Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. The Major Film-Makers, Volume One: Aldrich to King [One]

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CINEMA A CRITICAL

DICTIONARY TH E MAJOR FILM-MAKERS Edited bv Richard ^

Volume One: Aldrich

to

Roud King

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2014

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CINEMA: A Critical Dictionary Volume One

ALDRICH

to

KING

MENLO PARK PUBLIC LIBRARY (650) 858-3480

CINEMA A

Critical Dictionary

The Major Film-makers

Volume One

ALDRICH

Edited by

KING

Richard Roud

The Viking

New York

to

Press

Martin Seeker & Warburg 1980 in England by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd in the USA and Canada by The Viking Press

c

Published Published

No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of both Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd and The Viking Press All rights reserved.

Printed in Great Britain

Filmset in

Monophoto

Plantin

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main

entry under

Cinema:

title:

a critical dictionary

includes index.

Moving-pictures

1.

— Dictionaries. —

PN1993.45.C5 79i.43'o3 ISBN 0-670-22257-7 (vi)

1. Roud, Richard. 79-21892

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editor would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: University of California Press (from John Ford by Peter Bogdanovich); A. S. Barnes & Company, Inc., and the Tantivy Press (from Hitchcock's Films by Robin Wood); John Farquharson Ltd (from The Film Until

Now by

Paul Rotha); George Allen

& Unwin

(Publishers) Ltd (from Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit Ltd and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. (from

of Music by Friedrich Nietzsche); A. D. Peters & Co. Director and Directions by John Russell Taylor); Little,

Brown and Company, in conjunction with the York Graphic Society (from Spellbound in Darkness: History of the Silent Film by George C. Pratt); Faber and Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (from The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein and 'Wilkie Collins and Dickens', Selected Essays, by T. S. Eliot); Peter Owen Ltd and Grosset & Dunlap, Inc. (from Agee on Film by James Agee); the British Film Institute (from Rivette: Texts and Interviews); Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd (from Losey on Losey by Tom Milne; Godard on Godard by Tom Milne; William Wilder by Axel Madsen; Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut; and The Japanese Film by Donald Richie); Doubleday and Co., Inc. (from Losey on Losey by Tom Milne and The Japanese Film by Donald Richie); The Viking Press {Godard on Godard by Tom Milne); and Indiana University Press {William Wilder by Axel Madsen). Thanks are also due to the following: Film Comment for their permission to reprint an extract from Penelope Houston's article on John Huston, and E. P. Dutton, Inc., for permission to quote from The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris. {Film Comment: copyright 1973 by Film Comment Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by the permission of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. 1968 by Andrew Sarris. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The American Cinema: copyright

New

©

©

E. P. Dutton.)

The

editor

would

also like to thank the following for their help: Michelle

Snapes and Marku Salmi of stills; the British Film

Library which provided more than half the Institute's Library and Information Department; and Sue Craig.

the British Institute's Stills

Still-Picture

Acknowledgments {by page)

Parklane: p. 22; 20th Century-Fox: pp. 27, 52, 75, 131, 132, 663, 796, 849, 976-7; Farallone Films: p. 32; London Film-Makers Co-op: p. 42; Factory Films: p. 45; Universal MCATV: pp. 49, 57, 138, 162,

218, 268, 363, 647, 648, 651, 660, 671, 672, 688, 923, 947, 989, 991, 994, 1074; Paramount: pp. 55, 81, [p.

1094

constitutes

an extension of the Acknowledgments]

THE CONTRIBUTORS NOEL BURCH

(born U.S.A., French citizen) has written for Cahiers du Cinema and Film Quarterly. A Critical History of

Publications: Theory of Film Practice, Marcel L'Herbier, To the Distant Thunder: the Japanese Film.

GARY CAREY

(b. 1938, U.S.A.) writes for Film Comment. He was formerly Assistant Curator, Film Department, Museum of Modern Art in New York. Publications: Lost Films, Cukor and Co., Brando, More About All About Eve, Katharine Hepburn, Doug and Mary, and Lenny, Janis and Jimi.

GIULIO CESARE CASTELLO

critic

and

the

(b. 1921, Italy) is a movie and theatre 60s he taught 'Movie Theories, History and Criticism' at Cinematografia in Rome. He has also worked as a director in the theatre, is at present under contract to Italian Radio and Television. Publications cinema (Naples Prize, 1957), works on Italian neo-realism, Luchino

and historian. In the 50s Centro Sperimentale di on radio and on television and

include: // divismo, mitolgia del

Visconti, Eric

von Stroheim,

Rouben Mamoulian.

CARLOS CLARENS

(U.S.A.) writes for Sight and Sound and Film Comment. Publications: Horror Movies, George Cukor, the forthcoming Underworld Movie World.

RICHARD COMBS (New Institute's

Monthly Film

Zealand) writes for Sight and Sound.

He

is

the editor of the British Film

Bulletin.

RICHARD

CORLISS (U.S.A.), editor of Film Comment, was the movie reviewer for Publications: Talking Pictures, Greta Garbo, The Hollywood Screenwriters (ed.).

New

Times.

EDGARDO COZARINSKY (b. films are

.

.

.

1939, Argentina, resident of France) is a film-maker and writer. His (Dot Dot Dot) and Les Apprentis sorciers. Publications: fiction, essays on film, Borges,

Henry James.

ARLENE CROCE a journal

(U.S.A.) reviews dance for The

which she edited

until

New

1978. Publications:

Yorker. She is the founder of Ballet Review, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book,

Afterimages.

JAMES DAMICO

(U.S.A.) has written for Cinema Journals, Film Reader, Journal for Popular Film,

Movietone News.

DAWSON (b. 1938, U.K.) is a film critic and festivals organizer. She was formerly the editor of Monthly Film Bulletin. She writes for Sight and Sound, The Listener, Film Comment, Take One, Cinema Papers and Film-Korrespondenz. Publication: a forthcoming book on the New German Cinema.

JAN

BERNARD EISENSCHITZ (b.

1944, France) is an independent film-maker, historian and translator. has written for Cahiers du Cinema and La Nouvelle Critique. Publications: Histoire generale du cinema (muet) (ed.), Humphrey Bogart ('Prix Armand Tallier', 1968).

He

JEAN-ANDRE FIESCHI

(b. 1942, France) has written for Cahiers du Cinema and La Nouvelle has directed several films in the French television series Cineastes de Notre Temps as well as Les Nouvelles Mysteres de New York.

Critique.

He

JOHN GILLETT Telegraph.

Film

He

Institute

is

1925, U.K.) writes for Sight and Sound, Monthly Film Bulletin and the Sunday He works for the Information Department at the British well as for the National Film Theatre. Publications include: International

(b.

also a regular broadcaster. as

Encyclopedia of Film

JON HALLIDAY

(asst. ed.).

(b.

1939, Ireland) has written extensively on Japan,

Korea and Hong Kong. He

is

The Contributors

vi

of the editorial board of New Left Review. Publications include: Japanese Imperialism Today (with Gavan McCormack), The Psychology of Gambling, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism. a

member

MOLLY HASKELL (b. Voice. Publication:

1940, U.S.A.) has been the film critic of

From Reverence

to

New York

Rape: The Treatment of Women

in the

magazine and The Village Movies.

ANDRE HODEIR

(b. 1921, France) is a jazz and film-score composer. Publications: an analysis of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, Jazz : Its Revolution and Essence, Toward Jazz, The Worlds of

Jazz.

PENELOPE HOUSTON

(U.K.) has been the editor of Sight and Stund Contemporary Cinema 1945-1963.

RICHARD

JAMESON

sirlce 1956.

Publication: The

1944, U.S.A.) edits the Seattle Film Society magazine Movietone News University of Washington. He has contributed to numerous journals and anthologies, including Film Comment and Focus on Orson Welles.

T.

and teaches film courses

(b.

at the

RICHARD KOSZARSKI

(b. 1947, U.S.A.) is a film historian, critic and teacher at the School of York. He is also a screenwriter and has worked on documentary films about Roger and Erich von Stroheim. Publications: Hollywood Directors, 1914-1940 and 1941-19J6.

Visual Arts,

Corman

New

HENRI LANGLOIS

(1914-1977) wrote for La Revue du Cinema and Cahiers du Cinema. co-founder and director of the Cinematheque Francaise.

ANTONIN

J.

LIEHM

Experience, The Milos his wife,

He was

the

Closely Watched Film: The Czechoslovak The Most Important Art: East European Film after 1945 (with

(Czechoslovakia). Publications:

Forman

Stories,

Dragomir Liehm).

GAVIN MILLAR (U.K.) writes for Sight and Sound and The Listener. He is the producer of BBC's Arena: Cinema programme. Publication: second edition of The Technique of Film Editing (with Karel Riesz).

TOM MILNE (U.K.) Bulletin

is a freelance critic who contributes regularly to Sight and Sound, Monthly Film and The Observer. Publications: The Encore Reader, Losey on Losey, Mamoulian, Dreyer, Godard

on Godard.

JAMES MONACO

(b. 1942, U.S. A) is a freelance journalist, author and contributing editor of More, Take One and Cineaste. Publications include: The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette; How to Read a Film; Resnais; Celebrity; Media Culture; American Film Now.

GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH (b. British

Film Institute and

a

member

1939, U.K.) is the head of the Education Advisory Service of the of the editorial board of Screen. Publications: Visconti, numerous

articles.

CLAUDE OLLIER (b. 1922, France) has written on film for La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. He is also a well-known novelist of the nouveau roman school. Publications: La Mise-en-Scene, Le Maintien de L'Ordre.

ENNO PATALAS (Germany) is the director of the Munich Municipal Film Museum and was formerly the editor of the magazine Filmkritik. Publications: History of Film (with Ulrich Gregor), History of the Modern Film, Im Off (with his wife Frieda Grafe). TED PERRY (U.S.A.) was the director of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, until 1978.

VLADA PETRIC University. to

Her

(b.

1928, Yugoslavia)

is

the

Henry Luce Professor of Film Studies

at

Harvard

films include Evolution of the Silent Film Language. Publications include: Introduction

Film, Evolution of the Film Genres.

ANTONY RAYNS British Institute's

(b. 1948, U.K.) is pamphlet Fassbinder.

a freelance

film-maker and film journalist. Publication: the

DONALD

RICHIE (b. 1924, U.S.A.) is the acknowledged Western authority on Japanese film and the ex-curator of films at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Publications: Japanese Cinema, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu.

BROOKS RILEY (U.S.A.)

writes for Film

the associate editor of Film Comment.

Comment, The

Village Voice

and The Boston Phoenix. She

is

Vll

The Contributors

DAVID ROBINSON Keatori,

Hollywood

(b.

1930, U.K.)

in the Twenties,

is

the film critic for The Times. Publications include: Buster

World Cinema:

A

Short History.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

(b. 1943, U.S.A.) writes for American Film, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Time Out, The Village Voice and other magazines. He is also the translator of Andre Bazin's Orson Welles: A Critical View. Publications: Rivette: Texts and Interviews (ed.), the forthcoming

Moving

Places.

ROUD

RICHARD (b. 1929, U.S.A.) writes for The Guardian and Sight and Sound. Since 1963 he has been a director of the New York Film Festival. Publications: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Max Ophuls: an Index.

ANDREW

SARRIS (U.S.A.) is the film critic for The Village Voice and Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University. Publications include: The Films of Josef von Sternberg, The American Cinema, Confessions of a Cultist, The Primal Screen, The John Ford Movie Mystery.

P.

ADAMS SITNEY (b.

Archives.

He

is

Garde, Film Culture Reader

OSWALD STACK

is

a

(ed.),

pseudonym.

ELLIOTT STEIN (U.S.A.) Dr

Caligari's Cabinet

is the director of Library and Publications at Anthology Film Film Culture. Publications: Visionary Film: The American AvantThe Essential Cinema (ed.), The Avant-Garde Film (ed.).

1944, U.S.A.)

also the editor of

writes for Film

and Other Grand

Comment, Sight and Sound and Rolling Stone. Publication: Andre Barsacq).

Illusions (with

JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR

(b. 1935, U.K.) was the film critic for The Times and is presently Professor in the Division of Cinema at the University of Southern California. He writes for Sight and Sound, American Film and other journals. Publications include: Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear, The Hollywood Musical, Directors and Directions, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock.

WILSON

DAVID (b. 1942, U.K.) is the associate editor of Sight and Sound. He was previously editor of Monthly Film Bulletin and a general editor of the Cinema One series. He has written on the subject of film for The Guardian and the New Statesman. ROBIN

WOOD

(b.

1931, U.K.) writes for Movie, Film Howard Hawks, Personal Views.

Comment and Body

Politic.

Publications in-

clude: Hitchcock's Films,

The

publishers and authors would like to thank the following people for their help with research for this book: Geoff Brown; Penelope Houston; Keith Stewart; Allan Sutherland; and David Wilson.

1

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ROBERT aldrich Andrew Sarris ROBERT altman Robin Wood AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA P.

Adams

I

21

25

Sitney

28

AMERICAN CINEMA OF the 70s

Richard

Corliss

47

AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY SINCE i960 James Monaco AMERICAN FILM NOIR Edgardo

50

Cozarinsky

57

AMERICAN SCREENWRITERS

Richard

Corliss

64

LINDSAY ANDERSON AND FREE cinema John Russell Taylor Michelangelo ANTONIONI Penelope Houston ANTHONY asquith John Russell Taylor claude autant-lara John Russell

76 83 95

Taylor

96

AVANT-GARDE ANIMATION: THE GRAPHIC cinema P. Adams Sitney tex avery Jonathan Rosenbaum Boris barnet John Gillett bbs productions Brooks Riley jacques becker Tom Milne marco bellocchio Richard Combs INGMAR BERGMAN Jan Dawson BUSBY BERKELEY AND AMERICAN MUSICALS OF the 30s John Gillett Bernardo BERTOLUCCI Robin Wood alessandro blasetti Ted Perry budd boetticher Robin Wood JOHN boorman Jonathan Rosenbaum walerian borowczyk Richard Combs frank borzage Andrew Sarris Herbert brenon John Gillett ROBERT BRESSON Richard Roud BRITISH DOCUMENTARY MOVEMENT David Wilson

CLARENCE brown

Richard Koszarski

ROWLAND brown Richard Koszarski tod browning Elliott Stein BUNUEL Jean-Andre Fieschi the cabinet OF dr caligari Jean-Andre

LUIS

Fieschi

103 104

104 106

no 1 1

122 125

132 33 135

1

135 136 141 141

154 155 156 156 166 1

frank capra Elliott Stein MARCEL CARNE and JACQUES PREVERT

96

Richard Roud

80

181

189

john Cassavetes Richard Combs ALBERTO CAVALCANTI David Wilson claude chabrol Gavin Millar CHARLES CHAPLIN Andrew Sarris BENJAMIN CHRISTENSEN John Gillett rene clair John Russell Taylor SHIRLEY clarke Tony Rayns RENE CLEMENT and HENRI-GEORGES clouzot Richard Roud JEAN COCTEAU John Russell Taylor ROGER corman Tony Rayns vittorio cottafavi, riccardo freda and MARIO BAVA Tom Milne GEORGE CUKOR Gary Carey michael curtiz John Gillet CZECHOSLOVAK CINEMA OF THE 60S D. and A. J. Liehm dance IN FILM Arlene Croce LOUIS DELLUC Jean-Andre Fieschi CECIL B. DEMILLE Carlos Clarens JACQUES DEMY Gary Carey vittorio de sica Ted Perry

MARLENE Dietrich

Carlos Clarens

WALT DISNEY Jonathan Rosenbaum STANLEY DONEN Richard Corliss mark donskoi John Gillett ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO P. Adams Sitney CARL THEODOR DREYER: THE EARLY works Tom Milne CARL THEODOR DREYER: THE MAJOR phase Noel Burch Richard Koszarski E. A. dupont marguerite duras James Monaco ALLAN DWAN Richard Roud sergei m. eisenstein Noel Burch jean epstein Jean-Andre Fieschi JEAN EUSTACHE James Monaco DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS and MARY pickford John Gillett RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER David Wilson

