideas that have more than a 1920s rele-
vance. Film-makers interested in the cinema as a medium of
ideas and in the filmic equivalent of the propaganda slogan
could learn much from the work of Vertov: his early use of
titles as a vital graphic component of a film, his tireless quest
to capture the complexity of contemporary society and poHtics
and his faith in the power of the camera as a means of analysis.
The link is well symboHzed by the fact that the pohtical films of
Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960s were made in collaboration
with Marxist students who called themselves the Dziga Vertov
group.
 s
Sound Documentary

On the basis of the examples furnished by the silent documen-

taries ofRobert Flaherty and the films of the Soviet directors,
but with the added ingredient of sound, a whole documentary
movement grew up in Great Britain in the 1930s. The central
figure and prime organizer was a serious-minded Scot, John
Grierson, who gathered around him a group of keen young
film-makers, many of them university-educated. Among these
were Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, Harry Watt, Edgar Anstey and
Arthur Elton, aided too by the BraziHan-born Alberto
Cavalcanti. Grierson himself directed only one important fihn.
Drifters, in 1929, and was principally a producer and theorist.
Much of the influence of the group stems from the fact that so
many of its members followed his example and combined the
roles of film-maker and critic. The movement was never a
monolithic one and there was room for a whole range of atti-
tudes between, on the one hand, Grierson's conception of the
documentary film as the creative treatment of actuaUty and, on
the other, Rotha's more directly propagandist concern. But it is

fair to say that all the directors associated with the movement
subscribed to the basic principles set down by Grierson in an
articlepublished in 1932. These were, firstly, a belief in the
capacity of the cinema for getting around, for observing and
selecting from life itself, rather than using an invented story
acted out against an artificial background. Secondly, there was
 2W^.,i.r ---•:'- •• ,, •' .^-

Sound Documentary 45

a desire to persuade ordinary people to act out their lives in

real settings, and, finally, an awareness of the importance of
capturing the spontaneous gesture and the natural inflection of
speech.
Aside from the theory and critical writing which it produced
(Rotha, for instance,was one of the first historians of world
cinema), the documentary movement has two other claims to
importance: it established a structure for a new kind of film-
making, and, within produced individual works of great
this,
interest and considerable power. The organizational structure
was the great creation of Grierson. The documentary film-
makers scorned the products of the studios and the attitudes of
conventional producers and film financiers. They had, there-
fore, to find an alternative source of finance. For this they
turned to government and official bodies, offering in return a
service of education for the public in the workings of bureau-
cracy and public affairs. Most of the more important films pro-
duced were made for - and to a large extent reflected the
points of view of - big business and government-sponsored
organizations. Wright's Song of Ceylon (1934), for example,
was made for the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, and Anstey's
Enough to Eat (1936) for the Gas, Light and Coke Company of
London. The core of the sponsorship of documentary film-
making came from a succession of public bodies: the Empire
Marketing Board, the GPO Film Unit and the Crovm Film Unit.
The subjects tended therefore to be drawn from major indus-
tries and public service organizations: mining, fishing, trans-
port, the postal service,and so on. The tone of the movement
was setby the twenty-minute film. Industrial Britain, released
in 1933. This was very much a joint effort. It was produced by
John Grierson for the Empire Marketing Board and the original
footage was shot by Robert Flaherty, the great idol of the
young documentarists, who was in Britain on the visit that cul-
minated in the making of Man of Aran. Working with Flaherty
deeply influenced the group, but he did not complete the film
himself. Additional footage was shot by Wright and Elton and
the final version edited by Anstey under the close supervision
of Grierson, who also provided much of the commentary.
46 Film Realism

The film ignores such reaUties as unemployment and trade

unionism, and despite its title concentrates on the individual
craftsman rather than the role of organized labour. The result
is a very romanticized vision of the industrial process.

At the peak of the movement in the mid 1930s the documen-

tarists showed an intense preoccupation v^ith the technicalities
of film-making, particularly the use of sound. Typical -of this

tendency w^ere Cavalcanti's Coalface (1935) and the Wright

and Watt film of 1936, Night Mail, In both the visuals based on
actual observation v^ere subordinated in the overall design to a
highly elaborate sound track composed in a studio. There was
no attempt to render the actual sound of industry or transport
directly. Snatches of ordinary conversation and the sounds of
engines and machines were blended with the informative com-
mentary and then fitted into a rhythmical pattern made up of
the musical score by Benjamin Britten and poems by W. H.
Auden. The mixture was an exciting one, but far removed from
the original documentary intention of maintaining a close con-
tact with everyday reality. A reaction came in the form of two
documentaries made at about the same time by Elton and
Anstey, Workers and Jobs and Housing Problems. These turned
their backs on the stylistic experiment and fundamental ro-
manticism of Coalface and Night Mail. Instead the film-makers
allowed ordinary people to communicate through the camera.
The voices of workmen and housewives talking simply and di-
rectly to the audience replace the elaborate sound tracks, and
the day-to-day problems come across with a spontaneity that
had been lost in the more experimental works. Though much of
the interview technique is crude by modern standards, the ap-
proach was an original one in the context of British cinema and
brought together again the notions of documentary and
realism.
The 1940s and 1950s gave new types of documentary that are
also of real interest. During the Second World War Humphrey
Jennings made a number of films about Britain, such as The
First Days, Listen to Britain and the longer story film about the
fire service. Fires Were Started. It would be difficult to imagine

a more different man from Flaherty than Humphrey Jennings.

 Sound Documentary 47

Where Flaherty wandered the world, Jennings stayed linked to

one place, Cambridge, where he went to school, studied at the
university and acquired his basic values. Jennings cared deeply
about art and Hterature and was fascinated by the way in
which the Industrial Revolution had changed the British way of
life and by the way great scientists and thinkers have
influenced our view of the world. He dabbled in other art
forms, writing poetry and painting, and was interested in
systems of ideas as different as Marxism and surreaHsm. But
whether he was composing a poem or compiling his long (and
never completed) study of the Industrial Revolution, he felt
that it was wrong to invent either ideas or images. For his
history he used original documents and for his poems the sen-
tences, quotations and phrases that he found in his reading.
For a man like this, the cinema, which after all can be a
literal medium that deals with people and objects directly, by
showing them, was a natural form of expression. Making his
documentaries he was dealing with reality at first hand, filming
the life around him, men at work or at rest, factories or dance
halls, statues and buildings, streets and trees. He had a natural
sympathy for all things that are essentially British - Shake-
speare, St Paul's Cathedral, the River Thames. When during the
war with Germany he felt these things to be threatened, he
reacted with a series of films that weave together patterns of
the pictures and sounds that go to make up Britain. At the end
of Listen to Britain, for instance, Jennings moves from the var-
iety team of Flanagan and Allen entertaining workers in a fac-
tory canteen to Myra Hess playing Mozart in a National Gallery
denuded of its pictures (away in the country for safe keeping
from bombs). Then, without a break, he takes us on to the
sight and sound of a tank factory, a brass band, welders at
work, then to cornfields and a choir singing Rule Britannia.
Jennings's great achievement - and one that has never been
surpassed in its own sphere - was to make this mass of images
and sounds into a kind of film symphony that showed the
people of Britain what they were fighting for directly, without a
word of commentary.
An idea of the enormous range of the sound-image mixture
48 Film Realism

of the cinema is obtained if we contrast Jennings with Georges

Franju, who is as essentially French as Jennings is English. Both
iSlm-makers deUght in the use of eye and ear, but whereas
Jennings blends differing elements into a single whole (the idea
of Britain), Franju bases his style on contrasts and divisions. In
his firstand perhaps most striking short film, Le Sang des
bites, Franju shows the very ordinariness of a Paris suburb
and then moves in to reveal the work of a slaughter house
where in a matter of minutes a noble white horse is killed,
skinned, gutted and carved up. Unlike Jennings, Franju has a
basic distrust of authority and delighted in the days when he
made documentaries (he is now a feature film-maker) in per-
suading official organizations to back films that attacked their
own views. The best example of this is his film about the
French War Museum, the Hotel des Invalides. The fihn was
sponsored by the military authorities but set out to attack
what Franju sees as the false glory of Napoleon and the phoney
glamour of war. Franju did this simply by the way in which he
showed his material - there is not a word of direct preaching in
the whole film. He kept his camera fixed on a very small bust of
Napoleon while his elaborate praises were being sung, printed
the words of a popular military song that all French schoolboys
know, so as to bring home the meaning of the words, and used
an image of a half-destroyed statue in such a way that it
pointed up the whole horror of war. To underline his message
he employed a wonderfully sensitive musical score by Maurice
Jarre in place of a commentary.
We have mentioned only a few of the many ways in which
documentary methods can be applied to films. What all docu-
mentarists do have in common is that they set out from the
actual subject matter - be
it a primitive community or a new

socialist society, the sightsand sounds of Britain or the French

War Museum - and try to extract from this the ideas they wish
to put across. In this way any documentary can be measured
against something outside the film, if not the literal subject,
then at least the idea that this represents. That is to say, if
Flaherty chooses to make a film about man's basic struggle
against the sea and sets it in the Aran Islands, it does not have
 t^'-r

Sound Documentary 49

to show what literally happens there in the year of filming

(1934) but does have to agree with what we learn about the
it

struggles of primitive societies from other sources. It is fair to

ask of a documentary film-maker whether he has been true to
his subject and whether his film reflects the issues it raises
truthfully. This is the basic difference between the documen-
tary and the story film. Makers of fictional films may begin with
similar ideas to express but they are free to shape and alter
what they tell to suit the needs of the story. Of a fiction film we
cannot ask whether it is true to facts and circumstances out-
side itself, but only whether it creates a convincing make-
believe. Nowadays, for various reasons the documentary is
becoming less of a form of cinema and more a genre of tele-
vision. There are some very big advantages in this shift - 16
mm. film canbe used and this means that the filming can be
freer and more personal. But whether on the cinema or the
television screen documentary is essentially the same: it serves
the double purpose of informing us about the world around us
and making us widen our responses to it.
 Stroheim and the Realist
Fiction Film

The extent to which the cinema is an international art is im-

mediately clear if we consider those fiction films which try to
picture life The urge to show life as
as realistically as possible.
it is is as old as thecinema itself, but it was not until D. W.
Griffith that the cinema developed a camera style which, by
breaking the scenes into shots, allowed the camera to probe
into life and give an adequately complex picture of it. Already
here we come to one of the contradictions of the realistic film:
a single long shot of an action really happening often gives less
of the real feel of the event than a series of shots from carefully
chosen angles and from varying distances. The usefulness of
the first method is limited to stunts which we would otherwise
think were false (some of Buster Keaton's more amazing feats,
for example) or events which happen only once and have some
interest in their own right (a procession recorded for a news-
reel, etc). The story film, on the other hand, uses the second

method, that is to say, however realistic a film is intended to

be, it does not simply record reahty, it rebuilds it. Events have
to be staged several times, so that the parts can be filmed from
the appropriate angle, and the pieces, which were perhaps shot
over a period of days, must be put together again, to give the
illusion of one single happening.
Griffith wasinterested in both operations - the attempt to
picture life as accurately as possibly and the fragmentation of
 Stroheim and the Realist Fiction Film 51

events - but later film-makers often laid more emphasis on

either one or the other. In this way it is possible to pick out
two separate strands of cinema. The one - that followed by the
Russian Sergei Eisenstein and many others - placed the stress
on the way shots are joined together. Eisenstein soon dis-
covered that if you put two shots together they create some-
thing new which is not just the sum of their parts. He
explained this by pointing out that in Japanese writing more
compHcated ideas are built by putting two simple ones
together: water + eye = weep; dog + mouth = bark; knife +
heart = sorrow, and so on. He felt that the editing of the film
(what he called montage) was the key stage because it allowed
such a process to occur. As a simple example we might take the
lions in Battleship Potemkin. While he was shooting the scenes
of the massacre on the Odessa steps (one of the most famous
sequences in film history) Eisenstein also photographed three
stone lions, one lying, one sitting, one roaring. Edited together
in the film they show a single lion coming to life and conveyed
the idea of protest - with an emotional meaning something like
*Even the very stones cried out'. In the 1920s Eisenstein built
his films around such links (and of course more complicated
ones) yet he also used real settings, took as his actors amateurs
whose faces looked right and made stories about the groups
who created the revolution. The method is a very valid one and
finds echoes in both the British documentary cinema and also
in the sharp and startling editing of many exciting thrillers, but
what we generally think of as realistic cinema develops in a
very different way.
The most striking example of reaHsm in the 1920s, and a
work to set alongside Battleship Potemkin as a screen master-
piece, is Erich von Stroheim's Greed. Stroheim, one of the most
remarkable figures in film history, is the direct heir of D. W.
Griffith, having served as assistant director and bit player on
both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, In Griffith's Hearts
of the World and a number of lesser films in 1917 he first
created for himself the role of Prussian officer - *the man you
love to hate' - which he perfected in his first three films as a
director. Blind Husbands (1918), The DeviVs Pass Key (1919)
 -^ 'r'>r.t-~^~'

52 Film Realism

and Foolish Wives (1920). Stroheim's debut was a most strik-

ing one. Not only did he direct these films for Universal, he also
wrote the script and dominated the screen in the role of an
unscrupulous officer attempting to seduce another man's young
and frivolous vdfe. Stroheim's immensely detailed charac-
terization of the officer figure - immaculate in dress, de-
portment and gesture - was so striking that all kinds of tales,
many of them fostered by the director himself, grew up about
his Viennese background. He was said to be son of a colonel in
the dragoons and a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and himself
to have been commissioned as a cavalry officer at the age of
seventeen. In fact, he was the son of a Jewish merchant and
hat-maker and his military career (as a private!) seems to have
come to a speedy and ignominious end. The image, however,
was one that Stroheim preserved, on screen and off, for over
forty years and the fictitious Von' became his nickname. As
early as Foolish Wives the pattern of his career was clearly
apparent. He had already begun to assemble his team of favoured
actors and actresses, run into trouble with censors over the
content of his work and with producers over its length. His
next film, Merry-Go-Round (1922), set in Vienna and with the
customary Stroheim theme of a love affair between a nobleman
and a beautiful commoner, was an even stronger anticipation
of the troubles that were to dog Greed the following year, in
that he was taken off the film half-way through the shoot-
ing.
The story of Greed (1923) itself is one worth recounting at
some length, for it highlights the problems of the realist film-
maker in the commercial cinema. An adaptation of the Frank
Norris novel McTeague, Greed was made for Sam Goldwyn's
company, but without any close studio supervision, the direc-
tor acting as his own producer. Unfortunately for Stroheim, by
the time his film was finished theGoldwyn company had been
merged with others form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and he
to
found himself confronted with an unsympathetic production
team. One can understand the difficulties of Louis B. Mayer and
Irving Thalberg when faced with a forty-two reel film with little

or no obvious audience appeal. The outcome was inevitable -

WP-^'

Stroheim and the Realist Fiction Film 53

Stroheim's masterpiece was cut down to a quarter of its length

(a mere ten reels but still two-and-a-half hours of screen time),
and his reputation asan extravagant and unmanageable artist
was firmly estabhshed.The abridgement was accomplished by
removing all but seven minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour
prologue totally invented by Stroheim and tracing in detail the
hero's antecedents. All the subplots used to parallel and high-
light the main action were also deleted, together with all the
symboHc episodes and much of the characteristic Stroheim
grotesque exaggeration. What was left was the film's major
narrative line - the doomed relationship of McTeague and his
wif e Trina - complete and in its natural sequence, but with its
rhythm destroyed by numerous cuts and its deHcacy spoiled by
the crude titles often used to gloss over the gaps.
What is most remarkable today is the power of Greed even
in its mutilated form. Its scope still extends from McTeague's
upbringing by an alcoholic father in a remote mining town in
the Californian mountains to the final confrontation between
Mac and his onetime friend Marcus in the heat of Death Valley.
The core of the film, as of the novel, is McTeague's rise and fall
in San Francisco. At first he prospers, falls in love and marries.
But already the seeds of his downfall are set. Trina wins $5,000
in a lottery, thereby arousing the jealousy of her cousin, and
Mac's friend, Marcus. All continues well until Mac loses his job
(he is an unqualified dentist). He then dechnes into drink and
violence, while Trina becomes more and more obsessed with
her money. Though they live in total poverty, she refuses to
spend her lottery win or to offer Mac any support. Finally he
murders her, takes the money and sets off on his travels. But
Nemesis catches up with him in the form of Marcus, and the
last sequence of the film shows him after the final con-
frontation: handcuffed to the dead body of the other man, lost
in the vastness of the desert.
What protected Stroheim's film from total dismemberment
was his method of developing his scenes not by a mass of tiny
shots but in long takes with a wealth of detail crammed into
each shot. The editors, therefore, when they came to shorten the
film, left the major sequences largely intact, though sometimes
54 Film Realism

trimmed at the beginning and end. In these sequences

the mastery of Stroheim is always apparent. From Gibson
Gowland and Zasu Pitts he extracted splendid performances
ranging in mood from a tender excursion and first kiss (by, of
all things, a sewage outlet) to the eventual murder amid the tin-

sel of Christmas decorations. Stroheim makes the whole image

come to life. He organizes the actions of his characters in
depth and, instead of intercutting contrasting events as Griffith
was wont to do, he combines the two in a single expressive
image, as when a funeral passes in the background, seen
through the window, in the scene where Mac and Trina are
married. His use of settings is remarkably modern. Refusing
the easy option of studio settings, Stroheim took his actors out
into the real locations, shooting the finale, for instance, in very
difficult conditions in Death Valley itself. The house where Mac
and Trina spend most of their married life was recreated in San
Francisco from the descriptions contained in Norris's novel
with total fideHty to detail. In its present pared-down form
Greed has few immediate similarities with the rest of Stro-
heim's work. It lacks the decadent aristocratic atmosphere, the

obsession with class barriers and the officer code, the parallel-
ing of main action and subplot. But it does show the same
ruthless dissection of human behaviour and relentless working
out of the action from its given premisses. Like Frank Norris in
the original novel, Stroheim shows himself to be the heir of
Zola's naturalism, basing his work on the accumulation of a
mass of objectively observed detail and depicting characters at
the mercy of powerful and primitive emotions.
Despite the failure of Greed, M-G-M gave Stroheim a new
I
directorial assignment. The Merry Widow (1925), the first of a
trio of Stroheim films - the others are The Wedding March
(1926-7) and Queen Kelly (1928) - depicting themes of ro-
mance and misalHance in a basically Ruritanian setting. In all
three Stroheim was working against studio pressures, unable to
make the enormously long films of which he dreamed and
working with imposed themes and actors. He managed, never-
theless, to win for himself a considerable freedom in his choice
of minor players, in the elaboration of scenes of degradation
 Stroheim and the Realist Fiction Film 55

and grotesqueness and in the way he re-shaped basic plot

structures. Indeed, in The Merry Widow Stroheim's invented
prologue to the operetta story takes up two thirds of the
screen time.
However, Stroheim's lack of real commercial success and
the myth of the extravagant, untameable artist brought him
under fire from producers. After the coming of sound he di-
rected only one more film. Walking dowrn Broadway, in 1932,
which was not released because of a studio upheaval. Forced to
work simply as a screenwriter and actor, Stroheim sought a
new career in France. This led to one memorable role, that of
von Rauffenstein in La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by Jean
Renoir, who had been deeply influenced by his early work. But
mostly he had to act in totally mediocre films, and, when he
planned to direct another film, his project. La Dame Blanche,
was abandoned because of the outbreak of war. The last
decade of his life was the most barren artistically, with only
one notable part, that of the old and forgotten film director.
Max von Mayerling, in Billy Wilder*s drama of Hollj^vood,
Sunset Boulevard (1950), which looked back explicitly to his
last Hollywood film. Queen Kelly, Stroheim, like Welles and
Chaplin, is one of those film artists incompatible with the Holly-
wood system. His work and career are monumental but frag-
mentary and his work full of questions and contradictions.
But with Greed he demonstrated the ability of silent cinema to
equal the naturalist novel in scope and intensity.
 '
^'^v. " ,'^y^^^^*^^^vy:^''.;w^?]p^r^

1
Renoir's Poetic Realism

In the 1930s the man who took up and developed to. its fullest
the Stroheim tradition was Frenchman Jean Renoir, the son
the
of the great Impressionist painter. The 1930s were a very rich
and decisive period in the history of the French cinema. The
sound era got off to a brilliant start with Rene Clair's comedies
- most notably Sous les Wits de Paris, Le Million and A Nous la
liberie. For two brief years, while Clair's inspiration was be-
ginning to flag, Jean Vigo produced dazzling works - Zero de
conduite and VAtalante - which distressed contemporary
censors and distributors, but which today still retain a striking
impact. When the death of Vigo in 1934 and Clair's departure
for England (and ultimately Hollywood) in 1935 coincided with
a production crisis of unusual severity, it seemed that the
French cinema was doomed to inglorious extinction. But out of
the ruins was born a new golden age of film-making and a new
filmic style made up of almost equal doses of Jean Cabin gloom
and Popular Front idealism. The veteran Jacques Feyder re-
turned from the USA to give French directors a lesson in sheer
professionalism with La Kermesse heroique. Another experi-
enced director, Julien Duvivier, reached heights he has never
since equalled with a trio of films starring Cabin: La Bandera,
La Belle Equipe and Vepe-le-Moko. Feyder's young as-
sistant. Marcel Carne, made a feature debut with ]enny in 1936
and, before reaching the age of thirty, he had directed a sue-
 Renoir*s Poetic Realism "57

cession of works that stand comparison with those of any film-

maker of a similar age: Drole de drame, Quai des brumes.
Hotel du Nord and Le Jour se leve.
Yet amid this wealth of talent, which was decisively to affect
film-making in both France and Italy for years to come, there
was only one man who produced masterworks throughout the
decade - Jean Renoir. Between 1930 and 1939 he made no less
than fifteen films of very varying kinds, all of them profoundly
linked to the mood and ambitions of the French nation. Renoir
was not a hermetic artist, pursuing a course independent of the
pressures and fashions of the moment. His work was almost
always precisely related to its social and economic context and
yet it was, at the same time, shot through with a vein of poetry.
Reahsm and poetry - in their varying interpretations and
differing combinations - are the essential elements of any
analysis of Renoir's contribution to film-making in the period
up to the outbreak of war, which disrupted production and
drove many French film-makers, including Renoir, into exile.
The range of Renoir's poetic realism is enormous, even if
only his films of the 1930s are taken into consideration. At one
extreme there is the sober realism of Toni (1934), a film made
on location, without stars and based on real-life events. Toni
stands centrally in the reaUst tradition of world cinema. It
recalls the silent work of Erich von Stroheim in the 1920s and
anticipates many aspects of the Itahan neo-reahsm of the
1940s, particularly Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, made in
1942. Like this latter work, and unlike most other neo-realist
masterpieces, Toni is essentially a timeless film. It is not linked
to any specific social conditions in the France of 1934 (the
actual events on which it was based had occurred some twelve
years before) and, though the hero is an Italian migrant
worker, the pattern of the film would be little changed if he
were, say, a French peasant. The visual style of Toni shows
Renoir at his most restrained. The unemphatic shooting and
deliberate refusal to build up scenes dramatically give it a news-
reel quality which is totally in keeping with the director's
neutral acceptance of the characters' emotions, needs and be-
trayals. If one seeks analogies outside the cinema for a work
58 Film Realism

like Toni, it is inevitably toFrench naturalism that one turns.

The naturalist tradition in literaturehad a strong influence on
Renoir. He adapted novels by Zola to make Nana in 1926 and
La Bete humaine in 1938, and also filmed versions of a Mau-
passant story and the soberly realist Flaubert novel Madame
Bovary. The Maupassant adaptation - Renoir's beautiful forty-
five minute film, Une Partie de campagne (1936) - also reveals
another aspect of the director's realism, namely the desire to
recapture the snap-shot quahty of the great Impressionist
painters. As a result, the film, instead of being a sombre docu-
ment on the sorrows of love, is imbued with the whole atmos-
phere of Auguste Renoir's art.
An even stronger counterbalance to a possible documentary
impulse in Renoir is his profound love of the theatre, which
was later to culminate in the reflections on the relationship of
life and art contained in The Golden Coach made in 1952.

Several of Renoir's early sound films of 1931-3 were in fact

based on stage plays: On purge Bebe, Boudu sauve des eaux and
Chotard et Cie, What one might call the charade aspect is
constant throughout the 1930s. As examples one might
cite the puppet-play prologue of La Chienne, the amateur
dramatics of La Grande Illusion and La Regie du jeu,
as well as, perhaps: the court etiquette scenes of La
Marseillaise, More important still, it would be possible to argue
that Renoir's conception of a society rigidly structured so as to
separate masters and servants, officers and men, is derived less
from a Marxist analysis of the world than from the basic pat-
tern of French classical drama. This is certainly true of La
Regie du jeu (1939), for which Renoir prepared himself by
re-reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage classics
and in which Lisette, for instance, is far more the theatrical
soubrette than the representative of a politically unenfightened
proletariat. After films like La Bete humaine and Les Bas-
Fonds, both of which starred Jean Gabin, Renoir was here
trying to get away from naturalism and discover a more poetic
style. This he found especially in the plays of the eighteenth-
century dramatist, Marivaux, whose work seemed to him to be
half-way between poetry and realism.
 Renoir's Poetic Realism 59

'
Renoir's use of actors follows the same tendency. He is at
the very opposite pole to the neo-realists who conceived a
character and then sought a person with the appropriate
first

face and physique, regarding the latter as far more important

than acting experience. Renoir always uses actors - even Toni
contains professionals like Blavette and Delmont in the leading
roles - and he builds the character around the personahty of
the actor who is to play it. For him, actors are the co-authors
of a film and he could never conceive of scripting a film before
he knew who would play the roles in it. As a result his career
has been marked by a number of successful collaborations with
actors. In the 1930s he worked successively with Michel Simon,
with his own brother Pierre, and with Jean Gabin, the most
prominent French star of the late 1930s. Even Une Partie de
tampagne, his Maupassant adaptation shot in settings painted
by his father, was originally conceived not as a homage to
Auguste, but as a pretext for working with the leading actress,
Sylvia Bataille.
The 1930s are also marked by Renoir's own most sus-
late
tained efforts to become an actor. He appeared in Une Partie
de campagne and La Bete humaine before taking the crucial
role of Octave in La Regie du jeu. Sometimes Renoir's enthusi-
asm for actors and acting betrays him. His own performance is
one of the weakest aspects of La Regie du jeu, and the evol-
ution undergone by this film in the course of its making shows
how fleeting his responses to particular actors and actresses
could be and how radically they could alter the balance of a
film. But at best a great actor can have a decisive effect on a
film and give it a new dimension. It is this concern with actors
rather than any theoretical preconception that gives Renoir's
work in the 1930s its predominant photographic style: the
tendency to use lengthy shots and to work with several
cameras at once. The use of deep focus is systematic, as the
camera continually tracks to and fro to follow the characters
and to frame them, as they group and regroup, or relate them-
selves to the setting in which they find themselves.
The particular tension of Renoir's style comes precisely from
the way in which this involvement with the actors is set against
60 Film Realism

2L mature detachment from the character and his problems.

While he indulges his players, Renoir manipulates his charac-
ters like puppets, leading them often through the sexual
equivalent of a game of musical chairs. His detachment is
remarkable. He is incapable of taking sides against any class or
nationality, just as he could not conceivably impose a rigid
morahty on his characters. These latter are caught up in
conflicting and overlapping relationships that give rise to the
peculiar mixture of farce and seriousness which is the typical
tone of a Renoir film. They exist on a number of levels, being
part symbols, part marionettes and part characters in a con-
ventional sense, but above all they are human beings who exist
in a social context but whose behaviour, however outrageous,
is never prejudged. Occasionally Renoir's sense of detachment
becomes almost inhuman, but in general his universal accept-
ance is benevolent and beneficient, allowing him to show great
insight into the strange alliances and divisions present when-
ever a group of people interact. The Royalists and Republicans
of La Marseillaise are separated by little more than a mis-
understanding and a different relationship to the forces of his-
tory. As Renoir admits in one of his films, everyone has such
good, such convincing reasons. So it was that, despite a left-
vdng commitment that impelled him to make La Vie est d
nous for the Communist Party in 1936, he was still able to
draw a sympathetic portrait of two ageing aristocratic reac-
tionaries (Erich von Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay) in La Grande
Illusion, made the very next year.
Renoir's lack of stereotyped preconceptions and responses is

nowhere more apparent than in his permeability to events. As

his studies of human behaviour realistically capture the am-
biguities of love, so his films of the 1930s reflect only too
accurately the confused mixture of ideaUsm, patriotism and
social concern that typifies the period. Though many of the
films are comparatively timeless - Madame Bovary, for
example, owes little to the specific atmosphere of 1934 - one
can nevertheless trace the'evolving mood of the 1930s through
a succession of films directly linked to current issues. Boudu
sauve des eaux (1932) reflects the carefree anarchist atmos-
 '^^>r5i&^:r,-

Renoir's Poetic Realism 61

phere of the early 1930s. The figure of the tramp and the irres-
ponsible evasion at the end recall the world of Ren6 Clair's A
Nous la liberie made the previous year, while Michel Simon's
performance in the title role anticipatessome aspects of the
part he plays in Jean Vigo's VAtalante, With Vigo's other mas-
terpiece. Zero de tonduite, Renoir's film shares a sense of
anarchist poetry and a stress on the individual's need to pursue
his own life regardless of social pressures. Toni (1934), with its

story of migrant workers, shows an increasing concern with

social questions. This is developed in Le Crime de Monsieur
Lange (1935) which is very much a study of a group, with no
real individual heroes. The film's true scope is better conveyed
by its original title: On the Courtyard, It was made in col-
laboration with the writer Jacques Prevert, who was at this
time very much engaged with the October group, a left-wing
theatre group which had gone on a tour of Moscow and Len-
ingrad the previous year. Caught up in the atmosphere of 1935,
the highwater mark of the Popular Front unity of Socialists and
Communists, and using many actors associated with the Oc-
tober group, Renoir found himself involved in political matters
without having consciously engaged himself. In the following
year he made La Vie est d, nous, although not himself a
member of the Communist Party.
Several of Renoir's later films bear the mark of his in-
volvement in poHtics. La Marseillaise (1938) finally emerged as
a conventionally produced film, but it was originally planned as
a work to be financed by pubHc subscription, the first experi-
ment of a film for the people and by the people, as the advance
publicity put it. In fact the finished work is marked by the same
kind of ambiguity that characterizes La Grande Illusion (1937).
Revolution-filled Paris and the prison camp at Winterborn are
both depicted as places where good humour and comradeship
reign and all good men are moved by high-minded patriotism
and a sense of self-sacrifice. These two films are also essentially
backward-looking: La Marseillaise deals with the revolution of
1789, not the upheavals of the 1930s, while La Grande Illusion
treats war in the rosy terms of the 1914 cavalry officer instead
of facing the new threat of rising Nazi power. La Rhgle du jeu.
62 Film Realism

perhaps because it attempts less explicit comment, is in fact a

far more lucid analysis of the time in which it was shot. During
the months that separated Munich from the outbreak of war,
Renoir felt troubled by the state of mind of a part of French
society and world society. The resulting film proves how right
he was to feel that one way of reflecting this situation was to
tell what, on the surface, is a totally frivolous tale.
In their production methods Renoir's films of the 1930s have
marked similarities to many of the freer works of the late
1950s whose directors admired his ceuvre- and listened so in-
tently to his views on art and life. The films show an amazing
openness to life. Many sequences were improvised - Vne Partie
de campagne, for instance, was shot with a minimal script. La
Regie du jeu, for which he was producer, director, scriptwriter
and actor, is a perfect example of the extent to which a film can
be the product of a single man. It was shot in conditions of
total freedom and virtually made up as the shooting pro-
gressed. Though he worked with the two principal script-
writers of the French 1930s cinema - with Jacques Prevert on
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and with Charles Spaak on Les
Bas-Fonds and La Grande Illusion - Renoir was never at the
mercy of other people's ideas. He was quite capable of script-
ing and dialoguing a film by himself, and his work is free from
the rigidity that one finds, for example, in some of the films of
Marcel Carne at this time. Nevertheless, Renoir's films from On
purge bebe to La Regie du jeu are within the 1930s style of
realism in that all the major points are made explicit through
the dialogue. This was perhaps the least liberating effect of his
concern with the theatre: even La Regie du jeu is built on
this kind of pattern and, though the script was partly impro-
vised, the images are seldom allowed to speak for them-
selves.
Renoir's films of the 1930s are very much a product of their
age. If in some ways, such as the use of improvisation and
deep focus, they anticipate later developments, in others -
such as narrative structure and reliance on dialogue - they
belong to their period. One thing these films have in common is
their basic realist framework. Renoir never indulges in pure
 '^'^r^r
f^
Renons Poetic Realism 63

fantasy, being content to view the individual in a normal social

context. What most remarkable about this realism today is
is

what one might magical aspect, which stems from the

call its
quality of the observation rather than from any kind of con-
scious poeticizing. Renoir's films are those of a man who knows
how to leave reality to tell its own story, a man who can reveal
lifewithout recourse to flat naturahsm and create a sense of
mystery without ever leaving the domain of the everyday.
 8

Rossellini and Neo- Realism

It was only with the Second World War that realism became
the dominant mode of the cinema. There are all sorts of
reasons for this re-emergence of an idea known for so many
years. The war forced directors to leave the closed world of the
studios and make newsreels and documentaries as part of the
war effort (the effect of this was most striking on Hollywood
directors). In Europe studios and expensive equipment were
destroyed and those who wanted to continue film-making had
to use real backgrounds and a simple style. They could not
choose elaborate patterns of film-making because even the film
stock on which they shot their films was often old and scrappy.
The results possible with these poor means were particularly
apparent in Italy and it is to an Italian, Roberto Rossellini, that
we shall turn for our main example of the idea of post-war
realism in practice. But the Italians were by no means alone. In
Japan there were men like Akira Kurosawa and Yashiro Ozu who
made films about the lives of ordinary people, and a Httle later
India produced a great film-maker in Satyajit Ray, who began
with a trilogy of films about the growing up of a little boy
called Apu.
The Italian post-war film movement - usually knovm as neo-
realism - burst on the scfene vdth a film by Rossellini called
Rome Open City in which the director drew on his experiences
of the immediate past. Italy had been dragged, reluctantly, into
 Vv.^F"
••
Rossellini and Neo-Realism 65

the war by the ambitions of the dictator Benito Mussolini, who

thought that Germany was going to win and wanted to get a
share of the spoils. But quickly the tide of war had turned,
Germany began to lose, Rome was bombed and Sicily invaded.
Mussolini lost the support of his own Fascist council, was
deposed and then restored as a puppet ruler by the Germans.
In the course of these events the country was plunged into
complete turmoil and now there were two battles in Italy -
the big one between the Germans and the alHed armies and
the more personal one between the partisans and the Fascist
supporters of Mussohni. It was out of this confusion that neo-
realism was born. The dictator had fed the people with slogans
and deceitful phrases; the film-makers aimed to tell the un-
varnished truth. He had had vast projects like the setting up of
a new Roman Empire; they were concerned with the problems
of ordinary people. He had left Italy defeated, humihated, torn
by civil war; they looked for hope in the things around them.
All of this is apparent in Rome Open City. The film captures
the last days of the German occupation of Rome so well that
when it was first shown abroad many critics thought it must
have been made with hidden cameras while the Germans were
still The battle-cry of the neo-realist film-makers was
there.
Take the camera out into the streets', and this is just what

Rossellini did. Most films create an imaginary geography for

themselves out of various different settings and places. This is a
perfectly vaUd way of creating illusions but it was not good
enough for RosselHni, who wanted the truth. He made Rome
Open City one of the rare examples of a film which keeps
exactly to the correct streets and directions of the city in which
it was filmed. The director was working with people who had

lived through the German Occupation and fought with the re-
sistance movement and he made use of their adventures. The
flat in which much of the early action takes place was that of

the scriptwriter who had many times had to escape from the
Germans over the rooftops as the film hero does. The shooting
of a woman in the street by the SS had been witnessed by one of
the actors, and so on. The story was a simple one, but had a real
appeal to people who had just lived through similar events to
66 Film Realism

those shown on the screen. In the film, a Communist resistance

leaderis on the run from the Germans. For a while he manages

to escape them but the net tightens. When he is finally betrayed

he has also unwittingly given away the identities of several
other resistance men, including a Catholic priest. The scenes
of the fighting and torture look real, as real as newsreels. But
the film is not all grim and serious, for there are several
scenes featuring little boys who fight the Germans with bombs
at dusk, then run home to their parents who smack them
for staying out so late, not suspecting the real reasons for
this.
After concentrating in this film on a single group of charac-
ters, Rossellini next turned to a wider subject and, in a film
called Paisa (the Americans' slang expression for the Italians),
he followed the course of the alHed invasion from Sicily and
Naples, through Rome, Florence and the Apennines to the Po
valley in the North. He made his film out of six separate epi-
sodes, each built on the contrast of people from different back-
grounds thrown together by the war, the Americans and the
Italians. In one episode a Negro mihtary policeman comes face
to face vdth a NeapoHtan urchin who steals his boots and
cheats him. But his indignation disappears when he discovers
that the boy is a war orphan living in squalor in caves outside
Naples. In another episode, set in the Apennine mountains, a
group of Catholic monks entertain three army chaplains. All
goes well until they find out that one of the chaplains is a Jew
and another a Protestant. Then they are filled with horror and
try to convert them to the 'true' faith. Though the incidents
which provide the six stories are vivid ones, often showing
death and suffering, Rossellini's film was for him, and for his
fellow workers on it, a rediscovery of Italy. In making it they
travelled from one end of the country to the other and
Rossellini showed himself more interested in the ordinary little
actions of life than in big heroic ones. The invasion of Sicily,
for instance, was one of the biggest military operations of the
war and a major step in' the defeat of Hitler, but the director
shows only an explosion or two and a burning house, using
these as a background for a story about a dozen GIs and their
 RosselUni and Neo-Realism 67

Italian guide. This is all he needs to make a statement about

the horrors of war.
In 1947 RosselHni completed his trilogy of films about
war with Germania anno zero, about the state of Germany at
the end of the war when life had to start again from nothing. It
is the story of a twelve-year-old boy, Edmund, who has been
brought up in Nazi schools and taught to believe lies about the
master race and the need to be merciless to the weak. He kills
his ailing father to put him out of his misery, then realizes what
he has done. The finest section of the film follows his wandering
through the ruins of Berlin. We see from his ordinary actions
the way he is still partly a child, partly an adult with a crime on
his conscience. In a ruined house he plays at suicide with a gun-
shaped stone, then plunges to his death by leaping from a
window. Rossellini shows what meaning can be got from a boy
kicking a stone or walking on the cracks in the pavement, and
how simply showing these things can reveal a lot more than
dialogue or explanations in words. In his later career Rossellini
made all kinds of films: an affectionate portrait of St Francis,
some studies of tormented women starring his wife Ingrid Berg-
man, films about ItaUan history and Louis XIV of France. But
all his best work has a remarkable directness: it puts us face to
face with the situations and people concerned.
Rossellini is not the only reaHst film-maker in Italy in the
1940s but he is the one who is closest to a direct, documen-
tary-style rendering of Hfe. He never used a script, avoided
studios wherever possible and, when he needed actors for the
background parts, he just set up his camera in the road, waited
for a crowd to gather and then chose his players from among
the bystanders. Many of the ideas of Rossellini were shared by
his fellow directors. They all tended to make films out of inci-
dents drawn from life, items recorded briefly in the newspapers
or happenings too small to merit even a mention. In this way.
Vittorio de Sica made a film about what happens to a bill-
poster when he loses his bicycle {Bicycle Thieves): Luchino Vis-
conti told the story of a fisherman who tried to set up on his
own to avoid being cheated by the wholesalers who buy his
catch (La terra trema), and Giuseppe de Santis filmed a version
68 Film Realism

which a staircase collapsed under the

of a real-life incident in
weight of two hundred who had all applied for the same
girls
job {Rome Eleven O'clock). There were also films to be made
about the more violent happenings in the years after the war:
the story of a collective farm robbed of its money (de Santis's
Tragic Pursuit) or a man driven to crime when he returns from
the. war to find his family dead and his home destroyed (Alberta

Lattuada's The Bandit).

