Book Review: The Story of Film

Due to forces not yet fully understood, the remainder tables of America’s corporate bookstores have adopted Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film as a central bargain attraction. Cousins’s revisionist take on film history, 1888 to present, doesn’t seem much at home next to the latest Biskind sleaze-fest or another Marilyn Monroe peek-a-boo collection, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? For five dollars, Americans of every stripe can now be exposed to provocative theses about the history of cinema. That a book arguing, in somewhat populist terms, the centrality of Ozu to the development and poetics of world cinema has found its way to the bargain bins should be recorded for cultural posterity.

The Ozu bit is one of Cousins’s more provocative polemical choices. He argues, contra academic habit, that the real classical cinema was made not in Hollywood between 1917 and 1960 but in Japan during the thirties and forties. Classicism, the thinking goes, describes a certain kind of unadorned and natural unity between form and content, not simply musty memories of a cherished golden age. Hence, Ozu and Naruse and Mizoguchi become the exemplars of the medium. Cousins leaves aside Shimizu Hiroshi who seems to these eyes, at least on the evidence of Forget Love for Now and Japanese Girls at the Harbor, equally important in articulating a classical style in Japanese cinema, but why quibble with the minor omissions of a book so thoroughly committed to expanding the canon of cinema?

At this point I should mention that Cousins does succeed in livening up the standard accounts of film history, not least through flashing forward and backward on occasion to draw unorthodox parallels between the stylistic tropes of, say, The Best Years of Our Lives and Sátántangó. What’s more, there are titles and filmmakers here that even the seasoned cinephile will not immediately recognize. Cousins speaks of Indian filmmaker Baburao Painter and Spaniard Florián Rey in the same breath as Stroheim and Flaherty, all filmmakers who ‘in their social awareness or anthropological ambitions, their meticulous commitment to naturalistic detail and their anxiety about capitalism and exclusion … indicate[d] how incomplete was the view of the world reflected in closed romantic realism.’

‘Closed romantic realism’ is a politically-correct label of Cousins’s own invention meant to supplant the problematic ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ one alluded to above. The ‘closed romantic realism’ business is a slightly disparaging way of summarizing the whole tradition of Hollywood moviemaking, acknowledging that it stands as a phony (closed) and naively evasive (romantic) imitation of the real world while still maintaining some plastic and narrative semblance to it (realism). Fair enough, but I fear that Cousins’s sober and catholic approach to film history only erects new critical blindspots. While Cousins helpfully cites some unheralded dissenters from around the globe, he also counts King Vidor as one who ‘rejected close romantic realism’ on the basis of The Crowd. As a partisan of that film, I would argue that The Crowd illustrates the stylistic and political flexibility possible under the not-quite-so-monolithic Hollywood mode of production. Cousins seems to be suggesting the same thing, but can’t come out to say it.

What’s more, he devotes several pages to ‘postmodern innovators’ like Tarantino and the ‘lively independent production sector’ exemplified by Soderbergh and Hartley but ignores entirely true American independents like Charles Burnett and Billy Woodberry whose rejection of traditional narrative modes would seem perfectly in line with Cousins’s objective to cover ‘great, original films which seem not to have had an impact on successive filmmakers, because they were made in Africa, or poorly distributed, or flopped at the box office, or were directed by a woman, or were misunderstood or banned.’ Other questions: if originality and influence serve as equally valid criteria for inclusion, why are Deren and Warhol included while Brakhage, Kubelka, and countless others are left out? How can one write about Hollywood as ‘closed romantic realism’ and neglect to discuss Frank Borzage, the director who, more than any other, defined, exemplified, and justified that sensibility?

Cousins illuminates certain obscure corners of film history and ignores others that would seem to complicate his theses. The explanations and frameworks are often beguiling and curious but frequently not terribly rigorous. Still, there’s a spirit and openness of inquiry here that more than fulfills Cousins’s stated aim of writing ‘an accessible, jargon-free movie history for general readers and those who are beginning to study film.’ Though imperfect, The Story of Film is better than most any other introductory text book on the subject, despite an appalling number of typographical errors the professionalism of the enterprise.

For more experienced scholars and cinephiles, The Story of Film will appear to be an obvious improvement on the familiar and limited texts that they themselves suffered through on the way to finding the real cinema. Beyond that, Cousins’s text is problematic. Some paragraphs promise exciting discoveries, such as the one devoted to Murata Minoru’s Souls on the Road, a 1921 Japanese production that Cousins brackets with the much more canonical Intolerance and The Phantom Chariot as an example of films juggling multiple epochs through intercutting. I’d never heard of Souls on the Road before picking up Cousins’s book. Does it survive? Do any archives have a print? Cousins doesn’t provide any filmographies that answer these questions. Instead, only this note at the end of the introduction:

I have rewatched almost every film mentioned in this book. In some cases, however, that has not been possible. In these instances, I’m relying on memories of previous viewings. In addition, there are about forty films mentioned which I have never seen. Either prints of them no longer exist or I have been unable to track them down. They are included because filmmakers or historians have made a case for their importance.

That’s quite candid for the author of a work of this scope. Near as I can tell, though, nowhere in Cousins’s narrative does he note that any particular title is lost to neglect and nitrate decay. He does not distinguish in his prose between the extant and the vanished, thus substantially reducing the credibility and utility of his prefatory remarks.

On Marginality, Part III

 
This post constitutes the last of three parts about the genesis and implications of Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart. [Part One] [Part Two]

Rose Hobart is no more the key to Joseph Cornell than Rosebud is the key to Charles Foster Kane. And yet there is something essential in Rose Hobart, something beyond star worship and beyond a jocular affection for mismatched eyeline takes. Cornell is, by one light, the most avant-garde of avant-garde filmmakers—not just in his total suppression of narrative momentum but in his expression of concerns defined almost wholly by his status as an avant-garde filmmaker. Rose Hobart is about marginality, among other things—marginality implicit in the act of watching lovely shadows on a screen, marginality as defined by the viewer’s distance to the actress, and, I would like to argue, a kind of kinship through marginality where the distance between enchanted viewer and B-movie actress is bridged by their common home on the cinematic outskirts. He, a moviemaker without a camera; she, an actress whose face rarely graces a trade paper ad, whose private life remains unexploited by the gossip mongers.

Rather than exploiting Hobart as his private plaything, Cornell illuminates the fragility of her persona: his scissors impugn her autonomy no more and no less than those of the studio editors. Out of East of Borneo he creates something new—but it is a form fully conscious of the newness of East of Borneo, its own cuts just as phantom as his. Cornell, I think, understood that, properly speaking, there may be one East of Borneo—a sordid little eight-reeler running seventy-four minutes—alongside a countless number of alternate versions: heavily scratched 35mm copies; dupey 16mm reduction prints (as was the material source of Rose Hobart); this particular reel or that one; this moment or that one; East of Borneo as a sourcebook of delirious fantasy; East of Borneo as imagined by the child who has heard about it but not seen it yet; East of Borneo as imagined by an adult who read Morduant Hall’s Times review and hesitates to buy a ticket; East of Borneo as remembered after the house lights rise again the theatre, or perhaps inadvertently for the first time after the space of many barren years, now available only as a series of fragments and incomplete gestures. Rose Hobart is a reverie of East of Borneo: the images that come to one’s mind when another speaks its title, accompanied by the sounds of Brazil—not the real sounds of Brazil but the atmosphere of Brazil the arm chair voyager accesses through a Nestor Amaral LP. Its star Rose Hobart is cast adrift in the ether of memory and photography, her image only made meaningful and full again through a sympathetic viewer. As in Warhol’s later silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, only through extreme artifice—that is, visions blatantly truncated from their original commercial context and presented anew—are the ubiquitous star images allowed a measure of unsuppressed personality.