Jonathan Rosenbaum federico fellini John Russell Taylor MARCO FERRERI Edgardo Cozarinsky LOUIS FEUILLADE AND THE SERIAL Richard

192 193 194 201 212

213 220 221

222 232 233 237 243

244 252 265 265 271

274 275 275 278 279 279 291

296 310 311

313 314 328

334 335 335

PAUL fejos

339 340 347

Roud

348 359 360

jacques feyder Richard Roud W. C. FIELDS David Robinson ROBERT FLAHERTY Richard Corliss

365

1

1

Contents

ix

john FORD Robin Wood GEORGES PRANJU Tom Milne JOHN PRANKENHBIMBR Richard Corliss FRENCH cinema: ORIGINS Henri Lauglois SAMUEL FULLER Gavin Millar ABEL gance Bernard Eisenschitz greta garbo Gary Carey Philippe garrel Tony Rayns GERMAN CINEMA: ITS ORIGINS AND ITS masters of the 20s Henri Langlois

German cinema since 1945 Enno Patalas JEAN-LUC godard Richard Roud GONE WITH THE WIND Carlos Clarens JEAN GREMILLON Bernard Eisenschitz DAVID WARK GRIFFITH Vlada Petric RAYMOND GRIFFITH and CLARENCE BADGER John Gillett SACHA GUITRY Richard Roud ROBERT HAMER AND EALING COMEDY

RICHARD LESTER

387 393 394 401 404 415 419

marcel l'herbier Noel Burch PER LINDBERG Edgardo Cozarinsky harold lloyd Jean-Andre Fieschi Kenneth LOACH James Monaco

621

Joseph losey Edgardo Cozarinsky ERNST LUBITSCH: GERMAN PERIOD

631

420 432 436 446 447 449

John

MARCEL HANOUN

Noel Burch Howard hawks Molly Haskell WERNER HERZOG Richard Combs ALFRED HITCHCOCK: I Penelope Houston ALFRED HITCHCOCK: II Jean-Andre Fieschi

HONG KONG CINEMA Tony Rayns WILLIAM K. Howard James Damico JOHN huston Robin Wood kon ichikawa John Gillett thomas harper ince Torn Milne REX ingram Carlos Clarens ITALIAN silent cinema Giulio Cesare Castello

Richard Corliss

628 629 630

Enno Patalas

639

ERNST LUBITSCH: AMERICAN PERIOD

462 462

Russell Taylor

620

371

465 470 473 486 487 502 5

1

512 513 517 520 524 525 531

james ivory David Wilson MIKLOS JANCSO AND POST-WAR HUNGARIAN CINEMA Mira and A. J. Liehm ELIA KAZAN Jonathan Rosenbaum buster keaton David Robinson henry KING Richard Combs teinosuke kinugasa John Gillett dimitri kirsanoff P. Adams Sitney grigori kozintsev and LEONID trauberg David Robinson Robert kramer Richard Roud Stanley kubrick Robin Wood lev kuleshov Tom Milne akira Kurosawa Noel Burch Gregory la cava John Gillett fritz lang: German period Noel Burch fritz lang: 1936-60 Robin Wood harry langdon Richard Koszarski alberto lattuada Edgar do Cozarinsky Charles laughton Robin Wood laurel and hardy David Robinson

611

Mitchell leisen John Gillett PAUL LENI Carlos Clarens SERGIO LEONE Richard Corliss mervyn leroy Tony Rayns

617 617 618 619

532 536 542 548 551

552 553 559 560 565 571 583 583

599 609 610 610

Andrew

Sarris

Sidney lumet Richard Combs LEO MCCAREY Robin Wood NORMAN MCLAREN Jonathan Rosenbaum dusan makavejev Robin Wood LOUIS malle James Monaco rouben mamoulian Tom Milne Joseph L. mankiewicz Richard Corliss anthony mann Robin Wood chris marker Richard Roud the marx brothers Andre Hodeir Georges melies David Robinson jean-pierre melville Tom Milne LEWIS MILESTONE Richard T. Jameson VINCENTE MINNELLI AND THE I94OS musical Gary Carey kenji mizoguchi ivan mozhukhin

Donald Richie John Gillett Jean-Andre Fieschi F. w. murnau mikio naruse Donald Richie ermanno olmi Gavin Millar marcel ophuls David Wilson max ophuls Jon Halliday NAGISA OSHIMA AND JAPANESE CINEMA IN the 60s Noel Burch YASUJIRO OZU Donald Richie Edgardo Cozarinsky G. W. pabst marcel pagnol Richard Roud ALAN J. PAKULA and ROBERT

MULLIGAN

Robin

pier paolo pasolini

Wood Oswald Stack

SAM PECKINPAH Robin Wood Arthur penn Robin Wood leonce perret Noel Burch maurice pialat David Wilson lupu pick and carl mayer Jean-Andre JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI

687 689 696 703 704 720 721 728 729

735 743 752 761 763 764 77 1 775 778 780

AND

the polish emigres Mira and A. J. Liehm polish cinema since the war Mira and A. J. Liehm Abraham POLONSKY Richard Corliss MICHAEL POWELL John Russell Taylor OTTO PREMINGER Jonathan Rosenbaum VSEVOLOD PUDOVKIN Vlada Petric NICHOLAS RAY Jonathan Rosenbaum SATYAJIT RAY John Russell Taylor carol reed and david lean John Russell Taylor

681

78

Fieschi

ROMAN POLANSKY,

643 650 652 654 655 657 658 663 664 667 670 676

782

787 791 792 794 800 807 813 831

Contents

X karel reisz David Wilson JEAN RENOIR: to 1939 Richard Roud jean renoir: from 1939 Tom Milne alain resnais Richard Roud leni riefenstahl John Russell Taylor JACQUES rivette Jean- Andre Fieschi glauber rocha Edgardo Cozarinsky eric rohmer Molly Haskell mikhail romm David Wilson ABRAM room Richard Roud Francesco rosi Ted Perry roberto rossellini Robin Wood Robert rossen Edgar do Cozarinsky JEAN ROUCH Jean- Andre Fieschi KEN RUSSELL Robin Wood ERNEST SCHOEDSACK and MERIAN

cooper

Elliott Stein

mack sennett Jean- Andre Fieschi vincent sherman John Gillett DON SIEGEL Robin Wood ROBERT siodmak John Russell Taylor douglas sirk Jon Halliday ALF SJOBERG Edgardo Cozarinsky To)n Milne VICTOR SJOSTROM michael snow Jonathan Rosenbaum YULIA SOLNTSEVA Jonathan Rosenbaum SOVIET CINEMA SINCE THE WAR David Robinson

JOHN M. STAHL Andrew Sarris Claude Oilier JOSEF VON STERNBERG GEORGE STEVENS Edgardo Cozarinsky MAURITZ STILLER Richard Combs

835 835 845 854 866 871


peak with Dionysiac wisdom, thereby denying itself and its Apollonian eoncreteness. The difficult relations between the two elements in tragedy may be symbolized by a fraternal union between the two deities: Dionysos speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo, finally, the language of Dionysos; thereby the highest goal of tragedy and of art in sphere

general

A

is

reached.

New American were possible, might begin with

systematic history of the

Cinema,

if it

polemical opening: 'We shall have made a giant stride in Aesthetics, if we have achieved not only the deductive insight, but the unmediated apprehension of the per-

Nietzsche's

ception that the evolution of art and the

Apollonian-Dionysiac dichotomy are bound together, just as reproduction depends upon the duality of the sexes with their continual struggles

The

and

their periodic reconciliations.'

Nietzsche focused upon was, of course, Greek tragedy. In adapting his arthistorical model for a survey of the American avant-garde film I am not suggesting that the remarkable achievement of the latter can be compared with the sublimity of the former. Nietzsche's model is particularly appropriate for an art that undergoes a rapid evolution within a single country and for a limited audience that is totally familiar with all the art that

works

in the continuity of its tradition.

New American Cinema

The

new film-maker under consideration coupling

presence of Dionysos and the oneiric illusion-

ism of Apollo no element can be found

film.

The

early history of the

eye) and Le Sang d'un Poete (the cyclic suicides and the break-up of the statue-hero

In Deren and Hammid's an intricately structured cyclic dream ends in sparagmos. In the initial sequence a woman returns to her home after glimpsing a mysterious black-veiled figure before her. She observes the dislocainto

snowballs).

Meshes of

the Afternoon

which will eventually assume symbolic dimensions: a key, a knife, a telephone, a record player. She settles into an armchair before a window and falls asleep. That pattern of action is repeated three times as the objects become progressively more menacing. At the climax of the third repetition, three versions of herself perform a ritual around the dining-room table which ends in the election of one to attack the sleeping figure with a knife. But just at the point of

grace of the 'first run'. If the American film-maker

stabbing, the

on the themes and techniques of his European precursors, he did so with significant revisions. From the mid-40s until now, the New American Cinema has had a history of revisions, amplifications and attempted breaks with the accumulating past, with both the European film-makers of the 20s and with the Americans who preceded each

American avant-

garde film provides a thematic spectrum of the sparagmos. Its cinematic sources go back x.o Un Chien andalou (particularly the sliced

tion of several objects

drew heavily

which

not a combination of both forces. Within the dialectic of the New American Cinema the Dionysiac theme is sparagmos: the ripping apart of the flesh, most dreadfully concretized in the Orphic dismemberment of Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae. Throughout the 40s the sparagmos is continued and mediated by a series of structures that identify the essence of cinema as a self-reflexive dream. Yet by the late 60s the mediations of illusionism will become the subject of films, and the duration and editing of those films will project the sparagmos as the form of the is

one of the very rare situations within the history of the cinema where these conditions apply. For the most part the cinema has been international and anti-traditional. The network of film festivals and the production patterns of most prolific commercial filmmakers reinforce the illusion that the cinema operates like the solar year, producing styles and personalities which are pushed into the level limbo of history once they fall from the is

here.

of Dionysos and Apollo as dialectical functions breaks down simplistic form content distinctions. In the shifting mediations of the savage, intoxicated Nietzsche's

dream apparently ends: her

wakes her from the dream. Together they climb to the upper bedroom

lover's

kiss

she notices that all the previously displaced objects are where they should be. When they lie down together she suddenly grabs the knife and jabs it into his face. Yet at the moment of contact it is revealed to have been an illusion. She has stabbed and shattered a mirror in which his face had been as

American Avant-Garde Cinema

30 reflected. The pieces of the mirror fall mysteriously to the edge of a sea. Thus is climaxed a series of images and metaphors

for self-reflection: the veiled

woman

at

one

point showed she had a mirror for a face; the knife blade had functioned as a mirror; and here the sparagmos occurs within a mirror. In the final cycle of the film a man approaches and enters the house again in the same pattern as her previous entrances only to find her dead, her throat apparently cut, with seaweed clinging to her, and the fragments of the shattered mirror about her.

The films of Dali and Bunuel and Cocteau nourished a formal mode which expanded in the wake of Meshes of the Afternoon into the dominant avant-garde film genre of the late 40s and early 50s: the trance film. In it a somnambulistic protagonist wanders through a forbidding landscape or a mysterious house in quest of a revelation of his own sexuality. When the film-maker assumes the role of protagonist, we identify that type of trance film as a psychodrama. Meshes of the Afternoon had the unique distinction of being a collaborative psychodrama: Deren and Hammid, who were married when they made the film, played the female and male roles themselves.

form

is

However,

its

intricate

cyclic

uncharacteristic of the trance film.

In her second film, At Land (1944), Maya Deren (using a camerawoman but not a collaborator) is washed out of the sea which had rolled upon the broken mirror in her previous film. The entire film explores a spatial-temporal trope which had occurred briefly in Meshes. There when the figure with the knife rose to stab her sleeping self, she stepped from the floor onto sand, weeds, stone and carpet in the illusory time of a continuous walk from the table to the armchair. In At Land the unbroken progress of her bewildered quest takes her through a shifting labyrinth of interior and exterior scenes as if they were miraculously contiguous. The illusion of spatial continuity through continuous and fused movements is closely connected to the cinematic figure which permits the illusion of the protagonist meeting herself. In At Land that option is postponed until the climax of the film, when a tentative image of sexual identity (the protagonist caressing the hair of another woman) gives rise

which the running filmwatched by herself from several

to a final flight in

maker

is

crucial locations described in her initial odys-

This fragmentation of the self sometimes substitutes for and sometimes supplements the moment of sparagmos. sey.

In Kenneth Anger's Fireworks (1947), the film-maker plays dreamer who wakes from one dream, in which he is held, bloodied, in the arms of a sailor, into another dream in which he dresses and in his masochistic quest encounters the same sailor and his companions,

who

beat

him and

tear his flesh like a

Bacchic chorus. The sparagmos ends in a symbolized orgasm which revitalizes him and eventually leads him back to the bed (this time with the sailor) where the film began. In

major

her

Anagram

theoretical

of Ideas on Art,

Maya Deren

'An

essay,

Form and

Film',

identified herself as a Classicist.

She did so to distinguish her art from both the Romantic irrationality of surrealism and the graphic concerns of cubism. For Maya Deren the camera and its mechanisms constitute the ontological base of cinema. She rejects all attempts to distort or replace the

photographic

illusionism and Renaissance perspective of the conventional photographic image. The formal manipulation of realistic units into an Apollonian ritualistic stitutes for her the art of

form con-

cinema.

On

this

basis she rationalizes her privileging of dance

over painting as a model and subject for film. Variations on this basic structure, both filmic and mythic, occur in the first films of most film-makers who began their careers in the late 40s or early 50s. Curtis Harrington's Fragment of Seeking (1946) records the pursuit of a blonde girl by the filmmaker/protagonist through the corridors of a building to her room. At the very point where he embraces her, she becomes a skeleton with a wig; and in the final moments of the film, it is the protagonist himself, again in a wig, who is the object of his own sexual pursuit.

The most

sophisticated and elaborate of

the early versions of The Bacchae within the

American avant-garde cinema was Sidney Peterson's last film, The Lead Shoes (1949). Its space compressed by consistent use of anamorphic photography, its sound a hysterical scrambling of two ballads, the film in-

American Avant-Garde Cinema corporatcs

clliptically

and Oedipal

rendered

An

31

scenes

of

the

themes of Entr'acte and Le Sang d'un

intricate inter-

Poete; like Cocteau, Peterson interiorizes the

play between the words of the ballads, them-

violence and paradoxes of his eclectic cinematic language. In his subsequent films, The Petrified Dog (1948) and Mr Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1949) Peterson continues the portrayal of the artistic sensibility at the horizon of sparagmos. The former film seems to draw from the film-maker's two incomplete academic careers, as a medical student and as a sculptor. Here he resurrects a Victorian Alice in Wonderland whose chronic blinking provides a metaphor for the operation of the camera's shutter, to wander through a park and an anatomy class filled with fools, whose madness is defined by cinematic figures of fast, slow and reverse motion. Mr Frenhofer and the Minotaur, like all

fratricide

eros.

American corruptions of British originals, and the images of the film, often abstracted and reinflected by reverse or fast motion, incorporates within its montage a selves

principle of displacement analogous to the

dream world. Thus, the unburying of a son husband (the situation is ambiguous) by

or

woman in the film, through reverse motion filming of her covering him with the

sand, evokes the pains of childbirth; or the synchronization of bits from the ballad 'The Three Crows', which describes birds devouring a body, with fragmentary shots of the son eating bread, anticipates the surrealist dripping of blood from the bread which follows, and even the subsequent replacement of the son at the table by a dog nibbling a large bone. The cinematic strategies of The Lead Shoes offered a new option for future avant-garde film-makers. The montage of Deren, Anger and Harrington had derived from the conflict between the illusionary space within shots and the potential for subverting that illusionism by editing disjunctive spaces (and times) together. anamorphic Peterson's photography and rhythmic intercutting of a hopscotch through the film had the effect of fusing the different images, of negating the priority of montage and dynamizing imagery

and

allusion.