But always they were concerned with the way people fit
together in society - a man with his family, his job, his friends.
The problems were often just the lack of money with which to
live decently. Generally speaking the film-makers themselves
were not working-class (Visconti indeed is an aristocrat) but
they made their films on small budgets with little money to pay
for stars or studio settings. The stories were usually simple
ones with no flashbacks in time and no spectacular scenes. The
lighting was equally simple and, because they often used people
who had never acted before, the directors used medium and
long shots showing the characters going about their work or
mixing with other people, not close-ups to probe their faces.
This is not to say that neo-realism in Italy did not give us
memorable portraits. Few who have seen the films will forget
the dignified old-age pensioner whose only friend is his dog in
de Sica's Umberto D, the two young people who want to get
married in Renato Castellani's Two Pennyworth of Hope or the
forceful woman of the people, played by Anna Magnani, in Luigi
Zampa's Angelina MP. The Italian directors as a group were
much more concerned with individuals than with social prob-
lems in the abstract, and in their best films they did not adopt
any sort of party political fine. Rome Open City set the pattern
when it showed a Communist party worker and a Catholic
priest as being equally S3mipathetic characters, each with a very
worthwhile contribution to make. But what all the best neo-
realist films did do was to issue a challenge. Most of them did
not have a real ending. In a sense we are made to feel that life is
going on and that the situations in which the characters have
found themselves are going to be repeated. Unless, that is, we
the audience do something about it. Several of the film-makers
 Rossdlini and Neo-Realism 69

of the period made films about the South, one of the most
wretched parts of Europe, backward and poverty-stricken. But
the real value of films like those of Pietro Germi about Sicily,
for instance, is not that they opened the way for other films of
the same kind, but that they made people throughout Italy
aware of the problems. As a sort of superior journahsm, they
helped to bring about the new laws and reconstruction pro-
grammes designed to help the people of the South which were
passed by the Italian parHament in the 1950s.
The movement known as Italian neo-realism lasted only a
half-dozen years or so, and all its best achievements lie be-
tween Rome Open City in 1945 and Umberto D in 1951. At first
sight this seems a very short time, but in fact none of the
movements in film history that we remember lasted much
longer. This is true of the Swedish films set in natural sur-
roundings that enchanted world audiences before the First
World War, the German Expressionist films (all shadows and
monsters and dark secrets) of 1920-27 and the Soviet revo-
lutionary cinema of 1925-30 which showed the triumphant
building of a new society in Russia. In literature movements
may last a whole century, but with the cinema the pace is much
quicker. Yet it is certainly true that within its brief time-spell
the neo-reahst cinema in Italy did pose all the key questions of
a reaHst fictional cinema.
 9
Cinema- Veriti

Virtually all realist film-making during the first thirty years of

sound - in both fiction and documentary - involved a recon-
structing or restaging of reahty. Film-makers studied their sub-
jects, sometimes researching them in depth, but then organized
the material themselves for the actual filming. Neo-realism in
Italy used non-professional actors, but they alv^ays portrayed
characters created by the director and his writers. Lamberto
Maggiorani, for example, was a worker from the Breda factory,
and his face and gestures - so different from those of a pro-
fessional actor - add much to the power of Vittorio de Sica's
Bicycle Thieves, But this film does not tell his story- he plays a
fictional character, a bill-poster called Antonio, and acts out
situations which had already been devised before he first met
de Sica. Soaie of the leading figures of the neo-realist move-
ment, especially the scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, wanted to
move beyond this kind of realism and have non-professionals
portray their own stories. In one film called Love in the City,
Zavattini managed to do this, but this development was never
followed up in Italy. It was not until the 1960s that reahst film-
makers gave real thought to the possibihties of looking directly
at unstaged reality, at situations, that is to say, which unfolded
as the filming proceeded.-
The roots of this new approach are to be found not in Italy
but in the United States, in France and in Canada, and to find
 Cin6ma-VMU 71

equivalents for it one has to go back to the pioneer work of

Dziga Vertov in Soviet Russia. It is not by chance, therefore,

that this form of cinema became known as cinema-verite,
a literal translation of Vertov's watchword, Kino-Pravda
(Cinema- truth). There were some other links with the past,
too, but these take the form of a reaction against earlier docu-
mentary film-making methods. Richard Leacock, for example, a
key figure in cin^ma-veritd in the United States, had been
deeply influenced by his work as cameraman on Robert
Flaherty's last film, Louisiana Story, in 1948. But his own work
is largely a refutation of the approach of Flaherty, who typifies

the attitudes and methods of the older film documentarists in

that he always worked in 35 mm., restaged for the camera
those scenes he wished to record, and in general placed the
emphasis squarely on the visuals, with the subsequently com-
piled sound track playing only a subordinate part. The import-
ance of Leacock and his collaborators is that they questioned
each of these premisses and in so doing gave new definitions to
concepts like reaHsm and spectacle and a new role to the par-
ticipants in the particular drama which they had set out to
record with their cameras. In part they could do this because
they had found a new outlet for their work, the television
screen.
Toby, Leacock's made in 1955 when
first film for television,

he was was about a travelling circus in the Am-

thirty-four,
erican Mid-West and was filmed with methods not all that
different from those of Flaherty. Though not totally successful,
it aroused the interest of Robert Drew, a journalist from Life
magazine who was currently doing research into new methods
of reporting under the sponsorship of Time Inc. With Drew as
his producer, Leacock was able to shed the desire to make
'artistic' films and see himself rather as a new kind of journalist.
To Drew television reporting seemed basically a word story
illustrated with pictures and he was very much in agreement
with Leacock about the need to develop new lightweight
equipment for film-making. Through his association with Time
Inc., Drew was able to help finance Leacock's experiments in
devising equipment that would allow the film-maker to move
72 Film Realism

freely without lights, tripods, wires and so on. As a group of

enthusiasts- including Morris Engel, Don Pennebaker and the
Maysles brothers - gradually formed, Drew's ambition of fifty-
two one-hour television films a year seemed increasingly feas-
ible.
Fundamental to the whole notion of tinema-verite was
but cumbersome 35mm. format in
the. rejection of traditional
favour of 16 mm. (which was already widely used by under-
ground film-makers). This implied a certain loss of picture
quaHty, but this was more than compensated for by the re-
duced cost and the vastly improved prospects of developing a
really light-weight camera that could be handled by a single
cameraman. An equal priority for Leacock was the creation
of portable and manoeuvrable sound recording equipment
capable of providing a synchronous sound track. In Leacock's
view, the whole power of the spontaneously captured images
would be lost if dialogue had to be dubbed on afterwards (as
was the custom in Italy, even during the neo-realist period).
When the kind of equipment he envisaged was at hand, the
two-man film team - one holding the camera and the other
working the tape recorder - became a reality. There was now
no need to re-stage events for the camera - the team could
follow their subject from room to room, up stairs and through
doorways, even into his car, capturing sound and images simul-
taneously. The film-maker was thus placed in a potentially very
fruitful but also quite delicate situation. He relinquished his
role as director of the action, for if he tried to influence events,

he would obtain only false reactions and responses, reflecting

his own presence and not the natural inclinations of his subject.
If, on the other hand, he tried to be invisible - using a concealed

camera, for instance - he was Ukely to become, and be regarded

as, an intruder and be excluded from the crucial moments of
the situation he was recording.
Leacock's refusal to create artificial drama with acting and
scripts does imply a certain limitation of subject matter for the
cinema-verite film, in that situations containing a great
deal of natural drama are needed. Thus Leacock's films tend to
be about real conflict or struggle of some kind, and situations
 Cindma-VMt& 73

which do not have their own natural drama are ignored. The
first successful film of the Drew-Leacock team. Primary, is typi-
cal. Made with two frequent collaborators of Leacock, Al
Maysles and Don Pennebaker, it recorded the election conflict
of John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin in 1960,
capturing such moments as the candidates picking up a tele-
phone to learn the result. The team followed this with films
about a racing driver {Eddie Sachs at Minneapolis), about the
actress Jane Fonda opening in a play that turned out to be a
flop (Jane), and about the efforts of a young man to fight his
urge to leave a rehabihtation centre for drug addicts (David).
In addition to the need for such eventful subject matter, film-
making Leacock also involved a special relationship with
for
his subject and a new moral responsibility. When the first was
lacking, as when, with Greg Shuker, he tried to make a film
about Nehru, then the project in its original form simply had
to be abandoned. During the shooting stage of his films Lea-
cock had no real problems about the morafity of what he was
doing, since the complications of following the unpredictable
movements of a subject engaged in activities which were not
preplanned were sufficient to absorb the film-maker totally.
But during the editing the need to produce from the mass of
material shot a coherent, saleable film did set up certain
conflicts. Occasionally Leacock was guilty of cheating, as in
one of his most absorbing films. The Chair. This story is about
the last appeal of a man condemned to the electric chair for
murder and has a great simplicity and apparently natural
drama. But much of the latter - the question: Will he or won't
he be reprieved? - was contrived during the putting- together
of the film after the verdict was known. Not only were a
number of interesting sequences scrapped because they did not
relate directly with this theme, Leacock's team even went out
and shot missing scenes to help the film to fit this chosen
interpretation of events a month after the court's decision was
known.
As a method of working, Leacock's tinima-verite involves
the rejection of the whole technical apparatus and hierarchy
of the normal commercial cinema. There can be no assistants
74 Film Realism

engaged on the production, since their presence would

n
des-:

troy the sense of intimacy still possible for the two-man

team of cameraman and recordist. There can be no question
of the film-makers simply handing over the material to an
editor to piece together along with an indication of what they
had set out to achieve, because the real value of the method is
that.it throws up events and incidents which could not have
been foreseen but which of course totally colour the final
result. As Leacock himself has admitted, in this kind of
cinema every time you cut a section and put the remain-
der together, you are in fact telling a lie. For the film to be a
true reflection of the situation recorded the film-maker must
do own editing. If one of the limitations of this approach is
his
that, when the film-makers miss an interesting moment, there
is no way (apart from cheating) in which they can go back and
capture one of the style's great virtues is that the real sub-
it,

ject of the fihnmay not become known until the filming is over
and the rushes can be viewed. ISIehru, for example, turned out
to be not a film about how the Indian premier won an election,
but rather a study of the relationship of the fihn-maker and his
subject.
Though Leacock's film-making is one of the more fascinating
examples of cinema-verite, it is perhaps wrong to place too
much weight on him as an individual figure. All his most im-
portant works have been made in collaboration, and in his more
recent films - particularly the series of pop music films such as
Dont Look Back and Monterey Pop made with Don Penne-
baker - he has been content to act simply as a cameraman
and to leave the overall creative responsibility to his partner.
Moreover, it would be wrong to see his work outside the inter-
national context. In France, for instance, the early 1960s saw a
great deal of similarly fascinating cinema-verite. experi-
ment. The key figure here was Jean Rouch, an ethnographer
whose earliest films were simple records of tribal customs in
Africa. Lacking any training in film techniques and devoid of all
aesthetic concern, Rouch was free to concentrate on the impact
of filming his subjects. From the first, his feature-length films
show a desire to involve the characters in the making of the
 Cin^ma-VeriU 75

film. Moi un noir (1958), a study of an African stevedore, used

the subject's reaction to Rouch's images as its commentary.
Chronicle of a Summer, made with Edgar Morin a few years
later, applied the sociologist's traditional mode of inquiry to
the Parisian scene and was built around a series of interviews
and confrontations. Thus, in contrast to Leacock, Rouch never
tries to pretend that the camera is a mere observer. He sees it
as conditioning the responses of the people filmed, and in films
like La Pyramide humaine, set in a multi-racial African high
school, and La Punition, shot on the streets of Paris, he shows
an increasing interest in recording the results to be achieved
from fihning an improvised sequence which sets amateur
players in situations which are fictional, but close to the cir-
cumstances of their own lives. In this way the cinema-verite
film-maker's usual and dubious claims to an ^objective' state-
ment are forgotten, but new forms of film drama are made
possible.
Cinema-verite as envisaged by Leacock and Rouch has a
restrictedaim in that it can never conceivably do more than
supplement normal cinema. not a total revolution in
It is

method applicable to all film-making. But

it does serve to

widen the range of reaHty open to the camera, by allowing it to

record not the film-maker's assumptions as to what might have
happened, but events and situations as they do actually take
place.
 lO

Realist Film and

Television Realism

One of the central preoccupations of twentieth-century art has

been to redefine the boundaries of the actual and the illusory.
There are numerous examples of this that could be cited, from
the cubists' first use of collage techniques right up to the pop
artists' employment of the given idiom of the commercial, the
strip cartoon and the advertising display. In this movement
towards the real the cinema's role has most frequently been a
somewhat paradoxical one. As a medium using photographic
reproductions of reality in movement as its basic raw material,
the cinema has undoubtedly helped to foster this realistic ten-
dency of modern art. But film realists have in general turned
their backs on the full implications of this and remained
wedded to a basically nineteenth-century conception of re-
alism. This backward-looking attitude is reflected in the ap-
proach of such film-makers to technical advances like colour,
sound, wide screen, stereophonic sound and three-dimensional
images. The realistic possibilities of these have largely been
ignored and a realist film has been traditionally conceived as a
technically restrained work in black and white with a post-
synchronized dialogue and an emotive musical score. It took
the advent of television to alter a conception of reaUsm that
held sway in the cinema from Lumiere till the 1950s.
At the time when film-makers first faced up to the impact of
television such an effect hardly seemed likely. Producers put
 Realist Film and Television Realism 77

their faith in the production values which film-makers had

always seen as the prerogative of Hollywood and which tele-
vision could then not equal. To a certain extent this polar-
ization of film and television has persisted up to the present.
Just as the invention of photography in the nineteenth century,
by depriving the painter of sole claim to his traditional repre-
sentational role, allowed - perhaps even compelled - him to
turn to abstraction, so too television's fundamental naturalism
has served to free the film image for new expressive functions.
But the counter-current towards a synthesis of film and tele-
vision has been equally strong. Part of the impetus behind this
fusion has been economic, for, ironically enough, only a decade
or so passed before the film companies struggling to maintain
their solvency were endeavouring to sell their earlier *ante-
television' films to the television organizations. Equally, the
increased use of colour in film-making in the 1970s stems less
from audience demand or the requirements of film directors
than from the imperatives dictated by the spread of colour
television. The fact that, for television, 16 mm. film stock pro-
vides quite adequate images and even 8 mm. equipment can be
used for some kinds of news reporting, has caused the validity
of the traditional but costly 35 mm. cinema format to be in-
creasingly questioned.
StyHstically too the impact of television has been con-
siderable. The rapprochement came in the early 1960s
first real

with the cinema-verite movement, led by men like Rouch

and Leacock, which was considered in the previous chapter.
But more recently film-makers trained in the television studios
have renewed the assault on traditional film assumptions. In
particular, those directors who have sought
to combine the
naturalistic potential of the television form with the greater
flexibility that film-making methods afford have modified our
view of what a reaHst film is. Among those who have con-
tributed most to this change, Peter Watkins and Kenneth
Loach deserve particular mention. They were part of a group
which came to the fore in British television in the mid 1960s.
Watkins developed his style in two television films made at
the BBC in 1964-5. The first of these, Culloden, was a
78 Film Realism

reconstruction of the 1746 battle between the English and the

Scots which finally destroyed Bonnie Prince Charlie's claim to
the throne. Unlike the traditional historical film it treated the
battle as were a real event at which the camera crews and
if it

reporters happened to be present. Watkins used anewsreel style

- handheld cameras, jagged editing, uneven tracking shots -
calculated to play on the audience's associations with normal
news programmes. As a result the fact that this is a two-
hundred-year- old battle is forgotten and CuUoden is experi-
enced as a contemporary happening. The apparently casual
style is in fact a deliberately contrived one, for this, like all
Watkins's films, was fully pre-scripted, for all its avoidance of
any form of professionalism.
Most striking of all is Watkins's frequent insertion of inter-
views with the protagonists - princes and officers, soldiers on
both sides and even a military observer - all questioned about
their hopes, fears and ambitions. These interviews, staged to
look as authentic as possible with the faces framed so as to
make us forget the eighteenth-century dress, confront the
spectator with a direct experience of the battle and its after-

math. In this way the horror of CuUoden comes over par-

ticularly forcibly. To give a wider context a narrator's voice is
used to pick out the relevant facts and present the social and
economic background to the conflict. Watkins's subsequent
work develops this same style in new and more forceful ways,
treating it to futuristic instead of historical themes. The War
Game, made in 1965, caused the director to break with the
BBC, which refused to show this film on the grounds of its
allegedly excessive violence. It is, however, hard to see how the
subject Watkins was commissioned to treat - a nuclear attack
on Kent in the context of a worsening world political crisis -
could have benefited from a cosier or more comforting ap-
proach. The mixture of a future nightmare subject - Hterally
unimaginable carnage and destruction - with a resolutely con-
temporary, everyday television reportage style is a very potent
one.
Watkins later went on to apply the same techniques in the
cinema, especially in Punishment Park, made in 1970, which
 Realist Film and Television Realism 79

was a study of the violent backlash of ordinary middle-of-the-

road American citizens against hippies and social deviants in a
society threatened with war from without. Watkins's carefully
documented imaginings are all too convincing and the power of
the staged, but apparently authentic, interviews points out a
whole new dramatic aspect of the film-maker's response to
reaUty. Through all his work Watkins's vision of the horrors in
store for us unless we change the society in which we live is put
across with apocalyptic force.
An equally strong but very different challenge to traditional
film values is provided by the work of Watkins's contemporary

at the BBC, Kenneth Loach. Loach's style was formed in the

series of Wednesday plays he directed with Tony Garnett as a
producer in the mid 1960s. The scripts he used - Nell Dunn's
Up the Junction, Jeremy Sandford's Cathy Come Home and
David Mercer's In Two Minds, for example - were all fictional,
but based on first-hand research and documentation. In each
case the direction aimed at making the play look as totally
authentic as possible. In part this was the result of Loach's
rejection of the studio production method in favour of low
budget location shooting with unknown players. But the tele-
vision format itself was also a great influence. The particular
qualities of the television image and the habitual viewing pat-
tern of the audience both tend to foster a blurring of the dis-
tinctions between fact and fiction. News broadcasts and
dramas, sports reports and variety shows all form a part of the
same undistinguished mosaic, presented on the same level of
reaUty, uniformly structured as entertainment and trimmed to
fit pre-arranged time slots. Unlike film-making, where weeks,

or even months, will be spent on editing after the shooting has

been completed, television has the potential of showing life in
its real time, as it actually happens. Television direction itself
reflects this possibflity. The director sits in front of a number of
monitors or television sets making an instant choice of images
and determining the cutting between one image and another
during the actual performance. For these reasons perhaps tele-
vision dramas which have a live 'feel' to them are among the
most and the standard dramatic structure most
successful,

k
 ,.-j"Hib!»7;i"^«r7(';yi^

80 Film Realism

favoured is one which allows an involvement in an unfolding

process. Trials and inquiries of all forms can hardly fail to grip

when shown on television. The lack of definition in the images

also means that television is a close-up medium. A shot of a
dozen faces which would be perfectly clear on a cinema screen
is simply a blur on television. The ideal television performance

takes. this into account and stresses such qualities as intimacy,

spontaneity, casualness and underplaying. As a result the re-
lationship between actor and audience is different. Whereas
film stars have frequently carried over the same looks, quaUties
and gestures from one film to another and yet maintained their
own personaUty distinct from the role, television performers
are swallowed up by their parts. The audience sees not actors
playing roles, but real people acting out their lives, so that the
player becomes inseparable from the part he plays.
Kenneth Loach, whose work carries on into the 1970s with
both television plays - The Rank and File - and films - Kes and
Family Life - bases the whole of his stylistic approach on a
mixture of fiction and documentary with these television
characteristics. Cathy Come Home, his most celebrated work,
shows the enormous power of such a style and the huge audi-
ence it can reach and involve in its subject. Seen by about half
the entire population of the country in its initial screenings, it
helped foster a new national awareness of the problems of the
homeless by simply portraying the gradual destruction of a
family through its inabiUty to obtain adequate housing. The
struggles of the young couple to cope with parenthood, unem-
ployment and a uniformly hostile bureaucracy are handled
with complete naturalness, acted scenes and pre-scripted dia-
logue blending indissolubly with snatches of authentic speech
and candid-camera shots.
Yet this new form of screen naturalism poses the same basic
issues which occur throughout the whole development of re-
aHst film-making. Loach, like so many documentarists and neo-
realists before him, wants both to show and to inform. Film can
reflect the surface totally, particularly when handled in Loach's
manner. Capturing seemingly authentic faces, words and ges-
tures, it can make us forget the existence of the script and the
 1

Realist Film and Television Realism 8

camera, and experience the narrated story as a slice of real life.

But this very naturalism is at odds with any attempt to induce
a change in audience views. Loach has very definite attitudes
about the need to change the social system, to nationalize in-
dustries (including the film industry) and to attack bureau-
cratic indifference. This is clear from all his film and television
work and much of its power comes from his evident total sin-
cerity. Yet the naturahstic style he has perfected does not
convince as a mode of arguing the issues of equality or social
priority. With Cathy Come Home he reached a very large audi-
ence and created a great stir, but, as Garnett has pointed out,
two years later when the play was reshown the problem of the
homeless had actually increased. A means of combining fiction
and documentary which will actually foster change instead of
merely reflecting what injustices exist has still to be devised.

I
 PART TWO

Film Illusion
.^^
 II

The Techniques of Spectacle

The linking of film and fiction to provide entertainment for an

audience isalmost as old as the cinema itself. As we have seen,
MeHes was rivalling the theatre with his little comedies before
1900. Drama can be defined in many ways, but the film drama
which reached its cHmax in the Hollywood studios during the
1930s and 1940s is most aptly characterized in Alfred Hitch-
cock's definition of it as 'Hfe with the dull bits cut out'. This
implies a totally different attitude to life from that shown by
realist film-makers. In Hollywood Hfe is not observed, but pil-
laged as source material. The film-maker does not attempt to
capture the feel, texture and rhythm of reaUty, but instead
creates a facsimile, an independent entity which will give the
illusion of being true while in fact obeying the laws of audience
involvement. In place of a reproduction of life, we have Ufe
turned into a spectacle, that is to say, made visual, public,
dramatic. Whereas the realist cinema involves a rejection or at
best a simplification of technical possibiUties, the Hollywood
film drama is up with the industrial and technological pro-
tied
gress of the cinema. Despite the haphazard and in many ways
unsatisfactory manner in which this latter occurs, it is genuine
progress, for, as it becomes more complicated, the cinema
achieves one of its ideal aims, evolving into a spectacular form
of entertainment uniting action and size of image, sound and
music, depth and colour. It is only an historical accident that
86 Film Illusion

Lumiere's cinematograph was black and white, silent and two

dimensional - no one would have aimed at creating a means of
reproducing reaUty that had these limitations. Even within
these constrictions the cinema could achieve great dramatic
effect, as the history of the silent cinema shows. But from the
very earliest days film-makers did experiment by adding colour
and sound to their films and using new techniques of photogra-
phy and editing to give an illusion of depth and space. One of
the major contributions of Hollywood to the development of
the cinema is that it gave these isolated experiments viable

commercial form.
The cinema as spectacle is by its nature a highly technical
product. If you want to write a book, all you need is pen and
paper. Even a typewriter is not absolutely essential to begin
with. But this simpHcity does not mean that the book will in
any way be limited in its appeal. Poems jotted down in pencil
on the back of an old envelope can become recognized as mas-
terpieces of literature. This is not true of the cinema in its
normal commercial form. Nowadays a beginner can pick up an
8 mm. camera that automatically focuses and exposes his film
and is almost as simple and foolproof as a pen. But the film
produced can never be blown up and shown in an ordinary
cinema. Even 16 mm. filming which is considerably more ex-
pensive and needs a whole new range of skills - focusing,
taking light-readings to get the correct exposure, editing the
images and synchronizing a sound track - is still acceptable in
the cinema only in special circumstances - as a personal experi-
ment, as a record or report, in certain kinds of cinema-
veriU filming. For all normal story films the standard size has
always been 35 mm., and even if the fifty or sixty people who
are normally present whenever a scene is shot are not all vitally
necessary all the time, film-making at this level remains an
expensive medium requiring a great many highly skilled crafts-
men. The 16 mm. format is adequate for television trans-
mission, but the cinema needs a large clear screen image and
with the present state of mechanical and engineering skill this
kind of image remains very costly to obtain.
In the cinema it is often difficult to see why changes occur
 The Techniques of Spectacle 87

at a particular moment unless we look outside the area of

film-making itself. Film history is certainly not a steady
march of ideas, withimprovements being hailed and applied as
soon as they are practical. Film-making has always been a risky
business and the people who put up the money have to be
gamblers of some sort. No-one knows what makes a film a hit
that everyone will want to see. Imitating last year's hits is one
sure way to disaster, but so for that matter is making a film
that is even slightly in advance of public taste. Film-makers can
only use their instinct, their feeling for what is going to work,
and of course they make mistakes. In view of these problems,
when things are going smoothly, producers try to keep every-
thing as it is, and inventors with new devices get no hearing at
all. But when things go wrong, the whole situation changes, foe

producers are the kind of people who will risk everything

rather than admit defeat. The film company
Warner Brothers
was faced with bankruptcy, so it plunged into experiments vvith
sound in 1926 .and won. The whole industry was hurt by the
. .

success of television in the early 1950s and again looked

around for new gimmicks. Those who put their money into
wide-screen processes backed a winner, those who invested in
films with three-dimensional effects made a lot of money at
but then lost out completely. Though millions of pounds
first,

are made annually by some films, the industry as a whole has

always been precarious. It needs the banks and big business
to invest money in its enterprises and is therefore at the mercy
of forces from the world of high finance. The attitude of the
giant electrical companies was very important in the change-
over from silence to sound in the late 1920s. More recently the
effect of televisioncompanies has been equally decisive in the
spread of colour. Just as many film-makers in the 1920s would
have preferred to continue making silent films, so too nowa-
days many directors regret the unstoppable move towards
colour.
In the cinema, then, new technical ideas are not developed
because the artists engaged in film-making demand them. For
such people telling new kinds of stories in such a way as to use
the full existing possibiUties is generally a demanding enough
88 Film Illusion

occupation. New techniques are pressed upon the cinema by

outside forces: things are going badly, so the public has to be
given a novelty. Inevitably, the newness soon ceases to attract
audiences and attendance figures go back to what they were
before. The sound film - - was no
after the first excitement
more popular than the silent film.The reasons why some
changes, like sound and wide screen, are permanent also have
nothing to do with their artistic impact. The main reason is an
economic one. Exhibitors and cinema-owners who have to
spend a great deal of money getting their cinemas wired for
sound or putting in a big screen do so on the understanding
that there will be a permanent supply of suitable films. If this is
not forthcoming they can put pressure on producers. There is,
however, no pressure attached to inventions hke technicolor
that do not need new equipment. Exhibitors are happy to take
films in colour or in black and white - as long as the latter can
still draw crowds. On the other hand, inventions which make

even small demands on the audience and in this way irritate

them (for we demand to be totally absorbed without effort on
our part when we go to the cinema for our diet of illusion),
such inventions - 3-D with its special glasses is a good example
- exhibitors reject. Or at least until the next crisis comes
along.
By the normal rhythms of technical development in the
cinema we are now due for a new idea or two. The cinema
seems to change roughly every ten years or so. The 1910s
brought feature-length films, the 1920s sound, the 1930s
colour, the 1950s wide screens. Though the 1940s brought no
new technical devices (they were perhaps held back by the
war) new methods of realistic film-making were developed. The
1960s too were dull technically, for the studios were crumbling
and running deeper and deeper into debt, with no money for
technical novelties. But again these years were a period of in-
tense change in the types of films made, as the needs of the
new film audiences were explored. Yet there is still plenty of
scope for new ideas that will lead the cinema on to new fields
of experience. The problems of 3-D still have to be solved com-
mercially. There is the idea of the dynamic frame, which
 The Techniques of Spectacle 89

expands and contracts according to the type of shot being

shown. There is the possibility of projecting films all round on
circular screens (an idea that has been used once or twice since
it was first tried in 1896). For a brief moment one or two

people thought we might like to smell films as well as see

and hear them and systems with glorious names like
Aromarama and Smellovision were devised - but the future
possibilities of this idea seem limited. What is more hkely is
that the cinema, Uke the theatre, will begin to break down the
distinction between film and audience, and film will be increas-
ingly used in 'mixed media' shows where it is combined with
live action. This could have a great effect on the film art.
What is most striking, however, when we look at the cinema
from this kind of perspective is the extent to which it belongs
to the nineteenth century. The whole technical apparatus of
the cinema - celluloid, special lighting, enormous technical
crews involved in the shooting - is quite outdated in an electro-
nic age.What television transmission failed to do, namely break
down the idea that films are essentially something to be viewed
in public cinemas, may well be accomplished by video tape
when this becomes fully available. The time is not too far dis-
tant when people will be able to play video tapes of films in
their own homes as easily as they now play gramophone
records or sound tapes. When this happens, all kinds of changes
are likely. There will be no reason, for example, why films
should not last for many hours and be *read' over a number of
days as novels are. The whole idea of spectacle may give way to
new types of film experience that use other potentialities of
sound and image. Meanwhile, we are well placed in time to
trace the progress from the 1890s to the present of film as it has
been used to create a dream world for masses and intelligentsia
alike. The rise and fall of Hollywood is an epic story worthy of
Cecil B. De Mille himself.
 12

Edison and the Origins

of Hollywood

Ifthe European tradition of realism in the cinema looks back to

Lumiere and seems a logical development of some of the po-
tentiaUties that can be seen in his work, so the Hollywood
tradition stems equally clearly from the work carried on at the
West Orange laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison in New Jersey.
All the pioneers of the cinema, in Europe and in the United
States, owed a great debt to the work at West Orange, al-
though was aimed specifically at what proved to be a bHnd
this
alleyway: the development of the kinetoscope or peepshow.
Indeed it is curious that the very same fusion - in the name of
entertainment - of nineteenth century scientific knowledge,
technical skill and commercial enterprise that gave rise to the
cinema should also, just a year or so before, have fostered this
lame duck. Edison and his technicians were professional inven-
tors with all the resources needed to give the world a suc-
cession of mechanical and scientific wonders, and moving
pictures were a natural complement to Edison's newly invented
phonograph. By 1890, when work commenced in earnest at
West Orange, virtually all the basic problems had been re-
solved, in theory at least, and the task of converting a mass of
research material into a working device that could be manu-
factured and sold in commercially profitable numbers was pre-
cisely the kind of task for which Edison's laboratory was
equipped. Records show that though work on moving pictures
 Edison and the Origins of Hollywood 91

was carried on merely as a sideline, the creation of the kine-

toscope presented no insuperable problems. Unfortunately for
Edison, the existence of the phonograph (which was exploited
as a coin-in-the-slot machine) led him into a dead end. Instead
of thinking in terms of projection, Edison asked for, and got, a
peepshow that could be seen by only one person at a time.
In the course of later lawsuits many of the facts about the
kinetoscope were obscured, dates were falsified and a number
of very fanciful claims made. But, thanks to recent research,
particularly by the Gordon Hendricks, it is now
film historian
possible to estabUsh some sort of a timetable.* Edison's own
role in the work on moving pictures was purely that of a
businessman and all the real invention was done by one of his
employees, a young engineer from Great Britain called WilUam
Dickson, who later left the Edison group to help found the rival
Biograph company. It seems to have been in 1888 that Edison
first got the idea of a visual accompaniment to his phonograph,

and the work he set in motion drew freely on the results of

other earlier pioneers. In 1888 Muybridge lectured at Orange,
New Jersey, and there seems to have been some contact be-
tween him and the Edison people. In 1889 Edison went to
Europe and in Paris met Etienne Marey, who demonstrated
his equipment to him. By 1891 a prototype of the kinetoscope
could be privately exhibited, but a further two years passed
before all the problems were resolved. By early 1893 Edison
and Dickson had built the definitive model of the kinetoscope
viewer, as well as the kinetograph camera (which filmed vir-
tually all Edison's own motion pictures, working at a speed of
forty images a second) and the celebrated black maria, the first
photographic studio built specifically for motion pictures. Even
then the construction of the kinetoscopes, of which over a
thousand were eventually made, proceeded slowly, and it was
not until 14 April 1894 that the first kinetoscope parlour
opened on Broadway.

* Gordon Hendricks is author of The Edison Motion Picture Myth (Uni-

versity of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961) and The
Kinetoscope: America's First Commercially Successful Motion Picture
Exhibitor (The Beginnings of the American Film, New York, 1966).
92 Film Illusion

The kinetoscope, which was basically a box about four feet

high equipped with an eyepiece through which a person who
had inserted his coin could see a fifty-foot loop of tiny moving
pictures, enjoyed an immediate but short-lived vogue. At first
the pubUc was eager to see the new Edison marvel and parlours
were set up in major cities all over the United States. Many
kinetoscopes were exported to Europe, where they not only
found an enthusiastic public but also came into the hands of
men like Lumiere and Paul who were interested in the prob-
lems of projected moving pictures. It was the latter which
proved to be the lasting innovation, but though his kinetoscope
undoubtedly opened the way, Edison never seems to have con-
sidered the possibiHty or desirability of projected films, until,
that is, others had already shown them to be profitable. If,

therefore, it is to Edison's fellow industrialist, the Frenchman

Louis Lumiere, that the honour of being the first man to ar-
range a showing of projected motion pictures to a paying audi-
ence belongs, this is not to deny Edison and his fellow workers
a crucial role in the invention of the cinema. Indeed, his kin-
etoscope films are a much more striking anticipation of what
the cinema was to become in Hollywood than are Lumiere's
outdoor scenes. In essence the kinetoscope, despite its small
scale, was a form of spectacle and set out to offer the pubUc
traditional entertainment in a new form. Edison's little films
featured not the wonders of the natural world but music hall
acts, dancing girls, performing animals or boxing matches. The
bulky kinetograph camera could not be taken out into the
world in search of such attractions; instead noted performers
were summoned to the laboratory and their acts created or
feats restaged within the confines of the black walls of the tiny
Edison studio (in fact little more than a hut). If the kinetoscope
was subsequently superseded by the cinema the reasons lie less
in the nature of the entertainment provided than in the quality
of the image, for the content of Edison's films and the idea of
recreating events specifically for the camera lead naturally to
the system we know as Hollywood. The whole history of the
rise and fall of the kinetoscope in the 1890s is a striking dem-
onstration of the way that the film conceived as entertainment
 Edison and the Origins of Hollywood 93

becomes subject to, and in part a product of, commercial and

economic pressures, thereby ceasing to be simply the out-
growth of the camera as a recording device or the projected
image as a reflection of the world.
By 1896 the kinetoscope, already outpaced by a rival peep-
show, the mutoscope, in its own field, was proving unable to
compete with projected films. As a result, on 23 April of that
year came the first projection of kinetoscope films on to a
screen in New York. Though Edison himself had had Httle or no
faith in the movies while concerned with their invention, he
now showed himself a keen businessman in their exploitation,
setting up his own company to produce films and harrying his
rivals by clever use of his motion-picture patents. For Edison,
like the pioneers in other countries, soon found himself sur-
rounded by rivals making better use than he could of his own
discoveries. Among the first of these rivals was the German-
born Sigmund *Pop' Lubin, an unscrupulous plagiarist of the
works of Edison, Lumiere and Melies, whose company became
one of the most important early makers of films and whose
skill as a pubHcist did much to establish the cinema as a popu-

lar form of entertainment. Soon other companies came into

being: Vitagraph, founded by J. Stuart Blackman and Albert E.
Smith and numbering Florence Turner and the comedian John
Bunny among its players; Kalem, named after the initials of its
founders (George Kleine, Samuel Long and Frank Marion),
which possessed no studios and produced films in Ireland and
the Middle East as well as in the United States: and Essanay,
famous for its Bronco Billy Anderson westerns and some of the
early Chaphn comedies.
In 1908 all these companies, together with Selig, Biograph
(later to achievefame thanks to the work of GriflSth) and the
French firms of Pathe, Melies and Gaumont, combined to form
the Motion Picture Patents Company - usually known simply
as the Trust - and attempted to obtain a monopoly of the
cinema. By charging each exhibitor a licence fee of two dollars a
week, the Trust was assured of an income of a million dollars a
year, in addition to the profits from its films. The Trust seemed
to hold all the trump cards - Edison's patents, the biggest
94 Film Illusion

production companies, most of the film theatres. Yet it was the

independent producers and distributors omitted from the Trust
who eventually won through, perhaps because they included in
their number men of the calibre of William Fox and Carl
Laemmle, both of whom founded companies that continued to
survive for the next fifty years or more.
It- was partly as a result of the bitterly fought patents war
that production moved from New York to CaHfornia, which not
only offered the independents more sunshine but was also con-
veniently near to the Mexican border. With these advantages
to back up their own skill the independents triumphed, though
at the cost of severing the finance, which remained rooted in
New York, from the production, which moved to the South.
Hollywood itself was discovered, quite by chance, in the course
of such a move. In 1913 Cecil B. De Mille, later to be renowned
for his biblical epics, sent back an historic telegram to the
company that had dispatched him to shoot a western called
The Squaw Man in Flagstaff, Arizona. De Mille wired, 'Flagstaff
no good for our purpose. Have proceeded to California. Want
authority to rent barn in place called Hollywood for seventy-
five dollars a month.' The company agreed, advising him, how-
ever, not to make a long commitment. Despite their caution,
Hollywood was born.
This then was the world of the pre- 19 14 American cinema, a
teeming world of talent and bluff, artistry and money-grabbing,
with ruthless producers struggHng against strong French com-
petition for the control of their home market (an object finally
achieved during the 1914-18 war) and shrewd-minded exhibi-
tors building up chains of nickelodeons, as the first purpose-
built cinemas were called. The American films of the early
1900s were directly Hnked to the lives of the audiences. If there
was fantasy or escapism it was of a kind that related explicitly
to the hopes and ideals of the working classes and the immi-
grant population that made up most of the paying customers.
These films are the seed from which much later cinema has
sprung, though today their similarity with the Hollywood films
of the great years of the 1930s and 1940s is obscured by their
surface oddity. They were, of course, silent in the sense that
 Edison and the Origins of Hollywood 95

words came only in the form of written titles, but always they
had the accompaniment of music, at least a piano, even in the
smallest cinemas, and sometimes, in the very grandest, a full-
scale orchestra. The films were often incredibly crude to look
at, making much use of painted backcloths and with interior
scenes rather obviously shot in sets open to the sunlight. Pro-
jection was usually poor and until 1912 a film was hardly ever
more than one reel, or about ten minutes, long, and had needed
perhaps only a day's shooting. But already in these days the
importance of the narrative was apparent. Mostly the film had
a simple moral lesson - it showed the triumph of good over evil
or warned against the evils of drink or of the big city - though
at this stage without any complexities or shades of meaning. In
the very early years of the century a whole set of rules for film-
making had been established: actors had to arrive and depart
as in a stage play and they had to overact to make up for the
lack of words. They also had to be photographed full length.
'Who is going to pay for half an actor when he can get a whole
one somewhere else?' angry producers asked directors who
wanted to bring the camera closer. Such a system threatened
to strangle the development of the cinema as a form in its own
right, but gradually film-makers won themselves the freedom
to use the medium more creatively, partly by pointing to the
success of imported films which were often longer and more
sophisticated and partly by demonstrating that their ideas
would please audiences.
Among those who did most for the American cinema in
these very early years was Edwin S. Porter. He provides a link
between Edison, who established the American industry, and
Griffith, who made the cinema an art. Porter was in charge of
production at the Edison studio from 1900 until 1909 and
there is a pleasing Tightness in the fact that it was to him that
GriflSth turned when he entered the film industry. For Porter,
more than any other director, laid the foundations of the kind
of narrative cinema in which Griffith was to excel. Like so
many of the early figures in film history, Porter was not by any
stretch of the imagination an artist. He was a former mechanic
and cameraman who, without trying to be experimental, had
96 Film Illusion

hit on new ways of telling stories. He took Mfelies's pattern of a

series of tableaux a stage further by making the scenes follow
each other with more logic. In The Life of an American Fireman
(1903) he mixed shots of real fire engines with invented and
acted scenes. Put together in the order which Porter chose, the
two elements were fused to create a new, specifically filmic sort
of story and a novel excitement in the audience. In films like
this and The Great Train Robbery (1904) Porter developed his
ideas in a way that pointed to the future, but such films are of
interest today only as landmarks in the history of the cinema.
Unlike Meli^s's films, which were naive but not crude, they are
too primitive to have the power of exciting us as works of art
today. The elements of fihn storytelling are there, but they
have not been put together with any sense of rhythm or real
pattern. The fourteen scenes of The Great Train Robbery, for
instance, are each filmed in a single shot and the shots just
follow one after the other without real excitement. The con-
struction is so loose that the close-up of the bandit shooting
straight at the camera was supplied with a note to the effect
that it could be used at the beginning or the end, simply for
effect. For all its limitations, however. Porter's work does pre-
pare the way for the man who
ranks as probably the greatest
innovator in the history of the cinema, David Wark Griffith.
 13

Griffith and Film Drama

When D. W. Griffith entered the film industry in 1907 he was

already over thirty years of age, an ambitious man who had so
far failed to make any mark on the world in a life full of pov-
erty and disappointment. He grew up in the South, son of a
Confederate colonel known, because of the quaHty of his voice,
as Roaring Jake. The father's best-known exploit was to have
led a cavalry charge during the Civil War while riding in a
buggy (he was wounded at the time). After the war he had also
achieved some local fame with his readings from Shakespeare,
but he failed to make money in any of his enterprises and the
family was deeply in debt when he died. His son David had an
ambition to be a great writer, an American Shakespeare, but
his writings had little success with publishers and the one play
he did sell. A Fool and a Girl, for which he received $1,000,
flopped when it was produced in 1907. Meanwhile Griffith
worked as an actor, learning the techniques of the stage in the
course of ten years but achieving very little success. Again and
again the company with which he was touring at the time
collapsed and he found himself stranded and forced to do odd
jobs to pay for his fare home. But he persevered. In 1907 he
found a new outlet for his talents when he tried to sell a story
(a one-reel version of Tosca) to Edwin S. Porter at the Edison
company. His script was rejected, but he was offered the lead
in Porter's next film. Rescued from an Eagles Nest,

T-FAR-D
 ^ LHMi»-,'^,

98 Film Illusion

For someone like Griffith, a man with vast ambitions as a

stage actor and theatrical writer, working in films was a matter
for shame and secrecy, and for the first three years of his new
career he signed himself 'Laurence' Griffith. In many ways the
attitude of actors like Griffith was very strange. Great figures of
the stage, such as Sarah Bernhardt, had appeared in films in
Europe without harming their reputations, and for an un-
successful stage actor the pay that the film companies offered
was good. But ordinary stage actors still considered it de-
grading and welcomed the fact that they were anonymous,
known as faces but not by name. There was at this time no
status for the actor in the studios. An actor would play the
lead in one film and be merely an extra in the background of
the next. If she was playing Juliet an actress would be expected
to help with the costumes, while Romeo was building the bal-
cony. Yet within a few years this whole position was to change,
as the career of Mary Pickford shows. This was a trend in which
Griffith himself did not participate. He never bid to retain the
services of the many budding stars he discovered (Pickford, the
Gish sisters, Mae Marsh, etc.) and even his great epics were sold
without the benefit of star appeal.
Griffith turned somewhat reluctantly to directing for the Bio-
graph company in the summer of 1908. But having once begun,
he poured out films at the rate of two a week without a break
throughout the year, and in the five years up to 1913 he experi-
mented with all the basic techniques that comprise the art of
making films. In this time it is fair to say that he invented
virtually nothing (despite his later claims to the contrary). Ear-
lier pioneers, we now know, had proved incredibly inventive in

their use of new techniques with which to give a touch of

novelty to their fikns (like Porter with his close-up of the bandit
shooting). What is important about Griffith is that he used such
techniques in a genuinely dramatic way, so that in his hands the
cinema became a vivid and powerful way of telling stories and
captivating audiences. He had a basic awareness that the unit
of film-making is not (as in the theatre) the scene, but the
individual shot. He saw that a scene must be broken down into
shots if it is to have its full effect. He made exciting use of his
 Griffith and Film Drama 99

camera and found new ways of editing shots together to make a

sequence. For example, the chase had been a standard pattern
of film construction from very early days, and Porter had ex-
perimented with linking two stories in films like The Klepto-
maniac (1905), but the drama which Griffith extracted from his
last-minute rescues, with cross-cutting from the woman or
child in peril to the advancing hero and back again, was quite
unique.
Almost four hundred of Griffith's films of his 'apprentice'
years (1908-13) have been reconstructed from the paper prints
which were deposited in the United States Library of Congress
as a proof of copyright, and many of these are films which had
been unavailable to critics for many years. At the moment our
knowledge of Griffith is based on a comparatively few films, to
which writers and critics refer again and again, and we shall
probably have to make some adjustments when these newly
discovered films have been analysed. But even now we can see
the broad outlines of Griffith's advances. He made one-reel
films of just about every conceivable kind: adaptations from
the classics, historical (even prehistorical) dramas, comedies,
war films, contemporary social dramas, biblical epics. He ex-
perimented with expressive theatrical lighting in films like The
Drunkard's Reformation (1909) and Pippa Passes (1909), and
used linking shots and editing technique to replace the
'thought balloons' of Porter. He cross-cut to build up suspense
in The Lonely Villa (1909) and The Lonedale Operator (1911)
and used extreme long shots to create atmosphere in Ramona
(1910).
With the aid of his cameramen, Billy Bitzer and Arthur
Marvin, Griffith helped build up the fortunes of the Biograph
company, but his employers constantly tried to hold him back.
They wanted him to keep to the one-reel format in which he
had been so successful, while he wanted to make longer and
more elaborate films. Early in 1911 he made his first double-
reel film, but Biograph released it as two separate films. His
Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, and there were more problems
with his producers over his second two-reel effort, Enoch
Arden, based on Tennyson's poem. Despite the fact that long
100 Film Illusion

films were now being imported from Europe and successfully

shown in the United States, particularly the Italian epic. Quo
Vadis, the directors of Biograph were horrified when, in 1913,
Griffith produced a four-reel biblical epic, Judith of Bethulia.
The company refused to show this, Griffith's most ambitious
film to date, until a year later, with the result that there was a
quarrel and Griffith departed.
Though Griffith claimed that he never saw the long Italian
films about Roman history, like Quo Vadis and Cabiria, which
took the United States by storm, there can be httle doubt that
their existence prompted him to greater efforts. As soon as he
could, he plunged with all his amazing energy into the making
of a massive epic of the Civil War and its aftermath, which he
first called The Clansmen but which was later renamed The

Birth of a Nation. The source w^as a novel by Thomas Dixon,

combined with Griffith's own memories of the South. Though
Griffith toned down many of the worst passages in Dixon's
book, the film still aroused widespread criticism because of its
racialist attitude. The Negroes (all played, incidentally, by
white men) were shown to be good if they were devoted and
loyal servants, but totally villainous when free. The final se-
quence, in which the hooded Ku Klux Klan rides across country
to put the blacks back in their place, is hardly one that appeals
to any sensitive person today. But as shot and edited by
Griffith, it was capable of arousing enormous excitement. This
is a reminder of the extent to which our response to films is

purely an emotional one. Because of the power of the images,

we can in fact become involved with things which intellectually
we reject. Apart from the ending - in its condemnation of the
brutalities of war that tears a nation apart and divides families,
for example - The Birth of a Nation is less controversial and
more deeply moving. The scandal the film aroused in no way
hindered its commercial success. The longest (twelve reels) and
the costliest ($100,000) American film to date, it was also one
of the most profitable. Within a few years it had taken the
unprecedented sum of eighteen million dollars at the box office
and it must still, almost sixty years later, figure in any list of
the most successful pictures of all time. With it Griffith gave
 Griffith and Film Drama 101

Hollywood a new dimension and showed the enormous audi-

ence on which a really outstanding film could call.
Perhaps as remarkable a thing for us today as the film itself
(for what we see at film societies is only a worn and faded
skeleton of a great work) is the way it was made. Griffith her-
alded the new age of film-making, but some of his methods,
even in his longest films, remained those of the early days. He
not only raised the money and directed the film, he also shot it
without a script, shaping the film by instinct after just six
weeks of rehearsal with his cast. Hollywood did not yet exist as
a relentless machine for turning out carefully tailored films,
and actors were still expected in 1915 to find many of their
own costumes and props and to do their own make-up. They
would arrive on the set without having been given much advice
on how to play the scene. Often the same actor would play
several parts, and Joseph Henabery, who appeared as Lincoln
in The. Birth of a Nation, has recorded that he also played
thirteen other bit parts, including both a fleeing Negro and one
of the pursuing band of whites. Since Griffith preferred to work
with young and inexperienced actors and actresses, the result,
when he was making a two-hour epic, should logically have
been disastrous. But Griffith was much more than a technician.
He had a gift for building characters about whom the audience
would really care, and everyone who saw his film in 1915 was
caught up in its portrayal of love and hate, joy and misery.
Griffith poured all his earnings from The Birth of a Nation in
an even vaster enterprise, the mammoth Intolerance (1916),
which was almost as striking a flop as the earlier film had been
a success. The director had started out to make a con-
temporary film about the evil effects of heartless employers
and hypocritical moral reformers called The Mother and the
Law, but then he felt that this was too slight a work with
which to follow The Birth of a Nation. So he added to it three
other stories: the fall of Babylon to the invading Persians be-
cause of the treachery of the priests, the massacre of the Hug-
uenots in Paris on St Bartholomew's Day 1572 by the ruling
Cathohcs, and the crucifixion of Christ. Griffith's aim was
to build up a vast fresco of intolerance through the ages.
102 Film llltcsion

Therefore he did not place the four stories one after the other
as they would be in a conventional four-part film; he welded
them together to make one timeless epic. Griffith constantly cut
from one story to another and gradually built up to what must
be the greatest cUmax any film has ever aimed at. Babylon falls,
the Huguenots are all killed, Christ is crucified . but the
. .

young worker wrongly accused and condemned for murder is

saved from execution at the very last moment. Griffith aimed
to construct the film so that the four streams were wedded to
create *one mighty river ofexpressed emotion'. Buthis audiences
merely found it confusing and stayed away. As a result Griffith,
whose vision had so far outstepped his audience, was given a
burden of debt from which he never totally freed himself.
Though the results of these two films were so different,
together they changed the whole nature and status of the film
industry. The enormous profits of The Birth of a Nation, the
gigantic sets of Babylon which he built for Intolerance, the
world-wide fame which he showed a film-maker could obtain,
these were things which could not be ignored. When he had
begun film-making in 1908 it had been with a sense of shame.
Now when he came to England for the opening of Intolerance
just nine years later, he was received by the Royal Family,
treated as a celebrity wherever he went and given carte
blanche by the British government to make a film about the
War with Germany {Hearts of the World), Griffith was now
forty-two and at the climax of his career. His two great epics
had an untold influence on film-making both in America and iti
other countries, but new directors built on his achievements in
ways that he himself could not. If we look at the history of the
cinema in the 1920s it becomes clear that two of the major
trends derive from Griffith, both the search for greater realism
and the exploration of the creative possibilities of editing. But
Griffith himself was gradually overtaken by the times and the
creative originality went out of his work. He continued making
films until the beginning pi the sound era (when he made a
notable biography, Abraham Lincoln), and indeed made some
remarkable films with his young discovery, Lillian Gish. But
there was a difference of emphasis now. The works up to
 Griffith and Film Drama 103

Intolerance invite us to examine the revolutionary new tech-

niques used, the style of lighting, the placing of the camera, the
linking of shots. The LiUan Gish films like Broken Blossoms
(1919) Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm
(1922), on the other hand, show more clearly the roots of
morahty and the debt he owes to nineteenth-century
Griffith's
novels and melodramas.
New forms of expression do not grow up simply because
someone invents a new technique. The technique has to be
brought to life. Nor is a new form ever totally revolutionary. In
most cases it takes over the content of its predecessor. In this
way silent film comedy grows out of the music hall and, as
every viewer is aware, television adopts film methods, fills

much of time with old movies and so on. But at some point
its

the two elements have to be brought together to create some-

thing quite new: the old content totally transformed in the new
form. This is precisely what D. W. Griffith did for the cinema,
and a comparison with television is interesting because it is

arguable that television has not yet found its Griffith.