Though composed five years after the premiere of Rose Hobart, a brief Cornell piece from View magazine on Hedy Lemarr seems still the best guide for understanding the artist’s method and motivation:

Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally occur passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prison of silver light. But aside from evanescent fragments unexpectedly encountered, how often is there created a superb and magnificent imagery such as brought to life the portraits of Falconetti in “Joan of Arc,” Lillian Gish in “Broken Blossoms,” Sibirskaya in “Menilmontant,” and Carola Nehrer in “Driegroschenoper?”

And so we are grateful to Hedy Lamarr, the enchanted wanderer, who again speaks the poetic and evocation language of the silent film, if only in whispers at times, besides the empty roar of the soundtrack…. At the end of “Come Live with Me” the picture suddenly becomes luminously beautiful and imaginative with its nocturnal atmosphere and incandescence of fireflies, flashlights, and aura of tone as rich as the silver screen can yield.

Even a viewer more sympathetic to the talkie revolution than Cornell is apt to see his point; Hollywood photography between 1931 and 1941—that is, between East of Borneo and Come Live with Me—seems, to my eyes at least, a golden age of studio photography, the decade during which even the shoddiest of Hollywood features possessed—either through accident or through simple competence—a few glimmering moments. To cite two examples from the beginning of the cycle: neither John Francis Dillon’s 1932 sleaze sideshow Call Her Savage or Sidney Franklin’s 1931 adaptation of Private Lives is a masterpiece, but each contain moments of shimmering glamour that accord Clara Bow and Norma Shearer all the luminance of Dietrich in a Sternberg Valentine. The same holds true for Karl Struss’s work on The Story of Temple Drake or Joseph Walker’s on It Happened One Night, a Poverty Row quickie turned Academy darling thanks to unexpected Heartland popularity, with moments of lyricism worthy of comparison to Murnau’s Sunrise.

What Cornell saw in East of Borneo and Come Live with Me—and what any astute film historian can see given the chance to view most any two random studio programmers from the thirties—is a kind of unconscious grace hidden amid the studio rubble. Note Cornell’s adjective enchanted—the mortal Hedy Lamarr (or Rose Hobart) possessed by the spirit of art without being aware of it. The unconscious part is key: art created accidentally, almost in direct contradiction to one’s orders and plans, a serendipitous moment of beauty that slipped past everyone’s notice. Cornell’s role of curator is a fiercely democratic one—revealing the unconscious depths of poetry within the damaged goods of forgotten product. Cornell may make East of Borneo unintelligible on the level of plot, but he simultaneously makes legible its unintended poetry. No accident that Rose Hobart is framed by an eclipse—everything in between is one long, privileged moment, a journey into the ideal world of beauty that only happens once in a blue (or, in some prints, pink) moon.

Zodiac (2007)

According to a number of internet critics, Fincher’s 160-minute police procedural is some kind of a masterpiece. It’s a gripping piece for much of its length and the editing is so fluid as to suggest a new classicism unfolding before our eyes. I’m thinking especially of the swirl of images and dialogue as Fincher criss-crosses his locations (the Chronicle office, the city police station, the county police station, etc.) as each party learns of a new bit of evidence. It’s the closest any filmmaker has come to adapting the propulsive, multi-camera modern shooting style (inherited from television) into a genuine aesthetic.

It’s masterful but it’s no masterpiece. There’s brilliant, elegantly expressed stuff dancing around the seams of Zodiac—nods to the racist fear-mongering of the era in a panicked police ABP, recurring jokes about how most Californians have no sense of the geography of their own state. But as a period piece, it’s skewed: the yellow walls of the Chronicle newsroom make a stronger impression than any of the brittle milieu that should be palpably surrounding them. This film says next to nothing about San Francisco in the early seventies and only a little more about media complicity in the commission of sensational crimes. What’s here is mainly an obsessive, unsolvable whodunit. At turns, it’s a rather pornographic one, too, with detailed imaginings of the Zodiac killer’s grisly murders; like most teen slasher films, we know what to expect when a young couple pulls off the side of the road. As Joanne Laurier writes in her review for the World Socialist Web Site (a more consistently astute source for film criticism than you might expect), Zodiac falls so short of thoughtful critique that it’s virtually indistinguishable from the exploitative firestorm it purports to examine. Its method is more personal and insular but it’s just as evasive.

Adept as it frequently is, Zodiac as a whole pales next to the sketch for a supremely creepy thriller buried in its eighth reel. By an extremely convoluted chain of speculation that bears no reprinting here, Jake Gyllenhaal finds himself in the home of another could-be-the-Zodiac, this one the proprietor of a repertory movie theater. He and Gyllenhaal descend to the basement, a dank pit stacked with rusty film canisters. There’s an expert template here for a thriller that draws parallels between the nocturnal musk of cinephilia and unfettered homicidal mania. It’s the seed for a grand metaphor to explore the aura of cinematic fatalism that stretches back to the days of nitrate film and the 1897 Charity Bazaar. It’s also, if only in contemplation, a much more interesting movie than Zodiac itself.

On Bergman and Antonioni

And so a chapter closes, or so we’re told. The obituaries that followed the news of two masters’ deaths were, as these things must be, standard-issue profiles drawn up well in advance. It took a few days for the much more interesting pieces to emerge, the ones that yoked together the deaths of the once-chic Italian and the always-dour Swede to make a Statement about the Death of the Art Cinema. The Sunday Arts sections led with these. The titles were suggestive enough: ‘Ode to the ‘art’ film’ (Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times); ‘Closing Credits’ (Ty Burr in the Boston Globe); ‘Before Them, Films Were Just Movies’ (A. O. Scott in the New York Times).

Most of these pieces were baby boomer reflections on spent youth long since passed and presented almost explicitly as such. Some outlets printed deflations, of course. New City syndicates across the country ran J. Hoberman’s essay that ridiculed Bergman’s “high-middlebrow symbolism, evident metaphysical anguish and absence of challenging formal innovation [that] made his movies safe for college English departments.” And the New York Times Op-Ed page found space for Rosenbaum to post a harsh screed in which he concluded “while Mr. Bergman’s films may have lost much of their pertinence, they will always remain landmarks in the history of taste.”

Poor taste though it may be for Rosenbaum to consign Bergman to the category of ‘landmarks in the history of taste’ before the man’s ashes have had a moment to cool, the gushing think pieces essentially say the same thing. The appreciations of Bergman trot out the same hoary catchphrases and watchwords, ‘existential dread’ foremost among them. Few print any new observations or even suggest new ways of watching these films. The most deeply-felt moments in these articles are those in which the authors historicize the passing of Bergman and Antonioni, gliding over the works and focusing on the supposed death of serious cinema or film culture or halcyon days of critical consensus. It is, of course, the height of provincialism to treat foreign artists who made films within a specific cultural and personal context as important chiefly for their contributions to American moviegoing habits.