Peterson's style ultimately derived from

on the tactics of Rene Clair's and Francis Picabia's Entr'acte, a dadaist film with a quasi-narrative of absurd causes and effects ending in a frantic, fast-motion intercutting of a runaway hearse, a roller coaster ride, and speeding cars, boats and planes. The hearse itself conveys the innocent victim of a nonsensical shooting: a hunter on the his elaboration

rooftops of Paris kills a man while trying to shoot, alternately, a bird and an egg. In Peterson's version, The Cage (1947), he extended several of the transitions and cine-

matic tropes of Entr'acte into an allegory of the artistic personality, which fused the sexual

and the aesthetic quest. The film depends

upon an elaborate and discontinuous

inter-

play between subjective and objective shots: a weaving of the perspectives of a loose eyeball, the schizophrenic artist who lost it, and his

'realistic'

companions. Thus,

it

blends

,

Peterson's films after his initial collaboration

with James Broughton, The Potted Psalm (1946), grew out of a classroom project: teaching cinema as a means of encouraging painters and sculptors at the California School of Fine Arts to think inventively. In this work he deliberately conflated three sources: Balzac's story The Unknown Masterpiece, Picasso's Minotaur omachia and the punning stream of consciousness style of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The rhythmical intercut-

from the story, as well two characters reading the story, images from the etching, and the undertext of the Joycean monologue, continually shifts referential levels in a complex interplay between the passions of artists and the passions depicted in their art, between the act of modelling and represented model. The shifting images are visually unified by the consistent use of anamorphic photography for the first time in Peterson's brief ting of elliptical scenes as shots of

career as a film-maker.

Peterson has described his ambitions in Mr Frenhofer and the Minotaur:

making

It was my decision to do a thing about the Balzac story, taking seriously as the theme of the story the conflict between Poussin's classicism and its opposite. So, as strained through my mind, it became

way of exploring the conflict stated Rousseau's remark to Picasso: 'We are

really a in

the

two greatest

painters:

Egyptian manner, and

I

you

in the

in

the

modern.'

American Avant-Garde Cinema

32 In

the

of

the

history

of the Peterson reformulated the Picasso-Rousseau distinction as one between himself and Deren. If ritual structures and mythic evocations constitute the Apollonian pole of this cinema, the radical rejection of illusionary deep space is its Dionysianism. True to the Nietzschean formulation, Deren, with whom the Apollonian has been theoretically identified, breaks down the spatial illusionism of Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) with freeze frames and negative imagery; just as Peterson, the initial theorist of the Dionysiac, organized his films accorddialectic

American avant-garde

film,

ing to the ritualistic and mythic patterns. The succession of The Cage, The Petrified

Dog and

Mr

Frenhofer and the Minotaur deprimacy of the imagination in Peterson's cinema and a developing scribes an increasing

sureness in the ability of cinematic tropes to represent subjective states. But with the making of The Lead Shoes he initiated an exploration of mythopoeia where the portrait of the artist blends with family romance; there, for the first time, the cinematic figures seem to give birth to the narrative they elaborate, rather than to be born of it. As a whole, Peterson's cinema forecasts the evolution from the trance film to the

mythopoeic cinema, much as Maya Deren's too brief career had done. Yet it would not be until the mid-6os that the full implications of that tradition could be found. The first film Peterson worked on had been a collaboration with James Broughton; The Potted Psalm was a thorough conflation of their later styles, the subjective-objective inflection of a divided self and a mad erotic Chaplinesque. Broughton's first film on his

American Avant-Garde Cinema

33

own, Mother's Day (1948), remains among the highest achievements of the American avantgarde. It is a cinematic family album, in an ironic tone, wherein adult children farcically re-enact

the

mother. The simply the

Victorian fantasies of their age differential of the actors is most obvious of the many

strategies Broughton employs in his treatment of the irrecoverable past. Foreground and background placement, loop printing,

stop-motion

modes of

photography,

are

the

chief

inflecting the temporal disjunction

throughout the film, while the emphasis on games and play ironizes the fundamental violence of his vision of maternal domination.

Broughton uses the cinema both for the evocation and the analysis of an ironic nostalgia. In Mother's Day the cinematic tropes, the costumes from various periods, the representation of children's games by adults and the formal association of the whole film with a family album, all serve to underline the presence of the images and to locate the film in the mind of a remembering subject. In many of his subsequent films, such as The Adventures of Jimmy (1950), Looney Tom, the Happy Lover (1951), Four in the Afternoon (1951) and This Is It (1970), the interplay of verse or prose narration with the imagery creates comparable disjunctions of time. Broughton, like his less successful contemporary Willard Maas, was a poet before he became a film-maker; like Maas, he believed that Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poete provided the essential model for the avantgarde film of the future: a welding of montage and poetic language. 'The camera's challenge to the poet,' he has claimed, 'is that his images must be as definite as possible: the magic of his persons, landscapes, and actions occurring in apparent reality. At this point something approaching choreography must enter in: the finding of meaningful gesture and movement. And from the beginning I decided to make things happen head on, happen within the frame, without vagueness, without camera trickery so that it would be how the scenes were organized in the montage that would evoke the world I wanted to

—

explore.'

In this system Broughton aligns himself with the position of Maya Deren, even including the metaphor of choreography,

Dionysiac cinema of Peterson ('camera trickery'). In his cyclic films, Four in the Afternoon., The Bed (1967;, The Golden against

Positions

the

(1970),

Broughton

incorporates

comic choreographic movements into schemata of essential life rituals. The most significant heir to Broughton's cinema was Ron Rice, whose picaresque films The Flower Thief (i960), Senseless (1962) and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963) substitute a matrix of social alienation for Broughton's sense of the life cycle, but maintain the essential typology of his films. Robert Nelson, following both Broughton and Rice in his most ambitious film, The Great Blondino (1967), attempted an integration of the Dionysiac breakdown of 'actions occurring in apparent reality' when he introduced superimposition, distorted imagery

and

reflexive allusions to the facticity of the filmic materials in his picaresque story of the adventures of a tightrope walker.

The most important

avant-garde films of 50s sought formal alternatives to the trance film. The characteristic strategies of this period for breaking down the fictional authority of the dream landscape as mediated the

by

a somnambulistic representative of the

were the multiplication of protagonists within a single film, the drawing of attention to the raw materials of cinematic illusion, and the conscious interplay of deep and shallow space within the imagery. Christopher MacLaine's The End (1950), Stan Brakhage's Reflections on Black (1955) and Ken Jacobs' Blonde Cobra (1962, but edited from footage taken by Bob Fleischner in 1959) are the most important examples of the late and self-doubting trance film as it survived into the 50s. The films of MacLaine and Jacobs share several congruent tactics even though the latter film-maker did not know of the former until his films were completed. They both intercut colour and black and white footage in ways that undermine the authority and stability of both illusionary textures; they thrust the burden of narrative logic upon an ironic series of commentaries which often occurred during long stretches of blackness, so that the visual montage at times becomes a synecdochic and metaphoric commentary on the monologues. Jacobs' version of the discontinuity of the self

— 34

American

self in Blonde Cobra is even more complex than MacLaine's. Jacobs keeps himself out of the film completely. His mediator is Jack Smith, himself a major film-maker, and the film itself is constructed from fictional tapes and films of Smith made in the late 50s. Although there is no direct address to the audience, there is an ironic reference to the form of the film in its opening. When Smith quotes Ginger Rogers ('Let's call the whole thing off), the film suddenly seems to break off in flashes and leader and slowly recovers

make

a fresh start.

More

dramatically Jacobs calls for the placement of two live radios in the audience at every performance. The radios are cued to certain acts within the film, and they have the effect of undermining what tenuous illusion there is in the cinematic imagery. In the multiplication of roles and disguises that Smith assumes, in black itself to

and white and colour, or

on the soundrendered highly problematic. A slip of the tongue in the intensity of the first long story shifts from the third to the first person, lending a momentrack, the self or the

tary

referential

Smith

ego

stability

just is

to

the

character

has already recorded and liked it because it was vague. The intrusion of the authorial voice, the naming of the past and the future, and finally the indication of a present lost in

moment of replay, put into question the Active immediacy of the film pieces themselves. Similarly the central ambiguity of the self in both The Efid and Blonde Cobra devolves upon the very temporality of filmic construction, which begins with a moment of immediate presence the act of photo-

the

— —which undermined by subsequent reflexive —the editing and the introduc-

graphy

is

acts

By refusing to gloss over these discontinuous principles with an illusionary continuity such as the older trance films employed, the two film-makers make the temporal disjunctiveness of the film-making process an attribute of the self as they represent it. In a more linear fashion Brakhage encounters the same formal problem in Reflections on Black. He resolves it in terms of the polarities I have previously associated with the tion of sound.

stylistic

differences

between the films of Peterson. Brakhage

Maya Deren and Sidney

who walks a then climbs three storeys of a tenement house. At the landing of each storey the blind man 'sees' a drama of establishes

plays.

Av ant-Garde Cinema

a

blind mediator

The corresponding transition occurs near the end of the film when Smith, dressed in baby clothes, smashes a radio with a hammer

New

and

sexual frustration. Thus Brakhage conflates the linearity, and subjectivism of the early trance films with the multiple narratives of

a radio in the audience goes off synchronously. Both the early verbal slip which introduces the ego and the later moment which brings the radios into the Active texture of the film and which initiates the most optimistic moment as the infantile protagonist calmly puffs a cigarette to lullaby music are the contrasting moments of movement towards an autonomy of the self of its subject. In the rest of the film the ironies of montage, disguise and commentary substitute a chain of intertextural strategies for a stable self in the film. By contrast, Jacobs introduces himself into both the soundtrack and the images of Little Stabs at Happiness (1958-61). Here he disturbs the quality of presence in a series of unedited rolls of film, each representing the ambiance of an undramatic moment, when he talks over one roll to relieve the audience's restlessness, as he tells us. He talks about his past relationship with the people in the film and about his future plans. At one point he even tells us that he has played back what he

—

York

street at night,

The mediator's blindness is underlined by brilliant white scratch marks which the film-maker made over his eyes on the processed film. At times the scratch marks fill the whole, otherwise empty screen, as if we were looking through the scratches. These marks are both metaphors of the vision of the mediator and affirmations of the physical materiality of emulsion and celluloid in filmic illusion. In his previous film, The Way to Shadow Garden (1955), a more conventional trance film, the film-maker followed a moment of symbolic self-blinding with a switch from positive to negative, and the film ends as its subject wanders in a shadow garden of blazing white flowers and leaves against a black background. Here too the metaphor, which comes directly from the ending of Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time, calls attention to the cinematic their successors.

process.

American Avant-Garde Cinema

35

In the central episode of Reflections on Black the blind man sees himself, temporarily capable of sight. He begins to make love to a woman only to be interrupted by another man, presumably the woman's husband. At

and ground for the temporal ecstasies. For Brakhage the cinema is primarily a visual medium with no dircci means of representing a past which has not been recorded on film. He rejects the fictional dramatic film and

them-

bases his concept of temporality upon the discontinuity between shooting and editing

this point the scratch stars manifest

selves before his eyes.

The sudden

appear-

ance of the scratches converts an arbitrarily into an episode etiological atemporal representation of the past of the self. By the late 50s and early 60s Brakhage had invented a new form, the lyrical film, which was radically to extend the Sidney Peterson approach to imagery and which would represent the self and its temporal ecstasies in terms of the modalities of a continuous present.

Anticipation of the Night (1958) takes up the opening of Meshes of the Afternoon and elaborates it in terms of a Peterson-like consciousness.

We

see those parts of the

body

which

a subject sees himself: the shoulders, the legs and especially the negative image the body projects as shadow. The shadow man of Anticipation of the Night leaves his home at

the beginning of the film and encounters

and human universe as of imaginative loss which ultimately

sights of the natural stations

lead to his suicide.

In this film Brakhage fully achieves for the time a dialectical fusion between the image represented on the screen and the filmmaker/subject's reaction to it. By constantly moving the camera in imitation of the movement of the eyes and the fluctuations of

first

and by editing the movements in rhythms that suggest both the sudden and the gradual intrusions of memory and anticipation on the flux of the present, Brakhage mediates the visual world without a mediator. In his subsequent lyrical films the shadow man disappeared and the montage attention,

directly represented the

moments

of vision

and thought. Reading Gertrude Stein, Brakhage found a narrative mode which corresponded to his theory of vision and which guided his theory

which MacLaine and Jacobs found paradoxical.

For Anticipation of the Night, Brakhage adapted Stein's drifting, repetitive syntax to the cinema. Complexes of images undergo variations throughout the film; new elements are introduced gradually; images from the opening complexes have the charge of pastness when they recur later in the film; and proleptic imagery constitutes a future. Thus the present of the film incorporates

both

own memory and

its

and there which is not

anticipation,

moment

its

faculty for

never a present

is

qualified

by

the

ecstasies.

Three obsessive images of children dominAt the beginning of his theoretical book, Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage was to write: ate the film.

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? world alive with incomprehenand shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations in colour. Imagine a world before the 'in the beginning was the word'.

Imagine sible

a

objects

Early in Anticipation of the Night the shadow man attempts imaginatively to reconstruct the adventure of grass to a pre-verbal infant.

The camera moves through

leaves

and

grass,

of temporality. All Brakhage's lyrical films operate upon the fiction of a man, the film-

encounters and pursues a rainbow, explores the tactility of ground movement and ultimately reveals the mediation of a crawling

maker, looking on a natural sight and responding to it imaginatively. That encounter is always conceived as a crisis, and the moment of crisis provides the present tense

whom the shadow man observes. The very structure of the sequence as hysteron proteron, in which the childlike vision is imitated before the child is seen, suggests the child

American Avant-Garde Cinema

36 ultimate failure of the imaginative attempt. Somewhat later the film-maker sees children delighting in the rides of an amusement park at night and tries to participate in their rap-

moving

camera in sympathy with movements. Finally, near the end of the film he sweeps over the sleeping bodies of children. Their stasis emphasizes ture,

his

their whirling

the isolated consciousness of the film-maker. In his final and most extravagant attempt at

recapturing the freshness of their vision he imagine their animal dreams. Here the recovery is the strongest in the film, perhaps because it is without an external guiding gesture, but it too fails with the breaking of dawn and its implicit reduction of the entire quest for renewed vision to a nightly cycle. The shadow man fastens a rope to a tree and

tries to

hangs himself. Brakhage's subsequent lyrical films depend upon an ascesis of dramatic structure and mediating presences. In the remarkable short film The Dead (i960), for instance, he tests a series of metaphors for the horizon of death and finds them all insufficient. The very act of imagining and testing constitutes the

movement

of the film. Starting from two cliche sites the graveyard and the river the film-maker goes on to propose their superimposition, and then the negative image of the graveyard, as images of death vision. In the course of his mediation he presents both the poles of whiteness (images washing each other out) and blackness (black leader). Yet he dwells longest on a figure of discontinuity unique to the cinematic process: he superimposes the same negative and positive images filmed by a continually moving camera through the graveyard; they are a fraction of a second out of synchronization, except at a few points where their coincidence causes a solarized flash of an eerie white light as if

—

—

emanating from the tombstones. The tension between the imitation of eye movement of the film-maker walking through the cemetery and the mechanical of the positive/negative time-lag grounds the metaphor in the temporality of the editing process, which is further emphasized by the play of the colour river scenes against the black and white graves in rhetoric

other

moments

of

the

film.

The

radical

dualism of nature and self that emerges from and the other lyrical films of Brakhage

this

directly challenges the optimistic Apollonianism of Maya Deren's cinema and extends the Dionysiac inversion of illusionism that Peterson initiated.

When Maya Deren

died in 1961, Jonas the polemical leadership of the American £vant-garde. At first he at-

Mekas assumed tempted

to shift the terms of its dialectic. Since 1955 he had been moving from a position of militant opposition to the avant-garde a reconciliation, which was acby the making of his own first film, Guns of the Trees (1961). At that time Mekas was deluded by what was happening in Europe into thinking that a countercommercial cinema of 35-mm feature films was about to emerge in force in America. He saw the virtually simultaneous completion of his own film, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy (1958), Gregory Markopoulos' Serenity (1954-61) and Shirley Clarke's The Connection (i960) as a composite harbinger of a New American Cinema that would challenge Hollywood on its own

towards

celerated

ground. In addition to promoting these films through his magazine Film Culture and his column in the Village Voice, he proceeded with the apparently logical step of organizing a distribution outlet to service the

commer-

were hypothetically anxious to screen these films. Although that effort failed, the organization he founded, the Film-Makers' Cooperative, became the focal point for a concentration and revival of avant-garde film-making which far surpassed cial theatres that

the earlier high point of the late 40s.