In many ways the influence of the nineteenth century was a

liberating one for Griffith, in that it gave him something
against which to measure himself. In his apprentice years he
did not try to make films that were just a bit better than those
of his rivals: he struggled to capture the dramatic drive he
found in the melodramas of his youth and in the novels of
Charles Dickens. To the extent that he remained faithful to
these ideals he is remote from us. There is in Griffith's work a

genuine concern for the poor and underprivileged and for chil-
dren whose lives are ruined by unfeeling adults and a cruel
world of injustice. But there is also a great sentimentality, and
the cinema is a ruthless exposer of pretensions. The heroine of
Intolerance for instance, is called in the titles *The Little Dear
One'. Griffith's favourite heroines - Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish,
Mae Marsh - were all typical Victorian figures, pale, blonde
teenagers, obviously very vulnerable to the violence and evil
around them. genius is such that he can rise above his
Griffith's
seems unlikely, in the 1970s, that we can regard
limitations. It
seriously any film based on a story called 'The Chink and the
104 Film Illusion

Child' and telling of a poor little girl, worshipped by a shy

Oriental and beaten to death by her drunken father, a boxer
called Battling Burroughs. But the miracle of
Griffith is that he
makes something timeless out of these elements, so that
Broken Blossoms can still move us deeply.
We have traced the career of D. W. Griffith in such detail
because it spans the cinema's leap from being a mere amuse-
ment to becoming a powerful art form. Griffith was ten years
old when the cinema was born and thirty-two years of age
before failure elsewhere drove him to seek work in the studios.
But in the next ten years he transformed the whole notion of
what was capable of achieving. If we ask ourselves why
film
Griffithshould have been the man to accomplish this change, it
is easy to see that the answer must He within his character, in
the certainty with which he kept to his ideals. At the outbreak
of the First World War the American cinema had new markets
within its reach and was ready to be transformed from a back
street entertainment to a world-dominating industry. It had at
its disposal all the resources from which a new language of film
could be made, for it would be hard to think of a single tech-

nical device that was not known and used before 1912. But
within the industry itself there was no genuine impulse for
change. The men who controlled it were very conservative:
they gave the public what it had always wanted and made vast
sums of money doing so. Therefore they saw no need for
change. It needed a Griffith who drew his standards from out-
side the industry to conceive of the revolution from ten-minute
films to The Birth of a Nation. Griffith had to believe in himself
as a Shakespearean genius to be able to give the cinema an
awareness of itself as a powerful medium of storytelling and an
expressive art form.
 The Comedians

Of all the various forms and genres of the cinema comedy can
fairly claim to be one of the oldest. While both the gangster
film and the musical came into being only with the coming of
sound, film comedy, like the film serial, developed in France in
the early 1900s before being brought to its highest point in
Hollywood There were a great many comics in the
after 1914.
the French cinema before the First World War, but only one rec-
ognized master. Max Linder. The basic forms of comedy most
obviously suited to the screen - chases, comic fights, anything
in fact requiring fast-moving action - were all exploited before
his arrival on the scene, but it was Linder who gave the form a
new depth. In the four hundred or so films he made for Pathe
before 1914, he created a character of some subtlety: the ele-
gant figure of Max, immaculately dressed, with a flower in his
buttonhole and a pretty girl on his arm. The performances of
Max Linder also give a clue to one of the essentials of the truly
I individual comic: the ability to underplay, to achieve his effects
without undue exaggeration.
When comedy moved to Hollywood, however, it was not
until the 1920s that comparable individual comedians
emerged. Meanwhile, between 1912 and 1917, the centre of
comedy was the so-called 'fun factory', the Keystone studio of
Mack Sennett. Keystone provides a striking anticipation of the
studio system as it was to flourish throughout Hollywood in
106 Film Illusion

the 1930s. Here we see many of the principles of mass produc-

tion applied to what seems on the surface the most personal of
forms of expression, humour. Sennett, like so many of the key
figures of the American
silent cinema, learned his trade from
D. W. having entered the Biograph company in 1908, a
Griffith,
year later than the master of screen drama. Originally an iron-
worker, Sennett had thrown up his job to seek fame and for-
tune on the stage, but, despite considerable experience in the
music hall, he had achieved little success by the age of twenty-
eight when he turned to films. At this time the cinema was
developing rapidly in the United States and there was plenty of
scope for an ambitious man to make his mark. Within three
years Sennett had worked his way up from
tiny background
by himself. Then in 1912
roles to leading parts in films directed
came his big chance - financial backing, his own studio and a
free hand to make the kind of films he wanted. Sennett's years
on the stage had made him well able to fulfil the only condition
attached to all this: that he make films that would appeal to
the simple, unsophisticated tastes of the milHons of spectators
who flocked to the cinema every day.
Sennett was in many ways akin to the characters in his films.
Though many people claim to get their best ideas in the bath,
Sennett was probably the only successful businessman ever to
install a bath in his office and spend a part of every working
day sitting in it. He was a dominating personaUty. When too
many films were being shot in his studio for him to supervise
them all personally, he built a tower in the middle of the studio
lot, installed hisoffice at the top and looked down on his
workers toiling below. Such quirks of behaviour were quite
common (as we shall see later) among Hollywood studio
chiefs, but Sennett's brand of comedy was quite his own. He
imposed his own style on all the Keystone films, rigidly making
the players fit the appointed roles instead of building new
comic routines out of the individual talents of his actors. As a
result the most talented of the comics he discovered soon left
the Keystone studio. Chaplin, who made his debut with Sen-
nett, left after one year, and neither Harold Lloyd nor Harry
Langdon made any impact during their Keystone period.
 The Comedians 107

The keynote of Mack was the team. His com-

Sennett's films
edies were written by groups of gagmen and directed by semi-
anonymous technicians. For their effects they reHed on the
collective talents of a crowd of comics: Ford Sterling (the
poHce chief), Roscoe Arbuckle (the fat boy), ex-artist's model
Mabel Normand and cross-eyed Ben Turpin, supported by the
famous Keystone Kops and, from 1915, Mack Sennett's bathing
beauties. The gags were simple but effective. A hundred Kops
would pile out of one tiny taxi (easily achieved by stopping the
camera to allow them to get back in again, then refilming, over
and over again). Chases over rooftops, through rivers, on the
edges of cliffs, and so on, were all part of the day's work. For
thrills the express train would thunder to a stop an inch away
from the heroine, tied helpless to the rails (achieved by filming
the train backing away and then projecting the sequence in
reverse). If one policeman falling over was funny, Mack Sennett
thought (and his audience agreed) that a dozen falling over
simultaneously was hilarious. Whenever the pace was flagging,
someone would kick someone else's bottom or throw a custard
pie. This latter was in fact a delicate art. The pies, filled with
paste (which photographed better than real custard) had to be
pushed through the air rather than thrown, and the maximum
distance for accuracy was reckoned to be six to eight feet.
Arbuckle, who could hit a target with either hand at ten feet,
was recognized as a master.
There was nothing subtle about Sennett's Keystone films,
The actors had no time to build up real characters, and they
were bundled from one situation to another with phenomenal
speed. This tempo was an essential part of Sennett's comedy
style. Since cameras were operated by hand in those days, it
was simple to vary the speed of shooting. The near-miss car
crashes could be filmed at eight frames a second and when they
were projected at the standard silent speed of around sixteen
frames a second everything would happen twice as fast. Sen-
nett also reckoned to take out every third or fourth frame from
his films so as to speed things up. His films therefore were
made to have the jerkiness we tend to associate with all silent
comedy, whereas the later comedies of the 1920s appear jerky
108 Film Illusion

only because they are speeded up by being wrongly projected

at the sound speed of twenty-four frames per second.
For Sennett, stories were unimportant, a mere prop on
which to hang an action, and, generally speaking, his best
works are short ten- or twenty-minute films in which a suc-
cession of gags could be kept up at breakneck speed. He did,
however, make the first full-length American comedy, Tillie*s
Punctured Romance (1914) which helped set Charlie Chaplin
on the road to stardom. Comedy probably played as important
a part as the drama initiated by Griffith in making American
films popular throughout the world, and it was with Sennett
that comedy became big business. His films of 1913, for in-
stance, took about two million dollars at the box office. With
the arrival of Chaplin the stars themselves began to make
untold fortunes. In 1914, when Chaplin started at Keystone he
was paid $150 a week, at Mutual in 1916-17 he was making
$670,000 a year, and when he signed to make eight two-reel
comedies at First National a year later he was paid $1,200,000
plus bonuses. Other stars were earning similar amounts and
soon Hollywood had built up its reputation as a fabulous land
of dream fulfilment.
Chaplin was only one of four great comedians who flour-
ished in the 1920s, and though he overshadowed all his rivals

at the time, audiences are now rediscovering the others. At the

very end of his Ufetime, after thirty years of neglect. Buster
Keaton was acclaimed as the great comedian he was, and the
reputations of Harold Lloyd, famed for his thrill comedies that
had him climbing up the face of buildings and hanging from
ledges high above the traffic, and the baby-faced Harry Lang-
don have also grown recently. Looking back today, we can
only marvel at this wealth of talent, for each of the four had a
personal approach to comedy and created a totally individual
comic personality. The kind of range that silent comedy had
can be seen by comparing the work of the two best known
comedians, Chaplin and Keaton.
In the 1920s and 1936s there was no comic who aroused
greater acclaim than Charlie Chaplin. Within a few short years
of leaving Keystone he had made himself a millionaire, was
 ^S^•c'^^*

The Comedians 109

mobbed by crowds everywhere he went and praised and wel-

comed by artists and intellectuals in every country. Inevitably a
reaction to this popstar-style celebrity set in, becoming par-
ticularly apparent in the 1960s when Keaton's films were
rediscovered and widely shown, while ChapUn's remained virtu-
ally unavailable. But for all this, ChapHn's achievements in
comedy are to be compared with those of Griffith in drama.
Like almost all the great comics he learned his art in the music
hall, in direct contact with an audience. Perhaps it is only here
that a comic can acquire his most vital gift, the art of. precisely
timing his gags. Though superbly professional in his approach,
Chaplin was no dry technician. He drew on
a mass of memories
of a childhood Uved in a Victorian London that now seems to
belong, not to another age, but to another planet. His London
was a Dickensian world of slums and poverty, from which he
struggled to free himself. His autobiography shows us how
much his success - the wealth he earned and the celebrities he
met - meant to him, but he never lost his instinctive sympathy
for the poor and underprivileged.
Chaplin's individuality was apparent from the first. Though
he made thirty-five comedies for Keystone, he never fitted into
the Sennett pattern. He disliked the whole idea of the chase
(which was Sennett's stock plot formula) and wanted to de-
velop a character in depth instead of just piling up gags. In
essence, from his second film, made in 1914, to Modern Times
(made in 1936), he did just this, creating and exploiting the one
character, Charlie, whom he made into a universal figure. The
props were simple: baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby
hat. Because he was younger than Sennett's other comedians,
he added to these a small moustache. To start vdth, as he tells
us in his autobiography, he had no idea of the character. But
the moment he dressed like this, the clothes and the make-up
made him feel the person he was and by the time he walked out
on to the set, the character was fully born and gags and comic
ideas were racing through his mind. The great quality of this
make-up was that it allowed Chaplin to play any role: tramp or
gentleman, poet or adventurer, scientist or duke. He could be
sympathetic and downtrodden or quite mean and aggressive.
 110 Film Illusion

without breaking the spell of continuity. Above all, Charlie was

a figure who could be recognized and appreciated anywhere in
the world. It is not surprising therefore that Chaplin was one of
the bitterest opponents of talkies. He held out as long as he
could against them and both City Lights (1931) and Modern
Times (1936) were virtually silent films with music, but eventu-
ally Chaplin, like everyone else, had to concede the victory of
sound.
What is best remembered of Chaplin today, apart from the
unforgettable silhouette and the awkward gait, are the set-
pieces of comic mime. He showed what a comic of genius can
do with the simplest of props, a mop and a bucket, a staircase
or a fallen wallet. There are classic scenes which once seen will
never be forgotten, like that in The Gold Rush (1925) where he
is reduced to eating his boots, sucking the nails like fishbones

and chewing the laces like spaghetti, or his brilUant Hitler

mime in The Great Dictator (1940) where he plays balloon
with a toy globe until it shatters. And to hold all of his films
together there is his own personal involvement, the force with
which he presents his view of Ufe, with all its laughter and
tears. It is the sentimental side of Chaplin that has perhaps
dated most. When he guys Hitler and Mussolini in The Great
Dictator he is but when he appears in his second role
brilliant
as a little Jewish barber and preaches to his audience, the
result is merely embarrassing. Technically too Chaplin remains
a film-maker of another age. He learned his technique in 1914
and even his latest films, A King in New York (1957) and A
Countess from Hong Kong (1966), show that he has not de-
veloped this very much in the ensuing years. He remains a
performer rather than a director, a mime not a storyteller, but
the neglect from which his work has in the past suffered will
surely be overcome as his films (which he owns all the rights to
himself) are gradually made available to audiences once more.
Few people have made a greater contribution to the universal
popularity of the film art.
It would be hard to fine! a greater contrast to Chaplin than
Buster Keaton, who is now rightly seen as an equally great
screen comedian. Though he never worked for Mack Sennett,

x.i
 The Comedians 111

Keaton too learned his trade by acting on the stage (from the
age of five onwards) and then making short films at the rate of
about one a month, perfecting his technique and working out
his ideas of character. If Chaphn was a clown who mixed
humour and pathos, Keaton was an actor always playing
different roles in his various films. But all his parts have certain
things in common. The Buster Keaton figure is an apparent
dreamer or misfit who is placed in an awkward situation. With-
out cheating, stealing or being nasty, he manages to overcome
his problems and win his girl, through a dogged energy that
leads him to achieve the most astonishing feats. Keaton was a
master of the chase scene. In Go West (1925) he dons a red
devil's outfit and is chased through the streets by a herd of
cattle and dozens of poUcemen. In Seven Chances (1925) it is a
crowd of hundreds of women, all eager to marry him for his
money, who chase him out of town and into the path of a
landslide. He is always on the fringe of a disaster of this kind,
caught up (without knowing it) in a cyclone in Steamboat Bill Jr
(1928) or the Civil War in The General (1926).
Buster Keaton had a particular gift for seeing the comic
possibihties of machines and vehicles. One of his best-
known shorts is called simply The Boat, Keaton here builds a
boat in his cellar, knocks down his house trying to get it out
and runs his car over the quayside when he tows it to the
water. Undaunted he launches his boat, which promptly sinks.
One of Keaton's best feature films. The Navigator (1924), was
born when one of his collaborators found that they could buy
an old ocean liner for just $23,000 (and sell it again for about
the same amount when they had done with it). Keaton put only
two people, the rich but helpless hero and his haughty girl-
friend on board, and made nearly a whole film out of their
problems of adjustment in a space designed for hundreds of
passengers. The solutions they adopt gave Keaton the chance
to show his own mechanical ingenuity. In a similar way. The
General is built around a railway engine which the hero loves
as much as he loves his sweetheart. The film, set in the South
during the Civil War, unfolds with a neat and logical story line,
based as usual around the idea of a chase. The Northerners
112 Film Illusion

steal the hero's train with his girlfriend still on board, and he

sets out in pursuit by every available means - railway trolley,

penny-farthing bicycle, and a stolen engine. Having recovered
the train and the girl, the hero is promptly chased back South
again by the enemy, and the humour derives from the double
pattern: firstly his attempts to get around the obstacles the
thieves put in his way and then his successful thwarting of
their efforts to catch up with him.
During the whole of his film career, which was just about over
by the time he was thirty-three years old, Keaton had two
ideas in mind: to make his audience laugh, and to do so with-
out being ridiculous. For this reason he always made his fihns
look as real as possible. He shot in the open air, on location,
gave his characters authentic costumes and made almost no
use of models or dummies. When, in The General, the enemy
train tries to cross a burning bridge and plunges into the river,
it was a real bridge and a real train that Keaton used (making

this one of the most expensive gags in history). Keaton's visual

style has a great beauty which he arrived at quite instinctively,
and, when there are purely fantastic gags, these are always in a
dream setting (as in Sherlock Junior, 1924). Elsewhere, what is
most staggering about Keaton is that he actually performed the
fantastic feats his heroes have to achieve. Because of his ex-
pression he earned himself the reputation of being the man
who never smiled, but this was not a reflection of any deep-
seated melancholy. As he himself explained, he did not smile
because he was concentrating on what he was doing. In one of
his shorts this meant crossing a deep ravine on two planks
resting on thin parallel wires, making his way by continually
placing one plank in front of the other (he does this to escape
from pursuing Red Indians, only to come face to face with
others on the far side). In Sherlock Junior he rides on the
handlebars of a motorcycle, apparently quite unaware that the
driver has fallen off. His journey takes him through the traffic

of the town and over a partially built bridge which has a

finally
gap in the middle and lacks a final section to bring the road
down to earth again. By a miracle of timing, Keaton crosses it at
the moment when two pantechnicons are crossing beneath the
 The Comedians 113

gap and his weight causes the final section to collapse, bringing
him down to the ground as he drives along it.
Keaton had the physical resources of a brilHant athlete and
was quite without fear. The risks he was prepared to take in
order to get a laugh were unbelievable. In Steamboat Bill
Jr, during the cyclone sequence, he stands in the roadway and a
house front falls on top of him. We expect him to be crushed,
but the attic window is open and as he stands still, his head and
body pass through the hole. For this effect Keaton used a real
house front weighing several tons which was calculated to miss
his head and body by only two inches. Luckily it fell straight!
The ordinary spectator may not be consciously thinking in
terms of true or fake but such an indication as Keaton always
gives by refusing to cut does have an effect on us.
The great period of silent comedy lasted only a few years:
Chaplin's The Kid, The Gold Rush and The Circus, Keaton's The
Navigator and The General, Langdon's Long Pants and Lloyd's
Safety Last were all made in the course of eight years. During
this time the four film-makers used the full comic resources of
the film medium, building not only on their own enormous
talent but also on a firm foundation of a music-hall experience.
Mack Sennett had shown the popularity of the comic short film
and they all were able to learn the craft of film-making by
turning out ten- or twenty-minute comedies (Harold Lloyd, for
example, made nearly two hundred of these). The success of
such films and the profits that comedy could bring allowed
them for a time to work vdth complete freedom on all aspects
of their films. The 1920s were the great days of the inde-
pendent film-maker. When these comedians set up on their
own, they could build their own studios and employ a regular
staff of actors and technicians. This gave them a freedom rarely
enjoyed by film-makers but one of vital importance to com-
edians: the ability to try out material on an audience and then
go back to the studio and reshape it. The characteristic polish
of their work comes from the fact that having obtained an
audience reaction they could cut the sequences that failed to
work and build up those that succeeded best. The form of
comedy in which these men excelled died when sound came.
114 Film Illusion

but not really because it was impossible to make sound films on

the same lines: Chaplin's Modern Times was made as late as

1936. It was rather that the increased costs and new budgeting
methods made the freedom of a Buster Keaton seem out of
place. Sound offered the chance for a new sort of comedy, one
based on clever dialogue, that was popular with audiences and
could be controlled by products in a way that the work of,
say, Keaton could not. As film-making became a major industry
the production system changed and for the new breed of execu-
tives freedom was a dubious quaUty and individuaUty a cause
for alarm.
 The Studio Era

The end of the great age of silent film comedy brings us to one
of the most fascinating aspects of the cinema of the 1930s and
1940s, the studio system. It is at this point that Hollywood
begins to take on a distinctive personality as a mass producer
of films for a world market. To begin with, the word studio
itselfneeds a little defining, for it covers rather a large range of
meaning. Georges Melies had built himself a studio at Mon-
treuil in 1896 and, even earlier, Edison's kinetoscope films were
shot in the black maria. Throughout the pioneering days there
were studios of sorts in Hollywood - but only in the sense of an
open set with props, stages and equipment. This was the con-
text in which men like Griffith and Keaton did their best work,
and nothing could be further from mass-produced objects than
the films that they produced.
However, as early as 1915 the word studio took on its new
meaning with the opening of the vast Universal City set-up
by the producer Carl Laemmle. This pointed the way to the
giants which were to come, but Laemmle himself was not a
typical studio tycoon. He was known affectionately as *Uncle
Carl' because of the number of members of his family he em-
ployed. On his death in 1939 no less than seventy of his rela-
tiveswere found to be on the Universal payroll, a situation that
gave rise to all kinds of jokes, such as Ogden Nash's *Uncle Carl
Laemmle, Has a large Faemmle.' He was a generous, easy-
116 Film Illusion

going man, content to turn out unambitious pictures of no

great importance for family audiences. The casual way he ran
Universal City was legendary. In 1912 one of his directors shot
a ten-reel film in the studio without the producer knowing
anything about it (this was which became one
Traffic in Souls
of the big hits of the early cinema). Lateron Lewis J. Selznick,
an out-of-work jewellery salesman, is said to have become
managing director simply by hanging up his hat, com-
mandeering a desk and writing his name on the door. Certainly
it is true that when Laemmle eventually went to Europe to see

his family there he left in charge of his studio his shorthand-

typist secretary, Irving Thalberg, a young man of nineteen
totally without film-making experience. Beneath this absent-
minded exterior was in fact a shrewd and able mind, for it is
surely not by chance that both Selznick and Thalberg went on
to become important producers in their own right. Nor was
Uncle Carl as easy-going as he appeared: in the 1900s he had
been one of the few producers (with William Fox) to stand up
for the rights of independent film-makers against the power of
the 'Trust' massed behind Edison's patent rights.
When we talk nowadays about the studio system, however,
we generally think of the companies set up and run by men ten
or fifteen years younger than Laemmle. These companies came
into being - most of them in the late 1920s - when the big
chains of film theatres and distributing companies (mostly
based in New York) were linked with groups of film-producing
companies in Hollywood. The result was a continual tension
between the moneymen in the East and the film producers in
what was now the film capital of the world.
In the 1930s, when the system was Hollywood
at its height,
was dominated by own em-
eight major studios, each with its

ployees and stars and its own brand of film-making. Of these

eight, the so-called big five all had their own distribution
system, a circuit of cinemas in which their films were auto-
matically shown. There was Paramount, which. was descended
from several old companies, including Lasky Feature Plays
(which had made The Squaw Man) and Famous Players, foun-
ded in 1912 by Adolph Zukor, who was still a president of the
 The Studio Era 117

Paramount Company when he was in his nineties. Twentieth

Century Fox was created in 1935 thanks to a merger of two
very dissimilar companies. One was the virtually bankrupt
company founded in 1915 by William Fox who, some years
before the merger, had attempted to take over the whole film
industry. Fox failed, lost a fortune estimated at one hunderd
million dollars in the attempt, and died a comparatively poor
man. The other company in the merger was a new and dynamic
enterprise, Twentieth Century, created by Darryl F. Zanuck
and Joseph Schenk. Warner Brothers, the third major
company, was the product of four men, Sam, Jack, Harry and
Albert Warner, who had founded it in the 1920s and made a
fortune by being the first to introduce sound successfully with
The. Jazz Singer in 1927. RKO radio also had its roots in the
1920s but it is best known as the studio bought and owned
after 1947 by the multi-millionaire Howard Hughes (who had
already dabbled in film-making in the early 1930s). All these
four companies were important, but the greatest of the big five
was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which was welded together in
1924. Though the new company bears his name Sam Goldwyn
was already an independent producer by the time of the merger
(he later became the most important independent in Holly-
wood) and the dominant force in the M-G-M company for over
twenty-five years was Louis B. Mayer. As head of production he
was for several years America's highest-paid employee with a
salary of over a million dollars a year. For a good many years
M-G-M, too, had with the world of high finance in the
its link

person of another famous multi-milUonnaire, WilHam Ran-

dolph Hearst, who put up the money for films starring the
actress Marion Davies.
All the big fivewere combinations of production companies
and cinema chains. The three lesser companies - Universal,
United Artists (founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith. Charles
Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) and Harry
Cohn's Columbia - were merely production companies.
Though this made them of less importance in the 1930s, it in
fact proved an advantage in the late 1940s when the film indus-
try was throvm into disorder by a government ruhng that
118 Film llltcsion

production companies and cinema circuits had to be separately

owned.
As machines for turning out films, aU eight studios operated
in much the same way, and to understand their methods it is
necessary to know a Httle about the quite remarkable group of
men whose names have already been mentioned, the movie
tycoons, the great producers. Virtually all of these founding
fathers of Hollywood were either immigrants from Europe or
the first generation of children of immigrants who had come to
America to seek a new opportunity and to escape poverty. This
drive to escape their background circumstances gave them a
fantastic energy which they soon displayed in their relentless
fight to the top. Most of them had Uttle education, no artistic
background and, to begin with, no real knowledge of the enter-
tainment industry. They tended instead to be salesmen, often
connected with fashion in some minor way. Laemmle, from
Germany, worked in a clothing shop; Zukor from Hungary
began by sweeping out a fur store; Sam Goldfish (later Gold-
wyn) from Poland sold gloves; William Fox from Hungary was a
cloth sponger; Lewis Selznick from Russia sold jewellery; Mayer
from Minsk in Russia was a junk dealer, and so on. They found
an industry offering vast possibilities and they seized their
chance. Within four years in the movie business Sam Goldwyn,
for instance, had made nine hundred thousand dollars, and he
was by no means the richest.
The reason why men like this turned to the cinema in the
years before and immediately after the First World War lay in
the state of the cinema in these years. They were outsiders
with no inherited fortunes and with nothing to recommend
them to banks or finance houses. They were, however, well
suited to the film business which at that time was not quite
respectable, looked down upon even by the actors who were
attracted by the money it offered. Films were still shown in
penny arcades and converted warehouses so it was easy to
begin at the bottom. Yet this was a booming era in which
fortunes could be made overnight. The way in which Louis B.
Mayer made his first quarter of a milHon dollars - from his
share in the distribution of a single film. The Birth of a Nation -
 The Studio Era 119

showed what could be done. These men could succeed because

the new entertainment form of the film was a simple, inter-
national language with no rules to be learned. The kind of
tastes that were needed for success were those that the pro-
ducers had by birth. Films had to be made to appeal to the
poor and the working classes, the immigrant masses who had
poured into America in the first years of the twentieth century
and willingly paid out their nickels for a form of entertainment
that did not demand a great knowledge of the English language
and which nonetheless offered a good measure of laughs and
thrills.

The movie tycoons are probably the most attacked and

argued-about group of men in the history of the cinema.
The tales widely circulated about them show them often to
have been regarded as monsters by their employees. When
Louis B. Mayer died, Sam Goldwyn is supposed to have said
that the reason so many people turned up for the funeral was
that *they wanted to make sure he was dead'. Even this
unflattering remark was capped in 1958 when, after the funeral
of Columbia chief, Harry Cohn, a television comedian re-
marked to his audience, 'Well, it only proves what they always
say - give the public something they want to see, and they'll
come out for it.' There are plenty of instances on record of
these producers using violence, in words or fists, to get what
they wanted. If threats failed, some of them would weep or go
on their knees to get their own way. If they did not succeed or
were crossed, they would fire their employees quite ruthlessly
and do their best to stop them getting jobs elsewhere. They
were hardly more attractive when they were in a happy mood.
The sense of humour of Harry Cohn, for instance, is illustrated
by the fact that he had a special chair installed in the Columbia
dining room in which an unsuspecting visitor could be given an
electric shock when Cohn pressed a button. The titles of two
biographies show the kind of men the movie tycoons aimed to
be: the book on the Columbia president is called King Cohn
and that about Mayer is called Hollywood Rajah. Despite their
aims, their enormous salaries and their practically unlimited
power in their own domains, these men were far from regal
 120 Film Illusion

figures. Their contacts with art were usually disastrous. Sam

Goldwyn's attempt to buy the film rights to George Bernard
Shaw's plays gave rise to the retort, 'The trouble, Mr Goldwyn,
is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in

money.' Later Goldwyn brought over from Europe the dis-

tinguished playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and set him to
work, only to find that the hero of the script was a bee!
The reputation of the Hollywood tycoons is more often
based on such stories than on the films they produced. Re-
porters loved them because of the excellent articles they pro-
vided. Jack Warner, even when he was the milhonaire head of
production at his own studio, used to get up at pubhc dinners
and make rambling incomprehensible speeches full of terrible
puns and unfunny jokes. Sam Goldwyn's struggles with the
American language resulted in such memorable phrases as *In-
clude me out,' and 'I can answer you in two words - im pos-
sible.' As a consequence of this, the writers he employed spent
long hours making up Goldwynisms and trying to get them
pubHshed as the words of the master. But how can you com-
pete with a man who actually said things like *You've got to
take the bull between your teeth,' and 'I've read part of it all
the way through'.^ Even more striking were the troubles of
Harry Cohn. He was president of Columbia Pictures for
twenty-six years, yet when, in moments of stress or argument,
he was challenged to spell the company's name, he would
always begin C-O-L-0 ... If the logic of making films were a
simple one, the products of such men would surely be appalling.
But this was not the case. In part this was due to the quahty of
the men whom they employed to take charge of the artistic
side of production while they chased the power. Among these
were the young men who shot to fame as Hollywood's *boy
wonders'. Irving Thalberg, left in charge of Universal studios as
a nineteen-year-old, became Louis B. Mayer's right-hand man
at M-G-M. Mayer's son-in-law, David O. Selznick (himself son
of the pioneer producer Lewis J. Selznick), independently pro-

duced the greatest commercial success of the 1930s, Gone with

the Wind. Darryl F. Zanuck, who headed production at
Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years until he retired in
 fv^^'-^-*

The Studio Era 121

1956, returned to the old habit on his appointment as presi-

dent in 1962 by installing his own twenty-eight-year-old son
Richard as head of studio production and boss of the Holly-
wood end of the business.
Mayer, Goldwyn, Cohn, Warner and their like gave the
world audience their own kind of film. They were tyrannical
and often wasteful but they knew their own taste and that of
their audience,and created films that could be seen and ap-
preciated all over the world. This success was the result of the
kind of men they were. They hated things which were obscure
or 'arty' and they reHed on the qualities of story, star and
colour. Though they seem to have been rather disagreeable
people in many ways, they could recognize the talent that
would give them the kind of films audiences liked. And they
were willing to pay well for it. Naturally the films they made
were glamorous pictures of America, which came out as a
fantastic wonderland where every story had a happy ending
and good triumphed over evil ultimately. To make sure that
this was always the case, and because they were afraid of cen-
sorship from other people, they created their own code of
motion pictures which set limits on the kind of words that
could be used and the kind of scenes that could be shown. This
was easier for them to accept than for the writers and directors
they employed, because they always aimed at a family audi-
ence (with all the limitations that this implies). Louis B. Mayer,
for instance, always set out to produce films to which he could
take his own two daughters.
Producers like Harry Cohn tried to turn everything, in-
cluding script-writing, into a nine-till-five occupation in the
studio, and were highly suspicious of writers who seemed to
spend too much of their time sitting around 'thinking'. Cohn's
method of dealing with writers gives a clear indication of the
basic shrewdness of these tycoons. If he could not judge the
writing, he could test the writer's involvement. After a week or
two Cohn would send for the work of a new writer and tell him
that the script he had written was the worst he had ever read.
If the writer agreed, his days at the studio were numbered. If

he argued, pointed out good bits, he would stay on. If he

122 Film Illusion

discovered that Cohn had not in fact read a word of the script,
he might even get a rise! The writer's lot was not a happy one.
Often two writers would be working on the same script quite
unknown to each other, while the final script would be written
by a third writer drawing on their efforts. Of course, only a
certain kind of writer could work successfully in these con-
ditions, and successful screen-writers were often former
journalists or reviewers, used to working to deadline and to
order. In search of prestige, the studios would invite great
writers to Hollywood. Because of the very high fees which were
paid, many such writers were tempted to try their hand at
working for the screen, but the best scripts are not those writ-
ten by the men with the greatest literary talent (F. Scott Fitz-
"I
gerald or WilHam Faulkner for instance). The idea of a novelist
writing for the screen as freely as he would for publication is a
far newer one in the cinema and has its home not in Hollywood
but in Europe. In Hollywood many talented writers became
very unhappy at the way they were treated and took revenge
by writing about the place when they left. And most of the
novels about Hollyw^ood paint a very dark picture of it

indeed.
The power of the studio bosses over the people they em-
ployed was enormous. Jack Warner, for instance, once claimed
that he had a hand in editing every film to leave his studio. The
producer had complete freedom to stamp his taste on his films
and to fire anyone who did not co-operate in this. So the studios
developed their own group styles which fans could recognize at
a glance. At M-G-M, the studio that boasted of having *more
stars than there are in the heavens', the output in the peak
years was forty- two films a year. All were of a high technical
polish, for the studio could afford the designers and photo-
graphers who gave the glamorous image that made the studio's
films so popular. M-G-M had the biggest stars - Mayer dis-
covered Greta Garbo in Europe and built Clarke Gable to be
the greatest male star of the 1930s - and the high-key photo-
graphic style was designed to show them off to the best advan-
tage. Film stories tended to be tales of love that ended happily
and had an upUfting effect, set in a world that was luxurious
 The Studio Era 123

and therefore deeply exciting for audiences. But despite the

luxury, the family was sacred to Louis B. Mayer and nothing
was allowed to mar this. The public agreed with his views and
one of Mayer's biggest hits was the sentimental Andy Hardy
family series, starring the young Mickey Rooney.
At Warner Brothers the average product was very different
and the stess was on action and excitement, with Errol Flynn
appearing in fast-moving adventure stories directed by the
Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz. The Warners took years to
become really successful (only their desperate gamble with
sound made them rich men), and in the stories and settings
they chose there was a certain touch of the realism lacking at
M-G-M. Warners became famous for its thrillers and backstage
musicals, its typical players being actors like James Cagney,
Humphrey Bogart, and the very unglamorous Bette Davis.
Paramount was not a richer studio but its image was more
upper class, with an emphasis on gloss and high living. Cecil B.
De Mille made many of his biblical epics for the company;
Ernst Lubitsch made fast, witty comedies there; and Joseph
von Sternberg found that the Paramount designers were ideal
for the beautiful films, like Scarlet Empress, that he directed
with Marlene Dietrich. Twentieth Century Fox had Shirley
Temple, but also made reahstic studies of the life of the poor,
such as The Grapes of Wrath, made by John Ford in 1940,
while Universal became famous for its horror films.
The remarkable quahties of the studio movie are perhaps
best illustrated by the making of Gone with the Wind, which
had taken forty-seven milHon dollars at the box office even
before its recent re-release in 70 mm. form. David O. Selznick,
its producer and the driving force behind it, worked for over a
year on the script after buying the rights of the still un-
published thousand-page novel by Margaret Mitchell for
$50,000. He did not use just one writer, he needed eight in all,
and not one director but three (George Cukor, Victor Fleming
and Sam Wood). Together they spent four million dollars and
shot eighty hours of film. The hero, Rhett Butler, could only be
played, everybody was sure, by Clarke Gable, then the world's
leading male star. But he was under contract to M-G-M and it
124 Film Illusion

cost Selznick a large share of the profits to obtain Gable's

signature on the contract. For the female lead 1,400 girls
were interviewed and enough film shot in screen tests to make
a normal feature film. Even then filming had to begin before
Selznick had his actress - eventually Vivien Leigh was signed
out of the blue when on a visit to watch the fibning. The
resulting success with audiences everywhere justified the
trouble and expense, but Gone with the Wind is the kind of film
that could only have been made in Hollywood and at that time.
It needed the confidence and experience that can only come
from making vast numbers of films in a closed atmosphere
where film-making is all that counts. Only the Hollywood film
industry could build up the reserves of talent and create the
stars on which Gone with the Wind relies.
 i6

Disney and Animation

The system on the development of the film

effect of the studio
medium can be studied in microcosm as it were if we turn away

from the complexities of the feature film and consider what

happened to animation under the influence of Walt Disney.
The terms 'animated film' or cartoon are somewhat clumsy
expressions, far less revealing than their German equivalent,
the Trickfilm. The trick in question is to go one step farther
than in the conventional Uve-action film and to give an ap-
pearance of movement without actually filming something
moving. To make this possible the film is broken down, not into
sequences or even individual shots, but into single images or
frames, each of which is treated separately. Even if we limit
ourselves to films made one frame at a time and in which all
the movement is created by hand instead of by photographing
natural motion, we still have an enormously wide field: car-
toons of all kinds, puppet films and films that manipulate
objects to show buttons dancing or match-sticks on parade. If
we think of how these films have been made, frame by frame,
and remember that a sound projector eats up film at the rate of
twenty-four frames a second, it is immediately clear that w^e
are dealing with problems very different from those of normal
film-making. Animated films of any sort are going to need a
very unusual degree of patience and ingenuity, for the sheer
labour involved is enormous. A five-minute cartoon needs
126 Film Illusion

7,200 different pictures, while a ninety-minute feature requires

no less than 129,600. In return for this patience the animated
film gives the film-maker a total control which no feature film-
maker using real actors and settings can ever equal. The ani-
mator has the same total command over his creation as the
painter over his canvas.
There is another important reason, apart from this mechan-
ical difference, why the animated film should be considered
separately, and this is the way in which the camera is used.
Ordinary cinema grew up as the pioneers began to use the
camera creatively. Whatever effects a feature film-maker is
seeking - absolute truth to what is real or total fantasy - his
success can be measured in the way he uses his camera (the
position and angle he shoots from, the lighting he chooses for a
scene, the succession of images placed one after the other).
None of this is true of the animated film, which is free to
employ purely graphic ways of linking shots and obtaining
effects. The film cartoonist is as free to create marvels and
monsters as a painter is and, as every second's action is broken
down into twenty-four separate stages, he is able totally to
ignore the way the laws of logic, gravity or cause and effect
work in our real world. The speed of the action is not tied to
what human beings can perform, and the animator can play
with the rhythms of his images as a composer does with the
rhythms of his musical notes. All sorts of doubts have been
expressed as to whether the cinema is truly an art form. The
basis of most criticism is that since the camera exists simply to
photograph what is there, it is a mechanical, not a creative
medium. To justify the feature film against such criticism we
have to show the effect of the selection and reassembling of the
parts of reality which are photographed and this can be quite
difficult. But no such problem exists with the animated film, for

here everything, every movement, is created artificially. Be-

cause of this the animated cinema has its own history, quite
separate from that of the cinema as a whole.
The theoretical differences between the ordinary film and
the cartoon or puppet film have been emphasized here because
the effect of Walt Disney's application of studio techniques
^^RP^"^'-

Disney and Animation 127

to the animated film was to blur these distinctions completely.