Schickel is the most up-front about this, even when he pretends he isn’t:

The deaths on the same day of two masters of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, naturally prompt gloomy end-of-an-era reflections […] But, in truth, what I've been mourning these past few days is not so much the passing of these difficult, masterful old men but of the cinematic era they dominated -- which sputtered out, its passing largely unremarked, well over 30 years ago.

Schickel’s piece is not, one supposes, a ‘gloomy end-of-an-era reflection’ because he knows that happened over three decades ago. But his own account makes one suspicious:

I'm talking about the international cinema culture that arose in the postwar 1940s and dominated not just the screens of the world but the sensibilities of a newly impassioned audience at least until the early '70s. I'm talking about Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray, the entire French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Melville) and, lest we forget, the cheeky Czechs of the Prague Spring.

Much as Schickel would like to historicize art cinema, his own honor roll seems historically misleading. Ozu was scarcely seen outside neighborhood theaters on the West Coast until the very end of the ‘golden age of art house cinema,’ and even then he never attracted the kind of hip audience that flocked to Kurosawa and Fellini. Melville’s masterpiece, Army of Shadows, wasn’t distributed in the U.S. until last year. Le Samourai did play the circuit back then—in an English-dubbed print retitled The Godson to capitalize on a certain popular hit of the period.

And what about Rossellini? Here’s Arthur Mayer, who distributed the first neorealist films in the U.S.:

“Open City” was generally advertised with a misquotation from Life adjusted to read: “Sexier than Hollywood ever dared to be,” together with a still of two young ladies deeply engrossed in a rapt embrace, and another of a man being flogged, designed to tap the sadist trade. The most publicized scene in “Paisan” showed a young lady disrobing herself with an attentive male visitor reclining by her side on what was obviously not a nuptial couch.

When Open City opened at Chicago’s Imperial Theater, it was an adult-only show advertised as a “savage orgy of lust!” What about the films he made with Ingrid Bergman? They were obviously ignored in their time or forgotten by the time Hollis Alpert wrote this in an infamous 1959 Saturday Evening Review piece:

I hesitate to say that Bergman’s films are for the connoisseur, for that implies that their appeal is snobbish and even esoteric. It’s already possible to determine whether someone is middlebrow or upperbrow, depending on whether the word Bergman suggests Ingmar or Ingrid.

The point that should be apparent from the above is this: rather than a time of national awakening to the possibility of film as art, the art house age represented by Bergman and Antonioni saw a new insistence on the division between art for us and dross for them. It was the age of Masscult and Midcult, to take a phrase from Dwight Macdonald, who, after much hand-wringing, decided that art could not, by definition, be available to the masses.

That’s what these pieces overlook. They also assume that Bergman and Antonioni instigated auteurism. (Note that the Los Angeles Times also printed a side bar about those new ‘auteurs’: Cameron Crowe and M. Night Shyamalan.) It’s a related assumption, insofar as it elevates the sheen of the era over its historical details. Such terminological clumsiness obscures the schism that made film culture so vibrant in the period discussed—the fact that, for a vocal minority, the real auteurs were Hawks and Minnelli and Bresson. The Antonioni fans of the day would never have denigrated their god as an ‘auteur’: that was the word that Pauline Kael had ridiculed after Sarris suggested that Cukor had a more abstract style than Bergman. That we can today regard both Antonioni and, say, Sirk as great directors is progress from the past, but a position inconceivable without the battles that characterized that very past. Antonioni and Bergman represented one particular kind of cinema art and that was part of the point—an art genre that could be placed alongside, but more often presumed superior to, Manny Farber’s brand of termite art.

The truth is that films and film directors were taken very seriously before the art house era. Intellectuals of an earlier period surely did not need the Ingmar example to recognize that Griffith, Stroheim, Eisenstein, and Murnau were ‘personal’ or ‘distinctive’ artists even if they toiled in the tawdry movie industry. ‘Difficult’ films were indeed made before The Seventh Seal, though it would be irresponsible to suggest that Limite, Vampyr, Borderline, Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, Ménilmontant, The Wind, Enthusiasm, At Land, or Moonrise ever earned a comparable audience. (It should be noted, though, that for New Yorkers of a certain age, The Blood of a Poet and Lot in Sodom were the Seventh Seal of their generation.)

But Bergman and (to a lesser extent) Antonioni still constitute a significant strain in film and cultural history—the film of ‘personal expression’ that does not arise from the kind of national genre traditions or avant-garde responses to the same that could, with some thought, characterize all of the above examples. Bergman, his admirers insisted, always had something to do with Ibsen. True enough, but where is Bergman’s The Doll’s House? As Sarris, a lapsed Bergmaniac, noted in his original review of Persona:

Bergman had no politics to speak of—or to film of—simply because Sweden itself lacked significant political tensions .… Bergman’s metaphysical concerns might not have been as asocial if race riots exploded now and then in Stockholm. Bergman’s American admirers on the art-house circuit were nonetheless ripe for Bergman not only because his concerns were more relevant to the angst of sheer affluence, but because he seemed immune to the corruptions of mass taste. His small crew in Sweden was an eloquent rebuke to the massive apparatus of Hollywood films.

Consider the social commentary in that film: Liv Ullman sees a monk burning himself to death on her television screen. She reacts, as she does to everything else in the movie, with silence. Some pundits have postulated that her silence springs from a sense of alienation from the modern world that can drive a Buddhist to suicide over the Vietnam War. But Bergman doesn’t say much about Vietnam or the Vietnamese here, only about the hysteria inculcated in its observers from afar. It’s the world as a metaphor for interior cacophony.

Bergman’s films are distinctive and unlike those of any one else. They are insular, but not in the same way as, say, Sukorov’s The Second Circle. They come from a comfortable—but not necessarily less valid—position within the Swedish film industry. Though he made dozens of films, Bergman is not just the Swedish Curtiz. He was not striving for continued relevance in a big industry where you were only as good as your last picture. His films reflect a certain degree of privilege, free from the protean striving that even crops up in a great, if glossy, MGM picture like Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner.

Of course, as Kael so gleefully noted, a bad director’s films would be just as distinctive and his oeuvre as perversely whole as those of a good director. So distinctiveness alone cannot be the sole criterion for excellence. In Bergman’s case, though, the distinctive stamp reaches autobiographical heights, as in Fanny and Alexander with its Lutheran minister who finds brittle glee in the anguish of others, setting his playthings up and watching them suffer. That’s the Bergman formula through and through. And yet the intensity of Bergman’s films—their air of confession and private disgrace, of a stillborn catharsis—preempts the charge that his work is slight. If great artists profit from an awareness of their limitations, then Bergman belongs in the first rank. Like Warhol’s films, Bergman’s work operates with the assumption that a small, carefully delimited slice of the world can be harrowing beyond means and therefore truthful beyond measure.

Antonioni’s scope is much more ambitious. His films often amount to desperate tests, the characters wandering through endless social and moral matrices and finding each wanting and not nearly as distinct as had been hoped. He also plays with the limits of the medium, but in a different way than Bergman does, reducing plot to incident and character to a set of gestures and glances. There is, for example, the entrancing moment in L’eclisse wherein Delon and Vitti bend behind the pillars of the stock exchange to glimpse one another in the crowd. Dramatically, there is nothing here, but that’s the point: Antonioni has shifted the very stuff of cinema.