The phase

of the American avant-garde

have called 'agnostic' abandoned an omniscient camera eye and a stable firstperson perspective. A discontinuous relationship between the film-maker and his film is most frequently rendered by direct or indirect admission of his lack of authority over the

cinema

I

narrative or the structure of his film, most frequently presented on the soundtrack. The

works that Mekas first hailed as the origin of new mode of film-making in America drew upon these principles no matter how uncon-

a

scious of their history the new film-makers Jack Kerouac's ironic monologue which makes up the soundtrack of Robert

were.

Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull

My

Daisy

is

American Avant-Garde Cinema

37

one example of this; the Active director intrudes on the acted 'reality' of Shirley The Connection is another. In Clarke's Mekas' own Guns of the Trees a variety of sound strategies complement the pictorial range from documentary through fiction to symbolic mime. A more subtle form of disparity between subject and the film-maker's authority oc-

coincided with a revitalization of avant-garde film-making in America. Therefore when

curred in the films of the same period that were hailed for their 'spontaneity'. Cassavetes' Shadows (1959), Leacock's Primary (i960) and Rice's The Flower Thief are examples of a novelistic film, a documentary and a picaresque fantasy, all three characterized by hand-held camera work, elliptical editing and attention to gesture as a primary

theoretical speculations.

just

who

mode

of

characterization.

That

style

in-

directly calls attention to the peculiarities of

observation and the physical presence of the cameramen shooting the film. As such it aligns itself with the lyrical film. However, the observing sensibility does not correspond to the subject of the film; and although the discontinuity is by no means as radical as in films like Guns of the Trees, the authority of the subject matter in each of these works is subtly undermined. The paradigmatic example of this tension can be seen in Jonas and Adolfas Mekas' treatment of The Brig (1964). They entered into the stage production as if they were documentary cameramen in the Leacock style and filmed the play. In 1964 the Venice Film Festival gave it an award as a pure

documentary.

The

natural direction for this

mode

of

film-making was adopted by Jonas Mekas when he turned to his own daily life as a subject and began to construct a filmic diary. limitations of a film journal, such as the impossibility of recording what has passed and the transformation of action that occurs

The

when one becomes both the recorder and actor of life, are acknowledged in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1968) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) by organizing elements such as intertitles and spoken commentary which reflects upon both the filmic

images and the action they represent.

New

American Cinema The failure of the Group and of the Film-Makers' Cooperative to create a commercial alternative to the Hollywood studios and distribution system

Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Harry Smith and Stan Brakhage began to exhibit long films in the early 60s, after public

silences

of

many

years,

the Film-Makers'

Cooperative provided them with a limited but encouraging distribution and Film Culture magazine offered a forum for their

Both the trance

film

and the

lyrical film

presented versions of the self in a quest for sexual identity. By the early 60s these forms no longer seemed to satisfy the most ambitious film-makers. They began the elaborate mythic structures that equated the dialectics of individual consciousness with the elemental struggles of gods or demi-gods, much as the Romantic poets had done. The major works of this phase, such as Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963), Markopoulos' The I Iliac Passion (1967), Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic (also known as Number 12 and The Magic Feature, 1943-58), Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1962), Brakhage's Dog Star Man (1959-64) and Jacobs' unfinished The Sky Socialist (1965), subarchetypal conflicts for narrative stitute exposition.

Each of the central works of the mythopoeic phase presents its own mode of mythology and its own strategy for calling into question the authority of its mode. Kenneth Anger moved towards mythopoeia earlier than most of his contemporaries. One might almost say that he was the first to seize

upon the

direction indicated for the avantfilm by Maya Deren. Anger's garde Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (first version, 1954) depicts a convocation of Egyptian and Hellenic deities under the control of a

Magus and a 'Scarlet Woman' from the mythopoeic imagination of his chosen master, Aleister Crowley. From the opening ritual of waking and dressing the film acknowledges the ad hoc nature of its divine personifications. It is both the making new of ancient myths and a contemporary masquerade.

The turning point of the film, the poison-

ing of Pan and his subsequent sparagmos, coincides with the assuming of new masks and the compounding of guises. From the

beginning Anger had conceived of his film as

American Avant-Garde Cinema

38 a triptych.

When

he projected

it

as

such

at

the Second Experimental Film Festival at Brussels in 1958, the poisoning of Pan was the moment at which the images expanded

from the single to the triple screen. In the version in distribution (1966) Anger introduced superimposition at this point and incorporated

strategies

from Scorpio Rising

for calling attention to the illusionary status

of mythology. In Scorpio Rising he establishes an ironic series of comparisons between a mythologized archetype of an American motorcyclist and his positive and negative prototypes, Hitler and Christ. Whenever analogies are introduced they are effected by

most vulgar representations of the popular images of those figures. Nazi checkerboards, magazine photos and flags present the image of Hitler, while Christ appears through the mediation of a Hollywood a collage of the

Every time a clip from this its comic absurdity, Anger indirectly reminds us that we are the subject of a parallel illusion in watching his film. The same distancing is achieved in the religious film.

film occurs with

1966 version of Inauguration of the Pleasure the incorporation of images of flaming moats and dying sinners from Lachman's Dante's Inferno in the montage of the diabolical spells of the Magus. Furthermore, Anger stresses the themes of masking,

Dome by

motion picture illusionism and his own ambiguous relationship to both, by superimposing most of the dressing sequence from his early, fragmentary film, Puce Moment (1948). For Anger the mythopoeic aspiration of the American avant-garde film-maker is dialectically related Hollywood's vulgar to mythologizing, and every attempt by an American artist to transcend that tinsel Olympus must somehow be grounded in it. Only the first of Jack Smith's three major Flaming Creatures, Normal Love films, (begun 1963) and No President (1969), was definitely completed and distributed. All three exploited the chemical changes that occur in film stock not used until long after the recommended time limit for exposure. Smith derived this heightened textural ambiguity from seeing Ron Rice's picaresque

Taylor Mead, in The Flower Thief. However, he carried it to an extreme that Rice had not exploited. By cos-

portrait of a beat poet,

turning his actors in black and white gowns before flagrantly artificial white backdrops,

he capitalized upon the tendency of outdated film stock to wash towards whiteness. In the colour film Normal Love, a comparable pastel effect was achieved by elaborating an imagery that would coincide with the tendencies of outdated tolour 'material. Both films derived their mythologies from Hollywood. After exhibiting Flaming Creatures,

Smith acknowledged

his

com-

debt to von Sternberg and his ironic enthusiasm for the world envisaged in the arabesque films of Maria Montez. Normal Love, on the other hand, depicts a convocation of Hollywood types from horror positional

films: the

Werewolf, the

Woman. Yet

Mummy,

the

Cobra

Smith's films the distance between homage and parody, between naive aspiration and irony, is so problematic that it is difficult to determine the degree of consciousness the film-maker had in the astounding distancing of his illusions. Perhaps these films should not be situated within the mythopoeic phase of the American avant-garde at all. The insistence of Smith's art on the evocation of a polymorphousperverse innocence is so strong that there is in

absolutely no hierarchical distinction in his

work between play, sex-play and ad hoc mimesis for the camera. Only after seeing No President, in which a documentary of the life of Wendell Wilkie is intercut with highcontrast tableaux reminiscent of Flaming Creatures in an indisputably ironic manner, might a critical viewer of the earlier films conclude that the cyclic myth of creatures destroyed in an earthquake only to be reborn for more dancing and pseudo-necrophiliac sex-play, or the combination of these images with popular Spanish and rock music, is also ironic.

While Scorpio Rising describes the limitaof the mythopoeic imagination by grounding it in Hollywood archetypes, Flaming Creatures offers a more complexly tions

ironic version of the dialectic play of imagina-

tion

and nature. In the pivotal scene of the

film an act of imagination, or more exactly of the fancy, engenders a physical convulsion:

the camera responds to a comic orgy by gyrating in sympathy to it; yet before the orgy is over an earthquake occurs and the

same

spastic

movement

is

presented again as

American Avant-Garde Cinema

39

response to the natural disaster. After the earthquake, which temporarily destroys all the creatures, the possibility of a rebirth is explicitly tied to the power of cinematic montage. Into the middle of a long static passage of a fly clinging to and moving slightly over the brightly lit and gently swaying cloth backdrop, Smith proleptically injects a shot of a coffin lid beginning to move, emphasized by a synchronous change from the whining violin music which accompanies the fly to a 30s song. Then, as if he had been too hasty in cutting to the coffin, he returns to the empty scene and begins the coffin episode after another long static passage. Scorpio Rising, however, describes the ritual preparation for, and achievement of, a sparagmos (the death of a motorcyclist in a race at the end of the

a

That movement is expanded and commented upon by a montage of parallels film).

and antitheses. The sparagmos of Flaming Creatures is itself the result of an excess of enthusiasm in the act of filming, and montage in this film is the agency of renewal and cyclic continuity.

A very

different relationship

between

edit-

ing and mythopoeia can be found in the long

Gregory Markopoulos from this perIn his early work, Psyche (1947-48) and Swain (1951), he had used impressive montages of recapitulation as an organizational principle in the former and as the climax of the latter. Twice a Man (1962-63), Markopoulos' version of the myth of Hippolytus, employs a complex schema of memory within memory and a shifting mediation in the minds of four figures. The whole film is first posited in the memory of the Asclepius figure who is both the hero's lover and the agent of the cosmic rebirth. The Phaedra figure is divided into a young and old mother; the scene of rebirth is framed within the silent monologue of the former, while the latter is the emblem of the memory process itself. Finally, the episodes of the life of the hero are seen as his own films of iod.

memories

as

he wanders through the house

The ambiguous movement between and prolepsis

in this film

is

recol-

grounded

very structure of the editing of every shot. Rather than directly splice one shot to the next and build his dynamics on the stress accent of the point of change, as in the clasin the

will

strategies

of his youth. lection

montage of Eisenstein, Markopoulos introduce one or two frames of the forthcoming shot before the 'present' shot is completed; he also allows a series of brief flashes from the former shot to recur periodically as echoes after the former shot has ended as the dominant image. Thus one image breaks into the next in a moment of vibrating fusions of past, present and future time. With this structure operating throughout the film Markopoulos can introduce metaphors and complexly bracketed themes into his montage; he can also shift easily to extended passages of recapitulation. There are two passages at the end of the film in which hundreds of two-frame flashes from earlier scenes are repeated. The film-maker saw in this system an affirmation of the priority of montage over spatial transfiguration in the tradition I have associated with Maya Deren. In his crucial essay, 'Towards a New Narrative Film Form', he joins her in rejecting the use of filters, anamorphosis, or any other means of transforming the spatial given-ness of the cinematic image. He extends her commitment to the immanent aesthetics of the filmic material in a direction which she never took, when he points out that the fact that all films are a strip of still, rapidly changing frames has been 'understood only as a photographic necessity'. He emphasizes that rather than being a contingent fact about cinema this is the potential source of its primary structures. The operations of the single frame then became the focus of Markopoulos' later theoretical work. In The Illiac Passion Markopoulos no longer used this single-frame montage technique as a vehicle of psychological bracketing; nor are there any recapitulations in the film. Here, in his most ambitious work of mythopoeia, more than a dozen mythological episodes are interiorized as the passions of a modern Prometheus. The single-frame editing places the myths on a simultaneous level, while the film-maker employs a number of sical

to

identify

his

characters

as

imaginary beings. Most flagrantly he enters the scene himself at unpredicted moments to light-meter reading, set a prop in motion or adjust a costume. The elaborate costumes themselves set the actors off from the landscapes and cityscapes in which take a

American Avant-Garde Cinema

40 Markopoulos has placed them. The Romantic myth of a divided and reunited selfhood is also the subject of Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic. Here a female figure is injected by a magician with a substance that simultaneously makes her ascend to heaven and divides her body. The mental landscape of heaven is envisioned in a series of cyclic attempts to reconstitute her, ending with both her and the magician being swallowed by a titanic figure. After they descend through his body in an elevator they are defecated by him, whole again, on earth. Smith's film is the major instance of an animated mythopoeic film and also the example from this phase that most fully uses combined sound and image to attest to its fictionality. At the very beginning of the film, as the magician brings into the frame the basic elements out of which the woman will be initially constituted, we see him exit on screen right and then re-enter from screen left as if he had walked round the back of the screen.

Similar

acknowledgements

of

the

animation occur throughout the film. Figures move along arbitrary imagined lines against the back of the screen until suddenly a bridge will appear and they are bound to cross it as the only possible line of illusion of

movement

in the field of vision.

At one point

a

comparable gravitational

created when a series of couches descend the middle of the screen. The figures

illusion

is

cannot cross that path without the aid of a running jump or a parachute. By synchronizing the sound of traffic with this image Smith

superimposed sense that we are both seeing a vertical downward movement and watching a fiat horizontal movement creates the

from above. As a work of the graphic cinema Smith's film has a fundamental orientation towards of spatial illusion. He wittily acknowledges this near the opening of the film when the magician pulls a photograph of a watermelon patch into the frame. The photograph has a horizon in Renaissance perspective, but the frame of the film does

the

reorganization

not.

He

takes a

watermelon out of the photo-

graph for his manipulation in the more ambiguous black field of the film. When Smith speaks of sources for his mythopoeia MacGregor Matthews' presentations of the Caballah, Wilder Penfield's

—

open

surgery on epileptics, and Schrcber's Memoirs of My

brain

especially

D.

Nervous

Illness

P.

myth-making

—

between

link

a

radical

comand paranoia manifests itself. Brakhage's major work on cinematic myth-making, Dog Star Man, also presents a radically individualized spatial field and explores divided consciousness and its selfas an exploration of the

plexities of the self

inflicted torments.

Man

Dog Star

has a prelude and four

parts, corresponding roughly to the seasons.

man

The myth

itself

climbing

mountain and collapsing

a

chopping ing

down

mence

a

describes a

tree in

the

summer

mountain

in

with an axe

in winter, heat and fall-

autumn

to

recom-

the climb in winter. This action

is

concentrated in the first and fourth parts of the film. The second and third are dialectical opposites. They describe alternative modes of visionary revival for the fallen woodsman as he lies on the mountain after his collapse. Part Two explores the idea of innocent

which haunted Anticipation of is bracketed by images of the man lying on a rock, while superimposed infantile vision

the Night.

The

film

over him are the ragged images of a film strip of a naked female 'emanation'. The core of the film portrays an infant baby in black and white blinking his eyes, flexing his arms and turning in his cradle, while over his image a rapid montage of spring-like streams, trees, glittering textures, richly lush and almost fragrant landscapes, and a mother's breast, flash by in superimposition. In this section Brakhage proposes the untrained perception of an infant as one pole of the renovated vision that might revive the fallen

Dog

Star

Man. In Part Three he explores the other pole, that of vision heightened through sexuality. layers of superimposition mix images of a gradually accelerating human heart with solid colour, generally close-up shots of naked male and female bodies, and with scratches on the surface of the film rhythmically correlated to the beating heart. In the

Three

Part Four, the hero rises in quadruple superimposition and chops a tree. In the rapid and highly complex interlaying of four levels of imagery, his chopping is metaphorically extended to a procreative cycle of sex, birth, breast feeding and an encounter with

final

an infant crawling

in front of a fire.

American Avant-Garde Cinema The

deliberately

cycle

ments from

all

quasi-narrative

which the child technique

of

reconstructs

41 ele-

the earlier sections into a sequence. At the point at faces the fire, the collage

Part

Two

is

reintroduced.