Indeed, one could say that the driving force of Disney's creative
lifewas the attempt to destroy the essential difference between
photographed reahty and animated cartoon, just as the basic
impulse of Hollywood was to pass oflE a facsimile of life for life
itself. It would be as impossible to talk about cartoon films and

not mention Disney as it would be to ignore Chaplin in a dis-

cussion of film comedy, yet in many ways Disney's work tells us
more about the workings of the Hollywood system than about
the potentiahties of the animated film. When he created
Mickey Mouse, his first great success, Disney brought into
existence a superstar to equal CharHe Chaplin in world fame.
Though Mickey (originally called Mortimer, oddly enough)
dates from 1928, the empire founded on the profits from his
films continues today. Even now, when Walt Disney himself is
dead, we still get new Disney films made and shown to audi-
ences who know just what to expect. The size of the Disney
empire is staggering and it was calculated in 1966 that every
year all over the world 240 million people see a Disney film and
three times that number read a Disney book or magazine. Walt
Disney himself became a multi-millionnaire, one of the great
figures of Hollywood, and towards the end of his Ufe his form-
ula had proved so successful that he could not fail to get richer.
Like Chaplin he owned all the rights to every film he made, and
by re-issuing his past successes from time to time he could
make profits to equal those of many new films being shown for
the first time. Small children going to see Bambi find everything
new and wonderful; they are not aware that they are seeing the
same film that delighted their parents when they were children
back in 1942 or on a subsequent re-release.
In view of all this it seems rather sad to have to admit that
Disney did not actually draw any of his cartoon characters. The
original Mickey Mouse, for example, was drawn by one of his
most talented employees, Ub Iwerks, and the later ones (for
Mickey changed with the years) were devised by a team of
artists. Indeed, it is even said of Disney that he could not draw
Mickey Mouse at all, even in the autograph books of children
who visited his studio. In much the same way, though his films
128 Film Illusion

axe full of humour, no one has ever recorded a single funny

remark of his made in real life. The reason for this is simple:
Disney was not really an artist but a businessman like Thomas
Edison or Henry Ford. What is interesting about him therefore
is less his personality than the way he turned a neglected part
of the cinema into a great industry and made film-making into
a machine. Of course, all the great Hollywood tycoons tried to
do but Disney could succeed better than other studio
this,
bosses because everything in a cartoon film can be controlled
(and because his stars - Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and all
the rest - never gave trouble, nor asked for a rise!)
In many ways Disney was a model businessman, always
eager to use new devices and techniques. When sound arrived
in the late 1920s he already had plenty of problems, for he was
just launching his Mickey Mouse films, but he insisted on
finding a recording system and adding sound to his films. The
result was that his cartoons were brilliantly successful, replac-
ing the comic shorts in which men like Chaplin and Keaton had
learned their art. In 1931 Disney was one of the first to use
Technicolor and later in the 1930s his organization perfected a
marvellous new device, the multi-plane camera, which allowed
the camera to move into his cartoon scenes just as a camera
can move into a real setting. Whenever cartoons are made it is
usual to break up the picture into various layers - background,
middleground, foreground - as well as the separate charac-
ters, so that only the parts that actually move need be changed
from frame to frame. This saves an enormous amount of time
and labour, and if the various layers are painted on cellu-
loid they can be clamped together and shot as a single image.
For the real illusion of depth to be achieved, the layers have to
be separated to carefully calculated distances and then filmed
with great precision. This sounds fairly straightforward but it is
in fact a tricky engineering problem which was solved for
Disney by Ub Iwerks.
Of course, none of this matters to the small children who go
to see Disney films. They go to see the characters (Mickey
Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Goofy) or to follow a favourite
story - for almost all of Disney's full-length films (beginning
 Disney and Animation 129

with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937) have been
based on fairy tales or popular children's stories - Dumbo,
Bambi, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, etc. The parents can be
sure of what they are getting, for Disney had very clear ideas
on what he allowed in his films: nothing to frighten children,
no violence or nastiness. Cartoon films are extremely expensive
because of the time and talent they consume and Disney
expanded his organization to take in other types of film, ap-
plying the same principles to his nature films, films mixing
cartoons and live action and his television shows. Since he has
given so much enjoyment to so many people, it seems unkind
to criticize him but this is what one must do when one starts to
think about all the possibilities of the animated film. For,
though Disney has made more people see cartoons than anyone
else in the history of the cinema, he limited their appreciation
to just one of the innumerable range of forms of cartoon fihn-
making.
The reasons for this lie in the kind of man Walt Disney was.
He came from the American Mid-West, he did not have much
formal education and he had a fixed set of beliefs. In his films
he wanted to show that good triumphs over evil, that children
and animals are lovable and that humour can be wholesome
and still funny. He beheved in work, in business and in giving
value for money, but he was suspicious of things like art, great
music and literature. Perhaps his least entertaining feature film
is Fantasia in which he illustrates classical music. On seeing the

rushes of the scene showing centaurs galloping about to the

sound of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, he is said to have
exclaimed, 'Gee, this will make Beethoven!' Disney was not
interested in creating characters capable of arousing deep
emotions, he had two rather different ideas in mind. He wanted
the characters in his films to be cute and lovable and to look
real. The first aim he achieved by basing all his principal
characters on shapes derived from curved lines - plump
rabbits, babies, birds - and by including tiny animals in all his
stories. The second aim was more difficult to attain, for the
cartoon is more suited to picturing unreal or distorted things,
but Disney worked at it doggedly. He made his animators
T-FAR-B
130 Film Illusion

study real movement and sought devices (like the multi-plane

camera) to give an illusion of depth. Though his stories might
be tales of mystery and magic and his characters talking
animals, he always stressed their ordinariness. He also created
a cleaned-up world where there are no rough edges, no prob-
lems, no dirt. In this respect the supreme achievement of
Disney is his vast amusement site, Disneyland, where the visi-
tor can be surrounded by three-dimensional figures of the
Disney imagination - even a walking, talking Abraham Lincoln
- amid an atmosphere of good neighbourliness and fun.
To emphasize the limitations of Disney's work is not to deny
its success in its own terms or its influence. In a sense the
trouble with Disney is that he was too successful and
influential. Everywhere, even in places as far away as Japan or
Russia, his style was copied, to such an extent that the other
possibilities of the idea of animation were ignored. In France it
is Disney's influence that can be seen in the films of Paul Grim-

ault, who made the feature-length Mr Wonderbird [La Bergere

ct l& ramoneur) from a script by the poet Jacques Prevert in
1952. Equally Disney had a great effect on John Halas and Joy
Batchelor who in 1954 made the first British feature-length
cartoon. Animal Farm, from the novel by George Orwell. These
film-makers accepted Disney's idea of what a cartoon is: fully
drawn and over-polished, with attempts to smooth out the
movement and make the backgrounds a photographically accu-
rate replica of the world. It was not until some of the film-
makers who had broken away from Disney set up the UP A
company that it became apparent how limiting this influence
was.
Walt Disney reigned supreme from the advent of sound until
the early 1950s. His style caused the work of the pioneers of
animation to be forgotten, and the few animated films that
stood aside from his influence were seen as fringe works. Yet it
was only when his relentless quest for pseudo-realism was re-
placed by a new awareaess of materials and textures that ani-
mation could be regarded as having any real connection with
modern painting or twentieth-century graphic art. While, from
a present-day standpoint, one can attack the sentimentality
 Disney and Animation 131

and false values of many Disney films, it is impossible to deny

the sheer professionaHsm of the animation. For modem ani-
mators - even those working furthest from the comfortable
children's world of Dumbo and Snow White - this skill and
expertise remains an awesome achievement, and a reminder
that, though Hollywood may be replaced by more modern
methods of production, its greatest achievements remain un-
surpassable on their own terms.
 17

The Stars

No consideration of Hollywood is possible without reference to

the stars. They are one of the most fascinating aspects of film
history, particularly as they are a consciously and deliberately
created idea, not an essential part of what the cinema is. Films
can be made without stars. For the first fifteen years of the
cinema's history players were anonymous and the star was
unknown. Equally, as the present vogue of pop singers shows,
stars in the true sense can exist without the cinema. If we think
of the entertainment world's stars of the 1960s it is immedi-
ately apparent that a newer twentieth-century technical
marvel, the long-playing hi-fi record, has been just as efficient
at creating stars as the cinema ever was. The Beatles have
made films but they are by no means a product of the cinema,
as the idols of the young from 1910 to the 1950s tended to be.
Indeed, the cinema now no longer produces stars on the old
pattern - Elizabeth Taylor with her salary of one million
dollars a film is the last of a dying breed. Before John Wayne
there were half-a-dozen men who could claim to be western
stars, but when he makes his last western there will be no one
to replace him. As we shall see, the phenomenon of the stars is
linked up with the growth and power of the studios. Before
these latter came into being, the audience was captured by the
figures or characters they saw repeatedly on the screen - the
heroes of the serial stories, for example. But they did not go

J
 The Stars 133

beyond and become deeply and totally concerned with the

this
actors who
played these roles.
Even at the height of the star era there were still roles that
somehow had a greater impact than any of the men or women
who played them. A dozen or more Tarzan films have been
made and Tarzan is a sort of star in his own right. The magic
remains attached to the character itself. Something of the

same and television today. The exist-

sort is also true of radio
ence of stars has to do with the way we identify with charac-
ters we see on the cinema screen, but we do not automatically
turn the players we see into stars, and lately the cinema has
gone back to the earlier method. Among the biggest successes
of the 1960s were the James Bond films. Ian Fleming's fictional
character has become something of a cult. Books have been
written by learned Italian scholars about the 'semeiological im-
portance of 007'. A woman called Mrs James Bond wrote a
book about her husband - a distinguished student of ornithol-
ogy - whose only real claim to this sort of fame was that Ian
Fleming borrowed his name. The author himself got caught up
in the excitement and tried to live like his hero with none-too-
happy results. It seemed that the actor who played the role
must become a star in the old sense. Sean Connery was paid a
star salary for his interpretations of Bond, but none of the
glamour attached itself to him. In other roles he has become
just another actor (and one with more talent than he could
show in his 007 films). Similarly producers in the period since
the late 1950s have found their audiences to be very fickle. Julie
Andrews was the star of The Sound of Music, which collected
an unprecedented seventy million dollars at the American box
office, but producers who thought she was a star of the old
school received a nasty shock: her presence in other films did
not ensure their success. Just as film-makers have in recent
years shown independence of the studios, so too audi-
ences have shown their freedom from the star cult. They flock
in millions to see one film and yet stay away from the next one
in which the same players appear. Yet for a long time in the
cinema's short history the stars were the one really safe bet in a
risky business. It is with this period that the present chapter is
134 Film Illusion

concerned: the forty or fifty years during which the stars

reigned supreme, the time when, if they talked of the cinema,

people meant Chaplin or Pickford, Valentino or Garbo, Bogart

or Monroe.
The invention of the idea of the star can be traced with great
exactness. Though we may never know what star quality is
precisely, there is no mystery about when the first American
star was born. It was in 19 10, as the result of a pubUcity stunt
thought up by the man who founded the first studio of the
modern type, Carl Laemmle. At the time Laemmle was head of
the Independent Moving Picture Company of America (IMP for
short) and, like his fellow producer WilUam Fox, was having
trouble fighting the power of the Edison-backed Trust. Some-
thing extra was needed if the independents were to survive and
Laemmle it was who found it. Rumours were circulated (prob-
ably by Laemmle himself) that his newly signed actress, Flor-
ence Lawrence, was dead. In the Motion Picture World
Laemmle replied with an advertisement headed 'We Nail a Lie'.
In it he wrote that the story of the death of Miss Lawrence, 'the
IMP girl, formerly known as the Biograph girT, was 'the black-

est and at the same time the silliest lie yet circulated by the
enemies of the IMP'. To prove how silly it was, said Laemmle,
he had arranged for Miss Lawrence and her leading man, King
Baggott, to appear at St Louis's railway station. When she did
so, the crowd which turned out to greet her was bigger than
the one which had welcomed the President of the United States
the previous week. The people thronged around Miss Law-
rence, tore at her clothes for souvenirs and the star was
. . .

born.
Florence Lawrence herself did not remain an attraction for
long (in thisway too setting a pattern for the future), but
audiences now demanded to know the names of the players
they saw every week. With their personal fame secure, the
latter couldnow demand ever-increasing salaries. Laemmle's
second signing from Biograph was the actress known as Little
Mary or the Girl with the Curls. She had been born Gladys
Smith but we know her best as Mary Pickford. Signed by
Laemmle for $70 a week, she soon became America's Sweet-
 The Stars 135

heart and the highest-paid actress of the time, her salary even
keeping pace with that of Charlie Chaplin. By 1912 she was
earning $500 a week from another great pioneer producer,
Adolph Zukor, and four years later this had risen to $10,000
plus a bonus of $300,000. Even this was not enough to keep her
happy and an offer of $350,000 a picture lured her away to
another company. Mary Pickford is also an interesting example
of the way many stars get limited in the roles they can play by
an audience which will only accept the star in one sort of role.
Throughout her career Mary Pickford was condemned to play
the same role. At sixteen she had begun playing innocent little
orphan girls of a kind you find only in Victorian novels, and at
the age of thirty-two, in Little Annie Rooney, she was still cast
to play a twelve-year-old girl from the slums. All her attempts
to play adult roles were box-office failures and eventually she
retired, rich but defeated. Even then the audience taste for the
kind of role she played remained and in the years 1935-8 the
top box office star was the (real) little girl, Shirley Temple.
William Fox's venture into star-making was if anything more
interesting than that of Laemmle. There is something quite
natural in the rise to stardom of an extremely gifted actress
like Mary Pickford. Equally it is unsurprising that the great
comic actors should become stars, taking the names suggested
by their roles: Max (the Frenchman Max Linder), Charlie the
Tramp (Charles Chaplin) or Fatty (Roscoe Arbuckle). What Fox
did was to show that the same stardom could be achieved
without any of the talent that these men clearly possessed,
simply by publicity. Fox's big star of 1915 was a complete
fabrication. She was a mysterious vampire-like woman called
Theda Bara, a name which Fox's publicity men were quick to
point out was an anagram of Arab Death. She was supposed
to have been born within the shadow of the Pyramids and to
spend her spare time making exotic perfumes, looking into the
future and driving men mad with love. In fact she was a nice girl
from Cincinnati, USA, a tailor's daughter called Theodosia
Goodman. Like Mary Pickford, but even more quickly and dis-
astrously, she found herself a prisoner of her star role and re-
tired after forty films in three years.

u^
136 Film Illusion

One of the great secrets of the star idea comes from the fact
that being a star does not need any talent (as Miss Goodman
shows), for this creates a great bond between the star and the
audience. A girl can be serving in a shop or working as a typist
one day and on her way to stardom the next. This being so, any
shopgirl or typist can relate very directly to the star, who
becomes a glorified, dream-fulfilment version of herself. The
reason why stars do not need any special talent lies in the
nature of screen acting. To succeed on the stage an actor needs
a definite acting gift. The greatest actors are, it is true, born not
made, yet no-one could become Laurence Olivier overnight. A
stage actor needs some technique, training, experience, the ab-
ility to move, speak, master an accent. So it is that even the
best work their way comparatively slowly to the top, learning
their art acting as amateurs, working in repertory theatres,
tackhng small parts before taking on a role like Hamlet or Lady
Macbeth. In the cinema, on the other hand, such training is not
needed and can indeed be a handicap. Because of the way a film
is made and the manner in which it works on its audience, a
screen actor is called upon not to act but simply to be. This is
why film actors are always supposed to dread playing a scene
with an animal or a child. Children and animals have a spon-
taneous gift for being natural that only a rare adult can match,
and this is reflected in the success they have in the cinema. If
we were making any complete list of stars, we would have to
include animals Uke Lassie and the horses of the singing
cowboys of the 1940s, as well as the child stars like Shirley
Temple, Mickey Rooney, or Judy Garland, who were such a
great success in Hollywood in the 1930s.
Just how little acting talent or experience is needed for suc-
cessful acting is best shown perhaps by the films that do not
use stars at all. In realistic films some directors have made
masterpieces using people who have never even seen a movie
camera before - Luchino Visconti employing Sicilian fishermen
in his film La terra trema and Robert Flaherty turning his
Eskimo friends into actors for Nanook of the North. In the
hands of a great director anybody can play himself, or a role
very close to his own personality. The camera can do every-
 The Stars 137

thing. It can create, with effects of Ughting. shadow, movement

and cutting, apparent acting of a skill and subtlety that few
stage actors could match. But if a director can create a per-
formance out of nothing at all, and make anyone an actor, in
the case of the star there is something that no director can
give, not talent but the unique aura, the mystery, the mag-
netism that the star exhibits. Here the flair or sensitivity of the
director is seen in his ability to discover this magnetism in an
actresswho, to other people, simply looks uninteresting.
The way this works is clearly shown by the examples of the
two greatest female stars of the 1930s, Greta Garbo and Mar-
lene Dietrich. When she met the director Mauritz Stiller,
Garbo, for instance, was a plump, shy drama student whose
only film experience was acting in two advertising shorts and
playing a frisky bathing beauty in a Uttle comedy. Already a
great director. Stiller was looking for a star and already had a
name in his mind (Greta's real name was Gustafsson). He un-
covered her talent but ironically when they both went to Holly-
wood she won acclaim while he quarrelled with the studio
bosses and did nothing of real merit. He began directing her
first film there, but was replaced by another director at the
orders of Louis B. Mayer. After S tiller's death Garbo continued
working in Hollywood and in all she made twenty-four films for
M-G-M. Then suddenly, at the age of thirty-six and at the
height of her powers, she withdrew into total seclusion. All
great stars have an element of mystery in their make-up: in the
case of Garbo the mystery is complete. Marlene Dietrich was
likewise created by one man who saw in her possibihties un-
suspected by anyone else (she had already made several films).
Josef von Sternberg discovered her in Berlin, remained her dir-
ector in Hollywood and wrapped her in a veil of
for six years
mystery. The impact of both stars comes very much from the
quaUty of their faces when photographed in close-up, and it is
not by chance that virtually all Garbo's M-G-M films were
photographed by one man, the brilUant William Daniels, or that
Sternberg, as well as being a great director, was also a photo-
grapher of genius.
The quality of a star - the unique ability to exist fully in
138 Film Illusion

front of a camera -
not acting in the conventional sense, and
is

to begin with apparent only to the rare film-maker who

it is

can sense it instinctively. (The colleagues of Stiller and Stern-

berg all thought they were mad when they cast their dis-
coveries in their first starring roles.) Once estabUshed,
however, the communication between the star and the audi-
ence is direct and total - to be a fan is in a way to be in love
with the star. Yet as pointed out earUer in this chapter, the star
and all the things he or she represents are not an inevitable
part of the cinema. For stars to exist fully there must be a
studio system which will organize film-making around thein.
The films become simply vehicles for the star's talents; they
exploit the scenes and emotions which a star is uniquely gifted
to present. When happens the star becomes a real power -
this
he or she can insist on certain writers and photographers, hire
and fire directors, earn a bigger salary than the president
of the film company. Yet the star is not free. He or she still
remains a product, an object that the studio sells to the pubhc.
Advertising, invented news stories and romances, auto-
graphed photographs, fan clubs, personal appearances, all
specially staged and arranged, contribute to the fame of the
star and therefore to the value he or she has for the studio.
Often th^ once discovered, is denied the chance to have a
star,
private but has to live instead in an unreal world of gla-
life

mour and publicity. For this reason the lives of many stars,
despite their wealth, are often very unhappy. Their marriages
end in divorce (Richard Burton is Elizabeth Taylor's fifth hus-
band) or, tragically, they kill themselves with drink or drugs
(Marilyn Monroe was a striking example). Yet such is the
nature of the world of screen publicity that this only increases
the pubHc interest in stars and the public desire to see their
films.
Stars, as the name itself implies, are more than just human
beings of a particularly interesting type. ThQy are figures that
tell which we live and about
us a great deal about the society in
the basic human and dreams. The range covered by the
desires
term *star' is enormous. In many ways the very early stars,
particularly the actresses like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish
 The Stars 139

who began work with W. Griffith, are Victorian heroines.

D.
For all new inventions of the twentieth
the wonders of the
century - the car, the gramophone, the film itself - it is clear
that many people who made up the film audience still lived
emotionally in the nineteenth century. Until the late twenties
silence prevented the cinema from being a mere record of the
ordinary world and encouraged it to reflect our dreams, as is
shown by the stars of the late silent period. Rudolf Valentino,
one of the great romantic stars, built his career on being mys-
terious. Vv^omen fell him because he was remote
in love with
and unreal, yet the emotions he aroused were genuine enough
for two young women to commit suicide at his funeral. In the
1920s female stars with names like Alia Nazimova and Pola
Negri lived - or seemed to live - fantastic lives in princely villas
where no luxury was spared. The very existence of figures like
this - the sharp contrast of maidens in distress (Lillian Gish on
an iceflow drifting towards the falls) and vamps (mysterious
females luring men to their doom) - tells us a great amount
about the role and status of women. There is mystery, but of a
different kind, in Garbo and Dietrich (both, significantly
enough, imported into Hollywood from Europe). But as the
relationship of men and women moves to one of equality, stars
become more ordinary and more human, as with Katherine
Hepburn or Ingrid Bergman. The way women are treated as
objects comes through in the series of pin-up girls from Rita
Hayworth to Marilyn Monroe, now giving way to the more
modern image of pert young women like Audrey Hepbiurn or
Brigitte Bardot, who would never find themselves alone and
helpless on an iceflow.
The arrival of sound which brought female stars down to
earth also had the same effect on the men. The stars of the
1930s have solid American names - Gary Grant, Gary Cooper,
Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy. Interestingly, many
of these have remained popular long after their youth has
gone, creating a new category of unique father figures, ageing
yet attractive and manly. The core of the male stars is not the
boy-next-door figure but the man of action. Lancelots and Gal-
ahads come in several brands. There are the cowboy heroes
140 Film Illusion

from Tom Mix to John Wayne and the swashbuckling adven-

turers like Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. With the sound
film comes a new kind of hero, the tough guy from the modem
city - Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney.
All these types have a certain indestructible quality. Their
roles give them weapons with which to conquer the world - the
six-shooter, the duellist's rapier, the sub-machinegun - but
there are always rules governing their behaviour - the code of
the West (reflected in the ritual of drawing a gun), the duel-
list's code of chivalry or the gunman's evil rule of shoot first

and ask questions afterwards. A more modern variation is the

defeated hero of whom the cinema's greatest representative is
Humphrey Bogart, the battered world-weary private detective
of a dozen thrillers. More recently this particular image has
been revived in the figures of rebels like Marlon Brando and
James Dean. Dean who died after only three pictures while
driving his Porsche sports car at 160 miles-an-hour, is a figure
to rank with Valentino. Even after his death his fan mail
amounted to two thousand letters a week.
Such stars as these dominated the cinema for several
decades, but as they die or grow older they are not replaced by
similar figures. The cinema is constantly changing and develop-
ing new techniques. Modern methods of shooting, using freer
camera work, real settings and more comphcated stories,
demand different qualities. The old stars were a product of a
hot-house studio atmosphere: their names sold seats in the
cinema and so film-making was built around their needs and
whims. Now audiences make new demands and the stars
become relics. The older people who at one time went to the
cinema twice a week to see their favourite stars now stay at
home to watch television. The younger audience turns its at-
tention to the pop scene. As with the decline of the big studios,
another part of the era of the cinema has come to an end.
 i8

The Western as a

Film Genre

The creation of stars with whom the audience can identify is

one answer to the film producer's fundamental dilemma of how
to combine mass production with constant variety. On the one
hand, he must produce a regular, unending flow of films, for the
cinemas need a new work to show every week (in the early
1900s the position was even more difficult, for films were
changed every day or two). Yet, on the other hand, all the films
must be different, each one must offer something new, or why
should audiences keep on going to the cinema week after
week? This is the big difference between producing films and
producing, say, motor cars. In general, film audiences are not
really interested in which company has produced a given film,
and equally they do not care about writers or directors, despite
the influence these people have on the quahty of the film (a
rare exception is Alfred Hitchcock, whose films are sold on his
name rather than those of the players). But audiences have, it
seems, always been reassured by some elements of continuity
between this week's film and last week's. Hence, stars are
almost by definition players who never vary from film to film
and for a star to play a part that fell outside his customary
range was always considered a risky undertaking. In the same
way, if the film itself can be made to fit into a certain category,
so that the audience knows what to expect in general terms but
is intrigued as to how the well-known ingredients will be
 142 Film Illusion

served up this time, then a certain level of success can almost

be guaranteed. Audiences like to know what is in store for
them and a successful film is one which can be clearly and
accurately labelled: it is a western or a musical, a horror film or
a gangster movie, a slapstick comedy or a woman's picture.
Even today, when lists of new releases are made in the film
industry's trade papers, every film is given a one-word cat-
egorization - comedy, drama, adventure, etc. - and woe betide
any director who just wants to make a *film'.
Most of the forms which the cinema has made its own are
extensions or modifications of forms already existing in other
arts. There are, for example, close links between the musical on
film and on the stage and between gangster films and the thrill-
ers of men like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Yet
one form at least, the western, is largely a new development of
the cinema, though there is even here perhaps a connection
with the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill and other showmen
from 1870 onwards. The western can claim to be one of the
oldest of film types. Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery
of 1904, one of the very first story fihns, is a western of sorts in
that it tells how a group of bandits stop and rob a train and are
then pursued and killed. Since 1904 hardly a year has gone by
without some worthwhile western film (and any number of
worthless ones) being made. The western continues to draw
crowds and give exciting viewing and its range is extraordinarily
wide. There have been comic westerns and musical westerns,
and the form has even been successfully transferred to the
television screen (though one would have thought that the ab-
sence of the wide open spaces that only the cinema screen can
show would have been a crippling limitation).
The western is a further illustration of the question of fihn
genres that has already been touched upon in the discussion of
silent comedy. Because of its long history and continued popu-
larity, the western allows perhaps the clearest analysis of the
issues involved. As a form it offers the film-maker certain ad-
vantages. People like stories of adventurous open-air life that
take them out of their everyday lives, away from the monotony
of factory bench or school desk. They like a story that has a

I:;
 The Western as a Film Genre 143

clear and gripping development and moves to a satisfying

climax when everything is settled in a blaze of guns. The dis-
advantages of the western for the film-maker are equally clear.
There is a certain sameness which can result in a deadened
response on the part of the audience, or the automatic re-
sponse may be so strong as to drovm the message that the film-
maker is trying to get across (spectators will tend to find the
violence romantic, for example). But for a film-maker who
wants to talk directly to his audience about moral value?, or
about themes such as male friendship or patriotism, the west-
ern can offer an unequalled freedom. We all have a pretty clear
idea of what a western is, but if we try to pin down a definition
it becomes obvious that we do not base our judgement on what

the story is about or really where it is set. Westerns tend to be

about a certain period of American history and to show the
building-up of the nation, but they have an attraction that is
international. We find echoes of the western in a great many
Japanese fihns, particularly those of Akira Kurosawa, and some
of the most interesting westerns of the 1960s were made in
Italy. In a similar way virtually any kind of story can become
the basis of a western. John Ford's classic Stagecoach is a ver-
sion of Guy de Maupassant's story of the Franco-Prussian War,
Boule de suif, while The Magnificent Seven was based on a
Japanese period film, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai,
To define a western we have to look beyond the nominal
setting and story to the visual quality of the film itself. There
are certain images we expect to find in any film that calls itself
a western. We look for a certain sort of costume, for example,
and when a film like The Wild Bunch opens with the gang in
First World War army uniforms we feel - as the director
Sam Peckinpah intended us to at this point - a certain unease.
In a western there will of course be horses (some of these
have in the past been almost stars in their own right, like Cham-
pion and Trigger, the horses of the singing cowboys. Gene
Autry and Roy Rogers), and the kind of pictorial compositions
where horse and rider stand out against the skyline or suddenly
become visible against a rocky landscape. We expect guns,
elegant-looking weapons like the colt and the Winchester rifle.
144 Film Illusion

which help to explain to us the sort of people the story is about.

But there are other signs too: a sheriff's badge or a gambler's
fancy waistcoat. Nowadays it is going too far to expect
all badmen wear black hats or the hero to be dressed
to
all in white, though this has happened in the past in westerns,

but there is a powerful symbolism present in the clothes. When

in the classic western Shane, made by George Stevens in 1953,
we catch our first glimpse of Jack Palance, clad from head to
toe in black, we know immediately that he is a killer. One
might include the actors as part of the visual pattern for, in
addition to their star magic, there are some faces that almost
automatically conjure up the world of the West. The variety of
them enormous. In the beginning there were men like
is

Broncho Anderson, William S. Hart and Tom Mix. Then

Billy
came WilHam Boyd (celebrated as Hopalong Cassidy) and the
singing cowboys Autry and Rogers (whose popularity is, for us
today, one of the hardest things to understand about the
cinema of the 1930s and 1940s). Since the 1940s, mention of
the western summons up the faces of John Wayne, Alan Ladd
and Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott and Henry Fonda.
Not only are the names of the stars constant, so too are the
minor players in the background and, indeed, the roles they
play. The western has a varied but limited range of characters.
Mexicans and Indians have traditionally been cast as villains
and not until the 1950s were there serious attempts to present
problems from their point of view. The slow pan to reveal the
Indian hordes silhouetted on the hilltops is one of the classic
images of the western, to rank with the cavalry charge or the
stagecoach pursued across the plains. Women frequently have
very stereotyped roles. They are either scarlet-clad saloon girls
(leading a bad life but always willing to die to save the hero) or
gingham-clad ladies from the East bringing the civilized values
that the newly won West lacks. Though we often talk of
'cowboy' films, the really striking figures in most westerns are
those with more distinctive.roles - the cattle barons for ever at
war with the ranchers, and the men whose professions set them
off from the mass - the bankers (so often the outwardly re-
spectable cause of so much violence), the gamblers, the
 The Western as a Film Genre 145

gunfighters. The same scenes and settings recur in western

after western. The swing doors of the saloon open and a
stranger walks up to the long bar. As he orders his whisky and
confronts his long-sought enemy, the crowd melts away to a
safe distance. There is a poker game in one comer, usually
crookedly run and often a cause of needless violence, resulting
in the death of a good man or turning an impetuous youth into
a hunted As an aftermath of violence there are quieter
killer.

moments at the funeral of the dead man or at a church service

where young and old gather around a preacher who may not be
ordained but who knows his bible by heart. Then the streets
are cleared for the final confrontation of hero and villain, the
shoot-out fought man against man with a code of rules as
powerful as those of any duelling code.
The western has been called an art form for connoisseurs
because it assumes that you have seen it all before. You do not
spoil anyone's enjoyment of a western if you tell them how it
ends. What counts is not what happens, but how it happens,
the little ways in which a scene or a shot is different. It is clear
in any case that we do not go to westerns to be surprised. In a
traditional western it does not take us long to anticipate what
is going to happen: John Wayne will outpunch the badmen,

Randolph Scott will outwit them quietly, Henry Fonda will

keep his honesty and integrity in the face of violence. In one
way audiences like it because it is all so reassuring, but beneath
the surface there are real tensions and conflicts. Generally
speaking westerns deal with the years 1865-90, the years when
the West was opened up and a crucial period in American
history. Many of the characters bear the names of men who
and here we have a whole range of humanity. We
really lived,
find lawmen like Wyatt Earp and reformed drunkards like Doc
Holliday, men of peace like the Apache Cochise and arrogant
blundering fools Uke General Custer. America is still a society
in which men feel that they have a right to carry a gun and it is
in the western that some of the implications of this attitude are
examined in a succession of violent figures: the youthful Billy
the Kid, the warrior Geronimo, the outlaws Jesse James and his
brother Frank (often treated sympathetically), the animal-like
146 Film Illusion

Dalton brothers and their cousins the Youngers. Equally, many

of the incidents we find in westerns have their roots in history:
the gunfight at the OK Corral, Custer's Last Stand, the Battle
of the Alamo, the break-up of the great cattle ranches and the
coming of the railways.
The historical setting of the western is ideal. The period is
far enough away from the settings and costumes not to seem
just quaint and old-fashioned, yet near enough for personal
memories to remain (the director John Ford, for instance, met
Wyatt Earp on several occasions when he was a young man).
The questions raised are therefore far enough away to be
treated with detachment and yet close enough to involve Am-
ericans of today. The matter of the treatment of the Indians is
very important at a time when the position of the Negro in
America is always being discussed. The questions of the way a
man fits into a community and the kinds of demands it can
make on him are as relevant in the 1970s as in the 1870s. Some
westerns, like Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, which was scrip-
ted by Carl Foreman and starred Gary Cooper, are in fact pol-
itical fables, in this case a treatment of political upheavals of
the 1950s only nominally set in the old West.
There is another level too to the western. The plots can be
extremely simple and yet remain very effective. A man rides
into town, deals with the trouble there and rides out again
{Shane), or a man whose wife has been murdered confronts and
kills the men responsible (Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome).
Equally, the characters, while very clear-cut in terms ofgood
and evil, are of bigger than normal stature. They are not
weighed down as we are by the needs of everyday life. They are
free men called upon to defend what they believe in against
powerful enemies only too wilUng to use a gun. For these
reasons the western, for all its links vrith real events, is not a
realistic portrayal of life. That is to say, it does not present
human beings as they are vdth all their petty worries, but as
they ought ideally to be. In this way the western becomes
either myth (recording the deeds of legendary, super-human
figures) or a sort of morality play, showing the triumph of good
over evil.

i
r ^^!fTP^^^'

The Western as a Film Genre 147

When one thinks of film directors who make westerns, the

first name which comes to mind is that of John Ford. In the
course of a fifty-year directing career in Hollywood he has
made dozens of westerns, including some of the best-known:
Stagecoach (1939), My
Darling Clementine (1946) and The
Searchers (1956). In a trio of films with John Wayne in the
years 1948-50 {Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio
Grande) he celebrated the heroism of the cavalry in its war
against the Indians, but later, with Cheyenne Autumn in 1964,
he reversed the pattern and showed events from the Indian
point of view. Ford makes his films about the romance of the
West and this is reflected in his imagery. Many of his westerns
have been filmed in Monument Valley, which he chose not be-
cause of its authenticity as Indian country but for its pic-
turesque scenery. We constantly find figures silhouetted against
the sky, or noble men, whether cavalry officers or Indians,
facing death with a calm assurance. In Ford's work ideas like
honour, duty and nobility have a real meaning.
In his films we also find a strong sense of the community.
Seeing them we become aware of the pioneering spirit of the
men and women who went out to settle in the new land and of
the values on which they built their townships. When these
people gather to dance or pray the warm sentiment that
colours all Ford's work is clearly apparent. In the cavalry which
plays an important part in so many of his films Ford shows
both his respect for discipline and his sense of comedy. The
films are almost always given passages of knock-about farce
and far more stress is placed on loyalty than on the moral issue
of killing. The values which Ford celebrates are virtues such as
courage in the face of death, respect for the weak and for
women, obedience to orders. There is no one Ford hero - the
civilized restraint of Henry Fonda, the warmer vitality of John
Wayne and the cynicism of James Stewart all contribute to the
picture he builds up - but always these men are shown in their
relationship with their fellows and with the community.
When we consider a younger specialist in westerns like Budd
Boetticher (twenty years Ford's junior) we find quite a different
sort of style and method of approach. Here the hero is a sort of
148 Film Ittusion

buU-fighter, alone in an arena, facing an enemy whom he must

outwit by bluff or cunning. The hero of Boetticher's best films
of the 1950s - westerns like The Tall T, Ride Lonesome or
Comanche Station - is the lean, ageing figure of Randolph
Scott, who plays a man lacking all family ties or special skills of
any kind. Though his behaviour is quite matter-of-fact, he is a
man with a mission which absorbs him totally. In Boetticher's
films one of the common themes of many westerns - the long
journey to seek revenge on a past enemy - comes very clearly
to the foreground. The avenging Scott, relying totally upon
himself, settles down to even odds, outwits those who have
disarmed him and splits his enemies so that he can deal with
them one at a time. He succeeds, but there is no joy at the end
- he kills but takes no pleasure in it. The images in a Boetticher
film reflect the drabness of the hero's life. The setting is a
desert of rocks and scrub, not at all picturesque and offering
little shelter or sign of habitation. Everything is scaled down

and even the stagecoach tends to be drawn, not by elegant

horses, but by mules. In Boetticher's world simply staying alive
is an achievement that few characters manage.

In the hands of newer directors in the 1960s the western

changes yet again. Sam Peckinpah, ten years younger than
Boetticher, takes a new look at the West and finds new things
to stress. He sets his films in a precise historical setting, often -
as in Ride the High Country or The Wild Bunch - the end of an
era as the gunman begins to be out of date and the motorcar
comes to replace the horse. Similarly, where Boetticher pares
down the story to its bare essentials, Peckinpah builds up the
drama and stresses the realism of the character's clothes, guns
and behaviour. There are no innocents left in Peckinpah's
world - the women are as bad as the men, and the children
amuse themselves by tormenting and roasting scorpions. In the
end, most notably in The Wild Bunch, there comes a great
burst of savagery, with dozens of men dying in slow motion,
technicolor blood spurting most convincingly and a ballet of
total destruction being created.
There are many other fihn-makers who have made westerns
that merit attention - Anthony Mann with his epic westerns,
r The Western as a Film Genre

Howard Hawks, whose films tend to be studies of groups of

men welded together under pressure, and Delmer Daves, who
sets out to show what the West was really like. Yet even the
149

three we have looked at show the multiple possibiHties of a

form or genre and what varied' ideas can be expressed with
virtually the same materials: a man, a horse and a gun. A genre
can develop as the attitudes of the men who use it change.
Without fixed forms Uke the western and the stars w^ho help
bring them to life, the Hollywood cinema would never have
functioned so effectively, had so much impact on the world film
industry and given us so many good films. Now that the cinema
is giving way to television as the normal visual entertainment
for the vast mass of people, so television too is developing its
own patterns of storytelling, particularly the endless series of
episodes recounting each week the adventures of the same
group of characters. It is an indication of the richness of the
western as a genre that even here - as series like Wells Fargo,
The Virginian and High Chapparal show - it can play its
part.
 19

Hitchcock and Authorship

in Hollywood

Just as a novel mirrors the thoughts and feehngs of its writer or

a piece of music those of its composer, so too a film can be the
expression of a single person and a reflection of his views on
life and human experience. At first sight this seems an unlikely

idea. The making of any normal feature film involves the col-
laboration of dozens of people, all with special talents and
viewpoints. Moreover, the cinema is, undeniably, a very mech-
anical medium - the camera photographs what is put in front
of it and there does not seem to be much freedom left to the
film-maker. But in fact this is to underestimate the importance
of such things as the choice of how you shoot something, what
you leave out, the angle of the camera from which you shoot it,
the length of time you leave it on the screen, and the shots you
choose to precede and follow it. Together these allow a great
freedom to a film-maker and permit the film to be a genuine
expression of his feelings. Sometimes the key man is the actor
(Buster Keaton's films are an example of this), sometimes it
may be the writer, though even this is comparatively rare. In
general the man who has the greatest control over a film is the
one non-specialist, the director. It is he who has the possibility
of working with the writer on the preparation of the material
for shooting, who is in charge of the actors and camera during
the actual filming, and who may well also supervise the editing
of the film (putting together the individual shots in their ideal
 '
l:*v?^

Hitchcock and Authorship in Hollywood 151

order and rhythm). Because, in this way, the director can play a
part atall the vital stages, he has the chance to make the film

his own, to make it express what he wants it to. The writer

cannot do this so easily because he does not control the
images, the colours, the acting style or the players. The actor
himself cannot shape the film through his performance, as he
might do on the stage, because a film is nearly always shot out
of order and in tiny fragments, so that a whole day's shooting
may be pruned or re-ordered in the editing. So it is the director
who is the key man. Stars like John Wayne and Bette Davis
obviously have a great importance and stamp their per-
sonalities on the films in which they appear, but if a film is a
really good one, it will express more than just an actor's per-
formance and character: it will become the vehicle for a view
of life, a moral concern, an analysis of some chosen facet of
human experience.
In Europe it is not uncommon for the most important direc-
tors to be granted the kind of ideal freedom which we have
described here, and consequently the question of who is the
author of a film directed by Luchino Visconti or Federico Fellini
never arises: it is self-evidently the director. The Hollywood
system on the other hand has traditionally been geared to a
quite different scheme of priorities. The aim is not personal
expression but the production of dozens of films simul-
taneously so as to provide a never-ending stream of films for
the world's cinemas. In Hollywood therefore specialization
became the keynote. The studios employed a great many tal-
ented craftsmen, teams able to build and costume a Persian
city one week and an eighteenth- century villa the next. That
such men should be specialists is unsurprising, but the studios
took the idea a stage farther and tried to turn the creative men
into narrow specialists as well. A film director might not
become involved in a film until the script has been fully written
and every word of dialogue composed, and when the shooting
finished, he would hand over the film to a specialist editor.
Even the writing would not be the work of one man. Thus one
writer, regarded as good at shaping a story would compose the
tasic construction of a film, while another would write in the
152 Film Illusion

dialogue. A third might then add a few scenes to give greater

impact to a dull section, while a fourth would quickly revise
and poUsh the script ready for shooting. It was not uncommon,
in the great days of Hollywood, for a writer to be given a script
and be told to write in half-a-dozen laughs in the first ten
minutes, to create, out of nothing, a part for some female star
who had suddenly become available. Of course, only a certain
kind of film-maker could work creatively within the confines of
the studio set-up. Directors of great but unwieldy talent like
Erich von Stroheim or Orson Welles could never find a place
there. But there are film-makers of another kind who work
happily in this sort of situation, men like John Ford, Howard
Hawks or Douglas Sirk, the master of the glossy woman's pic-
ture.
The careers of men like these are at the heart of what we
mean by the word Hollywood, but the question of how to deal
with them critically is quite a difficult one. To begin with, the
issue of who is responsible for what and who should be credited
with the authorship of a film is often dubious in the Hollywood
context. In the case of a great many films there is no clear
answer, and there will probably always be the problem of the
isolated, inexplicably brilliant film in the career of a director or
writer otherwise doomed, it seems, to total mediocrity. Where
more consistent film-makers are concerned, it is almost always
helpful to look at a whole series of the man's works. Even if it

is not wholly successful, any film by a great director demands

critical investigation and will reward the critic who is seeking
to understand some of the basic impulses behind the film-
maker's work. A bad film may even be more revealing than a
good one, simply because the ambitions and intentions behind
it are more obvious. Re-evaluation must be constant, and there

are many instances of films which were neglected when they

first appeared but which now, after twenty years or more, look

infinitely better than other more celebrated works of the

period. A way of looking at films that takes a director's output
en bloc and considers each film to be, initially at least, worthy
of the same critical attention, can do far more than merely
uncover a handful of neglected masterpieces. It can change our
 Hitchcock and Authorship in Hollywood 153

whole sense of values in the cinema. The manner in which this

occurs becomes clear if we look and reputation of
at the career
one of Hollywood's most successful directors, Alfred Hitch-
cock.
In a career extending over fifty films and an equal number of

years in Britain and Hollywood, Hitchcock has always been a

professional. He has often contributed to the writing of his film
scripts, sometimes served as his own producer and constantly
made tiny cameo performances (as a sort of trademark), but
nevertheless he remains the epitome of the pure professional
movie director. For thirty years his films have been major
Hollywood productions backed by the resources of a big
studio. Generally too they have been based (often fairly re-
motely, it is true) on popular novels and plays, and acted by
leading Hollywood stars (names like Ingrid Bergman and Grace
Kelly, James Stewart and Gary Grant recur in the credit titles
of his films). He himself has fostered the image of the shrewd
but smiling professional. Yet his films show that there is still,
beneath the surface of the bland, rotund figure of the mature
Hitchcock, more than a trace of the child of four terrified by
being sent by his parents to spend a night at the poHce station
as a punishment for some minor misbehaviour, and of the
twenty-three-year-old aspiring director who had written his
first film script {Woman to Woman) but never touched alcohol

or been out with a woman. For a long time, however, the out-
ward image was all that concerned audiences and critics, as
attention was focused on his skill and adroitness as a director.
After ten years as a film-maker in the British studios these
qualities were strikingly apparent as he made an international
reputation with half-a-dozen thrillers for the Gaumont-British
company, including films like the first version of The- Man who
Knew Too Much (1934), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The
Lady Vanishes (1938).
It was clear from these films that Hitchcock was above all a
narrative artist. He was perfecting his way of telling stories
through images and sounds, so that his films became com-
pulsive viewing for an audience. Much of the pleasure to be got
from these films (as from many of his later ones) comes from