Authorship is never an easy matter when speaking of films, though these two filmmakers foregrounded personal themes and styles as the clearest proof of it. It is, to me at least, a less interesting kind of authorship than Evgenii Bauer updating classic literature for the cinematic idiom or Sternberg using genre conventions and studio resources to realize personal fetishes or, for that matter, Navajo Indians recording their lives at the instigation of anthropologists Adair and Worth. In the latter set of films, one really has a sense of the artist negotiating with the medium. These are first films in a more profound sense than is usually meant, for they are films unburdened with the history of the medium. The very rules of cinema are being discovered between the frames. Next to that, personal anguish artfully expressed looks cheap. And it goes without saying that selling one’s cinema as delicate episodes of personal expression (which, one should admit, Fellini did much more often than even Bergman) invites an equally subjective response. And where subjectivity is concerned, Bergman is easily too histrionic for those raised on Dreyer.

For a generation of filmgoers, though, these personal visions exemplified all that was noble and notable in cinema. (Personal visions of the Bergman-Antonioni variety, not the Brakhage-Mekas one.) The introverted values inherent in their work should not be denied but nor should they be dismissed on that account. The danger, though, in waxing nostalgic about a time when American moviegoers were ready for serious, difficult works is that such an account implies, without much evidence, that they’re indifferent to these things now. Schickel cites expensive Hollywood clunkers of the moment and complains that a contemporary filmmaker like Leconte can’t compete. But that kind of equation ignores the fact that Wild Strawberries bloomed, in its own way, alongside Ben-Hur and that Red Desert opened in the shadow of The Sound of Music. “We would rather be teased than troubled,” writes Scott, “and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness…. I don’t believe that the art of filmmaking has necessarily declined since then (I’d quit my job if I did), but it seems clear the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good.” That sentiment is easy enough so long as Scott doesn’t bother to hail any living filmmakers as supreme artists. Have the last twenty years really been dominated by mindless blockbusters or did it just seem that way because most print critics have been looking for art in all the old places while ignoring new waves in Hong Kong and Taiwan?

Assuming that the youth of America will be bored by the high seriousness and slow pacing of art house pictures, as Burr does in his piece, is a less sophisticated version of the fears that were inaugurated by Sontag’s death of cinema piece over a decade ago. Blaming MTV and Spielberg and home video and a host of other demons only goes so far in explaining why the art house aesthetic died. A better explanation may be that taste-makers conceived art cinema so narrowly that the departure of two of its luminaries seemed tantamount to the death of the medium itself.

UPDATE: Via e-mail, it appears that the pieces discussed above are the cream of a very uneven crop.

Recent Screening Notes: Del Ruth and Tourneur

Taxi! (1932)
Here’s a film that doesn’t live up to its exclamation point. Roy Del Duth directs an early Cagney vehicle in which he plays an independent cab driver resisting mob pressure from Consolidated Cab Co. He eventually marries Loretta Young, the daughter of a veteran cab driver who finds himself in jail after shooting a mob heavy who tried to kick him off his corner in the first reel. The mob intrigue angle is quickly dropped and the film becomes a flaccid melodrama about the domestication of short-fuse Cagney. In this respect, it’s the tragic inversion of Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking of 1935, in which Edward G. Robinson must convince his co-workers that, despite appearances, he really isn’t ‘Killer’ Manion. Both films are about the impossibility of ethnic character actors playing against type and getting away with it.

Despite the uneven script, Taxi! proves an occasionally lively production. There are some unaccountable documentary shots of New York which look all the more incongruous (and oddly surreal) next to the studio sets. And the second scene offers the unparalleled pleasure of James Cagney doing his shtick in Yiddish.

Lorna Doone (1922)

Maurice Tourneur offers his interpretation of Blackmore’s oft-filmed romance. I haven’t read that once-popular chestnut, but Tourneur’s version feels quite streamlined. He keeps his cutting to a minimum and develops a few choice scenes to the hilt. He focuses mostly on partings and reunions, constants in the courtship of Lorna Doone and John Ridd. The material leaves something to be desired, but the film confirms (as if it needed to) Tourneur’s mastery of staging and composition. Most of the major scenes begin in disarray, as characters dance around the frame until they find their way to their preordained places.

This is a highly classical piece, with the emotional logic of character relationships conveyed succinctly in visual terms. One particularly unassuming but accomplished early scene finds Lorna and John standing in the foreground of a forest, speaking for the first time in ten years or more. John’s departure is drawn-out: he holds onto Lorna’s hand for as long as he can while slinking away into the midground and finally slipping away and receding into the background. Tourneur makes many important scenes pivot around the gradual revelation of frame depth. Though not a precise or wholly accurate label, Tourneur appears today to have been a singular and fastidious kind of classicist—the kind who stocked his big scenes with undulating shadows in the foreground to complement the action of the background and adhere to some unspoken, vaguely academic notion that each shot should include enough signposts to prove just how many planes the artist could deploy simultaneously.

On Marginality, Part II

This post constitutes the second of three parts about the genesis and implications of Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart. [Part One] [Part Three]

Incomplete is neither an epithet nor a judgment of Rose Hobart so much as a sad historical fact. The urtext of Cornell’s first film is frustratingly elusive: while all the extant copies of the film adhere to the same montage (a mélange of East of Borneo, along with some unidentified stock shots), the performative aspects of Rose Hobart have been in some state of dispute since 1936. For its premiere at the Julien Levy Gallery, Cornell reportedly screened his 16mm print of Rose Hobart at silent speed, through a blue glass, with musical accompaniment from a Nestor Amaral record Holiday in Brazil. Though ‘silent speed’ can refer to a range of different frame rates, Rose Hobart is usually screened or transferred to video at 18 frames per second—the probable ‘silent’ preset on most portable 16mm projectors—resulting in a uniform length of 19½ minutes. Color and sound are more contentious. When the first digital incarnation of Rose Hobart was presented on the fourth disc of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Treasures from American Film Archives DVD boxset in 2000 (an expensive niche set, but still easily the widest distribution and exposure ever given to Cornell and his films), the film, taken from an Anthology Film Archives print, was bathed in deep lavender and accompanied by three tracks from the Amaral album—two instrumental and another vocal, called ‘Playtime in Brazil.’ When the film was released on Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell disc put out by the Voyager Foundation through the Museum of Modern Art four years later, the color was a pale blue-purple and the soundtrack featured only two songs—both instrumental, and only one the same as on the Anthology/Treasures copy. To further complicate the matter, the Walker Museum holds a pink print of Rose Hobart—also the tint of the color plates from the film in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s widely-assigned Film History: An Introduction textbook. One suspects, though, that Cornell—an artist highly enamored of interactive objects, though that point is obscured when his boxes are presented under glass in museum collections—may have liked, or even wanted, it this way. [1]

The Rose Hobart premiere is a storied event in the history of both modern art and avant-garde cinema. The legend is famous enough—an exasperated Salvador Dali interrupts the film, screaming “Salaud!” and (in some versions) kicking over the projector. The timid Cornell, legend has it, wondered aloud ‘Why, why—when he is such a great man and I am nobody at all?’ (Dali’s official reason for mischief: he had once considered making a film exactly like this, but never wrote it down; Cornell had stolen it—from his subconscious). The riot of one was enough to frighten Cornell away from showing his films publicly for three decades. Private screenings at the Cornell colonial on Utopia Parkway in Queens were the only way to see the film. Nevertheless, the absence of Rose Hobart from most accounts of film history until recently is still rather mysterious, especially given that the leading mainstream American film historian of the thirties, Lewis Jacobs, author of the ubiquitous The Rise of the American Film, was also himself an avant-garde filmmaker (Footnote to Fact, Tree Trunk to Head) of some repute in New York and a chronicler of that New York avant-garde scene in a 1949 survey published in Roger Manvell’s international Experiment in the Film anthology. The film history textbook trade, even when conceding space to Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and loose antecedents like Ralph Steiner, neglected Cornell’s films for many years; one will not find a reference to him in anything by Gerald Mast or Louis Giannetti.