There Brakhage had cut tiny pieces of film out of a strip and inserted them into another base strip as if he were making a mosaic. Thus a coloured ear inlaid into the black and white image of the child in that earlier section both called attention to the momentary emphasis on hearing in the catalogue of his senses and affirmed the filmic materials themselves. In Part Four the crawling child ends the cyclic episode and the image of the fire in the hearth elliptically becomes the winter sun above the Dog Star Man on his mountain. He looks up to it before he falls in slow motion, through a cascade of images from autumn, to another hibernal desolation. In the final images of the film, Brakhage shows him again chopping wood. Here his negative image is superimposed upon the night sky as if he were a constellation, and the rhythm of his chopping is reflected in the sputtering flares and scratches on the film stock until an ultimate metaphorical association between the woodchopper and the film cutter is made clear. In that final identity of the mythopoeic prototype and the maker of the film, Dog Star Man ends. Brakhage has also released a version of this film called The Art of Vision (1961-65), in which all the layers which make up the parts are seen separately and in their possible permutations; so that the thirtyminute double-layered Prelude lasts for an hour and a half as its two layers are seen individually followed by their composite. In this version the six-minute four-layered Part Four decomposes through all the triple and double-layered possibilities to its four single layers over eighty-four minutes. The distended version of the film both impresses the viewer with the structure of the spatial illusionism of superimposition and reinforces the cyclic theme of the myth. In both versions Brakhage uses superimposition, anamorphosis, painting and scratching over images, and collage effects to create a spatial vision that is his own rather than that of the camera. He also affirms the

ad hoc quality of his mythopoeia in this way. However, there is a sequence at the end of

Part One, the only unsuperimposed part in the epic, which dramatizes most fully the relationship of raw nature to the cinematic imagination as it veers towards paranoia. Throughout the climb the Dog Star Man is accompanied by his dog. As the film progresses, the angle of the mountain grows steeper until, near the end, he is climbing a cliff of seventy-five degrees. At this point, however, Brakhage gives us a shot of the Dog Star Man desperately crawling while the dog leaps easily at his side, confirming any suspicion the viewer might have had that the angle of the mountain was a function of the tilt of the camera. Yet rather than stop here at the unmasking of his own epistemological deception, Brakhage then tilts the camera all the way and shows the Dog Star Man slowly making his way up a ninety-degree wall!

The American avant-garde cinema began with an essential bifurcation which I have not yet treated. On the one hand, young filmmakers like Deren, Anger, Broughton, Peterson, Markopoulos and Brakhage absorbed from their Dadaist and Surrealist precursors those formal tactics which allowed them to invent a cinema that could describe the crisis of the self. Thus the early psychodramas bluntly posited the film-maker himself or herself as the figure of selfhood and the film was the description of that figure's

quest for a sexual identity through a landscape that was aggressively alien. At the same time such film-makers as John and James Whitney, Jordan Belson, Robert Breer and Harry Smith derived from many of the same Dadaist and Surrealist sources a cinema that rigorously excluded all effigies of the self. Theirs was the graphic cinema (see AvantGarde Animation). In Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Aiagic we found an early instance of the convergence of the subjectivist cinema with the graphic. Yet for the

most

part,

the

mythopoeic cinema was

a

direct outgrowth of the limitations of the trance

As long as the film-maker was limited to presenting the dialectic between nature and imagination in terms of a single passive consciousness and an active universe, he could not begin to elaborate discontinuities within the self and even more fundamental discontinuities between the self and its cinematic film.

representation.

Composite structures such

as

American Avant-Garde Cinema

42 The End and Blonde Cobra were attempts at overcoming these limitations, and acknowledging those discontinuities.

Romantic mythopoeia sciousness

projects

in

itself

which the con-

as

a

number

of

independent archetypes allowed the filmmakers to create elaborate forms in which certain epistemological issues fundamental to cinema could be dramatically represented. Since cinema is for the most part both an illusionary and an indexical medium (that is, one whose illusions are created by an external reality: the object filmed), one initial problem for the American avant-garde film-maker was to create a cinema in which his imagination and his will would be more evidently powerful than the actuality of the objects in front of his camera. The menacing landscapes of the psychodrama, as mediated by the trance figure, were clearly such transfigured actualities. The primary theoretical discussion which I have traced here centred on whether or not that transformation was to be essentially temporal or spatial. The success of the trance film brought with it the paradoxes of a strong selfhood: the spectres of solipsism and paranoia. If indeed the most pernicious illusion of cinema was Michael Snow's Wavelength: the

loft.

not its spatial and temporal continuity but the deception that a cinematic image attested to the existence of an external reality, which the most advanced mythopoeic films sought to unmask, was there any possible subject for cinema aside from the self? What would a transcendental cinema be that presented things in thetnselves? The graphic filmmakers, who had purged their works of the more obvious metaphors of selfhood, were affirming the filmic frame, the screen, grain patterns and the projector light as the basic elements of an anti-illusionist cinema. With the emergence of the structural film the graphic and the subjectivist tendencies converged.

For purposes of brevity and

a clarity

the complexity of very recent

does not permit,

I

shall confine

which

phenomena

myself to the

discussion of two works which directly address themselves to the problems of the evolution of the American avant-garde film I have been schematizing it. They are Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) and Landow's Remedial Reading George Comprehension (1970). Snow's film begins with a manifestation of

as

American Avant-Garde Cinema

43

purely indexical cinema. We see an empty loft from a high viewing position looking across the whole room to and through a bank of windows at the far wall. The only sounds

we hear

are those of the traffic

from the

street

move

book-

outside, until a group of people

a

loft. We see and hear them as in conventional film, that is, as if they were not being filmed, as if there were no camera there. When they leave, the image flickers and goes blank, calling attention to the actual flatness of the screen and the illusory nature of cinematic depth, but there is as yet no injection of the selfhood of the film-maker. The scene immediately returns. Two women enter the loft, go to the back wall and listen to a radio. As the Beatles' song 'Strawberry Fields' is heard from the radio mixed with the natural sounds of the women and the traffic, the tone of the whole image begins to change. This change occurs in such a way that we are forced to realize that someone (the film-maker) is placing different filters over the lens; the reddish tone of the image seems a fanciful response to the words of the

case into the a

song ('Nothing forever').

The

is

real

.

.

.

Strawberry

fields

held by hand, its deliberately obvious. This

filter

is

manipulation is playful, but banal, strategy takes on meaning in the context of Brakhage's lyrical cinema. By affirming the presence of the film-maker behind the camera, Brakhage presented the photographic imagery as what the film-maker personally sees. Snow's manipulation of the filter calls attention both to his presence behind the camera and to the mechanical nature of the recording instrument; he refuses to allow Brakhage's metaphor to operate and reveals it as such, a metaphor. Snow wrote of this film: I

wanted to make

nervous

system,

a

summation of

religious

inklings,

my and

was thinking of planning time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence could be celebrated, thinking of making a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of illusion and 'fact', all about seeing. The space starts at the camera's (spectator's) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).

aesthetic ideas. I a

of Snow's attitude to metarevealed in his careful definition of its

The complexity phor

is

perimeters, 'the beauty and sadness of equivalence'. The sadness of metaphor is that, in undoing Brakhage's equation of the camera eye with the film-maker's eye, he undoes his own metaphor of the screen and the mind.

The

use of the

filter is

tne

first

undermin-

ing of the indexical veracity of the visual

image. shift

From

positive

this point

and

Snow

will continually

between and negative. By superimposition or

filters

often

alternate

by

filtering in the printing he gives different colour tones to the black and white negative. The shifting filters make us aware of another limitation in the original image of the room. It is only when a strong filter dims the light within the loft that the signs and buildings outside the windows can be seen. Without such a filter the brightness of the daylight in relation to the artificial light within the room is such that the light at the windows blinds

us to what

When

is

the

outside.

women

turn off their radio and

the camera slowly zooms forward in minimal jerks, gradually closing in on the back wail. The moment of their exit is leave the

loft,

matched with a switch from the 'received' sound to a generated sine wave, an electronic buzz, which asserts its priority over indexical sound until the end of the film. Even in the two places where natural sounds occur the gradually rising sine wave continues. Midway through the film there is a sound of broken glass and noises as if someone were breaking into the loft. The sound continues until a man enters and collapses on the floor. However, while the sound representation is continuous, the image continually changes degree of graininess, colour tone; very moment of the man's appearance it suddenly becomes night (the windows are black). By this point, the visual images have become as much a projection of the film-maker's will as the sine wave. As the zoom passes over the body towards the wall, superimpositions occur which present among other things a deeper daylight image of the loft, from the 'past' of the film, over the night scene. The whole room becomes daylight and night again before the final dramatic act. A woman enters, goes to the far wall and telephones someone to say that there is a body in the loft. Then she leaves. After she has departed, her image,

texture,

and

at the

American Avant-Garde Cinema

44 in

black

and white and cut

flashes, appears

in

elliptical

superimposition repeating, silently, her entry, call and exit. The ghost

image

is

in

the most subjective in the film.

raises the notion of the loft as the

It

extended

locus of an obsessed consciousness. It is the point of maximum humanization of the contemplated space, ambiguous and troubling as it is.

However, Snow continues beyond this point towards an evocation of transcendence. The image slowly zooms in on a photograph tacked to the back wall. It is a black and white image of waves in the sea. As the camera frames the picture, surrounded on all sides by the immediate space of the wall, a superimposition dimly appears of the picture even

closer, filling the

whole screen.

proleptic, indicating the point towards

It

is

which

the image is moving. The forward movement occurs not by a zoom but by a change of light values.

When Snow

gives

more

light to the

image and less to the picture framed by the wall, the earlier image becomes the dim remembrance of where we had been, behind the 'now' of the waves. That superimposition ends and the camera slowly zooms forward over the frozen waves towards a horizon which is doubly illusionary (a photograph within a film), and in that final movement the motion of the camera is freed of the last vestiges of a residual grounding in 'real' space, which it had been shedding since closer

the introduction of the sine wave. The trajectory of Wavelength is initially mechanical, then a fusion of mechanism and the humanized presence of the film-maker. But after the telephone call it provides a metaphor for a superhuman authority. At the middle stage, when the film-maker is copresent with his machine, Snow incorporates the strategies of Andy Warhol, whose long takes of a man eating a mushroom {Eat, 1964) or of a building {Empire, 1965) and arbitrary zooming about the room where someone is delivering a confessional monologue (much of The Chelsea Girls, 1966) were themselves deflations of the metaphor of the camera as an eye or the mind.

Wavelength might be construed as a complex reaction to both the early and the late Warhol styles: the fixed camera and the impulsive zoom. Warhol's unbudging camera was at first a radical dehumanization of the

tactics

of

earlier

film-makers

within

the

American avant-garde. He recognized, at least implicitly, that their way of making cinema was closely bound to' the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism which he had been dehumanizing in his paintings. His shift to film-making involved an attack on the same front in a different rrfedium. However, as he became involved in making cinema, Warhol seems to have found himself possessed by the work of Jack Smith. Under Smith's influence, he slowly turned from the dialectically

least

cold presentation of affective or at gestures (sleeping, getting a

private

haircut, kissing, eating, etc.) to a

cinema that

focused on unstable psychologies and sadistically induced paroxysms of confession by its very refusal to be affected, as Stephen Koch has brilliantly analysed in his book Stargazer.

The unceasing zoom action which characmuch of Warhol's middle period tends

terizes

be a direct refutation of the conventional action of the moving camera. Rather than

to

press

in

upon the

face

or

the

revealing

gestures of the subjects of his films, Warhol prefers to is

make

it

perfectly clear that his eye

interested in everything but his subjects.

He zooms round

the

room almost

as if he

were pushing the zoom lever back and forth without looking, just as his fixed camera had manifested a special kind of disinterest. Wavelength captures the obsessive concentration of the earliest Warhol films by the slowness and steadiness of its attention at any given moment in the film. The camera seems basically still even though we cannot fail to see it jerking forward. In the movement to-

wards and into the photograph there is a parallel to Warhol's arbitrary zoom. However, it shifts from aleatory to intentional at a crucial moment. Until the last minutes of the film, the ultimate object of its progress is unknown. When it finally fixes on the still image of the waves, a new insight into the very nature of the zoom lens emerges. Initially the engineers who invented the zoom lens must have understood that the

moving camera, which actually traverses space, usually on tracks for smoothness, could be imitated by the ratio of two lenses to each other. In the shifting focal length effected by a lever without moving the camera itself, the illusion of forward or backward dollying

American Avant-Garde Cinema

Pope Ondine

in

Andy Warhol's The

Chelsea Girls.

45

46

American Avant-Garde Cinema

could be created. Earlier avant-gardists such as Gance and L'Herbier dreamed of such flexibility when they mounted their cameras on wires to imitate the flight of a snowball {Napoleon) or to fall to the floor of the stock

market {V Argent). In Wavelength, Snow illustrates the deceppowers of the raw film material, the degree of lighting and finally the zoom lens itself to portray depth. When he moves from the 'surface' of the photograph, bounded by the wall, into its depicted space, he specifically calls to our attention the ability of the zoom lens to continue its illusion of moving forward by a simple change of lens ratio. In terms of film theory, he moves at the beginning of the film from the kind of affirmation of reality that Kracauer would emphasize (its pure indexicality), to a subjective,

tive

humanized cinema

that

Deren and Brakhage

speak of despite their disagreements; and he finally affirms a position close to both Jean Epstein and Dziga Vertov, who held that the camera and the techniques of editing provided man with a machine for the transcendence of his sensual limitations. The essential rhetorical and cinematic figure

behind

metalepsis,

that

the is,

structural

cinema

is

the figure of a figure.

Snow's zoom lens comments on the moving camera; his still photograph comments on the still frames of filmic illusion. George Landow too had elaborated a metaleptical cinema in an attempt to overcome the excesses of selfconsciousness in his tradition. His early films the trope of refilming a film off a screen in order to emphasize its cinematic quality. In Remedial Reading Comprehension he marshals his gift of parody to reflect on the history of the American avant-garde film utilize

and to construe his own autobiography as a film-maker. It is the second part of an autobiographical series, the first of which, Institutional Quality (1969), explored the influence of television and academic testing situations on his choice of becoming a filmmaker. In Remedial Reading Comprehension he combines images of himself jogging, a girl dreaming, a classroom assembling, a film exercise for speed reading and an ironical advertisement for processed rice. The images of Landow himself are second generation. He refilmed them off a screen to destroy illusion-

ary depth. Furthermore, he superimposed a frontal image over a silhouette. On top of these images, which occur near the beginning and the end of this short film, he printed the words 'This is a film about you' and later 'not about its maker'. The explicit introduction of the category of the second person

acknowledges^ implicit theme in much structural cinema. There is an effort to present or rather to induce an experience without the mediation of a protagonist. Wavelength in its complex way attempts this. If the entire history of the American avant-garde film has been an exploration of the selfhood, as I have proposed, then Landow's film deceptively attests to it in the imagery and denies it in the text.

The dreaming woman

is

a version of

Maya

Deren's persona, and her association with the classroom refers to the place her

cinema has

in the origins of

Landow's own

be a film-maker. However, he presents himself as somehow more advanced than she because he acknowledges the act of desire

to

counterfeiting (exemplified by the imitation rice commercial) which occurs in the middle

of the film.

Both Wavelength and Remedial Reading Comprehension aspire to be films of de-mythologization.

They

are characteristic of the

most advanced achievements of the American avant-garde film in the late 60s and early 70s. Like each of the crucial films in their tradisought a greater 'purity' than the films from which they sprang. That purity itself can be analysed as the reference to and the balancing of the successive stances of tion, they

their predecessors.

Following the principles set down in the Introduction, I have chosen one of its chief partisans to write about the American avant-garde. P. Adams Sitney is not only a partisan; he is, with Jonas Mekas, one of the chief pillars of the movement. And therefore, as in his exhaustive study Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (1974), he is the ideal mediator, to use one of his favourite words. There is, I think, no better exponent of the movement; however, it will be noticed that he shares the tendency of all avantgardists to see no salvation outside the movement. Therefore, there are many statements in his essay (like 'By the 40s, the Hollywood cinema was moribund') which will

excite

instant

premature, perhaps.

disbelief.

