by Judy Jones
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926). As Caligaribegot the horror film, Metropolis—futuristic and allegorical—generated the sci-fione. Here we’re in a city (said to have been inspired by Lang’s first shipboard view of New York) built on two levels, one for the rich, with skyscrapers and hanging gardens and air taxis, the other—subterranean and prisonlike—for the workers who keep the aboveground society going. The story, which is perfectly preposterous, concerns a banker’s son who decides to go live with the workers, whereupon he falls in love with a girl name Maria. Do note, however, the sets (not that it’s easy to miss them) and the way in which the cast of hundreds is made to function more as scenery than as crowd. As for Lang: He’s a tough nut, and a bitter one (half-Jewish, he’d fled Germany even though Hitler wanted him to stay and make pro-Nazi movies), with a penchant for criminality and angst, the guilty innocent and the femme fatale.
Life underground in Metropolis
Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927; full title, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance). The highlight of the 1927 movie season, when the original seven-hour version premiered at the Paris Opéra. Also, the highlight of the 1981 New York movie season, when a painstakingly reconstituted four-hour version (by movie scholar Kevin Brownlow, egged on by Francis Ford Coppola) was shown at Radio City Music Hall. You’re up against two things here. The first is scale: from the 6,000 extras and 150 sets to the nicely matched ambitions of subject Napoleon and director Gance, plus the sheer enveloping scope of the tripartite, fifty-foot-by-twelve-and-a-half-foot screen. The second is technology. Gance’s Polyvision, as wraparound as Cinerama, in fact predates it by thirty years. What’s more, scholars see Napoléon as a clearinghouse for silent-screen techniques (Gance wasn’t known as the French Griffith for nothing) and tend to be especially overwhelmed by his moving cameras, sometimes handheld, sometimes suspended by wires, sometimes strapped to horses, pendulums, or, we’re told, dancers’ bellies.
Pandora’s Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929). By the other Golden Age German director who, along with Murnau and Lang, you maybe should have heard of. Not Pabst’s most famous movie (that would be Joyless Street or his bastardization of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera or maybe Kameradschaft, about German miners who rescue French ones), but probably your best investment. For one thing, it’ll prepare you for the big-deal Alban Berg opera Lulu, all about sex and parasitism. For another, it’ll afford you the chance to watch American actress Louise Brooks do her thing as Lulu. The movie goes on forever before Lulu, having devoured her fifth or sixth mate, praying-mantis-style, and now down and out in London, meets her match in Jack the Ripper; but there are enough high-perversity moments along the way to keep most of us latter-day sexual sophisticates satisfied.
The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930). Perverse, psychoerotic saga of how cabaret queen Lola Frohlich (Marlene Dietrich), who sings “Falling in Love Again” several times a night and spits into her mascara, transforms poor, respectable Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) into a whimpering clown given to doing his chicken imitation in front of an audience of vindictive former pupils. May give you another interesting insight or two into the frenzy and murkiness of Twenties Germany; will certainly acquaint you with the von Sternberg mystique— the visual bravura; the aspirations toward high art and European culture; the all-in-the-same-breath preoccupation with glitter and gutter; and, of course, with Dietrich, whom von Sternberg subsequently brought to Hollywood and directed in a string of cult classics full of veils, nets, fog, and smoke. After their collaboration petered out in the mid-Thirties, von Sternberg ceased to count for much, but the personal legend, the mastery of cinematic illusion and sexual delusion, the commitment to languor and decadence at a time when other directors were trying to say something meaningful about society, vouchsafe him classic status.
Showgirl (Marlene Dietrich) ensnares educator (Emil Jannings) in The Blue Angel
Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930). For those desiring a glimpse of the Russian countryside beyond what they got in Dr. Zhivago. Dovzhenko, the third genius of Soviet silent film, stands apart from his illustrious colleagues: The son of an illiterate Ukranian peasant, he taught himself filmmaking, didn’t choose to theorize, and had a predilection for the folkways, nicely blended with poetry and satire. His movie world has less to do with montage than with horses that talk (in title cards, of course), paintings of military heroes that roll their eyes, and animals who, as one critic notes, sniff the air and smell the revolutionary spirit. In Earth, his masterpiece, one’s confronted by nature, life, death, childbirth, and a farm in the process of being collectivized. Unfortunately, the shot in which a group of peasants urinate into a tractor’s radiator to keep it from boiling over has been removed from the foreign-release prints.