Even most purported histories of the avant-garde or underground cinema sidestep the Cornell problem, either entirely (c.f., James Peterson’s Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order; David Curtis’s Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution; A.L. Rees’s A History of Experimental Film and Video, published in 1999 when Cornell’s films were certainly in circulation; or the History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema catalogue issued by the American Federation of the Arts) or reference Cornell’s later collaborations with Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan without discussing Rose Hobart at all (c.f., Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Film). To their credit, P. Adams Pitney and Dominique Noguez (the latter writing in French) analyze the film and attempt to ascertain its influence in their respective histories, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 and Une Renaissance du cinéma: le cinéma “underground” américain—though both record East of Borneo as a Columbia release. Sitney even helpfully prints a hitherto unpublished Anthology Film Archives interview with Ken Jacob that puts to rest any assumption about the film’s influence on subsequent avant-gardists:

I was seeing Jack [Smith] again and I told him, “Jack, you’ve got to see this movie.” We looked at it again and again, and we were both knocked out. Jack tried to act at first like a little bit removed, like I was overstating it, and then he broke down and said, “No, it’s very good.” We looked at it in every possibly way: on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room, in corners, in focus, out of focus, with a blue filter that Cornell had given me, without it, backwards. It was just like an eruption of energy and it was another reinforcement of this idea I had for making this shit film [Star Spangled to Death] that would be broken apart and then again there would be an order.

The circumstances of the premiere being what they were, one would expect some astute historian to seize upon the December evening as the American cinema’s Rite of Spring. Such a reading would, in the very least, be firmly in line with subsequent Cornell scholarship, which repeatedly revels in an almost gawking conflation of the artist’s life and work. Joseph Cornell: earl of Utopia Parkway, outsider artist toiling in his basement on brilliant Surrealist boxes to entertain his retarded brother to the indifference of his ailing mother. A homebody who never left New York, haunting recital halls and finding his artistic inspiration in antiquarian bookstalls. Never married, perhaps a lifelong virgin, definitely an innocent—a would-be queer aesthete had he known he could be one. In short, a kind of nebbish savant for the art world set. Although Cornell did not screen Rose Hobart publicly for many years, one obviously cannot and should not assume that Rose Hobart remained locked in storage unseen; Cornell screened the film privately and even lent it out on occasion.

Whether it is Sandra Leonard Starr’s reading that appraises his art through the lens of Church of Christ, Scientist founder Mary Baker Eddy and her writings or Michael Moon’s ‘revisionist’ reading that locates Cornell’s style in his fondness for sugar pixie junk food, the overriding tendency is to deify Cornell as an accidental, improbable, and dingy genius. Yet the biographical evaluation of Cornell is oftentimes so intent on mythologizing Cornell (as blissful dreamer, as lunatic seer, as self-styled schlemiel redeemed through homespun surrealism) that it obscures the Cornellial contradictions that account for most of his mystique. Cornell’s domestic difficulties and many accounts of odd pilgrimages to Utopia Parkway (c.f., that of John Ashbery) suggest an outsider artist par excellence, but before establishing Cornell as the patron saint of Art Brut, one should remember that he exhibited in the same gallery as Ernst, Dali, and Duchamp, served as a designer for Dance Index magazine, corresponded with Susan Sontag, hobnobbed over Kool Aid and cafeteria jellyrolls with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol, and lived the life of an amateur scholar much more than most are comfortable in admitting. Cornell’s knowledge of nineteenth-century theater and ballet, accrued from long days at the New York Public Library, was deep enough to make him a world authority on the subject. His pack-ratting was widely known and Cornell was enlisted to lend bits and pieces of his disorganized picture collection to MoMA and the NYPL for, respectively, a 1933 exhibition of film stills and a 1950 fairy tale exhibition. 

Even the standard interpretation of Cornell’s filmmaking—whether Jodi Hauptmann’s Mulvey-inflected analysis of Cornell’s exploitative gaze or Noguez’s description of Rose Hobart, ‘un bel album de "fan" cinephage’—tends to present Cornell’s cinephilia as slightly unhinged fan behavior, at the expense of considering Cornell as a true film historian. In a survey written for a MoMA catalogue on Cornell, Sitney quotes from an unfinished letter Cornell wrote to French film historian Claude Serbanne in 1946:

Still I think we owe [Ferdinand Zecca] a debt for doing what melies seldom did,—working en plein air, leaving a record Atget-like of so many of the Parisian fin-de-siecle landmarks (the unpretentious ones like the boutique of a charcutier such as I have in my “The Man with the Calf’s Head” which Dali liked so much and in which he [sic] a quality of Gérard de Nerval. And then again this type of work influenced René Clair in his early work.)

That film history has still, by and large, failed to meaningfully assimilate Zecca into its grand narrative makes Cornell’s remark all the more beguiling. The difficulty lies in reconciling the Cornell mythos—a junk collector buying up random 16mm films by the pound from a seedy Jersey shore scrap yard, which, again, comes from Levy—and the evidence that he acted, on occasion, as a surprisingly sensitive art historian.

So Cornell remains a most perplexing enigma: neither urbane nor innocent, neither savvy nor vulgar, a great man who insisted he was a nobody or a nobody who everyone else pretended was a great man.

 
[1] A further error is implicit in Levy’s recollection of the premiere, found in his Memoir of an Art Gallery, probably the only extant account of the first screening of Rose Hobart and certainly the one that all other accounts draw upon. According to Levy, Rose Hobart was preceded by Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer, and an earlier Cornell’s film entitled Goofy Newsreel. While Levy does not write about Goofy Newsreel in much detail (other than to point to its ‘unfortunate title’), he does imply that it is a Cornell film—as opposed to the program of films Cornell occasionally hosted under the Goofy Newsreel banner. P. Adams Sitney’s report on Anthology Film Archives’ Cornell holdings does not mention any extant film called Goofy Newsreel and it is quite likely that Levy confused Cornell’s usual assortment of silent shorts with a carefully edited film proper like Rose Hobart.

The Hart of London (1970)

Jack Chamber’s longest film, called “one of the few great films of ALL cinema” by Stan Brakhage and ignored by most everyone else aside from Fred Camper, is a beguiling experience. Its first half consists of a series of dense superimpositions of material that seems to be stock newsreel footage of London, Ontario. Significantly, the forms buried here only begin to become legible when shadow crosses shadow—otherwise everything is a blown-out blur. There must be a profusion of contradictory images before any one image makes sense. That’s the theory that informs the flow of the whole film.