A

little

American Cinema of the 70s

47

On

the other hand, he does explain the and tenets of this movement better than anyone else: e.g., his statement that 'one initial problem for the American avantgarde film-maker was to create a cinema in beliefs

which his imagination and his will would be more evidently powerful than the actuality of the objects in front of his camera'. This sentence, I believe, explains the reason why the movement has excited both hostility and adherence; this need for the film-maker to assert himself, this mistrust of reality is the principal quality (or defect, according to one's point of view) of the American avantgarde film. Sitney's article on the graphic cinema, entitled Avant-Garde Animation, must be read in conjunction with this article, if only it is there that he discusses the work of the film-maker whom I find the most important of them all, Hollis Frampton. See also Jonathan Rosenbaum's piece on Michael Snow, Tony Rayns on Shirley Clarke, and

because

my own

article

on Robert Kramer.

For those who feel that Sitney has somewhat glossed over the films of Warhol, there are two excellent books: Stephen Koch's Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films (1973) and Peter Gidal's Andy Warhol: Films and Painting (1971). Other works on the experimental cinema that can be profitably consulted include: Experimental Cinema: a 50 Year Evolution (1971) by David Curtis, Gregory Battcock's critical anthology (1967)

The

and

New American Cinema

Sheldon

Renan's

An

Intro-

duction to the American Underground Film (1967), republished in Britain in 1968 as The Underground Film: An Introduction to its

Development

in

America.

AMERICAN CINEMA OF THE 70s Richard Corliss

Of the dozen or so American film directors who have come to deserved prominence since 1970, a surprisingly high percentage are the products of graduate film programmes at such schools as the University of Southern California, U.C.L.A. and New York University. The schools themselves may have provided little more than way stops for a generation of ambitious young cineastes (one could compose intriguing lists of direc-

tors

who,

as

actors,

early in their careers, cartoonists,

washers); but

it's

had worked

engineers,

dish-

likely that systematic ex-

posure to

classical

historical

moment when

American

films, at just the

these films were at intellectually respectable, had

becoming to do with convincing these Young Turks that the Hollywood tradition was an honourable one, and one ready to be reformed and revitalized from within. There is also an imposing roster of filmschool graduates who have become screenwriters: Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, David Ward, Walter Hill, Paul Schrader, W. D. Richter. And there are several young cinematographers, editors and, no doubt, key grips who have done a stretch as at least last

a

lot

migrant workers in the groves of academe. But even the hot-shot scenarists earning $300,000 for an original script hope to direct some day soon it has replaced movie stardom as the American 'showbiz' dream. The filmmakers mentioned below have already arrived. They include some of the most powerful men in the business, who now have the responsi-

—

bility to make innovations, and take risks, on multimillion-dollar budgets. Only time will tell

whether they

elephantiasis

fall

prey to stagnation and

—become middle-aged—and are

overthrown by the next generation, the

class

of 1980. Peter

Bogdanovich (born an 1939), honours graduate of the Film Buff School of New York, has been accused, by critic Richard Eder, of knowing how to make films, but not why. His films are genre pieces (horror movies in Targets, 1968; screwball comedy in What's Up, Doc?, 1972; fonder-guardian sentiment in Paper Moon, 1973; literary adaptation in Daisy Miller, 1974; musical comedy in At Long Last Love, 1975), as seen from a revisionist rather than revolutionary point of view genuine imitation valentines to the Hollywood system, of which

—

Nickelodeon (1976) is failed fond, his only the most blatant. Even The Last Picture

Show vich's

(1971), which established Bogdanoreputation, echoes an earlier film:

Martin Ritt's Hud (1963), also based on a Larry McMurtry novel, which dealt in the same drawling ironies, the same seducing of puritan losers by libertine predators. Only in his foibles and failures do passion and eccentricity surface: in his

obsession with Cybill

— 48

American Cinema of

Shepherd (Bogdanovich's Susan Alexander), and in his insistence on shooting the songs in At Long Last Love with direct sound. Generally, though, and despite his devotion to such humanists as Renoir and McCarey, the director's true mentor in style, spirit and

—

—

masterly direction of actors is that ultimate technician, William Wyler. Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939) had made a couple of 'nudie films' (The Wide Open Spaces and The Belt Girls and the Playboy, c. 1961) and a baroque horror movie (Dementia 13 [U.K.: The Haunted and the Hunted], 1963) before even enrolling at U.C.L.A.; his master's thesis was You're a Big Boy Now (1967). But after two more films (the ho-hummable Finian's Rainbow, 1968; the underrated The Rain People, 1969), Coppola had yet to find a personal or visual style or to hit pay dirt so he kept busy by writing scripts (notably Patton) for other directors. But with his two Godfathers (1972 and 1974) Coppola fused operatic intensity with a murky languor, and turned one of the most energetic of pulp novels into, in effect, a six-and-a-half-hour art film that grossed almost $200,000,000. Coppola's real diploma-winner, though, was The Conversation (1974): thematically similar to his first nudie film (the subject of both is frustrated voyeurism), but a beautifully controlled, sympathetic study of whispered betrayal

—

—

and quiet desperation. George Lucas (born 1945) was a student at the University of Southern California when two of his films a futuristic satire on cybernetics and a documentary about a Californian disc

— jockey —won

prizes at the

1967 N.S.A. Film Festival. Lucas has since expanded the scope of his shorts to featurefilm length, if not depth. THX-1138 (1971) is

a frighteningly

serene piece of software

been made by a well programmed computer; American Graffiti (1973) is nostalgic and puppy-warm, if too insubstantial and ingratiating. The spectacularly profitable blending of sci-fi and teen-pix came in 1977 with Star Wars the ultimate that could have

—

thinking-boy's film.

John Carpenter (born 1948), another U.S.C. graduate, won an Oscar while still in film school: for editing, scoring and helping to write The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), an affecting portrait of

the 70s

would-be cowboy in modern L.A. Sincethen, he has worked on low budgets and in familiar genres: science fiction (Dark Star, 1974), the garrison-mentality urban melodrama (Assault on Precinct 13, 1976) and the horror film (Halloween, 1978). Each one displays born film-maker's grace, the

a

and, unerring perfect camera setup.

assurance

instinct

for

the

Terrence Malick (born 1945) interned at American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Studies and made his debut with Badlands (1974). A remarkable film, it is a lineal descendant of Bonnie and Clyde (1967, the

the prototype film for the

Young

Turks).

Badlands views its outlaw lovers from an ironic, oblique perspective. Malick turned a bloody tableau into a pristine, sceptical, God's-eye-view of the 50s. In Badlands, Malick never apologizes, never explains which may be why it took this most talented to graduates five years next project. Days of Heaven's story sparse, romantic-triangle (1978) involving lower- and upper-class passions in the Texas Panhandle during the First World War is an heroic and meticulously planned

of

film-school

realize

his

—

pastoral fresco.

Steven Spielberg (born 1948) graduated

from another kind of 'film school': the TV movie. At 22 Spielberg directed the TV movie Duel (1971), Richard Matheson's story of a motorist terrorized by a malevolent truck; it proved impressive enough to be distributed, with some footage added, as a theatrical feature in Europe. Ever since, Spielberg has been accused of sacrificing human emotion to popular mechanics: in his preoccupation with automobiles in The Sugarland Express (1974), with Bruce, the mechanical shark, in Jaws (1975) and with the starship and aliens in Close Encounters of the Third

Spielberg film

—an

pleasure

Kind

(1977). This charge does

—and the notion of the well-crafted injustice.

a

It

ignores

the distinct at the

cinemagoer experiences

is scared out of his wits by an combination of plot manipulation and film-making wizardry. Audiences have certainly endorsed the Spielberg pleasure principle: Jaws and Close Encounters have had enormous box-office successes.

moment he intelligent

Brian likeable,

De Palma (born 1940) made 16-mm satires (The Wedding

three

Party

— American Cinema of

Paul

Le Mat

(left) as

the 70s

49

Big John Milner, drag-race champion,

[1967], Greetings [1968], Hi, Mom! [1969]) featuring the young Robert De Niro.

all

Box-office success eluded him until, like so many of his peers, he turned to reworking old genres. Hitchcock, a genre all

own, was De Palma's model: Sisters and The Fury (1978) all had Psycho elements and homages; and Obsession (1976, written by Paul Schrader) was virtually a remake of Vertigo. De his

(1973), Carrie (1976)

Palma's

obsessions are with slow motion and the circular tracking shot. It remains to be seen whether this engineer of stylistic

special effects can get

on

to a

new, more

profitable track.

Martin Scorsese (born 1942) directed his feature (Who's That Knocking at My Door? [originally / Call First, later retitled J.R.], 1968) while working at New York University, and his career since then could first

in

George Lucas' American

Graffiti.

serve as a how-to course in movie moxie and mobility: apprentice work (as chief editor of Woodstock, 1970), exploitation

upward

melodrama (Boxcar Bertha, 1972), succes. d'estime (Mean Streets, 1973), succes d' argent (Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, 1974),, succes de tout [Taxi Driver, 1976) and then

—

the inevitable folie de grandeur (New York, New York, 1977). Scorsese's films explode

with a palpable sense of physical danger, but their images are meticulously composed; the man knows how to make movies. Scorsese's advice to the next generation of film-makers: 'You should just start working wherever you can! Get out, hustle your ass, knock on every door, sneak into the studio. Drive counts. This is Hollywood.' Plus qa change .

Another

Demme;

.

.

appealing talent is Jonathan a 'graduate' of the school of Roger

American Documentary

50 Corman,

his best film to date is Handle with Care (ex-Citizens Band, 1977). It was characterized by Pauline Kael as being an 'elegant dead-pan comedy with the mellow light touch of the 30s Renoir. Who could have ever thought that there could be such a thing as red-neck grace?' But Miss Kael sounded a note of warning, too: 'This is .

.

.

the kind of high-spirited light that would have become a hit a few years ago. Today a picture is penalized if it has no stars and no obvious selling point.' How right she was: compared with Close Encounters or Jaws, it was a dismal failure at the box-office; yet it is very much a bet-

exactly

comedy

ter film.

—

Finally do I hear someone saying, and about time, too Woody Allen. Born in 1935, Allen came to film as an actor in Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat? (1964); his

—

film as director was Take the Money and Run (1969). His films during the 70s were amusing collections of nightclub numbers, but in 1977 he made Annie Hall. This is a film many consider to be truly important, a judgement with which I simply cannot agree. It is better than, say, Bananas, but it still seems to me with the exception of a few sequences and the delightful performance of Diane Keaton to be the same old Woody Allen ego-trip. And unfortunately, Allen is neither as witty nor as wise as he seems to think he is. This, I reiterate, is very much a minority opinion. first

—

—

ment of the tape recorder gave

a

since

new impor-

tance to the element of sound, making

much real

SINCE

i960

James Monaco

The

history of the documentary film in the States since the 50s is closely

United linked

with

a

series

of

significant

tech-

nological developments. Since the 30s the art

of non-fiction film had been severely constricted by the bulky, unwieldy nature of the equipment available to film-makers, a situa-

which had led to the quasi-fictional, highly 'worked' quality of most of the famous documentaries of the period before i960. But in the late 50s the development of lightweight, professional-quality 16-mm equipment suggested a new mobility for filmmakers intent on capturing images rather than creating them; likewise, the develop-

tion

it

employ sound recorded on location and thus easier for documentarists to

obviating the heavy mixture of studiorecorded narration and music which had previously dominated the documentary T soundtrack. f In i960, the invention of crystal synchronization provided the final necessary flexible in this system, allowing cameraman

link

and sound recordist to work independently, unhampered by the umbilical cord that used to unite recorder and camera. The first major result of this new technology was Primary (i960), produced by Drew Associates, a record of the Wisconsin primary election campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert

Humphrey. Drew

Associates, a watershed of

American documentary film, had been founded in 1958 by Robert Drew under the umbrella of Time, Inc. to make a series of films for television. The influence of TV was to be a major factor in non-fiction film in the 60s. In making Primary (and other important documentaries in the early 60s) Drew collaborated with three film-makers Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles who were to form the core of the

—

—

new movement which came

to

in

documentary

in the 60s

be called 'Direct Cinema'.

Central to the aesthetic of Direct Cinema a sense of objectivity: the events and people who were the subjects of films were able, thanks to the new technology, to speak for themselves. Stated events and voice-over narration were avoided. Sound was as important as image. Often referred to as 'cinema verite'', Direct Cinema was really in dialectic opposition to that French phenomenon. In their quest for objectivity, Leacock, Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles (and later Frederick Wiseman) suggested that the camera (and the film-makers behind it) could be unobtrusive, that their presence had little or no effect on the people who were the subjects of the film. Conversely, cinema verite, strictly speaking, has been based on a contrary theory: that the camera in Jean Rouch's words can and should act as a catalyst, and that the film-makers are very much a part of the process of film-making and therefore should reveal and expose them-

was

AMERICAN DOCUMENTARY

i960

—

selves.

—

American Documentary

since

i960

5i

Through

the 60s and early 70s the aesdevelopment of the documentary, both in America and elsewhere, can be seen as the product of the dialectic between these two opposing views of its function. Ironically, as American film-makers were discovering the thetic

that the new technology permitted, their colleagues in print, in the 60s, were reacting against that time-honoured journalistic virtue and developing more com-

objectivity

plex theories of the relationship between reporting and truth 'New Journalism', or 'Participatory Journalism', as they called them

—

—that

were closer in intent

to the film aes-

thetics of cinema verite.

cinema

Nevertheless,

verite

and Direct Both were

Cinema shared

certain objectives.

committed

developing

to

a

more sophis-

on the one hand, between film-maker and

ticated understanding of,

relationship subject, and, on the other, the connection between film and its audience. Both had an

the

essentially

wanted between

ethnographic

orientation.

Both

decrease the aesthetic distance event and observer. 'Real-time' editing, which emphasized mise-en-scene (or more properly trouve-en-scene') over monto

'

was important in this respect, as were a whole series of important technological

tage,

inventions

addition

in

to

the

lightweight

camera and crystal-synch sound. In the early

60s

radio

wireless

micro-

phones allowed the sound recordist more flexibility in relation to the subject, just as

crystal

synch had permitted a freer relation-

ship with the camera. In the late 60s fast flexible colour film stock added a new dimension to the hitherto exclusively black-and-white genre, and multitrack mixing equipment

gave sound editors an unprecedented degree of control over their material. Possibly the most important development, however, was the perfection of portable videotape equipment in the late 60s and early 70s. For a variety of reasons video, with its capability of immediate playback, proved itself superior in

many ways

to film.

As

a result,

much

of the

most interesting work in documentary in the mid-70s is being done on tape rather than on film.

Richard Leacock (born London, 1921) photographed Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story in 1948 and then worked as assistant to Willard Van Dyke before becoming a part of

Drew

Associates.

There he co-directed many

films with Pennebaker, including Primary;

Eddie

(i960),

a

portrait

of racing

driver

Eddie Sachs; David (1962), a study of a young jazz musician's battle with heroin addiction at Synanon House; and The Chair (1963), a widely praised portrait of a convict awaiting execution. With Drew he codirected Republicans : The New Breed (1964), something of a departure in that it depicted a group rather than an individual. Also in that year he finished Happy Mother's Day (with Joyce Chopra), a scathing analysis of the reaction of the town of Aberdeen, South Dakota, to the birth of the Fischer quintu-

new tourist attraction. Happy Day was drastically re-edited by the network to tone down its implied a

plets,

Mother's

ABC

of the commercialization of the Fischer quintuplets. In the late 60s Leacock joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and since then he has devoted himself increasingly to teaching and to the development of new methods and approaches, including a synchronous Super-8 system criticism

mm

which

will

open up film-making

to thousands

of students who could not otherwise afford it. He has continued to collaborate with Pennebaker, with whom he formed a production-distribution company in the early 60s.

D. A. Pennebaker (born 1930) studied at M.I.T., worked for an advertising company in New York, and began his career as filmmaker with a gem of a film, Daybreak Express a colour collage of images of New ( x 953)3 set to the music of Duke Since leaving Drew Associates, Pennebaker has concentrated on portraits of musicians and records of musical events. Don't Look Back (1966) followed Bob Dylan on his British tour of 1965 and was one of the first Direct Cinema documentaries to achieve

York subways Ellington.

a successful theatrical release. It also forecast

the mutually supportive relationship between rock music and the documentary which was just

more

a phenomenon that was marked by Pennebaker's folMonterey Pop (1968), the first film and one of the best. Two

developing, precisely

lowing film, rock festival years later this genre reached its peak with Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (1970), a mammoth three-hour split-screen record of the rock festival at Woodstock, New York. A

American Documentary

52

Mick Jagger

in the

Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter, the film of the Altamont concert

since

i960

—the 'dream

turned sour'.

few months

later,

the

phenomenon of

the beginning of the end of 60s rock was marked by the Altamont concert and the Maysles brothers' more subdued film of that social

dream turned

sour,

Gimme

Shelter (1971).