!:^
154 Film Illusion

the way the story element is handled. Events are piled one
upon the other at such a pace that the implausibilities of the
story pass unnoticed. The British national character is gently
mocked through the figures of chattering landladies, dim-
witted policemen and the ever-resourceful upper-class charac-
ters who keep the foreigners at bay with their pistols, while
caring most deeply about the outcome of the current test match
against AustraHa. He avoids the stereotyped hero-heroine situ-
ation with some sharply drawn couples whose bickering gives
way to real respect, and at the same time delights in playing
with cHches of setting and background. If the film unfolds in
Scotland, a flock of sheep and a mist will allow the hero and
heroine to escape {The Thirty-Nine Steps), just as in later films
the traitor falls from the Statue of Liberty {Saboteur, 1942) and
the hero saving the nation's secrets is pursued over the giant
faces of the Mount Rushmore national monument {North by
Northwest, 1959). Striking proof of Hitchcock's sheer skill as a
narrator is his use of the device he himself christened the
MacGufFm. He realized early in his career that, if the mechanics
of the plot were properly handled, the MacGufRn - the vital
document, evidence or secret for the possession of which the
characters chase, kill and cheat each other - could be reduced
to a mere shadow without harming the suspense. Thus, in two
of his best films. The Lady Vanishes and Nort^ by Northwest,
the complex action revolves around something quite small, in
the one case, a little tune (allegedly a code message) and,
in the other, a roll of microfilm.
The 1930s British thrillers took Hitchcock - almost inevi-
tably - to Hollywood, where he remained for thirty years, with
only brief visits to England to make two shorts for the British
Ministry of Information in 1944 and to direct two features.
Under Capricorn and Stage Fright, in 1949-50. When, in 1971,
he came back once more to the British studios to make Frenzy,
he included some striking echoes of his 1930s style, almost as a
kind of affectionate homage to his own past. In 1940, however,
when he was trying to establish himself in Hollywood, his
Englishness caused some difficulty, and he found producers
dubious about giving him the stars and budgets he needed. But
 Hitchcock and Authorship in Hollywood 155

gradually he affirmed his reputation as the master of screen

suspense, creating as it were a genre of his own. His thrillers

are quite distinct from both the American gangster films which
have their roots in social criticism and the Agatha Christie-
style whodunnits which he dislikes as mere cold puzzles that
do not deeply involve an audience. His films show his concern
not with what disaster may happen next, but with how the hero
or heroine will avoid an impending disaster. For Hitchcock the
distinction is crucial. If a character enters a room in which,
unknown to him and to us, there is a bomb, the explosion will
give perhaps fifteen seconds of exciting cinema. But if we know
the bomb is there when he enters, our attention can be held for
perhaps fifteen minutes. Always Hitchcock is careful to make
us identify closely vdth his innocent heroes, so that we share
emotionally the danger he places them in. If we do this,
another of his maxims comes true: the bigger the villain, the
better the movie. Taken in this way Hitchcock's films seem to
have a surface but no depth, and their director appears as a
clever, even cynical manipulator of audience reaction.
The director himself, in his public statements, seems happy
to talk simply about technique (how effects were achieved),
even if it means accepting this level of interpretation. For,
unUke European film-makers such as Antonioni or Bergman, he
has never talked about any profound significance in his films,
and his interviews offer few clues as to the reasons why they
are so powerful. Psycho, for example, is a highly complex film
however we approach it: probing, ruthlessly effective, highly
ambiguous and shot through with a macabre sense of humour.
To describe it, as Hitchcock does, as simply a *fun' picture is
hardly enlightening. It is therefore, not to the director, but to
his critics - particularly those who have looked at his whole
output - that we must look for starting-points if we are to talk
meaningfully about his films.
In a book published in 1957 the Frenchmen Claude Chabrol
and Eric Rohmer (both later to become noted directors) found
all kinds of moral issues hidden beneath the thriller surface.*

• Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, Hitchcock (Editions Universitaires,

Paris. 1957).
156 Film Illusion

Taking as their starting-point Hitchcock's Catholic back-

ground (he was educated by the Jesuits), they looked at the
themes of guilt and innocence, accusation and punishment,
good and evil. In films scripted by many different writers and
adapted from a diversity of sources, they found that Hitchcock
deals with the same preoccupations, many of them indicated
by the film titles themselves: Blackmail, Stcspicion, Shadow of a
Doubt, 1 Confess, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, Viewed in this way
the films allow a Hitchcock universe to be defined, in which the
characters live in a perplexing network of deceit and betrayal,
doubt and suspicion. Murder or violent death are among the
few unchanging constants, and there is no immediately obvious
way of escape. Blind confidence in others is disastrous, curi-
osity is and only confession may lead to a
relentlessly punished
sort of salvation. Here innocence cannot be taken for granted:
it has to be proved, and this often entails the hero in a con-

siderable ordeaL Characters tend to polarize into embodiments

of purity or evil, but their roles are interchangeable. Because of
this Hitchcock's films abound in instances of the transfer of
crime, guilt or punishment. In Blackmail (1929) the black-
mailer, by the manner of his death, throws suspicion on himself
and frees the heroine who is the real guilty party. Shadow of a
Doubt (1943) shows an innocent girl responsible for the de-
struction of her uncle who is intent on murdering her, while
Strangers on a Train (1951) is built around one character's
suggestion to another that they swop crimes - he will kill the
other's wife in exchange for the murder of his own father.
More recently the English critic Robin Wood has looked at
Hitchcock's films in terms of the nature and depth of the re-
lationship binding the hero and heroine.* He stresses the
growth of contact as each film unfolds and the way in which
the characters overcome their weaknesses and problems by
living through difficult situations together. This is a theme that
he finds common to such otherwise widely different films as
Suspicion, Vertigo and The Birds, If Wood's argument is ac-
cepted, then the customary dismissal of Hitchcock is turned
• Robin Wood, Hitchcock*s Films (A. Zwemmer, London, and A. B,
Barnes. New York. 1965).
 Hitchcock and Authorship in Hollywood 157

upside down and he emerges as a deeply moral artist concerned

with many of the great problems of the twentieth century.
Psycho, for example, becomes *one of the key works of our
age'.
Both these critical approaches have their limitations: the
one overemphasizes the Christian ideology and symbolism,
while the other tries to force the director into a scheme of
moral values which the critic sees all great art as embodying.
But both make us go back and look at the films again. A full

evaluation will entail a consideration not only of these themes,

but also of all the many shaping forces at work in the Holly-
wood system - producers, stars, genre conventions. In the case
of Hitchcock we must also take into account the fact that his
roots lie in the silent film, which he sees as the purest form of
cinema. His preoccupation throughout his career has been to
tell stories by means of images and virtually all the most

admired set pieces of suspense in his films can be analysed in

exactly the same terms as a sequence by a master of silent
cinema like Eisenstein. A film like Shadow of a Doubt, if looked
at simply as a series of images, can be seen to comprise a whole
series of visual parallels and duplications. For example, not
only are the innocent niece and the evil uncle both called Char-
lie, they are also both introduced in the same pattern of shots,

the only difference being that one is the mirror image of the
other (Uncle Charlie is first seen lying fully dressed on a bed
with his head to the right, his niece Charlie in an identical
position, but with her head to the left).
If emphasis is placed on such patterns of imagery and the

symmetry that they create, then it becomes increasingly

difficult to force Hitchcock into a straitjacket of Christian or
moral concerns. His films affect us not because they show the
working out of divine grace or the therapeutic impact of love,
but because they involve us in questioning the very way we
look at cinematic images. As the cinema is, for Hitchcock, a
visual medium, so his films are about the way his characters
see each other, the way they are forced to doubt their own eyes
and senses, the way they intrude on each other by looking and
probing. We, the audience, are deeply involved in this because
158 Film Illusion

the filmsmake us share the characters' perspectives. In Sus-

picion we share Joan Fontaine's doubts about Gary Grant, in
Rear Window we are involved in James Stewart's spying on his
neighbours, in Vertigo we are caught up in the mystery of Mad-
eleine's behaviour. But Hitchcock does not stop there. Most of
his fihns have a moment whenthe mask is removed, when we
and the characters see clearly an unsuspected truth. The use
made of this moment varies from film to film - it may be a
surprise ending (as in Suspicion), a revelation of basic sanity
(Under Capricorn), a punishment of our own voyeurism
(Psycho) or an upsetting of our sense of reality (Vertigo). But,
whatever the case, Hitchcock's films send us back to fun-
damental questions about the cinema: how do patterns of
images on the screen affect us? and how can we translate these
patterns into verbal terms to explain the meaning of what we
have seen.^ Hitchcock's art, like that of a great many directors
of the Hollywood studio days, revolves essentially around the
problem of reality becoming illusion and illusion turning to
reality, and thus plays on the paradoxical nature of our re-
sponse to the film image.
 2o
Hollywood's Heritage
and Influence

By the beginning of the 1970s the position of Hollywood was

totally different from what it had been in the great years of the
1930s and 1940s. The arrival of television had taken away the
unreflecting masses who had traditionally been the cinema's
main audience. Instead of being able to assume the interest of
habitual filmgoers, producers had to make films for audiences
who would pick and choose. As Sam Goldwyn said, who wants
to go out and see a bad movie when you can stay at home and
see one on television? Therefore film-making had to change and
tended to split into, on the one hand, what the industry calls
blockbusters - massive spectacles that no television programme
could equal - and, on the other, smaller less expensive works
made independently with a real personal involvement on the
part of the fibn-maker. Neither sort of film needs the kind of
production set-up that the Hollywood studios at the peak
represented. As a result, though the names still remain, the
studios are no longer there. Their films sold to television, their
studio lots developed for housing and their props auc-
tioned off to interested fans, they are now no more than
shadows to remind us of a past era of film history. But this past
itself continues to pose all kinds of questions crucial for an
understanding of the cinema. If Hollywood no longer exists as
a geographical entity, the many thousands of films produced
there are still - even increasingly - a part of our general
160 Film Illusion

cultural awareness. Movies are no longer subject to the old

rhythm of one week's general release and then long years of
oblivion. In the more fluid situation of the present more and
more films are available to the pubHc - the National Film
Theatre in London, for example, shows over a thousand
different films each year. Film societies are proliferating, and
scores of items from the Hollywood repertoire have been
bought for showing by the television companies. The newly
exhumed wealth of the American studios has had the same
degree of impact on cinematic awareness as the major archa-
eological uncovering of the civilizations of Greece and Egypt
had on wider European culture in the past.
Once it was easy to be certain about what Hollywood repre-
sented. The writers whom the studios lured with exorbitant
salaries and then ruthlessly exploited to turn out an unending
stream of trivia took their revenge in the image they painted of
the studio world. Novels like Scott Fitzgerald's The Last
Tycoon, Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and Budd
Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run, together with a whole
host of minor works, tell the same depressing story. The liter-
ary attitude to Hollywood is exemplified by the novelist Graham
Greene, whose novels and stories provided the source material
for a dozen films and who himself scripted eleven others in-
cluding Carol Reed's highly successful The Third Man. From
our present-day perspective the late 1930s are often seen as
one of the golden ages of Hollywood. Yet at the time Greene,
who was film reviewer for The Spectator for five years from
1935 onwards, could find little to enthuse about. In an article
about the role of the film critic he asked plaintively what he
was supposed to write about, since no more than two or three
films a year could be treated with respect. The only approach he
saw possible was a satirical one, and like a great many lesser
writers he set out to purge the cinema with laughter. But when
he complains of the picture postcard quality of the sunsets in
The Garden of Allah or the pasteboard desert and stunted card-
board trees of The Petrified Forest he is clearly setting up a
system of values which cannot allow the Hollywood cinema of
illusion its proper place. Standards appropriate for judging
 Hollywood's Heritage and Influence 161

literature or the documentary are inadequate to cope with this

type of film-making, and it is not surprising that, despite his
success as a screen-writer in the 1940s and 1950s, Greene
should always have felt ill at ease with the cinema. Looking
back on his career in 1958 he concluded that adapting material
for the screen, even reshaping one of one's own novels, was an
'ambiguous toil' because it meant using words for a cause not
beUeved in by the writer. The best he could bring himself to say
of the cinema was that, like a psychiatrist, it enables one to do
without it.
Greene's view of Hollywood as a devourer of talent and a
snare for the gifted is typical of his generation, but today
Hollywood fulfils quite a different function. For writers, artists
and film-makers it is now less of a threat to their independence
than an outstanding example of achievement. The ruthless ma-
chine which dominated and controlled those who, like Greene,
were drawn into its net, can now be seen to have given a re-
markable body of works. What is most striking and influential
for artists of today is that very professionaUsm and efficiency
which once filled all serious-minded critics with horror. Film-
makers of the 1960s and 1970s are concerned to make films of
a very different kind, but lessons learned from American
movies have often been crucial in their development. The
emergence of what was known as the *New Wave' in France in
1959 marks the first appearance of a generation of film-makers
weaned on the works of Hollywood's peak years. In film maga-
zines, particularly the influential Cahiers du tin^ma, young
would-be directors had looked again at the American film
scene and reversed all the critical opinions of their elders.
Directors who had worked successfully for long periods within
the studio system - men like Alfred Hitchock or Howard
Hawks - were no longer pitied as victims of an impossible
creative situation but seen as artists who, if different in kind,
were nonetheless of equal stature to independents like Orson
Welles or the European directors like Ingmar Bergman or
Luchino Visconti. These views were very apparent when the
young critics turned to film-making. Jean-Luc Godard, for
example, has explained how he made his first feature by
T-FAR-F
162 Film Illusion

conscious reference to shots and scenes he admired in the films

of George Cukor and Otto Preminger. A Bout de Souffle, which
appeared in 1960, is full of explicit connections: the casting of
Jean Seberg (who had been Preminger's Saint Joan) and the
one-minute silence observed by the hero in memory of
Humphrey Bogart, to take but two examples. The whole film
with its countless Hollywood echoes shows the force and novelty
that could be obtained by reinterpretating the gangster theme
in a new European context. Godard's Une Vemme. est une
femme, made the following year, is an equally direct homage to
the American musical, and references to Hollywood recur con-
stantly throughout the next few years of Godard's work.
Godard's contemporary, Frangois Truffaut, shows an equal
involvement with Hollywood. Truff aut's lifelong obsession with
Hitchcock has led him not only to write a long interview book
but also to attempt, in several films, to emulate the American
master of suspense. Truffaut even goes to the extent of employ-
ing Bernard Herrmann to write the score of one film and basing
two more on novels by William Irish, author of Rear Window,
A third member of the same group of French film-makers,
Claude Chabrol, is, however, the one who comes nearest to
creating works that could take their place as equals alongside
Hollywood products.
These New Wave directors are merely the most obvious
examples of a whole tendency among young film-makers of the
past decade to draw on the American experience of the cinema.
Such a development must lead us to reassess the whole of this
tradition and now books are pouring out filled with enthusi-
astic analyses of HoUyv^^ood movies. But the kind of study of
authorship which is so fruitful when applied to Hitchcock is
perhaps less relevant to some of those to whom it has recently
been appHed. Men like Allan Dwan, Sam Fuller and Roger
Gorman, who would once have been given no more than the
briefest of mentions in a film history, are now analysed at book
length as major artists, but many important areas are still
unexplored. There is little worthwhile writing on the studio
structure which is so crucial to an understanding of the Am-
erican cinema, and the contributions of writers and producers
 Hollywood's Heritage and Influence 163

are passed over in the current cult of the director. But our
knowledge of Hollywood is continually growing and ultimately
we can no doubt expect a full-scale reassessment which takes
into account social and economic pressures and faces the criti-
cal problems posed by Hollywood as a popular art. Instead of
the customary derogation of Hollywood films as escapist, what
is needed is a deeper analysis of their function of reinforcing as

well as reflecting moral values, and offering models of be-

haviour and basic reassurance to the audience.

I
 PART THREE

Film Modernism

I
 21

Film's Space-Time Potential

The realism which has dominated European thinking about the

cinema and the narrative style of the Hollywood movie are the
two most developed tendencies of the cinema. As we have seen,
both have their origins in the very earliest days of film and
both are in addition international phenomena. The industries
of Japan and India pose the same kinds of questions as Holly-
wood and realism has its adherents the world over. Both share,
too, a basic rootedness in the nineteenth century and are
offsprings of the same impulse that gave rise to the nineteenth-
century novel and music drama. Film realism adopts a con-
ception of reality as mere surface appearance which is quite at
variance with twentieth-century thinking, while the Hollywood
film deals with plot and character in terms which would have
been quite acceptable to any late-nineteenth-century novehst
or playwright. This basic conservatism of the film medium
bears out Marshall McLuhan's assertion that any new medium
begins by taking over the content of its predecessor and has
resulted in a certain failure to develop the full potential of the
cinema. The modernist possibiHty has never had anything like
the same coherence and weight as either of the other ten-
dencies, and the works with which we are concerned here are,
for all their novelty and audacity, isolated experiments which
never constitute a tradition. They represent, however, an
.equally valid and important aspect of the cinema's relationship
 168 Film Modernism

to reality and probably point the way to the future develop-

ment of the film medium. The has already
arrival of television
destroyed the studio system in which the Hollywood movie
was born and flourished and is also taking over many of the
documentary and naturaUstic functions formerly the pre-
rogative of the cinema. The underexplored modernist potential
is therefore free to assert itself as a major tendency of filmic

development.
At this point it would perhaps be as well to look back briefly
at the characteristics of modernism as it first emerged in the
arts over sixty years ago. In general terms the importance of
modernism lay in the fact that it disputed certain centuries-old
traditions in art and reaUsm
literature; perspective in painting,
in the novel, tonality in music. The necessity of modernism
derived from the fact that each of these traditions, though in
itself only one specific style chosen from a whole range of pos-
sible approaches, had come to be seen as the only possible
mode. Explored by successive generations of creators, such
modes had ceased to constitute a challenge to the artist's skill
and technique and had become instead a set of blinkers keep-
ing his eyes fixed on only one aspect of reality. In its origins the
modern movement is rooted in the work of the preceding gen-
eration and constitutes a further development of qualities in-
herent in late-nineteenth-century styles. Thus the music of
Schoenberg stems from a dissolution of tonaUty already appar-
ent in a late-romantic composer like Gustav Mahler; Joyce
takes to an extreme some of the concerns of the naturaUstic
novel; and the cubists draw new lessons from the conclusions
of Paul Cezanne. Equally, modernism did not succeed in totally
replacing older forms of tonality or realism: Sibelius and
Schoenberg were roughly contemporary, as were Kafka and
Thomas Mann, Joyce and E. M. Forster (the position being still
further complicated, as far as these particular examples are
concerned, by the fact that in each case the slightly older tra-
ditionalist outlived his modernist counterpart). Often too the
concern with experiment of this generation has produced a
reaction from younger artists and writers. As an instance of
 'W^^^ff'

Vilms Space-titm Potential 169

this one might cite the English novel's retreat into provinciaUty
since the death of Joyce.
Though it was in this way an artistic movement with its own
antecedents and a definite place in the continuing development
of art, the modernism of the pre- 19 14 era was also part of a
wider pattern. It reflected the dawn which questioned
of an age
the old certainties under the impact of new
scientific and
pseudo-scientific discoveries. Here one thinks of the new view
of the nature of man that derives from Freud's investigation of
the subconscious mind, the critique of bourgeois capitaHst
society expressed in Marx's analysis of man and society, and
the revolution in our insight into man's place in the universe
which we owe to Einstein's theory of relativity. This is not to
say that these discoveries were a direct influence, but they are
symptoms of a changing pattern of belief. As has been ob-
served, the truly contemporary artist is always slightly in ad-
vance of science, for he is conscious of the atmosphere about
him in a way that the scientist or critic is not: Picasso painted
Guernica long before Hiroshima was annihilated. Dostoyevsky
plumbed the unconscious before Freud. Equally important was
the impact of technological discoveries from the turn of the
century onwards. The pace of life changed, as new forms of
transport and communication (among them, of course, the
cinema itself) altered men's social experience of their own en-
vironment and brought in influences from previously ahen cul-
tures. The rapidity of this social change and the upheavals
caused by war helped foster a quest for novelty. The new mass
media - brilliantly characterized by Marshall McLuhan as ex-
tensions of man which institute new ratios both among them-
selves and among our private senses - created fresh ways of
thinking and of perceiving reahty. Changes of this magnitude
were bound to have a profound influence on art and literature,
even if they did not determine the specific paths followed by
the modernists.
Though modem movements mushroomed in the early years
of the century- cubism, constructivism, futurism, expression-
ism, dadaism, surrealism, etc. - and soon began to contradict
170 Film Modernism

each other as much as they contradicted the traditions of the

past, there are certain broad generalizations one can make
about the early modernists. Firstly, modernism was an art of
abstraction which refused to involve itself in mimesis. Artists
shed that desire to reproduce realistically the surface of life
which had been so important to men like Courbet and Zola,
and" turned their attention more to new areas like the sub-
conscious. Modernism may not have turned its back completely
on reality, but it certainly sought a new relationship with it.
Moreover, it widened the sphere of what had traditionally been
considered art by using the principles of distortion and dis-
location to great effect, and by producing works which were
often ugly and shocking to the untutored eye and ear. The
rejection of tonaUty led to new dissonances and rhythms in
music, the rejection of perspective gave rise to a new use of
paint and material in art, while novelists needed new linguistic
textures for their explorations of the stream of consciousness.
Modernism was roman-
also, in reaction to nineteenth- century
ticism, a highly intellectual artwhich refused the principle of
the untrammelled flow of emotion. Often there is something
which initially seems cold, even dehumanized, in many modern
works, for though the emotion is there, it is ordered in new
ways. The early modernists were generally men very aware of
their relation to past styles, often aiming at synthesis with
other arts and disciplines and frequently attempting to build
new systems on the ruins of the old (one thinks of Schoen-
berg's twelve-tone system or Le Corbusier's modulor).
The connection between the cinema and the modernist im-
pulse asit was expressed in these art movements of the early

years of the century is both intricate and intimate. Arnold

Hauser, in The Social History of Art,* dubs the post-

impressionist period, embracing cubism, expressionism and
surrealism, the Film Age. In his view, the agreement between
the technical methods of film and the characteristics of the new
is so complete that the
tw^entieth-century concept of time in art
time categories of modern art can be said to derive from the
•Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London. 1951).

i
 Film's Space-time- Potential 171

spirit of cinematic form. If this view is accepted, then it

becomes possible to see the entire pattern of modernism in

relation to the cinema, which, as one of the new electric media,
released art from what Marshall McLuhan has called the single
descriptive and narrative plane of the written word. Not only is

this relationship a general one; even specific modernist tech-

niques can be connected with filmic methods. McLuhan, for
example, notes that the stream of consciousness is really man-
aged by the transfer of film technique to the printed page.
The paradoxical nature of this interaction of a modernist art
which drew its lessons from the idea of film and a cinema
which was, in its practice, limited to aping nineteenth- century
realist methods, is clearly shown by the confrontation of
cubism and the cinema. The cubist movement in painting, last-
ing from 1907 to about 1914, runs exactly contemporary with
D. W. Griffith's creation of a film grammar between The Adven-
tures of Dollie (1908) and Judith of Bethulia (1913). Both
cubists and film-makers were engaged in creating a new way of
perceiving reality and achieving artistic impact by breaking
down the single viewpoint (perspective in painting; the camera
placed immovably in the 'best seat in the stalls' in film). By
approaching objects and situations from several angles simul-
taneously and fusing the fragmental images into a new syn-
thesis (full-face and profile in the same painting; long shot,
medium shot and close-up all used to analyse a single film
scene), they created new relationships between space and time,
between objects among themselves and between objects and
the spectator, who was called upon to look at the resulting
work - painting or film - in a new way.
On one level the essential unity of the two forms of ex-
pression is so total that Siegfrid Giedion's definition of cubism
in Space, Time and Architecture can be applied word for word
to the cinema:

It views objects relatively: this is from several points of view, no

one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it
sees them simultaneously from all sides - from above and below,
from inside and outside. It goes around and into its objects. Thus to
the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as
172 Film Modernism

constituent facts throughout many centuries, there is added a

fourth one - time The presentation
. . . of objects from several points
of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with
modern life - simultaneity.*

Yet despite this shared identity, it would be impossible to name

a single cubist film and absurd to seek any close connection
between Griffith and the cubists. In a recent thesis on cubism
and the cinemat the author was able to define many theoreti-
cal similarities between the two, but quoted only one specific
example. From Griffith's The Birth of a Nation he selected the
shot of John Wilkes Booth, immediately after he has entered
through the doorway into the passage outside Lincoln's box. In
his view, this 'yields an amazing congruence with cubist paint-
ings. The linear quaHty of the door frames and the railing on
the left taken as abstract lines yields a cubist arrangement of
planes; and because of the lighting, the figure seems to fuse
with the background.' What is surely more amazing still is that
this tiny and irrelevant example, lost in a work utterly remote
from cubist aspirations, was the only practical proof he could
furnish of the conjunction he had so admirably demonstrated
in theory.
• Siegfrid Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (OUP. London,
1956), p. 432.
t David De Smit, Cubism and the Cinema (Film Studies No. 4. Boston
University Communication Arts Division, no date).
 22

Silent Experiment

Though itsconnections with a modernist movement like

cubism are tenuous and purely theoretical, the silent cinema
did evolve its own original narrative patterns. Its achievements
during its short existence were great and various. It is probably
the only art form for which we can give the exact date of birth
and death. Strictly speaking, there was no cinema before 28
December 1895, when the Lumieres showed their first little
fUms, and the silent form of cinema was doomed on 6 October
1927, when, in a not very good Warner Brothers film called Tha
Jazz Singer, Al Jolson uttered the memorable phrase. *You ain't
I heard nothin' yet folks. Listen to this.' These words spelt the
end of an art which in little over thirty years had become an
immensely complex means of visual communication. On the
foundations laid by Griffith and Sennett a whole mass of works
came into being, ranging in Hollywood alone from the sombre
realism of Stroheim to the comic masterpieces of Chaplin,
Keaton and the rest. In Europe, aside from the Soviet masters,
we find works as divergent as Rene Clair's comedy. An Italian
Straw Hat, and Abel Gance's epic Napoleon, Carl Dreyer's
probing study of The Passion of Joan of Arc, shot almost en-
tirely in brilliant close-up, and Friedrich Murnau's atmospheric
The Last Laugh. If Murnau's film Sunrise, in which he combined
German experiments into visual style with the whole resources
of a major Hollywood studio, is perhaps the supreme
174 Film Modernism

achievement of the silent cinema as an art of movement, light

and shadow, it is the films of Sergei Eisenstein which show
most clearly the new form's struggle for autonomy.
Eisenstein completed only seven films in a creative life of
twenty-four years, but he ranks as one of the cinema's greatest
innovators as well as one of its profoundest theoreticians. His
approach is characterized by a series of contradictions. Though
deeply influenced by the Southerner D. W. Griffith, Eisenstein
remained totally committed to Marxism. Yet his political views
co-existed with an almost obsessive concern with religion and
religious imagery. Despite a background of bourgeois comfort,
he was driven by a desire to reach out to the ordinary people,
workers and peasants, with his work. His training as an engin-
eer was balanced by his work in avant-garde theatre groups
and his intellectual approach did not prevent the images of his
films from being among the most sensuous in the history of the
cinema. He is very much a part and product of the cultural
upheaval that followed the success of the revolution in Russia.
His first film. Strike, was made in 1925 when he was twenty-
five and reflects his interest in the theatrical ideas of Meyer-
hold and his own experience in the Proletkult Theatre, where
he mixed elements drawn from such varied sources as the
circus, the commedia comedy and oriental
delVarte, silent film
theatre. Strike, described in Pravda when it appeared as *the
first revolutionary film of our cinema', told the story of the

birth and failure of a strike in Tsarist Russia. The bosses are

caricatured in the bloated, loathsome figure of the factory
owner, and the faces of the police spies who overhear the
workers' discussions about the need for a strike are intercut
with the heads of animals. The strike, triggered off by the
suicide of a worker, runs its course, as the men's initial enjoy-
ment of an unaccustomed leisure gives way to hardship and the
authorities respond with threats, bribes and provocations. It is
a tiny incident involving a small child who strays amid the
Cossacks' horses which sparks off the final confrontation. Here
Eisenstein's mastery of crowd movement is most apparent, and
he indulges in some ambitious cutting by Linking the massacre
 Silent Experiment 175

of the workers by troops with shots of a butcher hacking up

meat.
Eisenstein was later unhappy about some of the theatrical
elements of this superbly vigorous film, and his next and most
famous work. Battleship Potemkin (1925) was more obviously
a development of theories of the Soviet film pioneers. Drawing
on Kuleshov's ideas of editing and Vertov's documentary ap-
proach, Eisenstein had elaborated what he called in a 1923
article the 'montage of attractions'. Behind this theory lay the
understanding that in the cinema two shots properly linked
could provide an impact greater than that which they could
produce alone. In his later theoretical articles Eisenstein was to
relate this idea to Pavlov's theories about our response to
stimuli and find parallels for it in Japanese art and the writings
of James Joyce. But in Potemkin his concern remains primarily
a narrative one: to tell in the most effective terms the story of a
mutiny provoked among the sailors of the battleship Potemkin
in 1905 when they are forced to eat rotten meat. The Odessa
steps sequence in the middle of the film constitutes perhaps the
best-known and most influential eleven minutes in film history.
The mutineers, having disposed of their officers, have sent
ashore the body of one of their leaders, killed in the fighting. In
the peaceful sunshine the people of Odessa come out to watch
the sailors and wave their encouragement. Then suddenly and
without warning the Tsarist soldiers appear and fire indis-
criminately into the crowd. By cutting between the ordered
march of the soldiers with their machine-like discipline and the
confused mass of people under attack Eisenstein created novel
filmic tensions. By means of carefully chosen details - a woman
running towards the soldiers, a pram bouncing unattended
down the steps, eyeglasses shattered by a bullet - he created
great emotional impact. Moreover, by the subtle way in which
he joined these details together, he showed how the attention
could be gripped in the cinema even though events might be
stretched out to take longer than they would in real life. In
doing so he showed film's freedom from the constraints of time
and its originality as an art of montage or editing. Eisenstein
176 Film Modernism

had originally set out with this film to cover the whole range of
revolutionary actions in 1905 but in the course of shooting had
become aware that the revolt of the sailors of the Potemkin
And even
alone offered sufficient material for a whole film.
within this deliberately restricted canvas he found that he
could take the single incident of the Tsarist soldiers' attack and
make it stand for the whole history of oppression and viol-
ence.
Eisenstein's next two films could hardly have been more di-
verse in their stylistic approach. In The General Line, begun
first but not completed until 1929, he set out to show in the
simplest terms the advantages of collectivization. He told the
story of a woman, Marfa Lapkina, who develops from a de-
feated, cowering peasant into a self-confident modem woman
thanks to the benefits brought by Bolshevik ideas and the
mechanization of agriculture. The film is not a reasoned argu-
ment in favour of the thesis it puts forward, but a naive and
very simplified hymn of praise for the new forces sweeping
away the dark stagnation of age-old traditions. Eisenstein's
exuberant delight in his own mastery of the cinema goes hand
in hand with Marfa's childlike devotion to the bull she buys
and the new machine whose advent she helps to make possible.
In contrast to the deliberate simplicity of this film, October,
made in 1927 to commemorate the events of 1917, is a work of

immense intellectual complexity. Eisenstein was faced in this

film with the problem of reconstructing just a decade later the
'ten days that shook the world'. He had both to conform to the
current party line and make an authentic record, convincing to
the thousands who knew the events at first hand. The overall
structure of the work shows the version which the party
claimed as the truth in 1927 (the part played by Trotsky, for
example, goes unmentioned), and in this sense October fails as
an objective historical document. Where it does succeed, on
the other hand, is in capturing the feel of the revolution. The
use of authentic settings and the masterly manipulation of the
scenes of mass action bring such sequences as the popular
demonstrations on the streets, the storming of the Winter
Palace and the smashing of the Tsar's wine cellar vividly to life.
 Silent Experiment 177

But aside from these realistic preoccupations, Ouober also

has a great importance as the most extreme example of Eisen-
stein's use of the possibilities of montage. Indeed, it is one of
the films which most clearly demonstrate the silent cinema's
claim to be considered as an authentically modern art with its
own formal language. Some of Eisenstein's devices develop
ideas tried out in the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin. Thus
the effect of a machinegun being fired is conveyed by rapidly
intercut shots of various details of the gun. The opening of a
bridge to cut off workers who have been fired on in a peaceful
demonstration receives a new pathos as we see a dead
girl's hair stretched across the widening gap. Eisenstein plays
around with time and space in other ways too to convey the
futiUty of the leader of the Provisional Govenmient, Kerensky.
As the latter adds title after grandiloquent title to his name, we
see him slowly climbing the same staircase, over and over
again. The angling of shots has an ironic effect as a statue
seems to crown him with a laurel wreath. The same effect is
also obtained by intercutting Kerensky preening with a mech-
anical peacock spreading its tail and Kerensky deep in thought
with Napoleon in the form of a small porcelain figure. The
advance of the counter-revolutionary General Komilov leads
Eisenstein to even more audacious devices. The statue of Alex-«
ander in symbolically smashed at the beginning of the fihn
pieces itself together as Komilov's power grows. The der-^
isoriness of his slogan 'For God and Country' is demonstrated
by a whole series of images illustrating the concept. Eisenstein
brings together in swift succession images from many civi-
lizations, moving from our conventional image of God - a bar-
oque Christ - to Indian statues, Chinese gods and finally to
primitive sculptures. Not all of this intellectual montage is
totally successful, but the imagery of October has a sen-
suousness and intellectual complexity scarcely equalled in the
cinema for thirty years, until in fact Michelangelo Antonioni
used a similar series of abstract images to complete his study
of contemporary neurosis in The Eclipse.
In 1929 Eisenstein signed a manifesto welcoming the coming
p£ soimd and pointing out some of the possibilities it offered.
178 Film Modernism

but nine years passed before he completed another film. In the

meantime he spent some months in Hollywood studying sound
techniques and elaborating scripts which were never filmed.
Then, with the backing of the sociaUst novelist Upton Sinclair,
he embarked on a disastrous Mexican venture. He shot thirty-
five miles of film forQue Viva Mexico, but quarrelled with
Sinclair and was never allowed to edit the footage. On his
return to the USSR he found his artistic preoccupations and
Western tastes out of tune with the current demands for
socialist realism and the first film he shot, Bezhin Meadow, was
banned for Ideological reasons. When, after years of teaching,
he returned to directing with Alexander Nevsky, an epic of
Russian resistance to the Teutonic invaders in the thirteenth
century, his style had changed completely. This film and the
two completed parts of the projected trilogy on Ivan the Ter-
rible represent quite a new preoccupation. Eisenstein now saw
the cinema as the genuine and ultimate synthesis of all the
arts, and these films are an attempt to fuse into a unity 'all
those separate elements of the spectacle once inseparable in
the dawn of culture and which the theatre for centuries has
vainly striven to amalgamate anew'. Eisenstein gave these
spectacular studies of the moulding of ancient Russia an oper-
atic dimension by his use of symbolic decor, expressive light-
ing and stylized acting, and his work here with the composer
Sergei Prokofiev constitutes one of the most successful at-
tempts to bring together images and music in the cinema.
 23
Expressionism

The relationship between the cinema and the major modernist

movements such as surrealism and expressionism is more tan-
gible than that with cubism, but it is equally subject to im-
portant limitations. 'Expressionist' and 'surrealist' are terms
frequently applied to films but rarely, if ever, is a specific con-
nection implied with the art movements of the early twentieth
century. More commonly the terms are used in an extremely
diluted sense to give a spurious importance to works more
properly designated as simply fantastic or bizarre. Expression-
ism as a literary and artistic movement had been ably charac-
terized by Walter Sokel as the existential or proto-existential
form of modernism, nearer to surrealism than to cubism, in
that it is 'subjective, dreamlike, visionary rather than object-
centred, intellectual and linguistically experimental'.* In this
precise sense expressionism finds comparatively little echo in
the cinema, even in the German cinema of the period immedi-
ately following the First World War. Much of what is generally
termed film expressionism is in fact rooted in German romantic
and Sturm mid Drang literature. In her fascinating study of
German cinema. The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner finds closer
connections with E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul Richter than

• weaker Sokel. The Writer in Extremis (Stanford University Press^

Stanford, California, 1959). p. 30.
180 Film Modernism

with Kafka, Toller or Trakl.* She also notes very pertinently

that certain chiaroscuro effects, so often thought expressionist,
existed long before The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and demon-
Max Reinhart, whose theatre exercised a decisive
strates that
influenceon the composition and lighting of much of the
German silent cinema, was the very opposite of an expression-
ist.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, which was directed by Robert

Wiene in 1919, does, however, remain a remarkable demon-
stration of the possibilities of an expressionist cinema. The
writers, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, apparently based their
script on personal experience (Janowitz had been at a fair one
day when a murder took place and thought he could sense who
the killer was). But in turning the script into a fihn the film-
makers replaced real locations with painted sets and backcloths
which were specially produced by a group of artists much con-
cerned with expressionist approaches. In this way the film adds
the atmosphere of the expressionist theatre - an atmosphere
dominated by distorted perspectives and shadowy phantoms -
to a story line reminiscent of Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The
story envisaged by Mayer and Janowitz dealt with a lucid young
man who solves the mystery of the murder of his friend and the
abduction of his fiancee. At the end he is able to unmask the
doctor in charge of the local asylum as the frightening Dr Cal-
igari, who uses the hapless somnambuUst Cesare as a funfair
attraction and as the tool to carry out his murderous inten-
tions.
The meaning of an ti- authoritarian script is reversed in the
this
actual film by the framework in which the story is set. The hero
is shown at the beginning to be himself an inmate of the asylum

and at the end Dr Caligari, far from being a murderous villain,

emerges as a sympathetic doctor who, now that he knows the
nature of his patient's delusions, will be able to cure him. De-
spite this apparent reversal, the film still maintains much of its
bite. At the end, for instance, the sanity of the resolution is
undercut by the fact that we still see the nightmare decor. The
•Lotte Eisner. The Haunted Screen (Seeker & Warburg, London,
1969).
 Expressionism 181

totally stylized acting of Werner Krauss as Caligari and Conrad

Veidt as Cesare very powerful and the film remains, as Parker
is

Tyler says, a fantastic modern exploration of the black forces of

sex, and as such a forerunner of many a modern underground
film. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is also a perfect example of a
film which turns its back on photographic possibilities and
creates its own reality. It captures perfectly a subjective view -
a madman's vision of the world - and fulfils the ambition of
its designers who wanted films to be drawings brought to life.
In essence expressionism proper in the cinema can be re-
duced to this one major work, and to a handful of attempts to
repeat the formula, such as Wiene's own Genuine (1920) and
Raskolnikov (1923) and Karl Heinz Martin's Von Morgens bis
Mittemachts (1920), together with a number of German fikns of
the period which take elements of expressionism but use them
as part of a style which cannot be defined as purely expression-
is tic (Paul Leni's Waxworks, Friedrich Murnau's Nosferatu,

etc.). More recent study has done nothing to refute the con-

clusions of Rudolph Kurtz writing in 1926 who saw the ex-

pressionist movement in the cinema as a history of repetitions
which did not get beyond its brilliant beginning and failed to
bring about a total upheaval and transformation.* We can,
however, use the term expressionism in a wider sense, to
denote any tendency to subordinate realism to the demands of
the symbolic expression of the artist's inner experience. If we
do this, we can indeed talk of an expressionist cinema. An ex-
pressionist use of light and shadow was as important an in-
gredient in the classic American gangster film of the 1930s as
the sociologically precise portrayal of organized crime. This
American tradition was renewed by Orson Welles with Citizen
Kane, and Welles's own later thrillers are brilliant examples of
expressionism in this sense. In Lady from Shanghai, for in-
stance, we find the grotesque characters of the evil Bannisters
and a final climactic gunfight in a hall of mirrors. The figure
of Hank Quinlan played by Welles in Touch of Evil is a figure
of nightmare proportions, and this film too has its classic
• Rudolph Expressionismus und Film (Verlag der Licht-
Kurtz.
bildbuhne, Berlin, 1926; reprinted Verlag Hans Rohr. Zurich, 1965).
182 Film Modernism

expressionist sequence, that in which Charlton Heston trails

Quinlan and his assistant through an urban jungle of
scaffoldingand oil derricks. Carol Reed's The. Third Man and
Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly are both, in their very
different ways, a part of this black tradition. The horror fibn
too often has expressionist overtones - the Gothic excesses of
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho are an excellent example. All these
are, however, films made within the conventional narrative film
meaning of the
structure and, despite the visual style, the total
work may be far from expressionist. The true heir of Caligari
would seem to be rather the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman,
many of whose films are expressionist in the anguish they
reveal as much as in the use of light and shadow.
The range of Bergman's work as writer-director in the
course of thirty years of film-making is enormously wide, rang-
ing from the naturalistic dramas, such as Port of Call, made
in the 1940s to the totally stylized television play. The Rite,
completed in 1969. But a number of his most significant films
are a part of the expressionist heritage and show the growing
independence of his work as it develops away from borrowed
expressionist devices to a fully mature and modern manipu-
lation of filmic potential. The opening of Sawdust and Tinsel,
which he directed in 1953, shows his debt to the silent cinema.
The long prologue depicting the agony and humiliation of the
clown, Frost, when his wife bathes naked with a group of
soldiers is particularly interesting in this respect. The sound is
unsynchronized and the lighting harsh and full of sharp con-
trasts. The cutting-together of such shots as the guns opening
fire and the officers bellowing at the men is done in conscious

imitation of Eisenstein and the whole sequence is a vivid

portrayal of anguish and despair. In Wild Strawberries, made
four years later, the film as a whole still has a rational struc-
ture, depicting an old man going to the University of Lund to
receive an honorary degree. But as he travels the old man is
disturbed by memories and nightmares. The film opens with
one such dream, of a strangeness recalling Caligari. Isak Borg
finds himself in a totally empty and silent city where clocks and
watches have no hands and where the funeral he follows turns
 F^/r'.-*-

Expressionism 183

out to be his own. Later, a return to the house where he lived

as a child brings fresh floods of dreamlike images. In these
dreams real and imaginary scenes of isolation and humiliation
are inextricably entangled and Isak finds that he can even con-
verse with the figures of his own past. The film finds its reso-
lution too in the world of memory as Isak, purged of his
tormenting thoughts, takes comfort in the remembered vision
of a summer day, shimmering water and the nearness of his
parents and childhood sweetheart.
The Face, made in 1958, is described by its author as a
comedy, but in fact it makes great use of the conventions of the
horror film. It opens, for example, with the classic shot of a
coach passing the gallows in a lonely wood and stopping to
pick up a dying man. Twice in the film an apparently dead man
comes back to haunt the living, and a key scene is one in which
a coldly rational medical counsellor is scared out of his wits
when an eye appears in his inkwell, a severed hand places itself
upon his and the man he has just dissected stands suddenly
before him. Within this framework, however, Bergman is con-
cerned to do more than merely terrify his audience. The whole
film is a meditation on illusion, deceit and pretence. In the
figure of Albert Emmanuel Vogler Bergman puts to us his own
doubts about the film-maker as conjurer playing on our human
weakness of seeing life and movement in a succession of pro-
jected images. Bergman has traced his interest in the cinema
back to his experiences as a child: the picture on the wall
which seemed to come aUve in the sunlight and blended with
the piano music heard from next door, or the shadows on the
nursery wall at night, not so much men or beasts as 'something
for which no words existed'.* This is the atmosphere re-
captured in The Face. Vogler is an impressive Christ-like figure
at the beginning - mute, bearded, claiming mysterious healing
powers. But the beard and the silence are both fake, and to
avoid imprisonment as a menace to society he has to pass
himself off as a cheat and swindler. His illusions need elaborate

•Interview with Ingmar Bergman in Films and Filming (September and

October 1956); reprinted in Andrew Satnsjnterviews with Film Directors
(Bobbs-MerriH. New York, 1967).
 184 Film Modernism

equipment, but they succeed in terrifying. He is reduced to

begging for payment, yet at the end is summoned to play
before no less an audience than the king himself. Throughout
the film we are constantly deceived as to what is real and what
is illusory, but the anguish of the artist in his self-questioning

torment is all too evident.