Chambers said that the theme of The Hart of London is ‘generations,’ which is accurate but something of an understatement. What comes through is a real feeling for the history of the city, and the relationship between children and their parents, but also the relationships between the residents and the city fathers, between local events and national attention, between daily life and its translation into news fodder, and finally between humans and the wider animal kingdom. It’s a film that studies particular cases and circumstances under wider notions of hierarchy, ancestry, and history. In a sense, it’s an ecological film.

Chambers utilizes found footage with a sincerity rare among North American avant-garde filmmakers. Unlike, say, Bruce Conner or Kenneth Anger, who take old stock footage or clips from a DeMille spectacle and deconstruct the ideological underpinnings of the footage, Chambers presents scenes of London life that could serve as a chronicle of local history vivid enough to impress the town council. The images of London professionals and politicians spill one into another like an arcane corner of memory yearning for resurrection and annotation. Rather than critiquing these images, Chambers uses them as a point of departure. By the time his chain of associations has led to a startling and unexpected full color scene, we’re clearly in the presence of a major film.

Zabriskie Point (1970)

For its first two reels or so, Michelangelo Antonioni’s first and only American film, Zabriskie Point, fits squarely with the style of other contemporaneous youth chic ‘vignettes from the revolution’ productions like Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, and, for that matter, the Monkees’ Head. Which means that it starts with a procession of Maoist or black power sketches that flow endlessly and somewhat uncomfortably into one another. Some black revolutionaries question whether white suburbanites would ever really risk his life to kill a pig. One pasty student vows that he will do just do. But he’s lost amidst a sea of protests and billboard jokes.

Zabriskie Point was produced during the anarchic period when the American studio system— realizing that its idea of great youth picture, Doctor Doolittle, had become utterly irrelevant in the marketplace—opened the floodgates to anti-Establishment pictures and begged for its life. So here we have Antonioni under the imprimatur of MGM—a picture divided against itself, the product of an entertainment conglomerate that tells us that zombies in grey flannel suits run your father’s Corporate America. It’s a film by and about a ruling class eager to destroy itself for one last buck.

This changes when the film slows down and moves out to the desert. Mark, the cop killer from the first scene, has stolen a private plane and, like all horny revolutionaries, uses his propeller to flirt with Daria, an alienated chick driving alone on the desert road. He buzzes over her car, swoons down towards it, nearly collides with it, only to pull back up at the last minute. She eventually flags him down. They talk, wander, and eventually make love. These sections are the film’s most accomplished—a startling union of exact cutting and ‘Scope composition that ascends to a kind of beatific plane.

Critics spat upon Zabriskie Point upon its first release in 1970, pointing to incoherence, pretentious dialogue, absurd pretexts for desert orgies and the like. But over thirty years later, it’s clearly a great, precise film of its time. The last reel elevates the whole piece to one of the saddest films I know. Daria stands on the side of the road, listening to a radio report about Mark’s death. She stands with her back to the camera, crying. It’s here that the relation between Zabriskie Point and Antonioni’s earlier output becomes clear. In that moment, when she realizes the bleak fate of her privileged life after one sullied and extinguished spark, she is no different from the bored aristocrats that populate L’Avventura. She has come as close as she ever will to radical excitement, knowing that she could never die for a cause as casually as her boyfriend. Daria, deflowered flower child of privilege, knows that she will never do anything so exciting for the rest of her life.

In short, Zabriskie Point becomes, like Easy Rider, a bleak vision of a generation’s demise. The fatalism is understated and subtle but much more affecting.

Reign of Terror (1949)

Henry Sheehan once speculated that the current vogue for film noir stems from the fact that the heightened stylishness of the pictures allows viewers without much sensitivity to lighting and camera angles to pretend they know something about film style—Mise en Scene Made EZ. Anyone can look at The Third Man and spout something about unsettling, crooked angles and ‘the influence of German expressionism.’ Film noir suggests a pre-packaged stable of themes, situations, and, above all, postures and attitudes: in today’s terms, it’s shorthand for a caustic, cynical wallop of baroque style that’s notable for its position as an implied opposite to the dangerous melodrama assumed typical of vintage Hollywood product. Old movies are dreary things you see on TV and can’t believe anyone was ever cowed over. Film noir is something that makes you sit up and marvel at the coarseness of the sensibility—and to think, right alongside those silly, sappy things. Instead of laughing at vernacular dialogue that now comes across as camp to the untrained ear, the noir buff prefers to indulge in stylized banter that was pure excess in its day.

Needless to say, the predilection for noir often but not always entails some condescending notion about what the movies used to be. Amidst a sea of weepies, here’s something modern and sexy. Noir buffs will pack the house for the most undistinguished, ‘re-discovered’ noir but steer clear of contemporaneous masterworks. Film noir, a term never used by its practitioners but applied liberally by critics and copyright holders, wouldn’t be such a frustrating conceptual framework were it a more productive one. The greatest noirs, it seems to me, are constricted, rather than made more legible, by that label. Sexual humiliation and moral degradation form the thematic heart of the genre, yet to simply pass off the pathetic scent of Scarlet Street as the apogee (or would it be nadir?) of noir pessimism seems to diminish the unique achievement of that picture. And even Kiss Me Deadly doesn’t approach the apocalyptic fatalism of Criss Cross, which ends with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo escaping to the figurative edge of the earth—still unprotected, still ill at ease, still waiting only for death.

Reign of Terror, directed by Anthony Mann and photographed by John Alton, stands as a great noir that forces modern viewers to accept an even more elastic definition of that elusive style-genre. Unlike most noirs, Reign of Terror moves outside the city and outside the cynical present into the tortured anarchy of the past. Set in 1794, it’s a gloss on the French Revolution that turns the fall of Robespierre into the most rollicking string of outlandishness criminal episodes that Feuillade never made.

It unfolds with the impossible but unassailable dream logic of a séance. Among its special details: an underground bakery that hides plutocrat henchmen; a quest for a single black book hidden somewhere in the rows and rows of empty ones; a bodyguard conquered by a gang of children armed only with pillows; a man strangled to death in one scene and perfectly conscious (and duplicitous) in another; guards who fire into a cage of a condemned prisoners without provocation; two lives spared with the promise of poultry; the same two saved later because a heavy kicks a kitten against a wall. It concludes with this divine joke: the only man whose word might free your lover from death has just been shot in the mouth, never to speak again. To subsume all of these surreal moments under the aegis of film noir expands the aesthetic possibilities of that style but shackles them to a set of expectations that remains stale and unedifying.

All of the above hints at why the film is interesting; an account of its singular skill and sophistication should demonstrate why it is good. Reign of Terror surely ranks as one of the most resourceful B picture programmers. Mann does not present the storming of the Bastille or any comparable spectacle. The crowd scenes are accomplished with clumsy rear projection photography. But most of the picture unfolds under endless shadows. The first meeting of Robert Cummings and Arlene Dahl is a fine example of the whole. He stands behind her in his dark hotel chamber, maintaining his grim composure and hoping that his allegiance to oppositional leader Barras will constitute the right answer to her question about loyalty. The wrong one will land him a knife in the abdomen. His face barely emerges from the shadows, yet hers seems submerged in them, a lovely spectre with tentative corporeality. They hold the pose while they exchange their dialogue, They deliver the lines so coldly and nervously that, for perhaps only a moment, they do seem like little more than figures drafted to demonstrate all the gradations of light that an ace cinematographer like Alton can pull out of a set-up like this. The shot exudes such palpable desperation, such eloquent fear that both actors will dissolve into shades. This is more than noir moodiness—this is a moment wherein line and weight and depth alone wholly express the urgency and fright of recognition and obscurity dictated by the plot.