In 1968, Pennebaker worked with Godard on the abortive project One A.M. When Godard abandoned it, Pennebaker took Godard's footage and edited it together with some of his own to produce One P.M. ('One Parallel Movie', Pennebaker or 'One

He

together with Mark Woodcock, produced a record of Godard's experiences in the U.S. entitled Godard on Godard: 2 American Audiences (1968). In 1970 he returned to music with Original Cast

Movie').

also,

Album: 'Company',

a study of the painful process of disc recording as well as a record of the music of the stage show. Also in that year Pennebaker produced another concert Sweei film, Toronto. Two short films

produced

for the Artists in Schools proof the National Endowment for the Arts date from 1971: The Children's Theatre

gramme

John Donahue, and Dancers in School. In 1973 Pennebaker completed a film about rock singer David Bowie called simply Bowie. More recently, he filmed a portrait of the Otrabanda Theatre Company (1976). The work of Leacock and Pennebaker had centred on individual subjects with evident of

interest a

—

a political candidate, a racing driver,

condemned man

—and achieved

its

greatest

success, therefore, in relatively straight por-

Pennebaker moved on to the films, whose aim was to capture the spirit of an event. It was left to Frederick Wiseman, perhaps the most intriguing exponent of Direct Cinema, to expand the range of the new documentary beyond portraiture and recording to the more complex and difficult area of the investigatraiture. Later,

more commercial musical

— American Documentary tion of political

Trained as

and

since

i960

social concepts.

a lawyer,

Wiseman (born

1930)

has since 1967 produced an ambitious series of investigations of institutions for National Educational Television (NET). The Titicut Follies (1967) studied a Massachusetts institution for the criminally insane and led to a public and political storm; High School (1968) did the same for a Philadelphia high school; Law and Order (1969) described the social and political forces at work in the Kansas City Police Department. These three major documents of Direct Cinema were followed by: Hospital (1970), shot in New York; Basic Training (1971), shot at Fort Knox; Essene (1972), a study of an Episcopal monastery in Michigan; Juvenile Court (1973), shot in Memphis; Primate (1974), a portrait of the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta which raises basic questions about forms of scientific research and which is probably Wiseman's most controversial film; and Welfare (1975), a harrowing study of that institution of oppression as it operates in New York City; and Meat (1976), about the meatpacking industry. Like other directors of Direct Cinema, Wiseman to a large degree ameliorates the 'catalytic' effect of the presence of camera and crew by shooting vast amounts of film. (His shooting ratio is often more than 30 to 1.) In effect, Wiseman and his crew eventually become 'part of the furniture'. His subjects are quite often very pleased with the portraits of them that emerge. But just as often, as in the case of the Yerkes Primate Center in Primate, once they discover the negative public reaction to the image they unwittingly against project, they turn Wiseman. This suggests that Wiseman is coming close to capturing that elusive quality truth and that Direct Cinema can succeed objectively. Yet Wiseman himself is very well aware that his films are essays with a point of view more like the New Journalism, despite their lack of narration or music, the tools most often used to suggest the filmmaker's Wiseman's essays, perspective. because of their relevance and complex intelligence, are probably the most intriguing

—

—

—

documents of Direct Cinema. Similar questions about the proportions of the relationships between film-maker, observer and subject are raised by the films of the

53 Maysles brothers. Albert (born 1926J, most manning the camera, taught psychology at Boston University before turning to film. David (born 1932), the sound expert, served an apprenticeship in the 50s in Hollywood as an assistant producer. Their first film was Showman (1963), a straightforward portrait of film impresario Joseph Levine. This was followed by three other celebrity films What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964), Meet Marlon Brando (1965) and Truman: A Visit with Truman Capote (1966). In 1969 the Maysles made Salesman, an intimate investigation of the life of Bible salesman Paul Brennan and one of the few commercially successful new often

documentaries. Gimme Shelter, the record of the Rolling Stones Altamont concert mentioned above, followed in 1971. Christo's Valley Curtain was released in 1972. The next year the Maysles began work on Grey Gardens (1975), a dual portrait of two eccentric women Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith B. Beale, Jr cousins of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis who

—

—

occupied a decaying mansion on Long Island. The Maysles prefer to call Grey Gardens (and Salesman as well) not documentaries but rather 'non-fiction features' and they point to a comparison of the work they do on film with the prose experiments in 'non-fiction novel' by Truman Capote to explain their orientation. But this kind of 'non-fiction feature'

presents

certain

ethical aesthetic

problems which the Maysles and their cofilm-makers (Charlotte Zwerin on most of the earlier films, Ellen Hovde, Muffle Meyer and Susan Froemke on Grey Gardens) haven't clearly resolved. The Maysles crew spent months with the Beale women, and obviously a strong relationship developed between the film-makers and the subjects of the film. Yet the Maysles, still tied to the objective criterion of Direct Cinema, pay scant attention to this affective relationship; they do not show themselves actively participating

even though their presence must have had an enormous influence on the two in the film,

'actresses' (who clearly play to the camera). Whereas Wiseman gets around this problem by shooting so much film that his subjects gradually become almost oblivious of the

camera's presence, the Maysles brothers are shooting subjects (this was equally true of

American Documentary

54

who

Salesman)

cannot ignore the camera.

This leaves the observer with the sense that the film-makers have been condescending in their relationship with their subjects; one longs for them to ask questions, actively to the roles which evidently exist. The Direct Cinema of Leacock, Pennebaker and Wiseman and the non-

fill

cinema of the Maysles

fiction

aren't,

how-

only attempts to deal with this ethical question. Several important documentarists with a political orientation have proved during the 60s and early 70s that the opposite approach the identifiable subhas jective involvement of the film-maker ever,

the

—

—

potential as well.

De Antonio

Emile

most

(born

19 19) has re-

approach of the new documentary. Point of Order (1961-63), his first film, was a condensation of 188 hours vealed

the

eclectic

of kinescopes of the Army-McCarthy Senate hearings of 1954, devastating in its effect.

Judgment (1967) was a portrait of lawyer Mark Lane as well as an explication of his theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In The Year of the Pig (1969) remains one of the most significant films made about U.S. crimes in Vietnam. America is Hard to See (1970) studies in detail Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign.

Rush

to

Millhouse television,

(1971), a collage of newsreels, interviews and other bits and

pieces,

caricatured

earned

De Antonio

House enemies produced

list.

Nixon and on the White In 1972 De Antonio Richard

a place

his only non-political film so far,

Painters Painting, a collection of interviews

with modern American artists. In 1975 he returned to the political arena with Underground, an intense series of conversations with five members of the Weather organization who had survived underground for more than five years. Each of De Antonio's films reveals a strong personality at its source; the films are usually tendentious and often witty; and they convey an urgent personal note in direct contrast to the objectivity of Direct Cinema. Working with De Antonio (and Mary Lampson; on Underground was Haskell Wexler (born 1923), an Academy Awardwinning cinematographer who has spent much of his time since the mid-6os working in documentary film. Wexler's first non-

since

i960

was The Bus (1965), an effective document of the March on Washington. He

fiction film

Nowsreel (1969), Torture and Conversation with President Allende (both 1971; both with Saul Landau) and Introduction is

responsible

also

A

Brazil:

Report

for

On

Enemy (1974, with Jane Fonda and Hayden),*his la^t a personal travelogue of a trip through North Vietnam. Wexler also photographed Interviews with My Lai Veterans (1971). While all these films are interesting, Wexler's greatest contribution to the development of the documentary is probably Medium Cool (1969), not really a documentary at all, but rather a vaguely fictionalized film using actors and sometimes a script, shot on location in Chicago during the time of the Democratic Convention in 1968. In this semi-fictional story about a TV news cinematographer who despite his aesthetic instincts begins to develop a political to

the

Tom

consciousness, Wexler has managed to convey an incisive essay on the relationship between the media and political realities.

Medium Cool

stands

as

one of the most

important American films

(fiction or not) of

the 60s.

The

political

documentary

as a

genre

at-

number

of other film-makers during this decade. Saul Landau, in addition

tracted a large

mentioned above, was responsand Robert Wall: Ex FBI Agent (1972). Cinda Firestone's Attica (1973) became one of the more widely circulated political documents of the 70s. The Newsreel collective did interesting work, as did a large number of other groups of 'underground documentarists' working at the to the films

ible for Fidel (1969)

grassroots

level.

As the question of the

between film-maker and subject became more politically acute, several movements developed to put the subject, as it were, in the director's chair. (The development of portable video equipment was especially significant in this respect.) Possibly the most important of these organizations was the Canadian Challenge for Change programme, responsible for the milestone You Are on relationship

Indian Land (1969). Just as the rock music festival had been the

most

financially significant

development for

documentarists in the 6os, so the Vietnam war became the most important intellectual influence. A wide range of documentaries

American Documentary

since

i960

55

Robert Foster as the TV cameraman in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool: 'not really a documentary all, but an incisive essay into the relationship between the media and political realities'.

and film essays covered the subject with a mixture of fine passion and reason, even if few of them reached wide audiences. In addition to the films mentioned above, Joseph Strick's Interviews with My Lai Veterans notable in this respect. significant (and the most widely seen) films about Vietnam were Peter Davis' The Selling of the Pentagon (1971), broadcast by CBS television, and Hearts and Minds (1974) which although it came at the end of the war nevertheless remains one of the most effective American documentaries. Building on the techniques developed by a variety of film-makers during fifteen years of the new documentary, Davis is not above charges of manipulation, yet Hearts and Minds is at once so deeply felt and so insistently rational that it even transcends its subject, becoming a portrait of the national consciousness that will bear repeated viewing for years to come. (1971)

is

The most

at

Throughout this period the style and approach of the new documentary had their effect on a number of essentially fiction filmmakers. Among those who adopted the techniques of Direct Cinema and non-fiction film were such directors as Michael Ritchie (Downhill Racer, 1969; The Candidate, 1972), Robert Kramer (Ice, 1970; Milestones, 1975), Floyd Mutrux (Dusty and Sweets McGee, 1971; Aloha, Bobby and Rose, 1975), Norman Mailer (Beyond the Law, 1968; Maidstone, 1970), and even Orson Welles (F For Fake, 1973)Just as video

had

a far-reaching effect

on

the shape of the film documentary in the 70s, so Direct Cinema also had an influence on television. Probably the most significant

example was NET's An American Family ( I 973> produced by Craig Gilbert, shot by Alan and Susan Raymond), a twelve-episode series which gained wide publicity even if it left itself open to many of the same ethical

American Documentary

56 charges that could be made against the 'nonfiction features' of the Maysles brothers, in that the presence of the film-makers clearly distorted

a

supposedly objective

portrait.

The most significant trend in American documentary in the 70s is a movement away from the cool objectivity of the Direct Cinema of the 50s and towards personal involvement, even on the autobiographical level. This is most evident in the films of a large number of women film-makers who have come to the fore in the last few years. Yet the tradition of Direct Cinema is still fruitful. Two recent important films which can claim its heritage are Jerry Bruck, Jr's /. F. Stone's Weekly (1973), an insightful portrait of the respected journalist, and Susan Sontag's Promised Lands (1973), a complex, dense, informative portrait of the ambivalent complexion of contemporary intellectual Israel that uses many of the techniques pioneered by Drew Associates and proves that the fabled objectivity of Direct Cinema need not be simplistic or misleading.

i960 The standard works on Documentary are Erik Barnouw's Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film (1974), Richard Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History (1973), and Lewis Jacobs' anthology The Documentary Tradition (1971). See also Frederick Wiseman, edited by Thomas R. Atkins (1973). See also below the articles on Jean Rouch, Dziga Ve/*tov, Robert Flaherty and the British Documentary Movement. Also see the articles on Godard and Robert Kramer: one of the most interesting developments of the 60s was the breaking down of the barrier between fiction film and pure documentary. Two footnotes: I do not agree with Monaco about the Maysles' Grey Gardens; regardless of their methods, the film is at least as 'true' the

Barsam's

as the films of, say, Wiseman. We must now add to the list of American women filmmakers a new name: Barbara Kopple. In her first feature, Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), she deals with a Kentucky miners' strike

compassionately and powerfully.

many

made

And her

that what thought of as bygone days the era of

beautifully

film

The Grapes of Wrath

ft

A

since

scene from Barbara Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A.: 'in her Kentucky miners' strike compassionately and powerfully'.

first

reveals

—are

still,

—

alas, with us.

C

feature she deals with a

AMERICAN FILM NOIR Edgardo Cozarinsky Film noir defies translation into English, though its object of study is mainly (and, one may argue, its only legitimate examples are) English-speaking. This, far from being paradoxical, is an avowal of French perspective (or alien distance) which enabled American and British critics to recognize the wood behind the trees. As early as 1946 (in La Revue du Cinema, No. 2) an omnibus review of Double Indemnity (1944), Murder My Sweet (U.K.: Farewell, My Lovely, 1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945), by J. -P. Chartier, was titled Les Americains aussi font des Films Noirs. The 'aussi' alluded to the pre-war French films of the so-called 'realisme poetique', which the reviewer found much less grim and hopeless than the recent American product. (Curiously enough, the only transplant

from

'poetic realism' to film noir ter-

—Carne's

Le Jour se Live [1939] into The Long Night [1947] proved fairly weak and uncharacteristic. The two remakes by Fritz Lang of Renoir films, to be discussed later, present an altogether differ-

ritory

—

Litvak's

ent case.)

And

it

is

not surprising that the

comprehensive treatment of the genre (Panorama du Film Noir, by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Paris, 1955) was the work of two writers connected with Positif, a magazine which at that time shared an enthusiasm for American films with Cahiers du Cinema, but with a somewhat sociological orientation towards genres as opposed to the mainly aesthetic concern for a latter's politique des auteurs. Paul Schrader (in 'Notes on Film Noir' in Film Comment, New York, first

1972) raised the issue that auteur criticism has not been fair to film noir because in it a director's individuality is less important than the elements shared by films of different dirbut this applies to all genre ectors; criticism.

— American Film Noir

58

The origins of the label are as literary as the film genre. In 1945, the French publisher Gallimard started the Serie Noire, a collec-

America : The Movies, 1946-1964, 1

971).

The

New

York,

relaxed logic of film noir scripts

—

tion supervised

has often been exposed Orson Welles reputedly did not understand what The Lady

introduced

from Shanghai (1948) was about even

by Marcel Duhamel, who with a text printed on the jacket

it

of W. R. Burnett's Little Caesar. Some excerpts from it are to be kept in mind: 'Those who like puzzles in the style of Sherlock

Holmes won't taste ...

find

[the

it

Its spirit is

series]

to their

seldom conformist.

It

presents policemen more corrupt than the Sometimes there delinquents they chase is no mystery; sometimes not even a detective. What's left, then? What's left is action, .

.

.

fear, violence.'

though

Thus, catholic in

its

it

was

prove

to

choice, the Serie Noire was

fairly

meant

which, according to Tzvetan Todorov (Typologie du Roman to stand for those novels in

Policier, in Poetique de la Prose, Paris, 1971),

replaced by suspense as a form of In novels of detection, 'starting

curiosity

is

interest.

from

a certain effect (a corpse,

some

clues)

its

cause must be found (the guilty party, or what drove him to crime)'. In the romans noirs, 'the causes are shown first, the initial data (gangsters preparing a hold-up), and the interest is kept waiting for what's to come, which is to say the effects (corpses, murders, hold-ups)'.