If The Face draws on the conventions of the horror film for

its pattern, the films of Bergman's maturity, like Persona,

which he made in 1966, are totally original. In Persona the
whole atmosphere is dreamlike and subjective. Gone is the
comfortingly rational structure of Wild Strawberries, and in-
stead we find an intellectual play v\dth illusion and reality and
constant reminders that what we are watching is not a slice of
life but a film. The breakdown of the form mirrors perfectly the

breakdown of the characters who form the film's subject. Yet

these characters themselves are not the rounded figures of a
naturalistic narrative. As the film's title indicates, they are, like
Vogler in The Face, in essence the masks they assume. Alma, a
nurse, and Elisabeth, a distressed actress, are compHmentary
halves of a single personality, yet their growing intimacy has
all the true tenderness and anger of a relationship between real
women. We are never sure of how real or imaginary any scene
is. If the core of the film begins fairly rationally, it still contains
perplexing scenes. Does Elisabeth utter the words we hear as
the two women are at table .^ Does she visit Alma in the night?
Or are these simply Alma's imaginings.^ Later the film discards
even this framework and the scenes between the women take
on an even more troubHng aura. The visit of Elisabeth's hus-
band is clearly imagined, but we have no clue as to which of the
women is imagining it. The women can read each other's deep-
est thoughts and their faces merge into one. Thus the action of
Persona moves away from the story and characters and into
our own minds, and we share in the subjective vision on an
equal footing vdth the author and the figments of his im-
agination.
\ USA I J"
2 +
''Os^EOf THE BRAVE

Bunuel and Surrealism

If we turn now to surrealism we find that many of its key

elements as a movement in art and literature are accessible to
the cinema: dream s and hallucinations, i magination and the
investigation of the unconscio us, c hance an? spo ntaneity But .

surrealism aimed to be more than just a movement like any

other - way of life - and in this its ethos
to constitute, in fact, a
is totally at odds with the commercial structure of the film
industry. Patrick Waldberg offers a useful definition of the ar-
tistic aims of the movement which shows its compatibihty with
filmic methods. Among all surrealist artists there is 'a desire to
find, over and beyond appearances, a truer reahty, a kind of
synthesjs of the exterior world and of the interior model . . .

Human figures and objects are divorced from their natural

function and placed opposite one another in_a^ relationship
which is unexpected - perhaps shocking - and which therefore
giv es eac h of them a new presence.'* Tec¥niques such as these
aims require are very much a part of our experience of cinema.
Religious artists such as Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson have
successfully depicted the reality they see beyond the world of
appearances, and the use of montage- juxtapositions for shock
effect lies at the heart of Eisenstein's conception of cinema.
Moreover, the surrealists' enjoyment of games and jokes which
• Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (Thames & Hudson. London, 1965).
p. 8.
186 Film Modernism

are not the traditional sense might have been expected

*art' in

to bring them close to a form like the cinema which, in the

1920s, was not quite respectable artistically. Certainly the
cinema exercised an initial attraction, and in 1929 Andr6
Breton and Louis Aragon uttered their celebrated dictum that *it
is in The Exploits of Elaine and Les Vampires that it will be

necessary to look for the great reaUty of this century. Beyond

fashion. Be yond taste'..
Yet what attracted them was the kind of diffuse and in-
voluntary surrealism that can be found in a great many otherwise
bad and which Ado Kyrou documents in his book, Le
films
Surrealisme au cinema.* The attitude of the photographer
and film-maker Man Ray is perhaps typical when he says that
in the most banal film there are always ten interesting minutes
and that even in the very best films there are hardly
more than this, for him at any rate. At first sight the cinema
may seem to be the ideal medium for surrealist thought and
creation, a rich and supple means of communication allowing
the artist to disregard totally the constrictions of weight, space
and time. But the basic methods of professional film-making
are alien to the vital surrealist notion of automatic writing, and
film producers are always likely to be hostile to the expression
of pure surrealist attitudes. Even in Paris in the period of the
avant-garde three of the key experimental works - Man Ray's
Le Mystere du Chateau de Des, Luis Bufiuel's Un Chien
andalou and Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poete - were all
made aside from the system and financed by a single patron, the
Vicomte de Noailles.
Ultimately one is led to the same conclusion as Gabriel
Vialle, that the true surrealist poets of the screen can be
counted on the fingers of one hand. In the wake of surrealists
like Ernst, Masson and Miro who put the emphasis on cal-
ligraphy, animation and movement there is some experiment
with *pure' cinema in the 1920s. But how much of this is di-
rectly surrealist.? Even H^ns Richter, who was closest to the
group, has said that at the time of Filmstudie (1926) he was not
sure that he really 'understood' surrealism. The abstract
• Adou Kyrou, Le Surrealisme au cinema (Arcanes, Paris, 1953).
 .

Bunuel and Surrealism 187

cinema of men like Richter and Fernand Leger has a definite

place in film history, but it remains marginal, and was even
attacked at times by the surrealist polemicists. Films, which
alternative surrealist method - that adopted by Mag-
11SP. t^ig

ritte,Delvaux and Dali - of using faithfully reproduced beings

and objects tginake a totally unreal scene,^rg^more numerous.
But if we are to use the term surreaUst with any precision we
need to ..gegaratefilmsof^^daist^ (such as Rene
i^^ Duchamp) and
Clair's Entr^acte^2^^
those whose authors were never part of the movement (one
thinks of Jean Vigo, whose films the surrealists in general liked,
and Jean Cocteau, who was for a time the surrealists' public
enemy Number One). If we do this we are left with virtually
nothing from the late 1920s and early 1930s apart from La
Coquille et le clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac from a
script by Antonin Artaud, and the two Buiiuel classics, Un
Chien andalou and L'Age d*or.
These two latter films are, however, a total vindication of the
idea of a surrealist cinema. Luis Buiiuel, one of the most com-
plex and original directors in the history of the cinema, was
born in Spain in 1900. When, at the age of twenty-five, he went
to Paris, he rejected for ever his middle-class background and
Jesuit education. As a young unknown on the fringes of the
surrealist movement he made his first film with another un-
known Spaniard, Salvador DaU. Un Chien andalo u was born out_
of discussion s the pair had ahnnt their drearns^^TTwa^^ scrip-
ted JQintJyJia.a-aiatter of three days. Buiiuel, alone responsible
forthe direction, was well served in his leading actor, for Pierre
Batcheff had all the qualities of the film's tormented hero (he

was to commit suicide three years later). Da li and Buiiuel

reglacedjhe^ cpji^entional story line with a succession of dreanT
happeningsand gags, choosing only images and events which
tKe5rcouH not explain rationally. I n this way the_film, illus-
traTesTe tter than any other thejiuirealists' basic behef in what
And re Breto n called the superior reality of certain forms of
association hitherto rejected, in the omnipotence of dream and
in the disjnterested play of thought. There is an element of
mystification in the choice of titles for the various sequences:
 188 Film Modernism

'O nce upon a time', yea rsjater', 'Aboutjlii:.£e o'clockin

'E ight
^ttiEjnoriiiiig* spring;. But a deliberate structure can be
and 'In

unravelled. This consists of a prologue, a lengthy sequence

built around the problems of a coupleJiampsred, by xultur^
Upbringin^^nd sexual fears, and a concluding ironic after-
thought (the couple buried up to their necks in sand). The
prolQgue - the slow and^ra^hic slitting of a jirrsey^ball by.an-
/enigmatic Jiiale (played by Buiiuel himself) Jntercut with a
^cloud^£assin£ across the_ moon - remains as shocking as it was
intended to be forty years ago. The problems of the couple are
handled through images which are partially expUcable in Freu-
dian terms but still remain striking and effective: the hand
caught in the door and seen to be teeming with ants; tlie young
^m^n's attempt t n^ssauliL±he girlthough weighad-^awn by the.
.j)ast (represented^y two priests, two gxand pianos and two
,_dead donkeys)^
Two years later Buiiuel, this time without Dali, completed
his second masterpiece, VAge d'or. This is a longer, more di-
dactic work, an indictment of our whole western civilization
and a call for revolt and total freedom. Like Un Chien andalou,
the film has no story line, simply a series of apparently random
episodes. The opening documentary-style account of the
fighting prowess of scorpions and rats is followed by a se-
quence showing the battle between starving guerillas and
bishops. The founding of a great city (referred to as Imperial
Rome) is interrupted by the frenzied coupling of a man and a
woman in the mud. Throughout love is set against convention
and freedom is seen at its most extreme (as the kicking down
of a blind man for instance). At a reception the wealthy guests
are amused by the senseless shooting of a child by his father
and remain indifferent to a fire in the servants' quarters and to a
farm cart passing through the room. The lovers, frustrated at
every meeting despite their longing for each other, turn to
mutual mutilation and the hero ends by tossing from an up-
stairs window such things as a plough, a giraffe, a burning
Christmas tree and two bishops. In a final, apparently discon-
nected, episode the degenerate Due de Blangis - who bears an
uncanny resemblance to conventional portraits of Jesus -
r Bunuel and Surrealism 189

murders a girl in themidst of an unspeakable orgy.

Bunuel's protest is no mere literary revolt. Its roots lie in
the condition of his native Spain, as his next film, the documen-
Land without Bread, makes plain. This study of a back-
tary.
ward region of Spain shoves that images of horror equal to
anything that Bunuel or DaU can imagine exist in reality. It is
enough to observe life, to study disease and poverty and to
note the irrelevance of the church's v^ealth and the state edu-
cation system to the real needs of the people. Land without
Bread is also remarkable in the way it anticipates later mod-
ernist cinema by its triple impact. It combines devastating
images of poverty, starvation and idiocy with a dry, matter-of-
fact commentary and a musical score filled with romantic ideal-
ism (Brahms's Fourth Symphony).
After these three films Bunuel vanished from sight for
eighteen years, working in a minor capacity on the production
and dubbing of films in Paris, Madrid and Hollywood. Then he
managed to re-establish himself as a director in Mexico and
burst back on to the world scene in 1950 with a masterly study
of slum life in Mexico City, Los Olvidados, From this date
onwards he has been able to continue his career without inter-
ruption and has made a whole series of films, mostly in France
and Mexico, which are in a more conventional narrative style,
but which show clearly that he kept true to his surrealist and
anarchist beHefs. The range of this later work is enormous:
commercial potboilers, adaptations of the classics (including
Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights) and a whole series of
more personally conceived films exposing the contradictions of
Christianity and bourgeois society. Nazarin, set in the Mexico
of 1900, is the story of a priest who attempts to follow Christ's
example absolutely, only to bring death and disaster to all
around him and to shake even his own behef. Tristana, made
twenty years or so later, is an equally ruthless expose of the
fallacy of bourgeois liberalism. The Exterminating Angel
showed an upper-class group reminiscent of the characters in
VAge d'or disintegrating when they are trapped by mysterious
forces in a luxurious apartment. The veneer of civilization
cracks and the violence, superstition and hypocrisy shows

mm
190 Film Modernism

through, as they turn the flat into a kind of primitive pre-

historic cave. Viridiana, made in Spain in 1961, is one of
Bunuel's most striking studies of sexuality, telling the story of
a novice whose sexual instincts are aroused by a particularly
sordid rape, and of her uncle, one of the many fetishists in
Buiiuers work, who obsessed by the death of his wife on
is

their wedding night thirty years before. All Buiiuers films con-
tain scenes of surreal beauty and strangeness, but none sur-
passes the orgy staged by a group of beggars in Viridiana and
set to the sublime music of Handel's Messiah. The mixture of
real and imaginary is inextricable in all Bunuel's work. Belle de
jour, for example, deals with a beautiful and wealthy society
woman who spends her afternoons working in a Parisian bro-
thel. The ending might seem to indicate that the whole film is in
fact a rendering of the young woman's fantasy about herself,
but this in no way undermines the force and bite of the film's
depiction of masochistic self-annihilation.
These later films of Buiiuel represent perhaps the most
striking linking of the surrealist belief and narrative style to be
found in the cinema. But as with expressionism, there is a
residue of surrealist influence which extends to younger direc-
tors of the present day. Film-makers like Roman Polanski and
Alain Resnais, for instance, admit to a strong surrealist
influence, and use the movement's methods and ideas as a vital
part of a more broadly based style.
 "^^f^l

25
Post-Disney Animation

Just as Disney's work gives us a picture of the Hollywood prod-

uction method in miniature, so too the progress of animation
in the 1950s and 1960s anticipates the development of the
feature film towards more modernist patterns of construction.
The work of Disney tends to make us overlook the fact that
animation has its own history, quite separate from that of the
ordinary cinema. Whereas reaUsm has its roots in Lumiere's
work and Hollywood looks back to Edison, animation's orig-
inator was a man called Emile Reynaud. From 1892 onwards
- before the first Lumiere screenings, that is to say - this
Frenchman was showing hand- drawn cartoon films to audiences
at the Musee Grevin (the Paris equivalent of MadameTussaud's).
These were in all respects but one the forerunners of modern
cartoons. The difference was that Reynaud did not use the
camera or indeed any photographic means of recording his
work. For this reason he could not reproduce his little films and
was limited to single showings. He continued his work until the
end of the 1890s but without much financial success. Ul-
timately he could not compete with Lumiere's cinematograph
and. like Georges Melies, he died a ruined man. Reynaud's
example of independence, if not his production method, was
followed by a number of animators in the early years of the
twentieth century: Winsor McCay, with Gcrti& the Dinosaur,
Emile Cohl with his Fantoche series and Max Fleisher,
192 Film Modernism

originator of Popeyc. All three used simple animated line-

drawings and their work retains a great freshness and charm,
but with the advent of Disney their example was forgotten.
The American UP A film-makers who led the revolt against
the Disney style in the early 1950s found that simply by leaving
lines and rough textures in their work they could free them-
selves from the Burbank studio point of view. With their work
the cartoon film began to be something that adults could enjoy,
as when an adaptation was made of James Thurber's ironic
study of married life. Unicorn in the Garden. UPA's most
popular character, the short-sighted, dumpy little Mr Magoo,
was not lovable at all. John Hubley left the brush strokes
apparent in his cartoons and used this style later to make films
with a serious message about the bomb {The Hole) and about
frontiers {The Hat), Ernst Pintofl's character, Flebus, was just
an outline figure against blank backgrounds, and as such he
echoed the methods of pioneers Uke Cohl. On other sides, too,
Disney's methods were assailed. The Warner Brothers' Bugs
Bunny took over as the leading cartoon character, with a far
richer personaHty than Mickey Mouse, and a whole host of
American cartoonists - such as William Hanna and Joseph Bar-
bera with the Tom and Jerry series - put back all the violence
that Disney had left out. In a typical five-minute offering poor
Tom might be beaten to pulp, shced by wires, fried and finally
blown up by his tiny rival. Along with the violence came a new
freedom to use distortion and completely unreal things in car-
toons with genuine zest.
Of course, there had always been individualists working in-
dependently in their own styles but before the 1950s they had
little effect. One limitation is the great expense of animation in
Disney style. His feature films cost several million dollars each,
and even with his brilliant reputation and organization not
many of them covered their cost on their first release. Inde-
pendents had to make smaller films, often for government de-
partments. In this way, Len Lye, who seems to have been the
first man after Reynaud to get rid of the camera and to draw

directly on film, made his Colour Box (1935) and Trade Tattoo
(1937) for the GPO , so that the postal slogans ('Post Early in
 Post'Disney Animation 193

the Day') mixed with abstract patterns of dots, lines,

are
squiggles and colours. Norman McLaren, who followed in Lye's
'

footsteps, went to work for the National Film Board of Canada

where he experimented in every sort of technique. He used
normal cartoon methods, drawings made direct on films, ani-
mation of live actors (posed twenty-four times every second!)
and cut-out shapes. Tiny films like Blinkity-Blank (1954) - the
encounter of a bird and an explosive worm - show his great
skill in giving life and wit to the simplest of subjects. The im-

portance of a man like McLaren is that he makes personal films

independently (and this is surely the ideal for the cinema of
animation), whereas by the 1950s Disney had turned ani-
mation into the equivalent of a factory production line with
men spending their lives specializing in one tiny piece of the
whole process. While few animators have tackled so wide a
range of styles as McLaren, many have shown an equal inde-
pendence of approach. In the 1930s there were several interest-
ing experiments in France. The architect Bertold Bartosch used
woodcuts and crude animation with great effect in the short
Vldee, which showed the fate of truth in a world dominated
by big business and torn by war. Hector Hoppin and Anthony
Gross by contrast used flowing line-drawings in their best-
known film Joie de vivre. Beginning with ISIight on the Bare
Mountain, a visualization of Mussorgsky's music, in 1933 and
working always in collaboration with Claire Parker, Alexandre
Alexeieff has experimented with a wholly individual technique,
the *pii^ board'. This consists of a large board covered with
small nails. When the height of these is varied and light shone
on them from and
different angles, all kinds of strange shapes
effects can be achieved. Given the immense range of methods
available to animators, only a few have so far been really ex-
ploited. Only one animator, Lotte Reiniger, for instance, has
used the possibilities of animated silhouettes.
In Eastern Europe since the war there has been progress in
other neglected fields of animation. The Czech Jiri Trnka, who
began as a cartoonist, gave the puppet film a new force and
intensity from 1947 onwards. Trnka's range is very wide: a
parody of the western (Song of the Prairie), a bitter poUtical
T-FAR-O
 .

194 Film Modernism

parable {The Hand) and even a feature-length version of

Shakespeare (A Midsummer ISIight's Dream), and his import-
ance is that he makes his puppets provoke more than childish
amusement. In his hands a puppet can express deep emotions
and have a force equal to that of a live actor. Around Trnka
has grown up a whole school of animators of whom perhaps
the most striking is Karel Zeman, whose films like The
Invention of Destruction (1956) and Baron Munchhausen (1959)
are a unique mixture of animation, tricks and live action, all
blended in a style that echoes nineteenth- century engravings.
In Yugoslavia, too, the animated film has taken a firm hold and
the Zagreb studio has turned out dozens of bright, inventive
little cartoons. The best known are those of Dusan Vukotic,
such as his Concerto for Sub-Machinegun (a parody of gangster
films) and the splendid Ersatz, in which a man surrounded by
inflatable gadgets is shown, in the last shot, to be an inflatable
gadget himself.
Poland's greatest animators, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan
Lenica, have both done most of their work abroad, Lenica uses
collage techniques in most of his films, with the cut-out figures
heavily outlined in black and simply animated against engraved
backgrounds. What emerges is a black, poetic vision of life. In
Monsieur Tete the little man hero, after innumerable adven-
tures, is loaded down with decorations, but as each new medal
is pinned on he loses one of his features (his nose, an eye and

so on) to end up a faceless nonentity. In Labyrinth a bowler-

hatted, winged little figure flies into a strange city, full of
Victorian-style monuments and peopled by nightmare monsters,
and is destroyed as he tries to leave. Rhinoceros is a virtuoso
piece, an eleven-minute rendering of lonesco's play about the
power of conformity, where everyone, including the hero,
eventually joins the mad rush to become an animal, in order to
be just like everyone else. Lenica's world is a bleak place where
no one is example, a happy Httle man is secure in
safe. In A, for
his room when he suddenly assaulted and terrorized by a
is

gigantic letter A. Eventually he manages to get rid of it, but his

rejoicing is cut short by the sudden appearance of an equally
large letter B . .
 Post-Disney Animation 195

Disney was principally a storyteller and not a draughtsman.

He ignored the style of illustration in the books he animated -
Sheppard's drawings for Winnie the Pooh and Tenniel's for
Alice in Wonderland were both boiled down to the same, old
Disney style, familiar for twenty or more years. But with the
new animators it is becoming possible to relate the cartoon (as
itshould be related) to the graphic arts. If we find the influence
of Dufy in a UPA cartoon or an echo of Seurat in Alexeieff or
Yves Tanguy in McLaren, it is because these film-makers are
artists aware of what has been going on in art. In this way the
animated film has come of age and we can now expect it to do
more than just amuse. As an example it is only necessary to
compare with Disney's work that of Walerian Borowczyk.
Working in France, Borowczyk has made cartoons that are
The mood is set in the early film
totally adult in their approach.
Dom in which a wig comes to life and slowly eats the other
objects on a table, including an apple and a bottle of milk,
finally crunching up the glass itself. Renaissance is a brilliant
example of the idea of using film backwards. It opens with a
shattered room which slowly puts itself together: a hamper,
some books, a doll, a trumpet, a stuffed owl and finally the
bomb which, reconstructed, blows the whole room up again.
His drawn films are equally strange and he has invented a
spikey and horrific couple called the Kabals. His masterpiece,
Les Jeux des anges, has an intensity quite equal to that of any
surreaHst painting of Max Ernst, a nightmare vision of a prison
world of suffering and cruelty. Where Disney gave the cartoon
its economic value and showed that it can be big business and
quite as profitable as any other film-making venture, Bor-
owczyk and his contemporaries have shown it to be a powerful
art form. Thus the idea of what animation is has been totally
reversed, and there can be little doubt that in the future it will
be one of the most exciting forms of cinema, for adults as well
as children.
 26
New Narrative Structures

One of the great diflerences between the modernist cinema of

the 1960s and the traditional form of the film in the 1930s is
the handling of the story element. The treatment of the flash-
back is perhaps the device which makes this distinction clear-
est. As early as the time of Griffith, film-makers discovered that
if they were given some warning, audiences were quite pre-

pared to accept that scenes shown them were *in the past',
showing, for example, how the heroine came to be in her pre-
sent predicament of lying tied to the railway line. Sometimes
the warning to audiences was a spoken one: 'You remember
how we used to . Later it became accepted that if the screen
.
.'

went blurred for a moment or two, this was to indicate that the
hero or heroine was remembering. The use of the flashback
became a regular part of film storytelHng and a great many
films used it to great effect. A typical example is Le Jour se
Uve, a film made 1939 by the French director Marcel Carne
in
from a script by Jacques Prevert. It opens with a shooting inci-
dent and closes with the suicide of the man responsible, played
by Jean Gabin. In between we follow not only the actions of
Gabin trapped in his attic room and the efforts of the police,
but also the series of events that led to the shooting. The order
and placing of these flashbacks within the unified frame of a
single night's activity gives a great emotional power to the
story.
 New Narrative Structures 197

Le Jour se Uve represents what we might call the classic

use of the flashback simply as a time device to tell a story out
of chronological order so as to make an added impact. This is a
method used in dozens of films and it continues to be valid
today. Beginning with the cHmax and then working through
the events that led up to it seems to be a pattern particularly
suited to the cinema. Probably the reason for this is that we get
completely caught up in a film which is shown to us in a dark-
ened room without the interruptions and distractions that tele-
vision has to cope with. So a film does not need the more
extreme type of suspense (*How is it all going to end?') to keep
us involved. As forms like the western show, it is enough for us

to ask ourselves the things we know will happen are going

how
to be arranged. In any case, the happenings in Le Jour se leve
could be re-edited in a chronological order and the result
would be a film that would make sense, even if it did not seem
so gripping.
More interesting for the future perhaps are films in which
events are not told from a single point of view by a sort of
godUke storyteller who knows all the answers. For a film can
use a flashback not only to go back in time but also to go
into someone's mind. If this happens, the film begins to show
all kinds of doubts and uncertainties, for the same events look

very different seen through another person's eyes. Then the

time in a fihn is not that of a clock outside the action but the
personal time, as it were, of a character and a whole new range
of ideas opened up for the cinema.
is

The filmwhich first pointed the way towards this new use of
the flashback and which, thirty years after it was made,
remains one of the most original films of all time in terms of
the ideas it contains, is Citizen Kane, made in 1941 by Orson
Welles. At the time Welles was only twenty-five years of age
but he had already made a name for himself in the theatre and
on radio. His radio production of H. G. Wells's The War of the
Worlds, for example, was so realistic that it caused widespread
panic, with many people thinking it was an authentic news
programme and taking to the hills in terror. So when he went
to Hollywood to work for RKO he was given complete freedom
198 Film Modernism

to work as he pleased, a massive salary and a quarter of the

eventual profits. These were unheard-of terms and it would be

nice to be able to say that the company thought it got value for
money. But in fact the film was so original that it frightened
the company bosses and provoked a scandal when the million-
naire WilHam Randolph Hearst, who thought the film a car-
icature of himself, tried to buy it for the cost price of $800,000.
To tell the life story of his fictitious newspaper magnate,
Charles Foster Kane, Welles chose a totally novel form not only
in the photographic style but also in the handling of time.
Giving up the idea that a film should try to tell the literal truth,
'what really happened', Welles told Kane's story from six
different angles and left us to sort out the truth. The film
begins with a very real-looking newsreel of Kane's life - the
oflScial portrait of what his career looks like from the outside.
Then the same events are gone over again in interviews with
five people who talk about sHghtly different, but overlapping
periods of his life. In this way we see how
complicated it is to
sum up a man like - his banker, his
Kane, for each of the five
business manager, his best friend, his second wife and the
butler who runs his fantastic mansion, Xanadu - sees him in a
different way. To give unity and a little suspense to the film
these six 'episodes' are put within a framework. A reporter,
told to discover the meaning of Kane's
word. Rosebud,
last
carries out the five interviews. He fails to get the answer he is
seeking, but in the final images of the film we in the audience
learn it - Rosebud was the name of Kane's boyhood sledge, a
reminder of the days before he knew he was one of the richest
men in the world.
The resolution of the 'Rosebud' mystery is perhaps the only
thing which separates Citizen Kane in terms of structure from
films made twenty years later. This is because the story ele-
ment which it represents has generally been abandoned by
modernist film-makers. An excellent example of the new atti-
tude is that of Michelangelo Antonioni. Brought up in the midst
of Italian neo-realism - he was a critic and screenwriter in the
late 1940s - Antonioni gradually moved away from the basi-
cally nineteenth-century approach to storytelling which that
 New Narrative Structures 199

movement represents. The first break - which can be seen in a

film like Le amiche, made in 1955 - was to abandon the
depiction of the social and economic problems of a single
character. Instead Antonioni fragmented the narrative
by dealing with a whole group of characters and offered a more
introspective picture of their thwarted loves and aspirations.
The landscape of urban streets and deserted autumnal beaches
is used to convey the mood of melancholy frustration.

Vavventura in 1960 carried these preoccupations a stage far-

ther. A beautiful and highly original film, it told of a yacht trip
along the Sicilian coast undertaken by a group of wealthy Itali-
ans, and of an ensuing emotional involvement. The plot is re-
duced virtually to nothing and, though its form is shaped by
the search for a girl, Anna, who disappears from one of the
islands visited, the mystery is never resolved. Instead the film
follows the pattern of the characters' emotions. Anna is for-
gotten as her lover and best friend, drawn together when they
set out in search of her, fall in love. Antonioni never tries to fit

his characters into a formally dramatic film story, rather he

allows the shape of the narrative to grow out of their irreso-
lution and neurotic self-involvement. The visuals, mixing
minute observation with subjective images, are crucially im-
portant in all Antonioni films. An acute sensitivity to landscape
is a recurring feature: the industrial setting of The Red Desert,
the trendy London of Blow-Up or the American desert of Za-
briskie Point, Increasingly the logic of plot is replaced by a sen-
suous response to imagery. The last ten minutes of The Eclipse
- shots depicting the place where both lovers fail to turn up for
their last meeting combined with more abstract images of
emotional aridity - constitute a montage sequence of a com-
plexity unequalled since Eisenstein's October, In similar fashion
'
Zabriskie Point ends with a long slow-motion vision of the de-
struction of a dream house and its luxurious contents. Image
here has replaced story as the focal point of interest.
A further step away from a naturalistic storytelling is shown
by the French director Robert Bresson. His work
films of the
maintains many surface links with the neo-reahst style: he
shoots on location with non-professional actors and avoids all
200 Film Modernism

explicitlyimaginary sequences. But in his work these elements

take on a quite new meaning. His refusal of a conventional
dramatic approach and omission of the customary Unking pass-
ages is illustrated by Diary of Country Priest (1951), in which
he took a novel by Georges Bernanos and recreated it in film
terms. He pared down the narrative to a simple line of classical
austerity, removed all the minor cUmaxes and clashes of
character and linked the images with a narrator's voice. The
result was a unique kind of interior cinema deriving its power
from the counterpointing of word and image. In A Man Escaped
he obtained similar effects by combining scenes of sordid life in
a Nazi prison vdth the music of a Mozart mass. Elsewhere he
has set up new tensions by a deliberate use of anachronism. He
is happy to take the mechanics of a plot set in 1774 {Les Dames

du Bois de Boulogne, adapted from Diderot) of 1876 {Une

Femme douce, after a story by Dostoyevsky) and transpose it
without modification into the present. The resulting strange-
ness points to the underlying meaning in Bresson's work. As a
CathoHc artist he is intent on showing the divine grace at work
through everyday reaUty, and his juggUng with plot and time
allows him to do this in an exceedingly effective manner.
The work of Antonioni and Bresson, while moving away
from conventional storytelling, still retains a basic narrative
framework. There are some forms of modern film-making,
however, which reject this dimension altogether. A fine
example of this is furnished by the work of Jean-Marie Straub.
In his Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach Straub traces in se-
quence the events leading up to Bach's death, but the only real
tensions in the film are not narrative ones but those arising
from the interplay of image, sound and music. The images are
static and longheld, depicting conventional documentary pic-
tures: manuscripts, engravings and figures in period costume.
Yet Gustav Leonhardt, who plays the composer, seems to have
been chosen for his lack of resemblance to the real man. He
does not impersonate Bach, he merely presents him without
involvement or motion. While Bach's music itself soars to noble
heights, it is continually undercut by the sound of a voice pur-
porting to recite from Anna Magdalena's diary. The endless
 Neu; JSIarrative Structures 201

babble about domestic trivia throws into fresh relief the re-
ligious sentiments of Bach's music, just as the unreal lighting
makes one question one's acceptance of the images.
The clash of levels of reaUty on which The Chronicle of Anna
Magdalena Bach depends for its impact is even more important
in a later Straub film, Orthon. Here we have a seventeenth-
century French classical play by Corneille performed in its en-
tirety. But the rhythms of the dialogue are destroyed by being
spoken by ItaHan non-actors and played in the open air.
Straub's chosen setting is not the theatrical space for which
the play was written but modern Rome. We hear traffic noises
and see cars and telegraph poles throughout, yet the figures are
not contemporary - they wear ancient Roman togas and speak
seventeenth-century French. Straub probably represents the
most extreme revolt against conventional film forms, but his
work demonstrates very clearly how a ninety-minute film
structure can be based on something other than a story or a
transcription of reality.
 27
Resnais and Time

The ability to juggle with time is as important to the cinema

and as wide-ranging as its ability to explore physical reality.
Films can bring together stories from four different epochs (as
in Griffith's Intolerance) or range, as Stanley Kubrick's 2001
does, from the primitive past when men were little more than
apes to a distant future, indeed can leave our scale of time al-
together. They can give the impression of moving about in time
as freely as a novel does, switching to and fro among the hap-
penings of a man's life. The film is only an illusion of Hfe:
twenty-four flashes of picture every second and the same
number of tiny pauses of darkness (as the image is changed).
So it can play around with time as we can do only in our dreams
or imagination. A film-maker can repeat time, as Luis Buiiuel
does in The Exterminating Angel. There the director shows the
guests arriving at a luxurious villa twice over with exactly the
same sort of shots. This gives an odd air of mystery to the
beginning of the film and prepares us for the supernatural hap-
penings that occur later. (This is one way to explain it. When
Bufiuel himself was asked why things happened twice, he just
replied that the film would have been too short otherwise!)
Time can also be reversed in a film simply by projecting the
images in the wrong order - as occurs with great force in Wale-
rian Borowczyk's Renaissance, which was mentioned in an ear-
w
Resnais and Time 203

lier chapter. Time can be slowed down, by making the speed of

the camera greater than that of the projector, or accelerated
by the opposite procedure - filming at, say, twelve frames a
second for projection at twenty-four. This always remains a
special effect but it can be used in all sorts of ways. Sam Peck-
inpah, in his western The Wild Bunch, makes the violent ending
seem even more violent still by filming it in slow motion, while
speeding up the action can add interest to nature documen-
taries (showing the opening of a flower) or add humour to
comedy (speeding up a mad chase, etc.).
The editing of a film also affects the time pattern. The
cinema has a number of what we might call punctuation marks.
As well as simply replacing one image with another by a
straight cut, a film-maker has the chance to do several other
things. He can fade (slowly darken the image till the screen is
black) or dissolve (replace one image as it fades away with
another growing steadily clearer, so that they overlap) or wipe
(that is pass a line across the picture that removes one image
and replaces it with another). All of these devices can indicate
the passing of time, but most films like to give the impression
that they follow real time. It is true, however, that it is rare for
the events on the screen to last exactly the running time of the
film. Audiences are happy to accept jumps from one part of the
action to another - one brief shot of the sun setting is enough to
convey the passing of twelve hours or so. When suspense is
built up, it seems quite natural for events to take longer than in
real life. In Battleship Potemkin the famous flight down the
Odessa steps of the crowd rushing headlong as the Tsarist
guards advance relentlessly takes much longer than would
really be the case. By picking out details in close-up, Eisen-
stein lengthens the episode but builds up a greater tension. This
sort of thing happens in any thriller: a gloved hand reaches out
for the door handle, cut to the heroine looking up at the slight
noise, cut back to the door handle slowly moving down, the
heroine looking frightened, the door slowly opening, the her-
oine screaming . Lengthened like this the film is built up as an
. .

emotional experience. And in a similar way the unimportant

204 Film Modernism

parts of a narrative - the hero unlocking his door or making a

telephone call - can be shortened by cutting, so that they last
only a fraction of their real time.
The film's range is enormous but there is one thing that all

the uses of time have in common. This is that whatever the

cinema shows, it shows it as if it were happening in the pre-
sent.There are no tenses in film as there are in language, no
past tense and no future. If the film shows events that hap-
pened in 1900, it takes us back to that year and shows us the
events as they unfold. The ability to make us feel we are there
when an action happens, to involve us in this way, is one secret
of the film's power.
Virtually all modern film-makers are concerned to some
extent with time. But the director who returns again and again
to this theme and whose films exploit brilliantly the present-
tense quality of the image is Alain Resnais. Resnais once
defined the cinema as the art of playing with time, and all his

films show a startling originality. He began his career by

making documentary films for eleven years before he was en-
abled to make a full-length feature film. Among his short films
two are of particular interest here in that they show different
aspects of the cinema's exploration of time. In Guernica (1950)
he made a study of the large fresco painted by Picasso in 1937
as a protest against the destruction of the Basque village of
Guernica by Fascist bombers during the Spanish Civil War.
Instead of simply allowing his camera to wander over the
painting, Resnais adopted the more ambitious idea of sep-
arating the various details that go to make up the picture and
dealing with them one after the other in the film. In this way
the separate images of suffering which made a composition in
space in Picasso's original painting now make a composition in
time in the film. Five years later, in a film called Night and Fog
{Nuit et brouillard), Resnais made a powerful study of the Nazi
concentration camps. In this he brought together material
from the various archives (black and white photos, newsreels,
etc.) and colour images of Auschwitz as it is today. The effect
of using two layers of time is very striking; the horrors of the
1940s are put into perspective. Yet at the same time we are
 Resnais and Time 205

reminded how easily we forget (the images of the past are grey
and already seem to be fading). As documentaries these two
films are remarkable for the way in which they use voices and
music as an essential part of the picture, as well as the manner
in which they take second-hand images and make something
totally original out of them, thanks to the idea of using the
cinema's special abilities to deal with time.
These same attitudes are to be found too in the five feature
films Alain Resnais completed between 1959 and 1968, each of
which deals with a different aspect of time. In Hiroshima Mon
Amour (1959), scripted by Marguerite Duras, he was con-
cerned with the idea of memory. How does what we
remember
of the past affect the way we now? Are our memories
live
private things that are spoiled if we tell them to a stranger?
Does our life have to follow certain patterns, so that we con-
tinually get into the same sort of awkward situations? It was
with questions like these that the film dealt. It told of a
woman, an actress, who is in Hiroshima to make a film about
peace. The very fact of being in this city brings
up the question
of the atomic bomb, a past from which we must learn
disaster
if humanity is going to survive in the future. But the problems

are not only of this dimension. The woman (we never learn
her name) has fallen in love with a Japanese architect.
While she is with him, filUng in the long hours before the
departure of the plane which will take her back to Europe, she
remembers being in love before. That was in Nevers, a little
town on the Loire in France, fourteen years ago. The man she
loved then was a German soldier who was shot on the very day
that the Germans withdrew, and his loss is something she has
never yet come to terms with. The film is shaped more like a
piece of music, with themes and variations, than a normal
story. The heroine constantly moves from the present (Hiro-
shima) to the past (Nevers) and back again. In the film, the two
time levels become one - we see images of France but hear the
sounds of Hiroshima.
Resnais's second full-length film. Last Year at Marienbad
(1961), was scripted by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and
remains his most puzzling work. It is difficult to talk about
206 Film Modernism

because it has none of the usual things we expect in a film: no

characters, real settings or story. It is an imaginary world,
set in
an elegant hotel with endless corridors and park-Hke gardens.
Here, cut off from the world of cars, newspapers and television,
a man tries to persuade a woman that they met last year.
Eventually she agrees and they go off together. This is all that
happens on one level, the one at which we usually look at films.
But from another point of view the film is packed with ques-
tions and tensions. The images and sounds keep contradicting
each other. We see a string quartet, but hear the sound of an
organ. The narrator describes a scene or an action, but we see
something else. The characters in the fikn refuse to play their
parts, and so on. Perhaps the film is best understood as an
attempt to show how our minds work. Most films that deal, for
example, with two people falling in love show the outside hap-
penings. The two stare at each other, kiss, run hand in hand
through a field of daisies, and we all understand: they are in
love. What Last Year at Marienbad does is show the same ex-
perience, but from the inside. When we are emotionally con-
cerned about anything, hundreds of thoughts flash through our
minds. If we have to make a speech, for instance, we may
manage it very well outwardly. But inside we may well have
been imagining being booed by hostile faces, or finding the hall
empty because we have come on the wrong night or standing
helpless at the front, unable to say a word. Last Year at Mari-
enbad shows this kind of wild and contradictory imagining as it
depicts an experience from the inside. In this way it opens up
areas of possibility for the film which have so far hardly been
explored.
Having made one film about the past and another about
the timeless world of our minds, Resnais returned firmly to the
present for his third feature film, Muriel (1963), which was
scripted by Jean Cayrol who had previously written the com-
mentary of Nuit et Brouillard, Everything in the film is perfectly
chronological and in the pubHshed script every scene is pre-
cisely timed and dated between 29 September and 14 October
1962. But the film is broken up into such tiny fragments that it
is quite diflScuIt to follow at a first viewing. The strangeness of
 k'v I jp.ij" 1-J5K- *; J'*
'

Resnafs and Time 207

Muriel comes from this and from the way it is quite the op-
posite of Last Year at Marienbad, Here we see only the outside
of the characters without any explanation, the everyday hap-
penings in their lives over a period of weeks, and can only guess
what has gone before. So we are astonished when the characters
react violently or show strong feelings. Despite its real location
and its everyday
of Boulogne, its lack of special colour effects
tone, Muriel is far removed from a documentary. The reaUstic
recording is balanced by the elements that show this is a
shaped work of the imagination. The angles are chosen with
great care, the sound overlaps for added effect, we hear a
wordless soprano aria and see acting that is deliberately
theatrical.
The nearest of Resnais' films to a reaHstic work is La Guerre
est -ftnie (1966) which recounts three days in the Hfe of a Span-
ish exile working for the overthrow of the Franco government.
Scripted by Jorge Semprun. it goes into the details of revo-
lutionary politics, the arguments for and against violence. Most
of it is in tone with the dull grey of the Parisian suburbs in
which the revolutionaries make their endless plans. From the
point of view of the handling of time, what is most interesting
is the way the film looks forward. Instead of flashbacks, Resnais
often uses flashes forward in time, recording the hero's antici-
pations. He imagines a dozen possibilities as he goes to meet a
girl he has never seen, foresees the beating he fears is in store
for his friend Juan at the hands of the Spanish police, and
anticipates the funeral of his dead colleague Ramon.
which was written by Jacques
In ]e t'aime, je t*aime (1968),
Sternberg, much La Guerre est finie is
of the ordinariness of
still there and a great part of the fihn is about the most banal

situations. We see scenes in the life of a very ordinary man: his

seaside holidays, hours spent with his wife, his daydreams.
Little moments, all of them, chosen at random from sixteen
years of a man's life. What is startling in Je faime, je Vaime is
the framework in which they are placed. The hero, Claude
Ridder, is a man who has been projected through time by scien-
tists to relive one minute of his past, and the flow of images we
see of scenes from his earlier life represent his frantic efforts to
208 Film Modernism

get back to the present. From this fact comes the double ten-
sion of the film. As well as showing the hero's struggle to get
out of his nightmare prison of time, we also relive the story of
his marriage, which ended with his wife's death and his own
attempted suicide.
One reason why Resnais, more than any other director, has
made such startling use of filmic possibiUties of time is that he
sees the film as an art of collaboration, linked with the other
arts. All his features have been made in collaboration with a
novelist of repute and reflect modern ideas of what a narrative
is. It must be remembered that, as a way of telling stories, the
cinema has always been behind the novel. In the years when
literature was producing the elaborate works of James Joyce
and Franz Kafl^a, film-makers were still trying to tell the
simplest of stories effectively. The cinema has much to learn
from the years of experiment in art and literature and Resnais'
working methods make this possible. He is not content to
adapt an existing play or novel but always insists on an original
film script composed by the writer in close collaboration with
him. As a result the writers with whom he has worked have
become deeply involved in the whole mechanics of film-
making, and the first three have already become film directors in
their own right. In this respect the most important 'by-product'
of Resnais' methods has been the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet,
who has followed his script for Last Year at Marienbad with a
number of striking and original films.
 28

Film and the Modern Novel

The cinema has always employed writers of great talent, but

as we have seen, under the Hollywood system this gave gen-
erally bad results, because the writers were not as involved in
the scripting of films as they were in the writing of their books.
Hollywood did not employ the Nobel prize-winner William
Faulkner to write the film equivalent of one of his novels about
the Deep South - he was simply invited to help knock the
script of Land of the Pharaohs into shape for Jack Hawkins. To
a great extent this attitude towards writers persists, par-
ticularly in Britain.
The British cinema has traditionally been a Hterary one but
with a fairly rigid division of creative roles separating the di-
rectors (usually recruited from the stage or, more recently,
television) and the scriptwriters, whose first commitment
remains to hterature. The 1940s and 1950s were the great age
of the adaptation of plays, dominated by a succession of ver-
sions of Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan and the classics (Shaw
and Wilde, Shakespeare and Dickens). A crucial change oc-
curred in the 1960s in that a whole new generation of vigorous
young novelists and playwrights - John Osborne, Alan SilHtoe,
David Storey and Shelagh Delaney - were brought in to adapt
their own works to the screen. But the promised revolution
never occurred because only one of these writers went on to
produce an original screenplay conceived totally for the
210 Film Modernism

cinema. Shelagh Delaney's Charlie Bubbles was a strikingly in-

ventive piece of v^ork, but unfortunately it was one of the big-
gest commercial disappointments of the decade and the idea of
using original screen material was never followed up.
The whole problem of relating experimental work in other
media to the cinema is exemplified by the film career of Harold
Pinter. His plays are among the most brilliantly inventive in the
whole modern theatre, breaking totally with the conventional
notions of action, character and naturalistic presentation. But
in the cinema he has been limited to turning two of his own
plays into not very successful films and otherwise scripting film
versions of novels by other writers. In collaboration with the
director Joseph Losey, Pinter has been responsible for some of
the most striking British films of the past ten years: The Ser-
vant, Accident, The Go-Between. But all of these have re-
tained a basic naturalistic form, a totally coherent and
unambiguous story line, and such experiment with time and
characterization as they contain seems timid when compared to
Pinter's work in the theatre.
On the continent, however, writers have been able to get a
greater involvement in the cinema and direct their own original
scripts. Working Sweden, the American critic and novelist
in
Susan Sontag has been able to make two sombre studies of the
paradoxical interaction of a small group of characters, Duet for
Cannibals and Brother Carl. In France the screenwriter of Hiro-
shima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras, could move on to direct
a film with all the ambiguities and unresolved tensions to be
found in her prose writing. Destroy She Says. These are
interesting films for they are totally personal works made with
the same commitment as a book or play would be, and they
raise some fascinating questions about the role of the director.
They are introspective exercises, not spectacles designed to
communicate with an audience. There is a deliberate de-
dramatization and the attitudes of the characters are simply
stated, not realized in emotional and dramatic terms. As a
result there is a gap between what the film represents for its
maker and what is actually conveyed to the audience - a gap
that the presence of a director should fill. The visual flatness of
 Film and the Modern Novel 211

both Duet for Cannibals and Destroy She Says is emphasized by

their extreme austerity. Such literary film-making is much more
fascinating than the dreary routine of conventional adaptation,
but it remains a strictly limited form, lacking the unmistakable
if indefinable touch of pure direction that a film-maker like

Alain Resnais can give his films.