Reign of Terror, then, is a drama of connection and communication. Its mode occasionally slips into excess, as when Danton and others leer into the camera, eyes cast straight ahead, forehead engulfing the screen, and deliver an exhortation. It is a direct, disarming mode of address that could, in any other context, come across as crude theatrics. But as Reign of Terror takes as its subject the thorny divide between democracy as an ideal and democracy as a back-stabbing, intrigue-heavy mode of political practice, the style is appropriate. These direct appeals to the mad mob in the audience stand as but one kind of rhetorical conflation practiced by Mann in Reign of Terror. Logically enough, a story of popular uprising in one period finds its expression in the popular narrative entertainment of another. A low genre and style designed to shake and startle its spectators to the core with thrills becomes the closest aesthetic and emotional equivalent to the political upheaval of a distant revolution. This is not the kind of historical film that draws a simple parallel between modern anxieties and portentous allegorical modes of the past, such as The Seventh Seal. Instead Mann demonstrates that the modern thriller, with its immediate emotional register and synaesthetic ambitions, approximates and replicates the paranoia of the past.

These parallels work so well because the film functions expertly as a thriller. Its assaults and conspiracies come across splendidly because Mann and Alton construct each episode with admirable rigor. They try as much as possible to keep all the action in a single shot, resorting to shock cuts only sparingly. Instead of letting a kidnapping or a beating simply interrupt the action (through a cut), they offer terror as an intrusion upon the continuity and harmony of the compositions themselves. Attacks come from within—brute violence that halts a character from crossing the frame or traversing its depths.

Again, though, the thematic unity of the thrills is the remarkable thing about Reign of Terror. The film’s anxiety over identity and loyalty has struck some as veiled commentary about the coming HUAC storm. This interpretation is too simple, both because it obscures the other major cultural message that might reasonably be taken from the film (one about fascism and mob rule and totalitarian dictatorship perpetrated through democratic means, whether in 1794 or 1933) and because its fears are more elemental. Reign of Terror justifies and elevates the Hollywood thriller because it, however improbably, aims to show that the routine tropes familiar to anyone with a knowledge of serial novels, detective pictures, propaganda stories, neighborhood theater productions, comic books, and the like actually drive the forces of history.

On Marginality, Part I

 
This post constitutes the first of three about the genesis and implications of Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart. [Part Two]. [Part Three].

On 21 June 1930, Universal Pictures announced twenty forthcoming films in its Universal Weekly trade paper, among them an unassuming jungle thriller called Ourang:

A startling dramatic romance filmed in the unexplored wilds of Borneo. Unique with almost unbelievable thrills and overflowing with virgin jungle color. The picture tells an absorbing tale of love and sacrifice in which a white derelict and a native girl find the only road to happiness stemming the stampede of the fierce ourangutans [sic]. Filmed by an expedition headed by Harry Garson.

Universal never completed, let alone released, Ourang. The demise of the project is unrecorded, but Garson incorporated most of the Universal footage into his subsequent feature The Beast of Borneo, issued in 1934 by his ad hoc road show company Far East Productions, Inc. By the time The Beast of Borneo was taken off the shelf, Universal had already recycled Garson’s Ourang footage for its 1931 Rose Hobart vehicle called (fittingly) East of Borneo.

Despite an aberrational sensation like All Quiet on the Western Front, Universal was a minor studio at the dawn of sound. Its assets hovered at $15.5 million in 1931—ahead of Columbia’s $6.35 million, but far, far behind the $173 million of Fox, the $213 million of Warner Brothers, and the $306 million of Paramount. East of Borneo was a cheap picture for a cheap studio, shot in four weeks by director George Melford.

Melford had been directing films since 1911. By the early thirties, the best gig he could find was Paul Kohner’s unit at Universal. Kohner headed the studio’s Spanish language unit—a truly marginal little department that turned out full Spanish language versions of the bigger studio properties (shot after hours on the same sets as the English versions, but with entirely different casts and crews) before the studios settled on dubbing as its standard for distributing their fare internationally—and hired Melford to direct a few features, despite the latter having no knowledge of the language. Given their working conditions, Melford and Kohner ground out a remarkable product—including their 1931 Spanish version of Tod Browning’s Dracula, by common consensus superior to the English version in every technical respect but not screened outside of Latin American cinemas for decades. Given the thriftiness of the unit, the trade buzz on East of Borneo—namely that the shoot was “begun in Sumatra, Shanghai, and the Far East by a sound-equipped expedition”—is rather difficult to swallow, unless read as an oblique reference to the Ourang expedition. East of Borneo, despite its English soundtrack, is every bit as threadbare as Dracula; Melford even recycles that film’s leading lady, Lupita Tovar, in a smaller role (though East of Borneo exploits Miss Tovar’s cleavage with aplomb equal to that of Dracula).

 
East of Borneo opened at the RKO Mayfair in New York on 25 September 1931, playing on the top half of a double bill with Murnau’s even more exotic Tabu (recently reduced to “popular prices”). The New York Times noted that East of Borneo ‘has its full quota, in fact a plethora, of jungle thrills.’ The Times’ Mordaunt Hall (clearly not the target audience for the film) admits at the end of his review that amid the amusing but juvenile pleasures of the jungle spectacle one finds ‘Miss Hobart ... serv[ing] the picture in her usual intelligent fashion.’ Variety’s review, published four days later, opened this way:

Sensational jungle and animal story loaded with thrill and natural for the neighborhood trade, even if it is pretty naive in treatment for the deluxers. For the class spots, however, it is promising for a week. Picture that ought to be great in the right places and moderately strong anywhere except blue-stocking clienteles.

Variety, too, singled out Hobart, noting she “plays a stilted role with the maximum of plausibility, and is even more than ever suggestive of Norma Shearer.” Another trade review, published as a preview in the 23 August issue of Film Daily, was more enthusiastic, calling East of Borneo “a colorful Oriental jungle meller that has practically everything ... it pours in everything of showmanship with prodigal profusion.” Photoplay wrote that East of Borneo was “a splendidly photographed thrill-story … exciting enough and beautiful enough to satisfy theater-goers with adequate work by Charles Bickford, Rose Hobart, and Georges Renavent.” neglected the matter of Hobart’s performance, they rated the direction “excellent” and the photography “the best”—the highest accolades Film Daily accorded to any of that week’s eight previews. Photoplay wrote that East of Borneo was “a splendidly photographed thrill-story … exciting enough and beautiful enough to satisfy theater-goers with adequate work by Charles Bickford, Rose Hobart, and Georges Renavent."