Le Million (René Clair, 1931). Breezy, flirtatious tale of Parisian artist Lothario who leaves winning lottery ticket in pocket of sports jacket, subsequently lent by softhearted girlfriend to passing thief, who happens to run secondhand clothing store on the side, where jacket is purchased by touring Metropolitan Opera tenor. Somehow, everybody (and all his friends) winds up on stage at the opera that night, then goes back to the hero’s garret for an 81/2-style snake dance. Stylized (somewhere between ballet and puppet theater) and a musical (perhaps the first in which the music really carries the story forward), Million is immensely likable; it’s also the prototype for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Watch what you say about Clair, though. A founding father of the talking picture and considered a paragon of levity and wit as recently as thirty years ago, he’s now written off by many as a fluffhead who relied too much on special effects.
Jewel thieves (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins, right) ensnare perfume heiress (Kay Francis) in Trouble in Paradise
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932). The plot doesn’t recount well (in a sentence, male-female pair of jewel thieves, impersonating aristocrats, set up French perfume heiress) and the stars are disappointingly second-order (Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis). But you’ll find out, in no time flat, what those “Lubitsch touches” are: the “dry sparkle” of language and sexuality; the “artless” wit, visual and otherwise; the “moderne” period sense; the ellipsis, the polish, the perfectionism; the total grasp of Americans’ preoccupation with sex and money; the caress. Lubitsch (according to Andrew Sarris, “the least Germanic of German directors as Lang was the most Germanic”) was also the only silent-era director Hollywood imported from Europe whom it didn’t wind up disappointing, defeating, or, as in the case of Murnau, sending home for burial. Gliding easily from silents to talkies, he pioneered the cinematic, as opposed to the theatrical, musical, adapted himself to Hollywood business ways, coaxed intelligent performances out of empty Hollywood heads, and kept the champagne flowing.
Zéro de Conduite and L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1933 and 1934). Counts as one selection: The revival houses always show them together (Zéro is only forty-five minutes long); besides, having seen the two of them, you’ll have seen Vigo, who died when he was only twenty-nine. One of those poetic rebel types, constantly being compared with Rimbaud and James Dean, he defies categorization and gives the avant-gardiste goose pimples; after Renoir, he’s the single biggest deal in the first golden age of French filmmaking. Zéro, a study of revolt and freedom in a boys’ boarding school, is alternately real and surreal, and so virulently antiestablishment that it was banned, from the critics’ screenings in 1933 (during which fistfights broke out) until after the Liberation. Today’s critics like to note the debts owed to it by such subsequent boys’ school pictures as Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows and Lindsay Anderson’s If… L’Atalante, about a couple of newlyweds attempting to adjust to life together on his river barge, is a less experimental, more commercial affair, adapted from somebody else’s screenplay and tarted up with a Man and a Woman–type theme song, but it’s still pure Vigo: imaginative, iconoclastic, clearheaded.
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1936). The official film record, ordered by Hitler himsel
f, of the sixth Nazi Party Congress, held in Nuremberg in 1934. The prologue has the Führer en route, flying in his airplane over the waiting city, then descending Messiah-like out of the clouds and subsequently marching blithely by tens of thousands of Nazi soldiers, who might as well be soldier ants. Torchlight parades; Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, listening transfixed one minute, Sieg Heil!-ing the next; naked-from-the-waist-up Hitler Jugend; speeches; some drilling of the troops; even dinnertime. Of course we’ll never know for sure whether Hitler really had a crush on the red-haired dancer-skier-actress to whom he encharged the making of movies on his political conventions and on the 1936 Olympics, but she stands enshrined as one of the few truly creative types (and virtually the only truly creative woman type, everyone but Susan Sontag seems agreed) to work in the medium.