Two writers-turned-directors to whom these strictures do
not apply are Alain Robbe-Grillet in France and Pier Paolo
Pasolini in Italy. Since writing the script of Last Year at Mari-
enbad for Resnais, Robbe-Grillet has made a number of ex-
tremely original films: Vlmmortelle, Trans-Europe-Express,
VHomme qui ment and VEden et apres. One thing that clearly
fascinates him in the cinema is the way in which the medium
allows the author to play on two senses - the eye and the ear -
at once. This is a luxury which the writer cannot find in Htera-
ture and it opens up new possibilities of expression. Another
difference between writing and film-making is that whereas a
novel can use words which are by nature abstract symbols to
build up a powerful impression of reaUty (one of the great
strengths of the nineteenth-century novel lies in this), a film by
contrast uses direct images of reality as its basic material. But
these images of reality can be undercut by the fictional context
in which they are placed. Robbe-Grillet's novels such as Jeal-
ousy and The Voyeur are hallucinatory word patterns in which
there is frequently an unseen narrator who tries with words to
create a pattern or construct an alibi. In his films, however, the
method of approach is quite the opposite. Robbe-Grillet takes
real people and settings and casts doubt on their reality by
showing them as they are filtered through the eyes and mind of
a narrator. He continually plays with the mixture of reality and
falsehood, truth and fiction. Passing through the mind of the
character whose angle of vision we share, the settings turn to
mere picture-postcard representations of exotic locales and the
women become the exquisite but mindless and inhuman figures
of our dreams - advertisement hoardings come to life. Robbe-
Grillet has the crime fiction writer's taste for mystification and
the re-order of events. Trans-Europe-Express, for instance,
perhaps the most approachable of his films, shows a group of
212 Film Modernism

film-makers on a train to Amsterdam. As they travel they make

up a film story about a drug smuggler using this very train, and
the 'rear images of them get mixed up with the scenes they have
invented for their hero. The plot twists and turns, following an
impossible sequence as they continually change and question
what the hero is doing. The material which the authors within
the film are forced to throw out of their planned work because
of its inconsistency or irrelevance forms, however, a very real
part of the film as we experience it. In the end the 'authors' in
the film (two of whom are played, to add yet another layer of
confusion, by Robbe-Grillet himself and his wife) reject the
story they have beenmaking up as unsuitable for a film. But as
Amsterdam their fictional characters are
they leave the train at
among the crowds, as if defying them and us, for the confusions
of the discarded film story have kept us engrossed for an hour
and a half. The crossword puzzle side to Robbe- Grille t*s ap-
proach is very apparent here, but it is balanced by his sense of
humour and his fascination for eroticism and sexual per-
version.
Pier Paolo PasoHni does not have the same interest in novel
structures and formal patterns of plot, but he does share
Robbe-Grillet's involvement in the ambiguities of film's re-
lation to reality. A poet and novelist before he turned film-
maker, Pasolini uses pastiche as his principal styHstic device.
All his work contains striking juxtapositions of ideas and
image borrowed from all kinds of cultural fields. His first two
films, Accatone and Mamma Roma, made in the early 1960s,
were basically realist studies of Roman slum life, but the sordid
events were filmed in a camera style full of visual allusions to
the fifteenth- century painter Masaccio and accompanied by the
music of Bach and Vivaldi. Since then he has shown a particular
interest in making film versions of religious and mythical
stories. Among his best films is a version of The Gospel Accord-
ing to Saint Matthew, handled with an eclectic mixture of Piero
della Francesca and newsreel shooting, cinema-verite tech-
niques and Prokofiev. In addition Pasolini has fikned adap-
tations of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Euripidies' Medea as well
as The Decctmeron and The Canterbury Tales.
 Film and the Modern Novel 213

Like Robbe-Grillet, Pasolini sees strong differences between

film and novel. The most important of these, in his view, is the
lack of metaphor in film language. Film expresses reality with
reality. Although he was brought up in Italy during the years
when neo-reahsm was the dominant form of cinema and Htera-
ture, and despite an admiration for reaUsts Uke RosselUni, Pas-
olini is very distrustful of naturalism as a form of expression.
He rigorously avoids the mere imitation of Ufe. He likes using,
in neo-realist fashion, actors chosen from the streets because
of the appropriateness of their faces and figures. But he does
not use them naturally. In his film. The Gospel According to
Saint Matthew, he poses them in positions taken from the
paintings of Piero della Francesca and dubs them with actors'
voices. For him the only means which allows the cinema to
compensate for the lack of metaphor (and hence, at a certain
level, of poetry itself) is the notion of analogy. If the film-
maker must always use what is real in the way of people, set-
tings, etc., these can be chosen to represent indirectly the re-
ality with which the film-maker is concerned. Thus Southern
Italy can give an image of Christ's Palestine for The Gospel and
Morocco the colours of Sophoclean Greece in Oedipus Rex.
New resonances are set up by this means and a quite unique
effect created by the remove from naturaUsm. Where most of
the Marxist-orientated Italian film directors aim to demystify,
to remove the aura of respectability from the capitalist ex-
ploitation of workers, for example, Pasolini is concerned to
rediscover the mythical element of reaHty. He
does not show
Christ to be simply a man (as a Marxist might be expected to
do), but instead gives in The Gospel According to Saint
Matthew Christ and two thousand years of Christian art and
legend. Similarly, he does not unravel Greek legend in terms of
modem psychology: he gives us in Oedipus Rex the mystery of
Sophocles plus the ambiguities of Freud and his own personal
involvement. In Medea the primitive sense of the sacred and the
oneness of nature exists alongside a sophisticated intellectual
awareness. Coming from literature Pasolini is able to bring in
this waynew understanding of the way film and reality can be
a
brought together and, like Robbe-Grillet, shows the quite new
214 Film Modernism

combination of the basic elements of image and sound which a

poet or novelist can find if he becomes involved with the
dnema. Thanks to writer-directors hke these two, film and
literature are becoming more closely related as equal and
modern forms of artistic expression.
 t^,fjfum^mh p

29
Godard — The Self- Conscious

Film-Maker

Of all the film-makers who have changed the look of the

cinema in the 1960s, none has had more influence than the
French director Jean-Luc Godard. When, among the credits of
his film Bande d part, made in 1964, he included the credit to
himself: *Cinema by Jean-Luc Godard' he was doing no more
than stating a truth. In many ways the cinema of the 1960s is
Jean-Luc Godard, and if we want to understand what the
cinema stands for today, there is no one who can give us more
insight. Godard is one of the people who have made the cinema
modern in the way that the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the
stories of Jorge Luis Borges or the musical compositions of
Pierre Boulez are modern. One of the most remarkable things
about the cinema, even in the years since the Second World
War, has been the extent to which it has refused to belong
completely to our own century. The world sees the Russian
Revolution and two world wars, the atom is split, new coun-
tries and continents have become centres of world interest,
men reach the moon and a new generation grows up sur-
rounded by technological marvels undreamed of by their grand-
parents, yet in much of the cinema we still see a nineteenth-
century world. Though it is so very much a product of our own
times, the cinema has always been cut off by its position as
a mass form of entertainment from the influences of other,
more inventive art forms.
216 Film Modernism

In the past, experimental cinema has been no more than a

fringe activity and has had as on the cinema as a
httle influence
whole as the equally specialized form of the cartoon. The com-
mercial cinema, typified by Hollywood, was always seen to be
simply a form of storytelling, as the popular novel had been in
the nineteenth century. D. W. Griffith, it may be recalled,
poured all his efforts not into rivalling the most up-to-date
literature of his day,but into finding the film equivalents of the
storytelling methods
of Charles Dickens. While James Joyce
was producing Ulysses or T. S. EUot writing The Waste Land,
the cinema's favourite forms like the western and the gangster
film continued to tell their stories of the clash of good and evil
with a straightforwardness quite lost in serious literature. The
cinema could continue in this way because the audience for
which it catered was one that liked good stories excitingly and
grippingly told. But times change, the cinema has a different
(and much reduced) audience, and a new generation of freer
film-makers with wider horizons has arrived. This change is
typified by the films of Jean-Luc Godard. He does not try to
persuade us to lose ourselves in the swiftly unfolding events of
his stories or to make us identify with his heroes (as we do
when John Wayne leads a cavalry charge). Instead he keeps
reminding us that what we are seeing is no more, and no less,
than a film.
Godard is a very difficult film-maker to talk about, for sev-
eral reasons. His enormous output of films in the first ten years
of his career as a director of feature films - eighteen features
and seven short films - any other major
far exceeds that of
director of the time. And
these were not mass-produced works
fitting neatly into existing categories or genres, but all of them
personal films breaking new ground. It would require a whole
book to trace Godard's development, his choice of material and
methods, from one work to another. Moreover, the way in which
his discoveries have influenced other younger film-makers
makes it often difficult to* sort out what is Godard himself and
what is just influence or imitation. Bearing all this in mind,
what can we say about his work? Firstly and most obviously
that it is personal in a way that films produced within
 Godard - The Self-Conscious Film-Maker 217

the commercial framework seldom are. Though film-making is

big business and involves dozens of people in the making of one
film, all thefilm-makers who are worth thinking or writing
about have their own style which we can recognize. We can see
this style in the choice of subject, the way the actors are
handled, the type of compositions used, the manner of editing,
and so on. Whether the film is a spy drama or a murder mys-
tery, whoever wrote the script and whoever the stars may be,
we can always recognize the signature of Alfred Hitchcock, for
instance. We do not need the appearance he always
little

makes in his films to tell us who is. Godard's per-

the director
sonal cinema, however, is of a rather different kind. He is not a
man who wants to tell a story and in so doing express his
personaHty in the way he narrates it. His early films, like the
parody gangster film Breathless (A Bout de souffle) made in
1960, do have stories it is true, but only as a way of holding the
ideas of the film together. By the time he reached One Plus
One, also known as Sympathy for the Devil, in 1968, all pre-
tence of a story had vanished. What Godard has been really
interested in from the very first is talking directly about him-
self. For this reason he crams all kinds of things into his fibns,

just as you might make up a notebook into which you put all
the ideas that occur to you, stories your friends tell you,
a few lines of a poem you have read and liked, some par-
ticularly atrocious pun you have just heard or invented, and so
on.
These are the kind of things we get in Godard's films, and, as
one of his characters says about Petrarch somewhere, all the art
lies in the digression. Godard's references and asides fit so well

into the whole pattern of his films because of the startling way
in which he makes them. He does not work from a fixed script,
but jots down a few ideas immediately before he starts shoot-
ing. Sometimes his actors are left to give their own answers. In
a film called Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967) he
even talked to his leading actress, Marina Vlady, by means of a
little microphone hidden in her hair while he was filming. He

questioned her, probed her ideas, argued with her - and filmed
her reactions.
218 Film Modernism

Godard does not like the make-believe that actors somehow

become the story characters they are impersonating, and in
most of his films real people turn up as themselves. The phil-
osopher Brice Parrain talks about v\7hat language is in Vivre sa
vie (1962), Fritz Lang discusses what being a film
it is like
director in Le Mepris (1963), the Rolling Stones rehearse a
number in One Plus One. Actors who are playing parts are
encouraged to keep their own gestures and personalities. One
very interesting aspect of this is the way Godard's own per-

sonal emotions are visible in his works. In the early 1960s he

was married to the actress Anna Karina, and this is reflected in
the films of the period. In Le Petit Soldat (1960) his fascination
with her is seen in the sequence during which she is photo-
graphed from every angle. Further portraits of Karina are
drawn in the musical Une Femme est une femme (1961), in
Vivre sa vie, which is set in the gangster world, and in
Bande a part. Godardinvites us to make direct connections
in these films in the way he shapes his material. In Vivre sa vie,
for example, he substitutes his own voice for that of the actor
in the scene where a fragment of an Edgar Allan Poe story about
a man who falls in love with the portrait of a young woman is

read. But Godard's marriage broke up and Pierrot le fou (1965)

is all about this, full of questions, doubts and differences.

One of the reasons for the new kind of films which Godard
makes is his background before he became a fibn director at
the age of thirty (he had previously made a few not very im-
portant shorts). He had spent ten years as a critic, writing film
reviews, interviewing film-makers and helping to run the maga-
zine Cahiers du cinema. This is an increasingly common back-
ground for film-makers these days. In Godard's case it meant
that he had a great knowledge of the film-making of the past,
in a way that few directors twenty years ago did. He had spent
many hours in a cinema attached to the film museum in Paris,
the Cinematheque, where it was the policy of Henri Langlois to
show hundreds of films without sorting them in any way. There
were old films and new ones, good and bad, French and Am-
erican classics and unknown films from distant countries, all
shown without being forced into any pattern. In this way
 ffP?3^55^5^^

Godard - The Self-Conscious Film-Maker 219

Godard acquired and he refers to film

his idea of the cinema,
history in as natural a way James Joyce refers to literary
as
history in Ulysses, The Cinematheque made Godard see films
not as stages in a historical development but as part of a great
fund of experience that the present-day director can draw on
as he wishes. Though he makes his films very much for the
1960s (and taken together his films give a very clear picture of
the period's attitudes and problems), he parodies Louis
Lumiere in Les Carabiniers (1963) and the American gangster
movie in Breathless, and includes clips of the silent classic The
Passion of Joan of Arc (made by Carl Dreyer in 1928) in Vivre
sa vie and Resnais' documentary Night and Fog in Une Femme
mariee (1964). This awareness that the cinema has its own
glorious past with which some at least among the audience
would be famiUar is typical of the yoimger film-makers of
today and contrasts strongly with the attitude in Hollywood
only a generation ago where a man was only reckoned to be as
good as his last film - all the others having been forgotten. The
abihty to pick at random among past film styles also puts the
film-maker on the same level as a painter who, thanks to the
museums and art galleries of today, can draw his influences
from the art of all countries and periods. Godard himself is also
very like many modern pop painters in the way he uses the
manufactured images in the world around us. His films are full
of posters, advertisements, neon signs, magazine pages, book
titles and the like. He juggles with these just as he juggles with
words in many of his films. His characters use quotations,
make speeches, rattle off sentences at random, even speak each
other's lines. Made in USA (1967), for example, is full of pims
and word games: 'The barman is in the pocket of the pencil's
jacket' or 'The counter is kicking mademoiselle'. One effect of
this mass of and pieces is that Godard's films have a
bits
strange, jagged rhythm - very much like that of life in any big
city. The apparent jumble has a meaning and shows Godard's

view of human life. The posters scream down at us, but we are
not really at home in the city. Our minds are full of Httle frag-
ments of knowledge, but we are as far as ever from the truth.
For Godard, indeed, life is very much like a prison. Several of
220 Film Modernism

his heroes are killers on the run or gangsters fleeing from the
police, reporters or private detectives investigating some
crime. These are familiar figures in the cinema but Godard uses
them new way. His vision is usually
in a a black one. When in
makes a film about
Alphaville (1965) he the future, he sees a
time when the computer reigns. Words like tenderness have
been removed from the dictionaries and a man can be executed
for the 'illogical behaviour' of weeping at his wife's funeral. The
force of the film is even more powerful because, refusing to
build futuristic sets, Godard made his film among the ultra-
modem buildings of Paris today. When in Weekend (1967) he
looks at the world of today directly, he chooses a married
couple as his subject. Each is deceiving the other and when
they go to visit her mother it is to kill her for her money.
Travelling they find nothing but traffic jams and senseless
slaughter on the roads. Society is a hopeless place, but going
back to Nature is no better. In the woods reign gangs of hippies
who have opted out and now live as killers and cannibals. But
human beings can reconcile themselves to anything, and the
last we see of the wife is when she sits down to a meal that she
knows contains stewed husband.
In the late 1960s Godard became more and more involved
with poHtical questions as students and young people all over
the world have done. La Chinoise (1967) was about left-wing
students and One Plus One dealt with, among other things.
Black Power. In the arguments of these films Godard shows a
considerable awareness of the realities of the situation. But
political films of this kind run up against a blank wall, for the
workers whom Godard would most like to influence are the
very last people who would go to see them. Nevertheless for
three years following the making of Le Gai savoir, a television
film which contains his immediate reactions to the student
revolt of May 1968, Godard worked outside the confines of the
industry. Together with a group of students calling themselves
the Dziga-Vertov group he made 16mm. films designed for
showing to groups and not for normal cinema dis-
political
tribution. It was not until 1972, with Tout va bien starring Yves
Montand, that he returned to the commercial industry. While

I
 Godard - The Self -Conscious Film-Maker 111

this three-year diversion is readily understandable in terms of

the director's own personal development, it is in other ways

ironic, for in the 1960s was Godard more than anyone else
it

who showed the enormous amount of freedom that could be

obtained by working cheaply and quickly within the normal
structure of the film industry. In these years he made films of
every kind - gangster and science-fiction films, musicals and
anti-war fables, social studies and films of personal confession.
The way in which he went to extremes in his rejection of the
rules and conventions has often led his imitators to make films
that are rough and hard to follow. But he helped to give a fresh
sense of Hfe to the film. As far as techniques are concerned, he
showed from the very beginning that the cinema has now de-
veloped far enough to do without all the props that have been
used to help the audience understand what was happening. He
showed that audiences can follow jumps in the story and are
not worried if finally he does not tie up all the loose ends. It
was Godard after all who defined what modern film-making is
all about when he agreed, in a discussion, that a film should

have a beginning, a middle and an end, but added that they did
not need to be in that order. His inventive use of what can be
done with images and sounds has helped change our idea of
what a film is. He has demonstrated that it is possible to admit
that a film is just a film, that the actors are simply acting and
that the corpses are covered with tomato ketchup and not
blood - and still move and excite the spectators.
 3°
Anger and the Underground

In moving away from the commercial film industry in the late

1960s Godard draws attention to the existence of a whole
alternative cinema which now flourishes alongside the con-
ventional one. Earlier avant-garde film-makers such as Buiiuel
and Cocteau had worked largely in isolation and both (Uke so
many other makers of such independent films) were eventually
absorbed into the normal film industry. Transfer to the com-
mercial cinema may not harm an avant-garde film-maker's
talent, but it does tend to have the effect of taking the edge off
his attack on the system. In America during the postwar years,
however, the development of cheap 16mm. equipment has al-
lowed one form of experimental film, the underground cinema,
to flourish quite independently - with its own financial struc-
ture, distribution system and audience -- and even to influence
the conventional cinema.
Instead of producing movies for the milHons, the under-
ground film-makers are producing private films for themselves,
their friends and a few Hke-minded supporters. There is plenty
of scope for them for a great range of subjects is left un-
touched by the normal cinema. The latter, hampered by cen-
sorship and the need .to cater for a family audience, has
neglected all kinds of aspects of life. Underground film-makers

can explore our dreams and fantasies, the bits of life we do

not talk about because they are private. They can also experi-
 Anger and the Underground 223

ment with ways of using pure forms and images with no con-
cern to tell a story or create characters.By using their freedom
in this way - men like Stan Brakage, Gregory
these film-makers
-
Markopoulos and Ron Rice have brought the cinema round a
full circle. When
Brakage uses the camera to photograph his
own family, he brings us back to Louis Lumiere picturing his
brother and sister-in-law feeding their baby in the garden. It is
to the underground too that we must look for a naive delight
in the possibilities of film to compare with that of Georges
Melies. For all the size and colour of Gone With The Wind and
The Sound of Music part at least of the cinema remains what it
has always been: the record of a man's life. Now that the rules
of film-making are all known they can be forgotten, and the
cinema, while remaining a vast entertainment industry, can also
become a truly personal form of expression no more remote
from the individual than poetry or painting. The change is sym-
bolized by the fact that film-making, instead of being a salaried
occupation carried on in the factory-like atmosphere of the
studio, can be a direct part of the film-maker's whole life, pur-
sued in his own home or workshop.
The taboos broken by underground film-makers fall into two
broad categories. The first are those concerning technique.
Even the decision to work with 16mm., though made partly
because of financial considerations, represents a reaction
against the Hollywood format and the concern with pro-
fessional standards that has traditionally accompanied it. But
it does not end there. In addition to the kinds of animation
techniques already described in the earlier section on post-
Disney developments, whole range of new devices,
we find a
most of which stem from the underground film-
directly
maker's method of working. Since he no longer has teams of
assistants and cameramen to come between him and the physi-
cal material he uses - the film stock itself - his work shows a
new awareness of this. Instead of attempting to construct
plausible fictions, many underground artists are concerned
with fihn itself as the physical reahty. So we find film-makers
using clear film, black leader, focusing marks, even splices as an
integral part of their films. Anthony Scott has made what he
224 Film Modernism

calls the longest, most meaningless movie in the world simply

by joining together every bit of film on which he can lay his
hands. Whole films may be made out of individual aspects of
film technique - single frames, a zoom in and out again, a take
limited only by the length of the reel and so on. Perhaps the
most striking examples of this kind of approach are those fur-
nished by the 'structuralist' films of Mike Snow, whose Wave-
length comprises a single forty-five-minute zoom across an
eight-foot room.
The second type of taboos are those related to subject
matter. On the one hand, this may simply imply a refusal of the
conventions of the naturalistic film and a concentration on
rhythmical movement - as in the balletic dramas of Maya
Deren or the poetic fantasies of James Broughton. More re-
cently, however, the underground has seen its role as that of
providing a super-realism with regard to sex. Explicit and
forthright expositions of such subjects as homosexuality,
sexual intercourse, masturbation, group sex and transvestism
are common. Examples are such films as Jack Smith's Flaming
Creatures, Ron Rice's Chumlum and many of the Andy Warhol
films. Warhol, pioneer of the immensely long film in which the
camera never moves and nothing perceptible happens {Sleep
and Empire, for example), moved on to more complex fihns in
which a minimal technique is combined with nudity and
frankly observed sexual sparring. These later films, among
them Bike Boy and Lonesome Cowboys, brought Warhol wider
audiences and contributed to the movement of the under-
ground away from the private statement and towards greater
audience concern (a change explicit in a film like Flesh, made by
Warhol's assistant, Paul Morrissey).
This is the context in which the work of a film-maker like
Kenneth Anger should be seen. He has all the typical hallmarks
of an underground film-maker, combining technical originality
(particularly his use of editing and superimposition) with taboo
subject matter (homosexuality and the occult). In addition,
however. Anger's work shows clearly the relationship between
the independent and the Hollywood cinema. He was born in
California and at the age of four appeared as the changeling
 Anger and the Underground 225

in the version of A Midsummer NighVs Dream which Max

Reinhardt directed for Warner Brothers in 1934. Anger mixed
with Hollywood people in his childhood and wrote a book,
Hollywood Babylon, about the scandalous side of life there: His
vision of the lost splendour of the movie capital is combined
with a taste for horror films, B pictures in general and serials of
the Flash Gordon type. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari also has a
place in his mythology, and a figure recalling the sleep-walker
Cesare appears in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Yet de-
spite this background. Anger's own films are very much under-
ground ones. They are conceived as personal expression, not as
works designed an audience, and the films we
specifically for
know are only part of his output. He has been using film
cameras since he was seven, and the films he does release are
generally fragments of longer films subsequently abandoned or,
in one case, stolen after a first showing.
Much of Anger's work seems to be an attempt to recreate
the illusory world of the Hollywood studio and the magical
setting of the Reinhardt film in particular (he quotes a few
moments of Mickey Rooney's performance as Puck in Scorpio
Rising), A concern with the paradoxes of light and fire is con-
stant and the vision of a sparkling tinsel paradise is a recurring
one, particularly in the early films. Examples of this are the
decorated Christmas tree which bursts into flames as a climax
to his first film. Fireworks, the Pierrot's moon worship and play
with the magic lantern amid a tinsel forest in Rabbits Moon, and
the glittering reflections of light on the Roman fountains of
Eaux d'Artifice, which give an impression of cold fire. Anger has
confessed to having indulged in arson as a child (^Nothing big, a
few fields . and a church') and the figure of Lucifer is a key
. .

one in the personal mythology he has evolved in his later films,

including his most recent work, Lucifer Rising. Often this play
with light and fire has sexual overtones, as in the famous image
of the incandescent Roman candle bursting from a sailor's
trousers in Fireworks and the routine of asking for a light'
which recurs as a way of making personal contact in several
films. Fireworks, which Anger made in 1947 at the age of sev-
enteen, is perhaps the most explicit exposition of his homo-
T-FAR-H
226 Film Modernism

sexuality. Shot in hishome in three days while his parents were

away, and using film stock stolen from the Navy, this fifteen-
minute work depicts the sexual frustrations of a young man
(played by Anger himself), his survival of a savage ordeal at the
hands of the sailors he entices and his eventual, magical contact
with another youth. A prefatory note in the film states that
these 'imaginary displays offer temporary relief, but Anger's
subsequent work continues this probing of the male face and
body, uncovering the latent sexuality.
Anger's films never use the camera to go out and explore or
transcribe reality. His is a claustrophobic world of mental
images and occult ritual. There are some echoes of the work of
Jean Cocteau in Fireivorks (particularly the use of the photo-
graphs at beginning and end), and Anger, like Cocteau, is
always intent on expounding his own private myths. Virtually
all his films have a ritual structure. In Fireworks there is the

graphically depicted beating of the hero, while in Puce

Moment, which shows a 1920s movie star of ambiguous femi-
ninity preparing to go out, we find the first of several sequences
of dressing and making-up, with clothes and jewels taking on a
life and meaning of their own. In Scorpio Rising and Kustom

Kar Kommandos the same ritualistic approach is applied to the

bike boys and their motorcycles and to a car enthusiast slowly
stroking the gleaming chromework with a white feather duster.
In the later Anger films this element is developed into full-scale
restagings of magic rituals - Shiva's feast in Inauguration of
the Pleasure Dome, Anger as the magus performing to Mick
Jagger's music in Invocation of my Demon Brother and the still

incomplete Lucifer Rising, The reason why these rituals are

powerful even to those who do not share his belief in the val-
idity of Aleister Crowley's Magick is that Anger's own sense of
evU and spiritual presence is so strong. This is apparent even in
the early films. In Fireworks the longed-for partner material-
izes in a flash of light (all the more noticeable for being
scratched on to the film), in Rabbit*s Moon there is a magical
conjuring-up of a beautiful woman who prefers Harlequin to
the hapless Pierrot, and Eaux d* Artifice is an invocation of the
spirits of the fountains. Anger has stated that he regards the
 Anger and the Underground 227

movies as an evil medium because they use the capturing of a

person's image as a means of stealing his soul. Evil is a quality
he conveys astonishingly well, particularly in his film on the
bike boys, Scorpio Rising,
The other key to the success of Anger as a film-maker is his
sheer technical ability. Like many other leading underground
film-makers he shoves an enormous professional skill though
his v^ork is shot through with private meaning. This skill is
apparent in the editing of images to music in the films up to
Scorpio Rising and the often quintuple exposures of the later
rituals. The result is a great complexity of meaning. There are
the startling juxtapositions - the classic mime and modern pop
in Rabbit's Moon or the intercutting of the priest moving round
the magic circle and the baboon chasing round a tree in Lucifer
Rising. The fusion of his images and his chosen pop music
tracks is often brilliant, as when he brings together the song
'She Wore Blue Velvet' with shots of a pretty boy in tight jeans
in Scorpio Rising, This film in fact provides some of the best
examples of the complexity of many of Anger's sequences, as
when he builds up the myth of the motorcyclist as Scorpio by
bringing together pop music (*You look like an angel but . . .

you're the devil in disguise'), images of James Dean and Hitler,

comic-strip cartoons, a television clip showing Marlon Brando
in The Wild One and staged images of the desecration of a
church, and then intercuts a wild homosexual orgy with
stagey scenes of Christ entering Jerusalem taken from the old
De Mille epic King of Kings, But even a quieter work like Eaux
d* Artifice shows great complexity if looked at in detail. On the
surface a mere linking of a lady in eighteenth-century wig and
costume and the fountains of Rome, it throws up all kinds of
tensions and conflicts of meaning. The woman is in fact a dwarf
dressed up and there is a sense of real connection between her
and the carved stone faces which come alive in the half dark-
ness. She emerges from and fuses into the water, and the move-
ments of her fan and the spurting water are equated. And above
all there is a link between water and fire (the title is a pun on

the French word for fireworks: feux d* artifice). Visually the play
of light on the fountains has the same impact as that on the
 228 Film Modernism

and the light itself is but a

tinsel streamers of his earlier films,
symbol of the bursting liberation of life. With Anger the
modernist impulse to use film to create an alternative reality
and express a personal subjective vision is totally vindicated.

b __ 1
 Bibliography

The arrangement of the bibliography which follows corresponds to

the order of the chapters of this book. It is of necessity selective,
being designed to offer suggestions for further reading on the
various topics treated. Subjects not dealt with directly in the book
are ignored, as are rare or out-of-print volumes. At the time of
writing, however, a large number of long-unavailable classics of film
literature are becoming available thanks to a programme of ex-
pensive reprints inaugurated by the Arno Press of New York.

INTRODUCTORY

There now no broad concensus of opinion on the overall perspec-

is

tive inwhich film is to be viewed of the kind furnished some twenty

years ago by such volumes as Ernest Lindgren's The Art of the Film,
Roger Manvell's Film, Paul Rotha's historical survey, The Film Till
Now and the influential Soviet theoretical writings of Eisenstein
{Film Form and The Film Sense) and Pudovkin (Film Technique and
Film Acting),
The contemporary approach is reflected in works of a more frag-
mentary nature: the anthology or the book of interviews. Among the
first variety, the best are perhaps Richard Dyer MacCann's Film - A

Montage of Theories (Dutton, New York, 1966) and Daniel Talbot's

Film - An Anthology (University of California Press, Berkeley and
London, 1966), while an excellent example of the interview book is
Harry M. Geduld's Film Makers on Film Making (Indiana University
 230 Bibliography

Press, Bloomington, 1967; Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970)

which covers the whole field, from Lumiere to Anger.
One of the few critics to attempt a comprehensive reassessment of
film theory is Peter Wollen in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
(Seeker & Warburg, London, 1969), a diflScult but rewarding book
that deals with Eisenstein's theories, the auteur concept and semeir
ological aspects of film.
Among recent attempts to offer a history of the cinema two
may be recommended: A Concise History of the Cinema^
studies
with contributions by thirty writers, edited by Peter Cowie (Barnes,
New York, 1970; Zwemmer, London, 1971), and a vaUant solo effort,
A Short History of the Movies by Gerald Mast (Bobbs-Merrill, New
York, 1971).
Film reference books are becoming increasingly popular with pub-
Ushers. The most useful paperback is Leslie Halliwell's The Film-
goers Companion (Paladin, London, 1972). By far the best of the
large-scale encyclopaedias is Dr Roger Manvell's The International
Encyclopaedia of Film (Michael Joseph, London, 1972), a major work
of film research.

FILM REALISM

Theoretical Statements

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of

Physical Reality (Oxford University Press, New York, 1960; as The
Nature of Film, Dennis Dobson, London, 1960).
An outspoken statement of film's realist potential, sometimes
forcing material into a theoretical strait jacket but thought-
provoking.
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? (University of CaUfornia Press,
Berkeley; Cambridge University Press, London; Volume One, 1967,
Volume Two, 1971).
These collections of Bazin's essays (translated by Hugh Gray) pro-
vide fine examples of a criticalmethod rooted in an appreciation of
realist film-making.

Documentary Film and its Background

Paul Rot ha. Documentary Film (Faber & Faber, London, 1935;
3rd edn, 1952; Hastings House, New York, 1964).

IlL
 Bibliography 231

Though undoubtedly dated now in its critical views, it offers

documentary approaches.
useful insight into 1930s
Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (William
Collins, London, 1964; Faber & Faber, London, 1966; Praeger,.New
York, 1966).
A collection of key articles by the driving force behind the British
documentary movement.
Jay Ley da. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film
(Allen & Unwin, London, 1960; Hilary House, New York, 1960).
Invaluable for background to the context in which film-makers
like Vertov and Eisenstein worked.
Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to
Woodstock (Hopkinson & Blake, New York, 1971).
A comprehensive survey of documentary style from 1920 to
1970.
Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary
(Seeker & Warburg, London, 1972).
A useful survey of British documentary, seen from a 1970s per^
spective.

Individual Documentarists and their Work

Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Innocent Eye: The Life of
Robert J, Flaherty (W. H. Allen, London, 1963; Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, New York, 1966).
A very on research material assembled by
useful biography, based
Paul Rotha and Basil Wright.
Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorenz and the Documentary Film
(University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1968).
A detailed study of the career of one of the leading American
documentarists of the 1930s.
JoRis IvENS, The Camera and I (International Publishers, New
York; Seven Seas Books, Berlin, 1969).
The personal story of the Dutch-born documentarist whose career
took him to the USSR, Belgium, Spain, the USA, Eastern Europe
and, more recently, Vietnam.

Silent Realism

Joel W. Finler, Stroheim (Seeker & Warburg, London, 1967;

University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968).
232 Bibliography

A chronological analysis of Stroheim*s work, concentrating es-

pecially on the genesis of Greed.
Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Von Stroheim (Farrar, Strauss &
Giroux, New York, 1971; Angus & Robertson, London, 1972).
A personal memoir and biography of Stroheim.
The script of Greed is available from Lorrimer (London) and
Simon & Schuster (New York), and an expensive shot-by-shot recon-
struction with 400 stills - The Complete Greed - is published by the
Arno Press (New York).

French 1930s Poetic Realism

Pierre Leprohon, Jean Renoir (Crown, New York, 1970).

A translation of a very useful book by a distinguished critic, first

published in French.
Leo Braudy, Jean Renoir - The World of his Films (Double-
day, New York, 1972).
An enthusiastic study of Renoir's style and beliefs.
P. E. Sales Gomes, Jean Vigo (Seeker & Warburg, London;
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972).
First published in French and for a long time the standard work
on now available in an English translation.
its subject,

John M. Smith, Jean Vigo (November, London; Praeger, New

York, 1972).
A new and detailed analysis of Vigo's rich but tragically short
career.

French scripts of the 1930s which are readily available in English

include Renoir's La Grande Illusion and La R^gle du jeu, Ren6
Qair's A Nous la liberty (with Entr'acte} and Carne's Le Jour se
Uve, all from Lorrimer (London) and Simon & Schuster (New
York).

Ualian Neo-Realism

Roy Armes, Patterns of Realism: A Study of Italian Neo-Realist

Cinema (Tantivy Press, London; Barnes, New York, 1972).
A detailed study of the movement from Rome Open City in 1945
to Vmberto D in 1951.
JosB Luis Guarner, Roberto Rossellini (Studio Vista, London;
Praeger, New Yoric, 1971),
 Bibliography 233

A film-by-film analysis of the great Italian director's work.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Visconti (Seeker & Warburg,
London, 1973; Doubleday, New York, 1968).
A comprehensive study of Visconti's work from Ossessipne to
Vaghe stelle delVorsa.

Lorrimer (London) and Simon & Schuster (New York) have pub-
lished the script of de Sica's Bicycle Thieves and the Orion Press of
New York have issued de Sica's Miracle in Milan and Visconti's La
Terra Trema and Senso (together as Two Screenplays).

Realism outside Europe

Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray (Dennis

Dobson, London, 1971).
A detailed study, based on personal contact and much research, of
the Indian director who drew inspiration from neo-realism.
Robin Wood, The Apu Trilogy (November, London; Praeger,
New York, 1972).
all Wood's
Analyses of three of Ray's greatest films, written with
customary insight and moral seriousness.
Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (University of
California Press, Berkeley and London, 1965).
An immensely detailed film-by-film study of Kurosawa's career up
to Red Beard,

The Kurosawa's Ikiru (Living), one of the greatest of

script of
realist films,published by Lorrimer (London) and Simon &
is

Schuster (New York), while Rashomon, his modernist masterpiece^

has appeared in a Grove Press (New York) edition,

Cinema-VSriti and Television

G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations (Doubleday, New

York, 1972).
Interviews with fifteen documentarists, including Rouch, Franju,
Wright and Leacock.
Alan Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action: A Case-
book in Film Making (University of California Press, Berkeley and
London. 1971).
Interviews with twenty-two cinema-verite and television docu-
mentarists, American, Canadian and British.
234 Bibliography

FILM ILLUSION

General Books about Hollywood

Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Direc-:

tions,1929-1968 (Button, New York, 1968).
Well-documented and brilliantly provocative notes on the whole
range of directors active in Hollywood over four decades.
Parker Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies (Henry Holt^
New York, 1947; Seeker & Warburg, London, 1971).
This is an original and thought-provoking account of the 1940s
cinema, far ahead of its time when first published.
Paul Mayersburg, Hollywood and the Haunted House (Allen
Lane The Penguin Press, London, 1967; Penguin Books, Harmondsr
worth, 1969; Stein & Day, New York, 1968).
A useful, fairly light, introduction, with plenty of interview mat-?
erial.
Ian Cameron, The Movie Reader (November, London; Praeger^
New York, 1972).
A collection of some of the best writing from Movie magazine^
with pieces on Hitchcock, Preminger, Hawks, etc.
Kevin Brownlow, The Parade*s Gone By (Alfred Knopf & Son,
New York; Seeker & Warburg, London, 1968).
The best of the interview books, a nostalgic picture of Hollywood
based on original material, lovingly edited and beautifully illustrated
with rare stills.
Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse:
Hollywood Directors Speak (Angus & Robertson, London, 1969;
Regnery, Chicago, 1971).
A dozen or so interviews, mostly with men prominent in the
1940s.
Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (Doubleday, New
York, 1970; Seeker & Warburg, London, 1971; Penguin Books^
Harmondsworth, 1973).
Interviews with directors of the 1960s, including Mailer, Penn and
Kubrick.
Andrew Sarris (ed.), Hollyii^ood Voices (Seeker & Warburg,
London, 1972).
A reprint of the American interviews collected in Sarris's more
comprehensive book. Interviews with Film Directors (Bobbs-Merrill,
New York, 1967; Avon Books, New York, 1969).
Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light
 |iyii|il|ip#ji|[i \j§

Bibliography 235

(Thames & Hudson, London; University of Indiana Press, Bloom-

ington, 1970).
Interviews with seven cameramen from the golden days of Holly-
wood.
Bernard Rosenberg and Harry Silverstein, The Real
Tinsel (Macmillan, New York; Lollier-Macmillan, London, 1971).
A collection of interviews with a whole host of Hollywood old-
timers (not simply directors).

The Beginnings of Hollywood

Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (Harcourt Brace,

New York, 1939; Teachers College Press, New York, 1968).
Remains a useful account, though it has not been updated since its
first appearance.
Lillian GiSH, (with Ann Pinchot), The Movies, Mr Griffith and
Me (Prentice-Hall, New York; W. H. Allen, London; 1969).
A good picture of life and work in early Hollywood by one of the
great stars of the period.
Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema.
Paul 0*Dell, Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood (both Zwem-
mer, London; Barnes, New York; 1970).
Two wxll-documented studies giving the basic facts in a di-
gestible form. Part of a series covering the whole history of Holly-
wood decade by decade. Other volumes (variable in critical stance
and value) are Hollywood in the Twenties by David Robinson,
Hollywood in the Thirties by John Baxter, Hollywood in the Forties
by Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Fifties by
Gordon Gow, and Hollywood in the Sixties by John Baxter,

The Comedians

David Robinson: The Great Funnies: A History of Film Com-

edy (Studio Vista, London; Dutton, New York, 1969).
Basically a picture book, but lively and well-written.
Charles Chaplin: My Autobiography (The Bodley Head,
London; Simon and Schuster, New York, 1964; Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth, 1966).
Chaplin's account of his own career is naturally of interest, but
this is very much a public portrait with little personal insight.
Theodore Huff: Charlie Chaplin (Henry Schuman, New York,
1951).
A useful study of the great comedian.
I
236 Bibliography

Isabel Quigley: Chaplin: Early Comedies (Studio Vista, Lon-

don; Button, New York, 1968).
Covers Chaplin's career up to the end of the First World War in
loving detail.
David Robinson: Buster Keaton (Seeker & Warburg, London;
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1969).
An excellent survey of the whole of Keaton's career and style of
comedy.
RuDi Blesh: JCeaton (Macmillan, New York, 1966; Seeker &
Warburg, London 1967, Collier Books, New York, 1971).
A useful supplement to Robinson's more critical work, providing
plenty of biographical detail.
Charles Barr: Laurel and Hardy (Studio Vista, London, 1967,
University of California, Berkeley, 1968).
A useful guide, well documented and packed with stills.
Allen Eyles: The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy
(Zwemmer, London; Barnes, New York, 1966).
A film-by-film account of the Marx Brothers' film career.

The Studios

Norman Zierold: The Hollywood Tycoons (Hamish Hamilton,

London, 1971, published in the USA as The Moguls, Coward-
McCann, New York, 1969).
A well-researched account by the author of a noted biography of
Garbo.
Philip French: The Movie Moguls (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
London, 1969; Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971).
Informal and amusing account of all the major Hollywood pro-
ducers.
Lillian Ross: Picture (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York,
1952; GoUancz, London, 1953; Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,
1962).
The now classic account of the production battle behind the
making of John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage,
John Gregory Dunne: The Studio (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
New York, 1969; W. H. Allen, London, 1970).
A devastatingly amusing piece of reportage on the day-to-day
workings of Twentieth Century Fox in the late 1960s.
Richard Schickel: Walt Disney (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
London, 1968; as The Disney Version, Simon & Schuster, New York,
1968; Avon Books, New York, 1969).
 Bibliography 237
An excellent account of the real Disney behind the legend, the
production genius obscured by nostalgia for Mickey Mouse.
Bob Thomas: King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn
(Barrie& Rockliff, London; Putnam, New York, 1967).
Thalberg: Life and Legend of the Great Hollywood Producer
(Doubleday, New York, 1969; W. H. Allen. London, 1971).
Selznick (Doubleday, New York, 1970; W. H. Allen. London,
1971).
Thomas has made himself something of a specialist in the study of
the idiosyncrasies of the Hollywood producers and
all his books are

knowledgeable and packed with anecdote.

Mel Gussow: Darryl F. Zanuck (W. H. Allen, London, Double-
day, New York, 1971).
A further biography much in the Bob Thomas mould.

The Star System

many studies of individual stars and ghosted auto-

There are a great
biographies.The Citadel Press (New York) have also brought out
innumerable picture books on stars of past and present. Serious
studies of the system are much rarer.
Alexander Walker: The Celluloid Sacrifice (Michael Joseph,
London, 1966; Hawthorn Books, New York. 1967; Penguin Books^
Harmondsworth, 1968).
A good introduction to the star system and its principal victims,
the female sex symbols, by a leading journalist. Atrociously titled as
Sex in the Movies in the Penguin version.
Alexander Walker: Stardom (Michael Joseph, London; Stein
& Day, New York; 1970).
A sequel to the previous work and a thorough investigation of the
star system.

The Western

Jim Kitses. Horizons West (Thames & Hudson, London; Uni-

versity of Indiana Press, Bloomington, 1969).
A sometimes tortuous but always interesting study of Mann,
Boetticher and Peckinpah.
Peter Bogdanovitch, John Ford (Studio Vista, London; Uni-!
versity of California Press, Los Angeles, 1967).
Basically a long interview with Ford and a thorough fihnography;
good background material.
238 Bibliography

John Baxter, The Cinema of John Ford (Zwemmer, London;

Barnes, New York, 1972).
An analysis of Ford's career to date.

The script of Ford's Stagecoach is published by Lorrimer (London)

and Simon & Schuster (New York).

Authorship in Hollywood

Renewed interest in Hollywood film-making has given rise to a

whole flood of director monographs and interview books, some of
them profound, many rather trivial. The following list in alphabetic
cal order of subject omits studies already mentioned in previous
sections.