Universal touted the early success of East of Borneo with a subsequent ad in Film Daily (“universal gave rko a smash picture[.] rko gave it a smash ad campaign[;] a smash lobby ... a smash 24-sheet campaign[;] a smash exploitation resulting in smash business at rko’s mayfair), but the picture was not a sustained success: in the 1932 Film Daily Yearbook, Universal’s ad read, “The company that gave you frankenstein and strictly dishonorable takes great pride in calling your attention to this imposing list of hits,” followed by two columns of twenty-three titles—East of Borneo buried in nineteenth place. The next page of Universal’s big ad buy featured a full-page publicity pic of studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr., followed by one of Strictly Dishonorable director John M. Stahl. Similar treatment was never accorded to marginal Melford and East of Borneo failed to crack the top fifty of the Film Daily Yearbook critics’ poll. So after a circuit of cheap runs, the picture built from the scraps of the never-completed Ourang disappeared from public view. That is, until December 1936 when Joseph Cornell would take the scraps of East of Borneo and fashion his perpetually incomplete masterpiece Rose Hobart.

Recent Screening Notes: Hawks, Walsh, Resnais

A Girl in Every Port (1928)
This film belongs in the second tier of Hawks’s credits, though it contains in embryo many of the situations and attitudes that would be crucial to his best work. It’s the template of all the Hawks pictures that came after it, as well as most of the derivative ‘buddy’ pictures that owe a debt to Hawks. It doesn’t reach the highest level of Hawks’s achievement because the whole film basically just follows the episodic carousing of randy sailors Victor MacLaglen and Robert Armstrong. Its limited scope only allows for so many variations upon a theme, as opposed to the polyphonic exploration of human dignity found in a film like Rio Bravo or To Have and Have Not.

Louise Brooks emerges in the second half of the film as a carnival performer who must hide her past with Armstrong to secure a future with MacLaglen. (Brooks is introduced, it should be noted, literally gliding across the screen in an amazing low angle shot that simulates the point-of-view of a water bucket. Hawks was still evidently in the fussy, Murnau-influenced stage of his career that he would later denounce.) Brooks’s role is underwritten and her presence, though lovely, is ultimately problematic because it throws into relief the brawny limitations of MacLaglen’s own acting style.


Manpower (1941)
This may be the ultimate MacMahonist movie. Raoul Walsh directs an improbable story of two roughneck linemen buddies (Edward G. Robinson and George Raft) who nearly kill each other over ex-con and clip-joint ‘hostess’ Marlene Dietrich. The filmmaking here is as strong as anything Walsh ever did. The opening five minutes—a crazy montage of big machines, downed power lines, ringing telephones, fast trucks, and loose dancing—features constant camera movement as spectacular as anything in L’Herbier’s L’Argent (1928) and a devotion to speed that would impress any Futurist.

After that things settle down a tad, but the film still derives it effect from unexpected juxtapositions. The most economical and expressive is a memorable image of Dietrich, the night after her honeymoon with Robinson, bending over the kitchen stove in an apron, smoking a slim cigarette. Like everything else in Manpower, this image contributes to a rather discordant fantasy of blue-collar American life. Another image that falls under that index: the grubby linemen playing poker in their well-decorated, white-telephone boarding house. And the subsequent image of a forty-year old kid sliding down the banister of said boarding house with his ass to the camera.

Also notable is the wedding scene in which the traditional bride-and-groom figures atop the cake have been replaced by two towers linked by electrical line. It’s a curiously phallocentric image in this, one of the most homoerotic of studio pictures. If nothing else, it clarifies the implications of the earlier scenes of the linemen bending over an unconscious Robinson and taking turns pumping up and down on his shoulders.


Pas sur la bouche (2003)
A companion piece of sorts to Resnais’s great Mélo (1986), Pas sur la bouche is another unfashionable descent into the popular theatrical forms of the 1920s. Instead of a melodrama, the genre here is the operetta. Resnais preserves (and makes newly legible) the wit of the original piece, but also infuses it with a strange, distanced melancholy. Rather than crafting a reactionary antique, Resnais presents topical satire of the past without any ironic affectation. So, in a small way, he restores the relevance of immigration hysteria of the twenties by unflinchingly, if implicitly, presenting it in the light of recent EU anxieties. More significantly, though, he resurrects an unfashionable style not to evoke nostalgic feelings, per se, but to demonstrate the superficiality of fashion as such: as with Mélo he wrings some enormous emotional depth from a disreputable tradition and, in doing so, confronts his audience with a question about the very meaning of style and form. Caught in the past but pungent in the present, Resnais’s adaptation presents most of the musical numbers in single, gliding takes that play so subtlety with depth, perspective, gesture, and movement that a full appreciation can only be gained after multiple viewings. Again like Mélo (and, for that matter, like Gertrud), much of the feeling and impact of Pas sur la bouche come from the evident and exacting care put into giving each line of text its most sympathetic and supple airing. It’s not a translation of theater so much as a complete consideration of how its materials might best be rendered organic and new for the cinema. About as entertaining as any two hours in the movies and a masterpiece. 

On the Waterfront (1954)

For whatever reason, I came to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront after seeing eight or nine Frank Borzage films. According to the American Film Institute, On the Waterfront is one of the great American films while Borzage’s work—like that of Sternberg, Vidor, Ophüls, or Lubitsch—remains unsanctified and unsanctioned. But, given the proximity of a 35mm screening and some sense that I was unduly dismissing a film I simply never had much of a desire to see, I trudged to On the Waterfront recently.

There are certainly great things buried here. Boris Kaufman’s photography deserves special mention: he attempts a sort of Life Magazine version of neo-realism—gritty but not cock-eyed, superficially immediate but geometrically precise. Whatever coherence the film has emerges from Kaufman’s camerawork. It certainly doesn’t come from the directing and scripting. Kazan and Schulberg keep their eyes on the morals here; all the points are underlined, all the metaphors made explicit, telling business and expressive gestures strictly aberrational and never fully part of the larger atmosphere. In other words, reminiscent of the Ford of The Informer rather than the Ford of How Green Was My Valley. The mood is unrelentingly grim in a way that forsakes the possibility of the elegant digression; instead the elegance quota must be satisfied with the trite symbolism of pigeons flocking around Brando the stoolie. Brando's performance, as some have remarked, is pretty good, but that’s easy compared to narrative and psychological cipher that is Eva Marie Saint. Karl Malden’s performance as the priest is histrionic and pitched unevenly enough to begin with; it is seldom helped by Leonard Bernstein’s underscoring, which often aims to elevate this scraggly proletariat fairy tale to a soaring middle-brow outing to Lincoln Center.

The political theme is rather dubious. Perhaps best understood when clustered with other contemporaneous liberal-rightwing Hollywood movies such as The Sun Shines Bright and Bad Day at Black Rock, On the Waterfront infamously, if only implicitly, equates speaking surly truth to mob power with naming names for HUAC. But an ideological critique of On the Waterfront need not venture outside the film itself, which essentially presents the dockworkers as a gullible mass with such limited class consciousness that they actively sabotage their own interests (shades here, too, of Metropolis). Kazan presents the Hoboken underclass as an amalgamation of unthinking automatons, ready to toe the mob line and spit upon their martyr until he demonstrates anew his capacity for righteous violence. For a film supposedly on the side of the people, On the Waterfront fits rather snugly in the rightwing tradition of celebrating unabashed individual courage, even if that means turning a real political situation into an abstract match between heroes and villains. Classic this ain’t.