Henry V(Laurence Olivier, 1944). The first of the trio of Shakespeare films he directed and starred in (the others are Hamlet, 1948, and Richard III, 1956); the first time Shakespeare was ever made into a good movie; and the first sign from England—apart from Hitchcock and the documentarists—that that country could bring anything at all to the art of the sound film. What’s in it for you? Well, there’s the sheer gloss on the enterprise, from its unprecedented $2 million budget through the Olivier screen presence (in this case, under a haircut that Grace Jones would be proud to have come up with). There’s the enchantment of the movie’s structure, which features a camera traveling over a model of early-seventeenth-century London, on into the hexagonal Globe Theatre, where, get this, the premiere performance of The Chronicle Historie of Henry the Fifth is just getting under way. Finally, there’s the play itself: You get a free crack at Henry V and its “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” and “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” speeches. On the other hand, you’re not going to recognize anybody in the cast besides Olivier (no Gielgud, no Richardson, etc.). And you aren’t fighting the Battle of Britain, as audiences felt they were when the movie first came out; if a lump in the throat or a surge of feeling is what you’re after, you stand a better chance of acquiring it at the Kenneth Branagh version—or at Braveheart.
Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945; English title, Children of Paradise). A lot of movie: sumptuous sets re-creating the Paris of Balzac; six central characters (most notably the mime Baptiste, played by Jean-Louis Barrault; the ham actor Lemaître, played by Pierre Brasseur; and the courtesan Garance, whom they both love, played by the legendary Arletty); two distinct acts; a whole set of art-is-life, life-is-art, play-within-a-play-within-a-movie undercurrents; and a running time of three hours and fifteen minutes. Either you love the “literary,” deliberately old-fashioned style of this superromantic, super-fatalistic spectacle or you side with Truffaut and the New Wave (see next page) and wonder how a director, still in his early thirties, for crying out loud, could make such a reactionary, pretentious piece of crap. Whichever, Enfants is an eyeful, concocted by Carné and the poet/ screenwriter Jacques Prévert, one of the most celebrated pairs of screen collaborators ever.
French, Likewise Hollywoodese,
for the Movie-Goer
Don’t know the grip from the gaffer—or from the dolly? How about the gaffer from the auteur? And what’s a McGuffin for, anyway? Read on.
First, the French. The two most important terms are montage and mise en scène, and, for cinema buffs, they’re opposed. Mise en scène (literally, “put into the scene”) refers to everything that takes place on the set: direction of actors, placement of cameras, deployment of props, choice of lenses, and so on. Montage can mean simply “editing,” or it can mean the kind of creative editing that, à la Eisenstein, juxtaposes specific shots so as to create whole new meanings. For what it’s worth, film-theory fans point out that realists prefer mise en scène, expressionists montage.
Next, three terms rooted in the Fifties and Sixties. The (1) Cahiers du Cinéma reference you occasionally trip over is to a film magazine (literally, “Notebooks of the Cinema”) founded by, among others, the French theorist André Bazin, and contributed to by, among others, such (2) Nouvelle Vague (or “New Wave”) directors as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, all of whom were determined to do in, once and for all, the talky, theatrical, studio-crafted movies of France’s postwar years. For inspiration, they went back a generation to the more spontaneous, more heartfelt Thirties of Renoir, Clair, and Vigo, who, in their opinion, constituted the “authentic” French tradition. They also cast their gaze on Hollywood, on Hitchcock and Hawks and a clutch of other, less prominent directors. Soon they, like their mentors, would be seen as the prime forces, the (3) auteurs (literally, “authors”) behind their movies, mediating style, theme, and technique through a single consistent vision. Truffaut first used the term in 1958; Andrew Sarris, film critic for The Village Voice, is most responsible for promoting the auteur theory in this country.