Roger Gorman - The Millenic Vision, ed. David Will and Paul
Willemen (Edinburgh Film Festival, Edinburgh, 1970).
Allan Dwan - The Last Pioneer, Peter Bogdanovitch (Studio Vista^
London; Praeger, New York; 1971).
The Cinema of John Frankenheimer, Gerald Pratley (Zwemmer^
London; Barnes, New York; 1969).
Samuel Fuller, ed. David Will and Peter WoUen (Edinburgh Film
Festival, Edinburgh, 1969).
Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Garnham (Seeker & Warburg, London^
1971; New York, 1971).
Samuel Fuller, Phil Hardy (Studio Vista, London; Praeger, New
York; 1971).
Howard Hawks, Robin Wood (Seeker & Warburg, London;
Doubleday, New York; 1968).
Hitchcock, Frangois Truffaut (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1967;
Seeker & Warburg,
London, 1968; Panther Books, London, 1969).
Hitchcock*s Films, Robin W^ood (Zwemmer, London; Barnes, New
York, 1965).
Stanley Kubrick Directs, Alexander Walker (Harcourt, Brace, Jo-
vanovitch. New York, 1971; Davis-Poynter, London, 1972).
Fritz Lang in America, Peter Bogdanovitch (Studio Vista, London,
1967; Praeger, New York, 1968).
The Cinema of Fritz Lang, Paul M. Jensen (Zwemmer, London;
Barnes, New York; 1969).
Losey on Losey, ed. Tom Milne (Seeker & Warburg, London^
1967; Doubleday, New York, 1968).
 |ip.|J|ll, Ji^^^llUU

Bibliography 239

Tfie Cinema of Joseph Losey, James Leahy (Zwemmer, London;

Barnes, New York; 1967).
The Lubitsch Touch, Herman G. Weinberg (Dutton, New York,
1968).
Rouben Mamoulian, Tom Milne (Thames & Hudson, London; Uni-
versity of Indiana Press, Bloomington; 1969).
Arthur Penn, Robin Wood (Studio Vista, London, 1967; Praeger,
New York, 1969).
The Cinema of Roman Polanski, Ivan Butler (Zwenmier, London;
Barnes, New York; 1970).
The Cinema of Otto Preminger, Gerald Pratley (Zwemmer,
London; Barnes, New York; 1971).
The Films of Robert Rossen, Alan Casty (Museum of Modern Art,
New York. 1969).
Sirk on SirK ed. Jon Halliday (Seeker & Warburg, London, 1971;
Viking Press, New York, 1972).
Douglas SirK ed. Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday (Edinburgh Film
Festival, Edinburgh, 1972).
George Stevens: An American Romantic, Donald Richie (Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 1970).
The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg, John Baxter (Zwemmer,
London; Barnes, New York; 1971).
Josef von Sternberg, Herman G. Weinberg (Dutton, New York,
1967).
The Cinema of Orson Welles, Peter Cowie (Zwemmer, London;
Barnes, New York; 1965).
The Films Orson Welles, Charles Higham (University of Cal-
of
ifornia Press, Berkeley and London, 1970).
Orson Welles, Joseph McBride (Seeker & Warburg, London; Viking
Press, New York; 1972).
Orson Welles, Maurice Bessy (Crown, New York, 1968).
Billy Wilder, Axel Madsen (Seeker & Warburg, London, 1968; Uni-
versity of Indiana Press, Bloomington, 1969).

Comparatively few Hollywood scripts are ever published. The

M-G-M Library of Film Scripts has, however, got under way with
Lubitsch's Ninotchka, Cukor's Adam*s Rib and Hitchcock's North by
Northwest (Viking Press, New York, 1972); Wilder's The Apartment
and The Fortune Cookie have appeared as one volume (Studio Vista,
London, 1970); and The Citizen Kane Book (Seeker & Warburg,
London; Little, Brown, New York, 1971) has the script of Welles*s
first feature preceded by along and provocative essay by Pauline Kael,
240 Bibliography

FILM MODERNISM

General Books

David Curtis, Experimental Cinema: A Fifty Year Evolution

(Studio Vista, London; Universe Books, New York; 1971).
An excellent survey of the whole field of modernism, from the
European avant-garde and American independent cinema to the
underground.
John Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (Methuen^
London: Hill & Wang, New York; 1964).
A good introduction to some of the key film-makers of the 1960s
including chapters on Fellini, Antonioni, Buiiuel, Bresson, Bergman,
Hitchcock and the French New Wave.
Roy Armes, French Cinema Since 1946, 2 volumes (Zwemmer,
London; Barnes, New York; 1966, 1970),
The first volume contains a section on Bresson and the second
deals with Resnais, Godard and their contemporaries.
Ian Cameron (ed.). Second Wave (Studio Vista, London; Prae-
ger.New York; 1970).
Contains useful essays on film-makers of the post-Godard gener-
ation including Straub.

Silent Experiment

Ivor Montagu, Film World (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth,

1964).
A comprehensive survey of the cinema's potential which draws
many of its examples from silent films.
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and The Film Sense (Merid-
ian Books, New York, 1957).
Eisenstein's writings remain among the most valid as well as the
most influential in the history of the cinema.
Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (The Bodley Head, London,
1952; Grove Press, New York, 1960; Dennis Dobson, London,
1970).
The definitive biography of the Soviet director;
Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (International
Books, New York;Seven Seas Publishers, Berlin; 1968).
A vivid account of Eisenstein abroad, with the scenarios of two
unmade films, Sutter's Gold and An American Tragedy.
 Bibliography 241
The scripts of Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible have been
published by Lorrimer,

Expressionism and Ingmar Bergman

LoTTB Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Thames & Hudson,

London, 1969; University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1970).
Brilliantly written and beautifully produced book on expression-;
ism and German silent cinema.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Dennis Dobson^
London; Princeton University Press, Princeton; 1947).
A closely argued psychological history of the German cinema from
its origins to 1933, with a supplement on the Nazi propaganda
fihn.

The script of Robert Wiene's classic, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, is

published by Lorrimer (London) and Simon & Schuster (New
York),

Peter Cowie, Sweden: An Illustrated Guide, 2 volumes,

(Zwenmier, London; Barnes, New York; 1970).
The second volume is a historical and critical survey of Swedish
cinema, devoting much of its space to Ingmar Bergman's career-
JoRN Donner, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, 1964).
An original and idiosyncratic study by the Finnish-bom film critic
and director.
Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (Studio Vista, London; Praeger^
New York, 1969).
A perceptive analysis of Bergman's whole output.

Many of Bergman's scripts have been published: Smiles of a

Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and The
Magician (the film released as The Face in Britain) together as Four
Screenplays by Simon & Schuster, New York, 1960; Wild Straw-
berries and The Seventh Seal as separate volumes by Lorrimer;
Through a Glass Darkly, The Communicants {Winter Light in
Britain) and The Silence as A Film Trilogy by Orion Press (New York)
and Calder & Bovars (London, 1967); Persona and Shame as one
volume by Calder & Boyars (London, 1972)^
242 Bibliography

Bunuel and Surrealism

Raymond Durgnat, Luis Bunuel (Studio Vista, London, 1967;

University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968).
A lively, involved analysis of the underlying themes and motifs of
Buiiuers work.

The Orion Press have issued a collection of Three Screenplays

(Viridiana,The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert) and
Lorrimer and Simon & Schuster have published VAge d'or (widi Vn
Chien andalou). Belle de jour and Tristana,

Post-Disney Animation

Ralph Stephenson, Animation in the Cinema (Zwemmer,

London: Barnes, New York; 1967).
A useful survey of the range of contemporary animation.
Ronald Hollo way, Z is for Zagreb (Tantivy Press, London;
Barnes, New York; 1972).
Well-illustrated survey of the output of the Yugoslav studios.

New Narrative, Time and the Novel

Ian Cameron and Robin Wood, Antonioni (Studio Vista,

London, 1968; Praeger, New York, 1969).
A detailed analysis by two experienced critics.

The Orion Press have published a collection of Four Screenplays

by Antonioni {Vavventura, ll grido, La notte and The Eclipse) and
Lorrimer have issued Blow Up.

Ian Cameron (ed.), The Films of Robert Bresson (Studio Vista,

London, 1969; Praeger, New York, 1970).
A symposium of essays by six critics on Bresson's films up to
Mouchette.
Oswald Stack (ed.), Pasolini on Pasolini (Seeker & Warburg,
London, 1969; University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, 1970).
A very useful interview book in which Pasolini expounds his the-
ories at length.

The script of Pasolini's Oedipus Rex is published by Lorrimer

(London) and Simon & Schuster (New York).
 Bibliography 243
Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais (Zwemmer, London;
Barnes,New York; 1968).
A detailed critical analysis of all Resnais' films up to La Guerre
est finie.
John Ward, Alain Resnais or the Theme of Time (Seeker & War-
burg, London, 1968; Doubleday, New York, 1968).
Contains some striking insights, though it tends to distort some of
Resnais' work to make it fit a preconceived theory.

Calder& Boyars (London) have published Marguerite Duras'

Hiroshima Mon Amour (with Une Aussi Longue Absence)
script for
and Alain Robbe-Grillet's scripts. Last Year at Marienbad and
Vlmmortelle.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots and Towards a New Novel

(Calder & Boyars,
London, 1965).
Though largely about literature, Robbe-Grillet's essays give some
clear insights into the attraction of the cinema for novelists like
himself.
Richard Roud, Straub (Seeker & Warburg, London; Viking
Press, New York, 1972).
A sympathetic examination of Straub's work, supplemented by
the script of his first feature.

Godard

Richard Roud, Jean-Luc Godard (Seeker & Warburg, London^

1967; Doubleday, New York, 1968).
The first full study in English; an informed if somewhat Journalr
istic account.
Ian Cameron (ed.). The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Studio
Vista, London, 1967; Praeger, New York, 1969).
Essays by various critics on each of Godard's features up to the
date of publication.
Toby Muss man (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology
(Button, New York, 1968).^
A wide-ranging collection of notes, reviews, interviews and essays
by and about Godard.
Tom Milne (ed.), Godard on Godard (Seeker & Warburg,
London, 1972).
A selection made from a decade or so of Godard's critical writ-s

ings.
244 Bibliography

Lorrimer and Simon & Schuster have published a good selection of

Godard's scripts: Alphaville, Made inlJSA, Le Petit Soldat, Pierrot
le fou and Weekend (with Wind from the East). Masculine-Feminine

has been published by Grove Press (New York).

The Underground

Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (Grove

New York. 1969; Seeker & Warburg, London, 1971; Penguin
Press,
Books, Harmondsworth, 1973).
A major study of the American underground, relating it to experi-
ments in Europe and evaluating its beliefs and achievements.
Gregory Battock, The New American Cinema: A Critical
Anthology (Button, New York, 1967).
A useful collection of articles and manifestoes, giving a good pic-
ture of the range of activities and -interests flourishing under the
label of the underground.
 Index

A (Lenica. 1964). 194 Baggott, King, 134

Abraham Lincoln (Griffith. 1930), Bambi (Disney, 1942), 127, 129
102 Bande d part (Godard, 1964), 215,
Accatone (Pasolini, 1961), 212 218
Accident (Losey, 1966). 210 Bandera, La (Duvivier, 1935), 56
Adventures of Dollie, The (Griffith. Bandit, The (Lattuada, 1946). 68
1908), 171 Bara, Theda. 135-6
Age d'or, V (Bunuel. 1930). 187. Barbera, Joseph, 192
188-9 Bardot, Brigitte, 139
Aldrich, Robert, 182 Baron Munchhausen (Zeman,
Alexander Nevski (Eisenstein. 1959). 194
1938), 178 Bartosch. Bertold, 193
Alexeieff, Alexandre. 193, 195 Bas-fonds, Les (Renoir. 1936), 58,
Alice in Wonderland (Disney. 62
1951), 195 Bataille. Sylvia. 59
AlphaviUe (Godard. 1965), 220 Batcheff, Pierre, 187
Amiche, Le (Antonioni. 1955), 199 Batchelor, Joy, 130
Anderson, Bronco Billy. 93. 144 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein.
Andrews, Julie, 133 1925). 40, 51, 175-6, 177, 203
Angelina M. P. (Zampa. 1947). 68 Belle de jour (Bunuel, 1967). 190
Anger, Kenneth, 224-8 Belle tquipe. La (Duvivier. 1936),
Animal Farm (Halas & Batchelor. 56
1954), 130 Bergman, Ingmar. 155. 161, 182-4
A Nous la Libert^ (Clair, 1931). Bergman, Ingrid, 67, 139, 153
61
56, Bernhardt, Sarah, 98
Anstey, Edgar, 44, 45 BHe humaine. La (Renoir, 1938)<
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 155. 177, 58, 59
198-9, 200 Bezhin Meadow (Eisenstein, 1936),
Arbuckle, Roscoe, 107. 135 178
Artaud. Antonin. 187 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948),
Atalante, V
(Vigo. 1934). 56. 61 67, 70
Auden, W. H., 46 Bike Boy (Warhol, 1967). 224
Autry, Gene, 143. 144 Birds, The (Hitchcock, 1961), 156
Avventura, V
(Antonioni, 1960). Birth of a Nation, The (Griffith.
199 1915). 51. 100-101, 104. 118, 172
 -^'^W^vlUW

II
246 Index

Bitzer, Billy. 99 Cheyenne Autumn (Ford, 1964),

Blackmail (Hitchcock. 1929), 156 147
Blackman. J. Stuart. 93 Chien andalou, Un (Buiiuel. 1928),
Blavette. 59 11. 186. 187-8
Blind Husbands (Stroheim. 1918), Chienne, La (Renoir, 1931), 58
51 Chinoise, La (Godard, 1967). 220
Blinkety-Blank (McLaren, 1954), Chotard et cie (Renoir, 1933). 58
193 Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966). 199 (Straub, 1967), 200-201
Boat, The (Keaton, 1921), 111 Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch,
Boetticher. Budd. 146. 147-8 1961), 75
Bogart. Humphrey. 123. 134, 140, Chumlum (Rice, 1964), 224
162 Cinderella (Disney, 1949), 129
Borowczyk, Walerian, 194-5, 202 Circus, The (Chaplin, 1928), 113
Boudu sauve des eaux (Renoir, Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), 181,
1932). 58. 60 197-8
Boyd, William, 144 City Lights (Chaplin, 1931), 110
Brakage. Stan, 223 Qaire. Ren6, 56, 61, 173. 187
Brando, Marlon, 140, 227 Coalface (Cavalcanti. 1935). 46
Breathless (Godard. 1960). 217, 219 Cocteau. Jean, 186, 187. 222, 226
Bresson, Robert. 185, 199-200 Cohl, Emile, 191, 192
Britten, Benjamin, 46 Cohn, Harry, 117, 119. 120, 121
Broken Blossoms (Griffith. 1919), Colour Box (Lye, 1935), 192
103. 104 Comanche Station (Boetticher,
Brother Carl (Sontag. 1970), 210 1960), 148
Broughton, James, 224 Concerto for Sub -Machine gun
Bunny, John, 93 (Vukotic, 1959). 194
Buiiuel, Luis, 11. 186. 187-90, 202, Conjuring Away of a Lady at Robert
222 Houdin Theatre, The (Melius,
Burton, Richard, 138 1896). 27
By the Law (Kuleshov. 1926). 39 Connery, Sean, 133
Conquest of the Pole, The (M^li^s,
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 1912). 27
(Wiene, 1919), 180-81. 182, 225 Cooper. Gary, 139, 144, 146
Cabiria (Pastrone. 1914). 100 Corman. Roger, 162
Cagney. James. 123. 140 Coronation of Edward VU, The
Canterbury Tales, The (Pasolini, (M^li^s, 1902), 26
1972). 212 Countess from Hong Kong, A
Carabiniers, Les (Godard, 1963), (Chaplin, 1966). 110
219 Coward. Noel. 209
Carn^, Marcel, 56. 62, 196-7 Crime de Monsieur Lange, Le
Castellani, Renato. 68 (Renoir. 1935). 61. 62
Cathy Come Home (Loach, 1966), Cukor, George, 123. 162
79-81 Culloden (Watkins, 1964), 77-8
Cavalcanti, Alberto, 44, 46 Curtiz, Michael, 123
Cayrol, Jean, 206
Chabrol, Claude, 155, 162 Dali, Salvador, 187, 188
Chair, The (Leacock, 1963), 73 Dame blanche. La (Stroheim pro-
Chaplin. Charles, 55, 93. 106, ject), 55
108-11, 113, 114, 117, 127, 128. Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Les
134. 135, 173 (Bresson, 1945). 200
Charlie Bubbles (Finney. 1968). Daniels. William, 137
210 Daves, Delmer. 149
David (Leacock. 1962), 73
 Index 247
Davies, Marion, 117 Eden et aprhs, L' (Robbe-Brillet,
Davis, Bette, 123, 151 1970), 211
Dean, James. 140. 227 Edison, Thomas, 18, 90-96, 97,
Decameron, The (Pasolini. 1971), 115, 128, 134, 191
212 Eisenstein, Sergei, 9, 12, 34,. 39,
Delaney, Shelagh, 209-10 40, 43. 51. 157. 174-8, 182, 185.
Delmont, Edouard, 59 199. 203
De Mille. Cecil B., 89. 94. 123. 227 Elephant Boy (Korda &
Flaherty,
Deren. Maya, 224 1937). 35
De Santis, 67, 68 Eleventh (Vertov. 1928), 42
De 70
Sica, Vittorio, 19, 67, 68, Elton, Arthur, 44, 45
Destroy She Says (Duras, 1969), Empire (Warhol, 1964), 224
210-11 Engel, Morris, 72
Deux ou trois choses que }e sais Enoch Arden (Griffith, 1911), 99
d'elle (Godard. 1967), 217 Enough to Eat (Anstey, 1936). 45
Devil's Pass Key, The (Stroheim, Enthusiasm (Vertov. 1930), 40, 42
1919). 57 Entr'acte (Clair, 1924), 187
Diary of a Country Priest Ersatz (Vukotic. 1961). 194
(Bresson, 1951). 200 Exploits of Elaine, The (Gasniei;,
Dickson, William. 91 1915). 186
Dietrich, Mariene, 123. 137. 139 Exterminating Angel, The (Buiiuel*
Disney. Walt. 125-31. 191. 192. 1962). 189, 202
193. 195
Dom (Borowczyk and Lenica. Pace, The (Bergman, 1958), 183-4
1958). 195 Fairbanks, Douglas, 117, 140
Don't Look Back (Pennebaker, Family Life (Loach, 1971), 80
1966), 74 Fantasia (Disney, 1941), 129
Dovzhenko. Alexander, 34, 39 Fantoche (Cohl, 1908), 191
Drew, Robert, 71. 72. 73 Faulkner, William, 122, 209
Dreyer, Carl. 173. 185, 219 Fellini, Federico, 151
Dreyfus Affair, The (Melies. 1899). Femme douce, Une (Bresson, 1969),
26 200
Drifters (Grierson. 1929). 44 Femme est une femme, Une
Drdle de drame (Carn^. 1937), 57 (Godard, 1961), 162. 218
Drunkard's Reformation, The Femme marine, Une (Godard,
99
(Griffith, 1909), 1964). 219
Duchamp, Marcel, 187 Feyder, Jacques. 56
Duet for Cannibals (Sontag, 1969), Filmstudie (Richter, 1926), 186
210-11 Fires Were Started (Jennings,
Dulac, Germaine, 187 1943), 46
Dumbo (Disney. 1941). 129, 131 Fireworks (Anger. 1947). 225-6
Dunn, Nell. 79 First Days, The Qennings, 1939).
Duras. Marguerite. 205, 210-11 46
Duvivier, Julien, 56 Fitzgerald. F. Scott, 122
Dwan, Allan, 162 Flaherty. Robert, 18, 30-37, 38, 41.
43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 71, 136
Earth (Dovzhenko, 1930), 40 Flaming Creatures (Smith, 1963).
Eaux d'artifice (Anger, 1953), 225, 224
226 Fleisher, Max, 191
Eclipse. The (Antonioni. 1962), 177. Fleming, Victor, 123
199 Flesh (Morrissey, 1968), 224
Eddie Sachs at Minneapolis (Lea- Flynn, Errol. 123. 140
cock, 1961). 73 Fonda. Henry. 139. 144. 145, 147
Fonda. Jane, 73
m^
^-^^f^r

248 Index

Fontaine, Joan, 158 Grande Illusion, La (Renoir. 1937)<

Foolish Wives (Stroheim, 1920). 52 55. 58. 60, 61. 62
Ford. John. 36. 123. 143. 146. 147. Grant. Gary. 139. 153. 158
152 Grapes of Wrath, The (Ford, 1940),
Foreman, Carl, 146 36, 123
Fort Apache (Ford. 1948). 147 Great Dictator, The (Chaplin,
Fox. William. 94. 116, 117. 118. 1940). 110
134, 135 Great Train Robbery, The (Porter^
Franju, Georges, 48 1904), 96. 142
Frenzy (Hitchcock, 1972). 154 Greed (Stroheim, 1923), 51-5
Fresnay. Pierre. 60 Greene, Graham, 160-61
Fuller. Sam. 162 Grierson. John. 19. 34, 35. 36, 44.
45
Gabin. Jean. 56, 58. 59, 196 Griffith, D. W., 18, 50. 51, 93, 95,
Gable, Clark, 122. 123-4, 139 96, 97-104. 106, 108. 115. 117.
Gai savoir, Le (Godard, 1968), 220 139. 171-2, 173, 174, 196, 202,
Gance, Abel, 173 216
Garbo, Greta, 122. 134. 137. 139 Grimault, Paul, 130
Garden of Allah, The (Boleslawsky. Gross, Anthony, 193
1936), 160 Guernica (Resnais, 1950), 204
Garland, Judy, 136 Guerre est finie. La (Resnais, 1966),
Garnett, Tony. 79, 81 207
Gaumont. L^on, 93
General The (Keaton. 1926). Halas, John. 130
111-12. 113 Hand, The (Trnka, 1964), 194
General Line, The (Eisenstein, Hanna, William. 192
1929), 176 Hart. William S.. 144
Genuine (Wiene. 1920). 181 Hat, The (Hubley. 1964), 192
Germania anno zero (Rossellini. Hawkins, Jack. 209
1947). 67 Hawks. Howard, 149. 152. 161
Germi. Pietro, 69 Hearts of the World (Griffith.
Gertie the Dinosaur (McCay, 1909). 1917). 15. 102
191 Henabery. Joseph. 101
Gish, Lillian, 98. 102. 103. 138, Hepburn. Audrey, 139
139 Hepburn, Katherine, 139
Go-Between, The (Losey, 1971). High Noon (Zinnemann, 195). 146
210 Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais,
Godard. Jean-Luc. 43, 161, 215-21, 1959). 205. 210
222 His Trust (Griffith, 1911). 99
Golden Coach, The (Renoir, 1952), His Trust Fulfilled (Griffith. 1911),
58 99
Gold Rush, The (Chaplin. 1925). Hitchcock. Alfred, 85. 141. 153-8.
110, 113 161, 162. 182, 217
Goldwyn, Sam, 52. 117. 118, 119, Hole, The (Hubley. 1962). 192
120, 121, 159 Homme qui ment, V
(Robbe-
Gone with the Wind (Cukor, Grillet, 1968), 211
Fleming & Wood, 1939). 120. Hoppin. Hector. 193
123-4, 223 Hdtel des Invalides (Franju, 1951),
Gospel According to Saint 48
Matthew, The (Pasolini. 1964), Hdtel du Nord (Carn6. 1938). 57
212. 213 Housing in New Zealand (Furlong.
Go West (Keaton, 1925), 111 1948). 30
Gowland. Gibson. 54 Housing Problems (Anstey &
Elton. 1935). 46

w^^m
 Index 249
Hubley. John, 192 King in New; York, A (Chaplin.
Hughes, Howard, 117 1957). 110
King of Kings (De Mille, 1927), 227
I Confess (Hitchcock. 1952), 156 Kino-Pravda (Vertov, 1922) 40
Id^e, V (Bartosch, 1934). 193 43. 71
Immortelle, V (Robbe-Grillet, Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich. 1955),
1963). 211 182
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome Kleine, George. 93
(Anger, 1954). 225. 226 Kleptomaniac, The (Porter, 1905).
Industrial Britain (Flaherty. 1933). 99
34, 45 Korda. Alexander. 35
Intolerance (Griffith. 1916), 51. Krauss. Werner. 181
101-2. 202 Kubrick, Stanley. 202
In Two Minds (Loach. 1966). 79 Kuleshov. Lev. 39
Invention of Destruction, The Kurosawa. Akira. 19. 64, 143
(Zeman. 1956), 194 Kustom Kar Kommandos (Anger.
Invocation of my Demon Brother 1965). 226
(Anger. 1969). 226
Italian Straw Hat. An (Clair, 1927). Labyrinth (Lenica, 1962). 194
173 Ladd. Alan. 144
Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein, Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947).
1945-6), 178 181
Iwerks, Ub, 127. 128 Lady Vanishes, The (Hitchcock,
1938). 153. 154
Jagger, Mick, 226 Laemmle. Carl. 94. 115-16. 118,
Jane (Leacock. 1963), 73 134, 135
Janowitz, Hans. 180 Land, The (Flaherty, 1942). 36
Jazz Singer, The (Crosland. 1927). Land of the Pharaohs (Hawks.
117. 173 1955). 209
Jennings. Humphrey, 46-8 Land without Bread (Buiiuel.
Jenny (Cam6. 1936), 56 1932). 189
Je t*aime, je t'aime (Resnais. Lang, Fritz. 218
1968). 207-8 Langdon. Harry. 106. 108. 113
Jeux des Anges (Borowczyk, 1964), Last Laugh, The (Murnau. 1924),
195 173
Joie de vivre (Hoppin &
Gross, Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais^
1934), 193 1961). 205-6. 207, 208. 211
Jour se Uve, Le (Cam6, 1939), 57. Lattuada, Alberto. 68
196-7 Lawrence, Florence, 134
Judith of Bethulia (Griffith, 1913), Leacock, Richard, 71-5. 77
100. 171 L^ger. Fernand. 187
Jungle Book, The (Disney, 1967), Leigh. Vivien. 124
129 Leni. Paul. 181
Lenica. Jan. 194
Karina, Anna. 218 Life of an American Fireman, The
Kaufman, Mikhail. 42 (Porter, 1903), 96
Keaton. Buster. 50, 108. 109. Linder, Max, 105, 135
110-13. 114. 115. 128. 150. 173 Listen to Britain Qennings. 1941),
Kelly. Grace. 153 46. 47
Kermesse h^roique. La (Feyder. Uttle Annie Rooney (Beaudine,
1936). 56 1925). 135
Kes (Loach. 1970). 80 Lloyd. Harold. 106. 108, 113
Kid, The (Chaplin. 1920). 113 Loach. Kenneth, 77, 79-81
250 Index

Lonedale Operator, The (Griffith. Mayer, Carl. 180

1911). 99 Mayer. Louis B.. 52. 117. 118, 119.
Lonely Villa, The (Griffith. 1909). 120. 121. 122. 123, 137
99 Maysles. Albert and David. 72. 73
Lonesome Cowboys (Warhol. McCay, Winsor, 191
1968). 224 McLaren. Norman, 193, 195
Long, Samuel, 93 Medea (Pasolini, 1969). 212-13
Long Pants (Lloyd & Capra, 1927). Melius, Georges. 22. 25-9, 85. 93,
113 96, 115. 191, 223
Lorenz, Pare, 36 Melomaniac, The (Melius, 1903),
Losey. Joseph, 210 27
Louisiana Story (Flaherty, 1948), Mepris, Le (Godard, 1963). 218
36, 71 Mercer, David, 79
Love in the City (Zavattini. 1953), Merry-GO'Round (Stroheim. 1922)^
70 52
Lubin, Sigmund. 93 Merry Widow, The (Stroheim.
Lubitsch, Ernst. 123 1925.) 54. 55
Lucifer Rising (Anger. 1966), 226. Midsummer Nights Dream, A
227 (Reinhardt. 1934), 225
Lumi^re, Augusta. 22, 23 Midsummer Nights Dream, A
Lumi^re. Louis. 18. 22-9, 76, 86. (Trnka. 1959). 194
92, 93, 173. 191. 219. 223 Million, Le (Qair. 1931). 56
Lye, Len, 192 Mix, Tom, 140, 144
Moana (Flaherty. 1926). 34
Madame Bovary (Renoir. 1934), Modem Times (Chaplin. 193 6)«
58. 60 109. 110. 114
Made in USA (Godard. 1967), 219 Moi un Noir (Rouch. 1958). 75
Maeterlinck, Maurice. 120 Monroe. Marilyn. 134. 138. 139
Maggiorani. Lamberto, 70 Monsieur Tite (Lenica. 1960). 194
Magnani, Anna, 68 Montand, Yves. 220
Magnificent Seven, The (Sturges, Monterey Pop (Pennebaker. 1968)„
1960). 143 74
Mamma Roma (Pasolini. 1962). 212 Morin, Edgar. 75
Man Escaped, A (Bresson. 1956). Morrissey. Paul, 224
200 Mother (Pudovkin, 1926), 40
Mann, Anthony. 148 Mozhukhin, Ivan, 39
Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934), 35. Mr West in the Land of the Bol-
45 sheviks (Kuleshov, 1924), 39
Man Who Knew Too Much, The Mr Wonderbird (Grimault. 1952),
(Hitchcock, 1934). 153 130
Man with the Heads, The (Melius. Muriel (Resnais, 1963), 206-7
1898). 27 Murnau, Friedrich, 34. 173. 181
Man with the India-Rubber Head, Muybridge, Eadweard, 18, 91
The (M^li^s. 1902). 27 My Darling Clementine (Ford.
Man with the Movie Camera, The 1946), 147
(Vertov. 1929). 42, 43 My stbre du Chdteau de Des, Le
Marey, Etienne, 18. 91 (Ray. 1929), 186
Marion. Frank. 93
Markopoulos, Gregory, 223 Nana (Renoir, 1926), 58
Marseillaise, La (Renoir, 1938), 58, Nanook of the North (Flaherty,
60. 61 1922). 33. 34, 36, 37, 38, 136
Marsh, Mae, 98, 103 Napoleon (Gance, 1927), 173
Martin. Karl Heinz, 181 Navigator, The (Keaton. 1924),
Marvin, Arthur. 99 111. 113
 Index 251
Nazarin (Buiiuel, 1958). 189 Pickford. Mary. 98. 103. 117. 134-5-
Nazimova, Alia. 139 138
Negri. Pola. 139 Pierrot le Fou (Godard. 1965), 218
Nehru (Leacock, 1962). 73, 74 Pinter. Harold, 210
Night Mail (Wright & Watt. 1936). Pintoff. Ernst. 192
46 Pippa Passes (Griffith, 1909). 99
Night on tfie Bare Mountain Pitts. Zasu. 54
(Alexeieff. 1933). 193 Plow that Broke the Plains, The
Normand. Mabel. 107 (Lorenz. 1936). 36
North by Northwest (Hitchcock^ Polanski, Roman. 190
1959), 154 Popeye (Fleisher, 1933). 192
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922). 181 Porter, Edwin S.. 95-6. 97. 98. 99^
Nuit et hrouillard (Resnais, 1955), 142
204-5. 206. 219 Port of Call (Bergman. 1948). 182
Precise Measurements for En-
October (Eisenstein, 1927). 176-7^ gineers (Chambers. 1947). 30
199 Preminger, Otto, 162
Oedipus Rex (Pasolini,; 1967)^ Pr^vert, Jacques, 61, 62, 130, 196
212-13 Primary (Leacock, 1960)» 73
Olivier, Laurence. 136 Prokofiev, Sergei, 178
Olvidados, Los (Bunuel, 1950). 189, Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960). 155, 157,
One Man Orchestra, The (M61i^s» 158. 182
1900), 27 Puce Moment (Anger, 1948). 226
One Plus One (Godard, 1968), 217, Pudovkin. Vsevolod. 34, 39
218, 220 Punishment Park (Watkins. 1970)^
On purge h6h6 (Renoir? 1931), 58^ 78-9
62 Punition, La (Rouch, 1962), 75
Orphans of the Storm (Griffith, Pyramide Humaine, La (Rouch,
1922). 103 1960), 75
Orthon (Straub. 1969). 201
Osborne. John, 209 Quai des brumes (Carn^, 1938). 57
Ossessione (Visconti, 1942), 57 Queen Kelly (Stroheim. 1928). 54,
Ozu, Yashiro. 19, 64 55
Que viva Mexico (Eisenstein pro-
Pfltsa (Rossellini, 1946), 6&-7 ject), 178
Palance, Jack. 144 Quo vadis (Guazzoni, 1912). 100
Parker. Qaire. 193
Parrain. Brice, 218 Rabbifs Moon (Anger, 1950). 225,
Vartie de campagne, Une (Renoirg 226. 227
1936). 58. 59. 62 Ramona (Griffith, 1910). 99
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 9, 211, 212-14 Rank and File, The (Loach, 1971),
Passion of Joan of Arc, The 80
(Dreyer. 1928). 173. 219 Raskolnikov (Wiene, 1923), 181
Path6. Charles. 93, 105 Rattigan. Terence. 209
Paul. Robert W.. 92 Ray. Man, 186
Peckinpah. Sam. 143. 148. 203 Ray. Satyajit. 19. 64
Pennebaker. Don, 72, 73 Rear Window (Hitchcock. 1954),
P6p6 le Moko (Duvivier, 1936), 56 158
Persona (Bergman. 1966). 184 Red Desert, The (Antonioni. 1964),
Petit Soldat, Le (Godard. 1960), 199
218 Reed. Carol. 160. 182
Petrified Forest, The (Mayo. 1936). Rtgle du jeu, La (Renoir, 1939),
160 58, 59. 61. 62
Reinhardt. Max. 225
252 Index

Reiniget, Lotte, 193 Searchers, The (Ford, 1956), 147

Renaissance (Borowczyk, 1964), Seberg, Jean, 162
195. 202 Selznick. David O.. 120. 123-4
Renoir, Jean, 19. 56-63 Selznick. Lewis J.. 116. 118. 120
Renoir. Pierre, 59 Sennett, Mack. 105-8, 109, 110,
Rescued from an Eaglets Nest 113, 173
(Porter, 1907). 97 Semprun, Jorge. 207
Resnais. Alain. 190. 204-8. 211< Servant, The (Losey. 1963). 210
219 Seven Chances (Keaton, 1925). Ill
Reynaud. Emile, 191. 192 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)^
Rhinoceros (Lenica. 1963), 194 143
Rice. Ron. 223. 224 Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock,
Richter, Hans. 186 1943). 156. 157
Ride Lonesome (Boetticher. 1959), Shane (Stevens. 1953), 144, 146
146. 148 Sherlock Junior (Keaton, 1924),
Ride the High Country (Peckinpah. 112-13
1961). 148 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford,
Rio Grande (Ford, 1950), 147 1949). 147
Rite, The (Bergman, 1969), 182 Shuker. Greg. 73
River, The (Lorenz, 1937), 36 Sillitoe.Alan. 209
Robbe-Grillet. Alain, 9. 205, 208, Simon. Michel. 59. 61
211-12. 213-14. 215 Sirk. Douglas. 152
Rohmer. Eric, 155 Sixth of the World, A (Vertov,
Robinson. Edward G., 140 1926), 42
Robinson Crusoe (Buiiuel. 1952), Sleep (Warhol. 1963). 224
189 Smith. Albert E., 93
Rogers, Roy. 143, 144 Smith. Jack, 224
Rome Eleven O'clock (De Santis, Snow, Mike, 224
1952). 68 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Rome Open City (Rossellini. 1945), (Disney, 1937), 129. 131
64-6. 68. 69 Song of Ceylon (Wright. 1934). 45
Rooney. Mickey. 123, 136, 225 Song of the Prairie (Tmka. 1949).
Rossellini. Roberto, 12. 19, 64-9, 193
213 Sontag, Susan, 210-11
Rotha, Paul, 9, 19. 36. 44, 45 Sound of Music, The (Wise. 1964),
Rouch, Jean, 74-5, 77 133. 223
Sous les toits de Paris (Clair,
Saboteur (Hitchcock. 1942). 154 1929). 56
Safety Last (Lloyd. 1923). 113 Spaak. Charles, 62
Saint Joan (Preminger. 1957). 162 Squaw Man, The (De Mille, 1913),
Sandford. Jeremy. 79 116
Sang des bites, Le (Franju. 1949). Stagecoach (Ford. 1939), 143, 147
48 Stage Fright (Hitchcock, 1950),
Sang d'un poHe, Le (Cocteau, 154
1930). 186 Steamboat Bill Jr (Keaton, 1928)<
Sawdust and Tinsel (Bergman, 111, 113
1953), 182 Sterling, Ford. 107
ScarlettEmpress (Sternberg. 1934). Sternberg, Jacques, 207
123 Sternberg, Joseph von, 12, 123,
Schenk, Joseph, 117 137, 138
Scorpio Rising (Anger. 1964). 225, Stevens, George. 144
226. 227 Stewart. James. 147. 153. 158
Scott, Anthony. 223 Stiller. Mauritz, 137, 138
Scott. Randolph, 144. 145, 148 Storey. David, 209

J
 Index 253

strangers on a Train (Hitchcock. Umberto D (De Sica. 1951). 68, 69

1951). 156 Under Capricorn (Hitchcock, 1949),
El Stxaub. Jean-Marie. 200-201 154, 158
Stride Soviet (Vertov. 1926). 42 Unicorn in the Garden (Hurtz,
Strike (Eisenstein. 1925). 174-5 1953). 192
Stroheim, Erich von, 18, 50-55, 56, Up the Junction (Loach. 1965). 79
57. 60, 152. 173
Sunrise (Murnau, 1927). 173 Valentino. Rudolf. 134. 139
Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950), Vampires, Les (Feuillade. 1915-16),
B 55 186
Veidt. Conrad, 181
Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941), 156.
158 Vertigo (Hitchcock. 1958). 156,
Sympathy for the Devil (Godard. 158
1968). 217 Vertov. Dziga. 9. 18. 38-43. 71, 220
Vie est d nous. La (Renoir. 1936),
Tahu (Flaherty & Murnau, 1929), 60. 61
34 Vigo, Jean. 56. 61. 187
Tall r. The (Boetticher, 1957), 148 Viridiana (Bufiuel. 1961). 190
Taylor, Elizabeth, 132, 138 Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962), 218,
Temple. Shirley. 123, 135. 136 219
Terra trema. La (Visconti, 1948), Visconti, Luchmo, 19, 57, 67, 68,
67, 136 136, 151, 161
Thalberg. Irving. 52. 116. 120 Vlady, Marina. 217
Tfttrd Man. The (Reed. 1949). 160, Von Morgens bis Mitternachts
182 (Martin. 1920). 181
Thirty-Nine Steps, The (Hitchcock, Voyage across the Impossible, The
1935). 153. 154 (M^li^s. 1904). 27
Thomson. Virgil. 36 Vukotic, Dusan, 194
Three Songs of Lenin (Vertov,
1934), 40 Walking Down Broadway (Stro-
Tillie's Punctured Romance heim. 1932). 55
(Sennett, 1914), 108 War Game, The (Watkins. 1965),
Toby (Leacock. 1955), 71 77
Toni (Renoir, 1934). 57-8. 59. 61 Warhol, Andy. 224
Touch of Evil (Welles. 1958). 181 Warner. Jack, 117. 120. 121, 122
Tout va bien (Godard. 1972). 220 Watkins, Peter. 77-9
Tracy. Spencer. 139 Watt. Harry. 44
Trade Tattoo (Lye. 1937). 192-3 Wavelength (Snow. 1967), 224
Traffic in Souls (Tucker. 1913). 116 Waxworks (Leni. 1924), 181
Tragic Pursuit (De Santis. 1947). 68 Way Down East (Griffith. 1920).
Trans-Europe-Express (Robbe- 103
Grillet. 1967). 211-12 Wayne. John. 132. 140. 144. 145,
Trip to the Moon, A (M^li^s, 1902). 147. 151. 216
27 Wedding March, The (Stroheim,
Tristana (Bufiuel. 1970). 189 1927), 54
Tmka. Jiri. 193-4 Weekend (Godard, 1967). 220
Truflfaut, Francois. 162 Welles. Orson. 19, 55, 152. 161,
Turksib (Turin. 1929), 40 181-2, 197-8
Turner, Florence, 93 Wiene. Robert. 180-81
Turpin, Ben, 107 Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah. 1969).
Ti4^o Pennyworth of Hope 143, 148. 203
(Castellani, 1951), 68 Wild One, The (Benedek. 1954).
2001 (Kubrick. 1968), 202 227
Wild Strawberries (Bergman, Wyler. William, 19
1957). 182
Wilder. Billy. 55 ZabrisJde Point (Antonionl, 1969),
Woman to Woman (Cutts, 1923), 199
153 Zampa. Luigi. 68
Wood. Sam, 123 Zanuck. Darryl F., 117. 120
Workers and Jobs (Hton, 1935). 46 Zanuck, Richard. 121
Wright. Basil. 44. 45 Zavattini. Cesare. 9. 19, 70
Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock, 1957). Zeman. Karel, 194
156 Z^ro de Conduite (Vigo. 1933), 56,
Wuthering Heights (Bunuel. 1953). 61
189 Zimiemami, Fred, 146
Zukor, Adolph, 116, 118. 135
More about Penguins
and Pelicans

Penguinews, which appears every month, contains details of

all the new books issued by Penguins as they are published.

From time to time it is supplemented by Penguins in Print,

which is a complete list of all titles available. (There
are some five thousand of these.)

A specimen copy of Penguinews will be sent to you free

on request. For a year's issues (including the complete
lists) if you hve in the British Isles,
please send 50p
or 75p you live elsewhere. Just write to Dept EP.
if

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, enclosing a

cheque or postal order, and your name will be added to the
mailing list.

In the USA.: For a complete list of books available from

Penguin in the United States write to Dept CS, Penguin Books
Inc.. 7110 Ambassador Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21207.

In Canada: For a complete list of books available from

Penguin in Canada write to Penguin Books Canada Ltd,

41 Steelcase Road West, Markham. Ontario
 Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film
Parker Tyler

The film is still tbe Cinderella of tiie arts. Beside her 'the
other arts take on the look of ugly stepsisters whose affability
and condescension tend to caricature them^ writes Tyler in
this study of sex in the cinema. Yet the bane of Hollywood
over fifty years, as he shows, has been the belief that the
film's ideal function is the reporting of boundless 'facts'

and ^ectacles. Too often the sex goddess of the silver screen
rises more from foam-rubber than a sea of flesh. The success
or failure of the great American epic depends entirely on
whether it strikes popular sympathies in the right area.

Many are the directors and stars with a flair for experiment
and plagiarism. Far above these stand die diverse geniuses
of Chaplin, Eisenstein and Warhol, whose films Tyler regards
as works of art in themselves. Tliis book is a distinguished
critic's evaluation of the film - past, present, and to come,

•Parker Tyler sees, hears and feels more than any of us? -
Richard McLaughlin in the New York Post

:\
a Pelican Boo.

>ok the varyfrfg relatibWT^IpfBDef

lage and reality iniitm^lrofn Lur
^,he present.
^^^^B
l^e author first looks at film realisni|
the early documentaries of Vertov ar
r laherty to cinema-verite - and at the
progress of fictional. realism - from
Stroheim's silent ma^M|[^^, Greed, to
the films of Renoir, i^^^^^L^d the
television work of Kem^^^^^B. In the
second part of his book WHBroers
H iiywocd and film illusion, showing how
th work of Griffith and Chaplin finally gave
:^

system of studios,
book concludes with
CUSSIOI Dwth of film
Pates how film, as
?ntieth-century art
closely related to such movements as
Lssionism and Surrealism, has found
genuinely new form of
3side the novel and the

hows a still from Bunuel's 'Un Chian Andalou'

United Kingdom 7Bp

Australia 12.55 (recommended)
Mew Zealand $2.55 ArtirJ

Canada $2 >5
U.S.A. $2.9^