Two more French terms, by the end of which we’ll find ourselves at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The first is cinéma vérité (the second word means “truth”), which can be used loosely to describe almost any kind of documentary technique (including the application of such techniques to fictional subjects), or strictly to describe movies that—starting in the Sixties—were made with lightweight (and hence very mobile) equipment, two-person camera-and-sound crews, and extensive on-camera interviewing.
The other French term: film noir (the second word means “black”), a term coined by French critics to describe the kind of Hollywood gangster picture in which the crooks aren’t so much bad as sick, and the passions run dark and brooding. John Garfield was the film noir protagonist par excellence, Gloria Grahame or Shelley Winters its abused and no-better-than-she-should-be female lead.
François Truffaut, body-surfing on the Nouvelle Vague
John Garfield, film noir protagonist par excellence
Shelley Winters, as the woman men loved to abuse
Another genre term—strictly American—worth noting: “screwball comedy,” which reached its height in the Thirties, in such films as Bringing Up Baby (1938, directed by Howard Hawks, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant), and which focused on sexual relationships, madcap action, and verbal one-upmanship, usually among the upper class, and which is to be opposed to the slapstick comedy of the silent era. The one other genre-related term not immediately obvious: Alfred Hitchcock’s McGuffin, the plot element or device that, according to him, drives the plot and fuels the audience’s interest, but that can be ignored once it’s served its purpose (for instance, the whole Janet Leigh, love-and-money business at the beginning of Psycho).
Then there’s the technical, get-to-know-your-cameraman vocabulary. Here, it’s a seminal—and tricky—distinction between the zoom and the track that’s most worth paying attention to. Both describe ways of following a moving subject with a camera, the zoom with a lens that automatically refocuses to allow for a variable distance between camera and subject (and subject and background), the track with a moving camera, usually mounted on rails, that maintains a single focus on—and consequently a constant distance from—its subject. Tracking is as a result a steady process; zooming a fast, somewhat arhythmic one in which distant objects can be magnified, or close ones moved rapidly away from.
A pan is what a stationary camera does when it wants to survey its vicinity, simply moving on its axis from left to right, or right to left. Other stationary shots include the tilt (the camera moves up or down) and the roll (the camera lies on its side and maybe turns over). Pans are common, tilts less so (just as one looks up less often than one looks to the side), rolls least common of all, in general relegated to “trick” shots, up to and including the one in which Fred Astaire, in Royal Wedding, seems to be dancing on the ceiling.
Also an issue: Getting from one scene to another. Here the choices include the fade-out (the image gradually goes to black) followed by the fade-in; a dissolve superimposes one image on another, so that the screen is never entirely image-free. With a
wipe, more common in Thirties movies than in contemporary ones, an image appears to wipe off a preceding one. Of course, transition can also be effected by out-and-out cutting. A jump cut within a scene gets us from point A (hero enters room) to point B (hero flops down on bed at far side of room) without forcing us to watch him walk by his desk, his bureau, and his bulletin board with the pennants pinned to it. Cross-cutting establishes a feeling of parallel action by cutting repeatedly from one scene (and mood, and set of characters) to another.
About the equipment: The boom is a traveling arm used to hold the microphone above the actors (and, with any luck, out of the frame), the dolly a set of wheels on which the camera is mounted so as to be able to “track.”
And the personnel. The gaffer, from a nineteenth-century nautical term, is the chief electrician responsible for the placing of light. The grip casts the shadows, working with “flags, nets, and silks,” as a grip of our acquaintance put it, somewhat archaically, we thought. (The gofer makes Danish and Xerox runs.) As for that most mysterious of all cinema terms, best boy, we’re sorry to report that he plays neither page to the director’s knight nor paramour to the leading lady. All he does is assist the gaffer or the grip, a reminder of just how workaday studio, as opposed to Cahiers, life can be.
A Whirlwind Tour of British Poetry
Don’t even think of unpacking. Just wash out yesterday’s socks, then prepare to get a grip on six hundred years of poetry in motion. GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Bifel that in that seson on a day,