Arguably, the narrative of detection suited to written fiction, while the

is

best

roman

noir

provides some of the best raw material for film. Once the mystery is explained in the detective novel, the reader's pleasure derives less from an unexpected denouement than from filling in every blank left in the intrigue. The novel of suspense advances, instead, by the sheer pregnancy of its situations: the chain of obscurities is less a riddle to be solved than a quality not to be dispensed with, a token of a certain world image (or of the particular system built to confront it). Thus, novels of suspense may be reread for pleasure, literary or otherwise, while there seems to be no point in going back to a detective novel once the key to its mystery has

been disclosed. This is even truer of the film adaptations, where 'the audience (is) freed from causal narrative novels, films

to

a

greater

extent

than in the

where you can check back;

one

episodes'

is

precipitated

(Lawrence

into

Alloway

a in

in

series

the of

Violent

after

completing the film; Howard Hawks wired Raymond Chandler, while shooting The Big Sleep (1946), *o ascertain whether one character was murdered or committed suicide, and Chandler couldn't give him an answer. It is the minute inevitability with which the films proceed, illuminating a self-sufficient system of crime, deception, hard-edged violence and suppressed eroticism, that lends to even very minor films noirs a sharp, challenging consistency which

medium

is

that of the film

—

most uncompromising a kind of performance where the story is just as necessary, and important, as the libretto to an opera: a pretext, whether for music or for a concerted interplay of sounds and images.

An

at its

issue frequently raised

that of the

is

film noir's qualifications for the status of genre, an argument which seems to ignore

the fact that the notion of genre retical tool,

not

any group of works

some

is

a 'natural' fact: to

as a

genre

is

a theoconsider

to choose

traits as pertinent, others as irrelevant.

notion of genre may operate on the level of subject matter (the Western, the thriller), of formal organization (the musical), of tone

The

(film noir). These areas intersect freely there are musical Westerns, and thrillers are not necessarily noir, depending on the pertinent traits chosen, and the level of their intersection. The evolution of any particular

genre results from a constantly shifting interaction of several series: the works belonging to it, the genre itself among other genres, the languages (verbal, iconic, filmic) where these exist, this language among others, and the social context of all this intercourse. The same work may belong to different genres in different periods; a genre may grow selfconscious and derive new stimulus from this awareness. The following proposal works with the provisional list of narrative units advanced by Roland Barthes. These units are (a) functions, recognizable segments of action, which may be cardinal functions (nuclei) needed to develop narrative, or catalysts, connective tissue

be

between those;

(b) indexes,

clues to a psychological,

which may

atmospheric or

American Film Noir

59

philosophical context, or just plain informa-

Accordingly, film noir as a genre would choose its pertinent units among catalysts and clues. This implies that circumstances of anecdote are more relevant to it than story development; that connotations of scenery, of minor figures, of gesture and intonation may be more telling than action itself. The resulting genre, rather predictably, is one with a sharply defined centre (whether Lauru, Out of the Past or Gun Crazy) and blurred boundaries (if The Blue Angel qualifies, why not tion.

Broken Blossoms}). Two remakes by Fritz Lang of Renoir films of the 30s illustrate the weight of 'circumstances' and 'connotations' in the film noir. (Lang, of course, may be the only cineaste to have made of Chandler's 'smell of fear' his one recurring motif.) Scarlet Street (1945) not only plays the story of La Chienne (1931) on a lower key, but strips it of its lively,

naturalistic

context.

Where Renoir

picked his characters from daily life, leaving them there the better to study them, Lang abstracts an embittered wife or a shabby interior and places it in that sparse tragic scenery where glistening asphalt and raincoats are as telling as a scantily dressed woman in bed, confronting her elderly lover

with teasing laughter. When the stuff of tragedy has been played out, the main character in the Renoir film sets out to live on different assumptions than before; in the Lang film, there is nothing left for him but to disappear into the night. The case of La Bete

Humaine (1938) and Human Desire (1954)5 where story divergences are wider, is even more interesting, because Lang's film achieves a minute though discreet elaboration

smell of fear which the stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world

gone wrong The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than .

Film noir, then, like so much that is representative in American fiction, focuses reality sharply but seems reluctant to apprehend it by any accepted idea of realism: the realistic impulse is usually sublimated into romance, grotesquerie or melodrama. In Hollywood films, the archetypes and icons of popular culture used to provide a fluid but enduring frame of reference, encompassing the permanent and the transient in ever renewed balance; in the case of film noir this meant merging a concrete influence from

popular

American

German

heritage into a limited, but sharp

Caught (1949), both ized,

are

may need to impose Raymond Chandler, speaking in the

introduction to The Simple Art of Murder (1950) of the pulp fiction of the late 20s and early 30s, coincides with Duhamel's presentation of the Serie Noire and achieves an unintentional but accurate description of film 'Most of the plots were rather ordnoir inary, and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. Possibly it was the

—

a

diffuse

superficially

German-

Hollywood

quintessential

in

the

which their novelettish condition may be more telling of American conflicts and illusions than Kazan's Boomerang (1947) or Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948) which advertise their documentary

extent

to

,

trappings.

The literary source, of course, is that of the hard-boiled school. But it must be observed that the private-eye characters (Hammett's Sam Spade, though definitely not his Nick Charles, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Ross

Lew Archer

Macdonald's

et al.)

were useful

to the film noir because of their existence as

points of view. Marlowe's defensive irony and subdued romanticism build up a full

guides

itself.

and

probing, kind of American realism. Preminger's Fallen Angel (1945) and Ophuls'

by the

as the realistic illusion

fiction

and

character,

social landscape.

.

night.'

of recognizable small-town Americana, his creatures no longer doomed by any law of heredity but by the dreams fostered in them

Circumstances, connotations, yes, but such

.

on

titudes he,

and

i.e.

project a set of consistent at-

to incident

and environment; but mainly as unreliable

his like, operate in

labyrinth

a

of appearance:

the

of their investigations is dialecnecessary to the web of partial tically disclosures, deceptive clues, multi-layered intricacy

truths.

The

private investigator

a narrator,

beyond

is

also valuable as

his use for the incon-

apprehension and rendering of He provides a structural frame for episodes that are not crude and immediate, but recalled and analysed in a narclusive

fictional facts.

rative,

however

tentative, a fact often

em-

—

—

6o

American Film Noir

phasized by his off-screen commentary. After Citizen Kane, complex patterns of ex-' position played explicitly with the distance between story and plot. Without even an offscreen voice, Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) may be said to be 'in the first person' in a more intelligent and engaging way than the pretentious 'subjective camera' of Robert

Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (1946). Extreme instances are two Billy Wilder Double Indemnity (the James Cain films novel adapted by Chandler), where the narrator agonizes to death while recording his

and

Boulevard (1950), where he is a fresh corpse. In between, his tone may be dismayed (Murder My Sweet), philosophical (The Lady from Shanghai) or elegiac (Out of the Past [U.K.: Build My Gallows High], 1947). A lot has been made of the German confession,

Sunset

on film noir. Low-key, highcontrast lighting, and moods of introspective influence

gloom and resigned defeatism, are generally acknowledged as legacies of Expressionism, carried over by the German exiles. As this is an instance of recurrent cross-breeding, some qualifications

are

necessary.

Most

of the

exiled directors connected with film noir are Viennese, by birth (Lang, Preminger,

Wilder, Ulmer) or affinity (Ophuls). As to the far cry of Expressionism, it is better heard in the fantasy and horror revival of the early 40s than in the film noir, connected rather with the Weimar melodramas of bourgeois malaise and street fascination, and with the feeling for city life of the Neue

—

Sachlichkeit semi-documentaries Siodmak, Wilder, Ulmer and Zinnemann all worked on Menschen am Sontag (1929). On the other hand, German influence in Hollywood had been operating since the middle 20s, when the camera work of Variety and Der Letzte Mann seems to have been much imitated. It is the product of the 30s (in its turn, when not overtly political, an ersatz of Hollywood genres) that, in its own

UFA

—

minor key, looks closest to the film noir visual and dramatic elaboration restrained by the early requisites of the sound period; a

moment when anything vaguely avant-garde looked 'dated', and when most of the German-language

Murnau features.

directors

younger

than

Lang were making their first The American work of exiled

or

cinematographers like Karl Freund, Rudolph Mate, Franz Planer and the frequently uncredited Eugen Schufftan, is often less extreme than that of their Hollywood colleagues, whether Stanley Cortez, Lee Garmes, Milton Krasner or John Alton, all of whom perfected a style for film noir that did not tinge ohe res! of their work when the occasion called for it, they could

—

reproduce

it,

even

brilliantly, as

Alton did

(in

colour!) for such a late film noir as Slightly Scarlet (1956), directed by Allan Dwan.

The career of Douglas Sirk is the most complex instance of this process. The UFA quality of his early Hollywood films (most striking in the European settings of Summer Storm and A Scandal in Paris) was incorporated into his Hunter-Zugsmith-Uniperiod, to achieve a fully original treatment of American materials which is both critical and imposingly formalized. Though not exactly films noirs, Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959) breathe in the dramatic, iconographic and social space defined by film noir. Film noir is inescapably urban. Rural imagery may only intrude as memories of lost innocence, a brief doomed refuge or the impossible final escape (The Asphalt Jungle, 1950; The Prowler, 1951). If the most confident growth of the novel as a literary genre versal

was

parallel to the

industrial

era,

it

urban development of the is

the film noir that has

proposed some of the most striking images for the sudden inversion of delusive appearances, for the cohabitation of law and disorder in mutual ignorance, that made cities the ground of, say, Balzac and privileged Dickens. In doing this, film noir offered a negative image of America, a topography of derelict or garish spaces (neon-lit bars, seedy office

blocks,

cold-water

flats,

all-night

Turkish baths, bus terminals) where the occasional upper-class residence may be visited

—

but only precariously lived in the past is due to strike back any minute, as it does in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Born to Kill (U.K.: Lady of Deceit, 1947), Sunset Caught, Flamingo Road (1949), Boulevard and so many others. In the film noir,

the

the tracks

right

keep

and

the wrong side of stern distances

their

glamour and wealth, night and destitution

'The smell of

fear':

Richard Widmark and Victor Mature

confront each other cratic optimism.

devoid of

all

demo-

The rigid Hollywood censorship of the period has been recognized as a source of indirect narrative and allusive eroticism, richer in implication and sheer invention than the recent permissiveness has proved to be. This may be related, of course, to such traditional aesthetic criteria as the struggle with form, the economy of rejection and substitution. But, more pragmatically, by dealing with criminals or with disreputable behaviour in respectable milieux, but always with characters called to violent ends and 'deserved' punishments, film noir was free to explore less predictable zones of social intercourse, to be less timid or perfunctory in its treatment of money and sex as the basic springs of its intrigues. Once labelled with the original sins of social concupiscence and

in

Henry Hathaway's Kiss

of Death.

sexual availability, Lizabeth Scott and Robert Mitchum were free to enjoy a larger share of human experience than Greer Garson or Van Johnson were allowed at the time. In the same way, the declared condition of 'crime stories' enabled many films noirs to rush in where the more dignified dramas

—

feared to tread thus, the fabric that keeps society from falling apart was exposed to an oblique, searching light.

The violence of film noir is subtler than its familiarity with assault, theft and murder. It and hierarchies, opposing and unaccepted reality. Compared with the indulgent bloodshed curis

implicit in codes

unfulfilled ambition

rent

in

the

precision

Widmark

in

late

the

60s,

two

there

is

shots

hustling a crippled

a

classical

of

Richard

woman

tied to

her wheelchair down the stairs (Kiss of Death, 1947), or in the only blow an effete

— American Film Noir

62

Webb needs to send a prospective through a window {The Dark Corner^ 1946) both films directed by Henry Hathaway. In the same way, the force of sex is all the more formidable because it is estranged Clifton

killer

—

women costly

are

glazed objects of pleasure

or

emblems of power; therefore beyond

reach or understanding; therefore danNo European tradition of belles dames sans merci can account for the exuberance of scheming, rapacious or just plain deadly dames in the film noir: Claire Trevor in real

gerous.

Murder My Sweet and Born to Kill, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Thelma Jordan (U.K.: The File on Thelma Jordan, 1949), Rita Hay worth in Gilda (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai, Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946), Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy (1950), the memorable Hazel Brooks

My

of Sleep Love (1948), Beverly Michaels and Cleo

Hugo Haas

films

.

.

.

The

in

Joseph H. Lewis's

Gun Crazy.

forgotten

of the careers of Veronica

Lake, Lizabeth Scott and Gloria Grahame were indelibly stamped by their passage through film noir. Passion, as opposed to ingrained violence, when allowed, to shew, flashed across the screen with the stark independence of madness. Psychoanalysis as therapy was to there justify the flashback-withinflashback narrative in Brahm's The Locket

(1946), but it stood clear of the urge to kill that sustained Born to Kill, Lewis' Gun

Crazy, Werker's

He Walked

Baker's Don't Bother

Dmytryk's

atypical,

by Night (1948), (1952), even sunny The Sniper

to

Knock

(1952).

The psychoanalyst as a character was to drop the helpful attitude of his first steps in Hollywood whether Lady in the Dark (1944) or Spellbound (1945) and appear as

—

'Passion flashed across the screen with the stark independence of madness': Peggy

John Dall

the

Moore

—

Cummins and

—

— —

American Film Noir

63

Doktor Mabuse reincarnate, feeding an appetite for power on the secret guilts of the foreshadowed by Otto Kruger in affluent Murder My Sweet; then came Helen Walker in Nightmare Alley (1947) and Jose Ferrer in Whirlpool (i949)> crafty, well-groomed figures who were something more than plain blackmailers and not at all 'mad scientists'. Rather, as projections of subdued anarchist feelings ('anything that appears wholesome is certain to cover something unmentionable'),

—

they acted out the audience's vicarious enjoyment in the stripping of social masks, untouched by any idea of revolt. The gangster, instead, already operating long before film noir and still in business, became subtler and could even sustain a lyrical mood. Around 1930 (Little Caesar,

Enemy) he was a social force in action; by the middle 40s he had developed into a small-time Kane, half-conscious of his tragic Public

destiny.

Gordon

Wiles' seemingly unknown is a perfect rendering of

The Gangster (1947)

a 30s story line in film noir key:

unconcerned

with the rise of its character, it covers the decay and collapse of his criminal career, closing in rain-beaten, out-of-season Atlantic

City turned into a decor of Murnau-esque grandeur. One of the effects of psychoanalysis on Hollywood was to turn Greek tragedy into a topical commodity, and such old pros as Raoul Walsh and James Cagney were able to achieve a masterpiece with an Oedipal gangster who blows himself up White Heat (1949), where film noir may be seen already overreaching itself. Vulnerable heroes and ambiguous villains also made for a wider range of characterization than the 30s would have dared to try. Only the deep romantic streak in Humphrey Bogart's toughness could sustain him without damage in a decade's progress into respectability: from the sentimental crook in High Sierra ( 1 941) to an oft-beaten private eye in The Big Sleep and, finally, an attorney in Knock on Any Door (1949) and The Enforcer (U.K.:

Murder,

Inc., 1951).

Though out

film

difficulty

noir

incorporated

science-fiction

and

withanti-

new screen formats the launched in 1953 delivered a heavy, if not immediately deadly, blow. The demand for overgrown production values helped to disintegrate that fabric of taut narrative and

communism,

dramatization which had lain under even the most extravagant examples of the genre. While The Robe was in production, Fox still had place for Baker's Xight Without Sleep (1952) and Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), DUt such low-budget thrillers were to become rarer and rarer. Only 3-D, aiming at different effects from those suited to wide screens, would attempt the first Spillane adaptation the Jury /, (1953). This, and the later Mike Hammer films, are to the earlier film noir what astringent

—

Spillane's

novels

are

to

Chandler's

—low-

quality reworkings that look more genuine when indulging in coarser plots and blunter

sado-masochism, as was the case in The Long Wait (1954). 1953 also saw a musical parody of the genre the 'Girl Hunt' number in Minnelli's The Band Wagon, which today can be read as a critical inventory of the genre's imagery and devices: when Astaire, dancing his way through the city perils, is hit on the head, the screen is flooded by one of those whirlpoollike effects indulged in by Murder My Sweet at each of Dick Powell's fainting spells. Overwrought and mannered, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) was the end product of a genre, already dwindling in a deeply modified context. Its engagingly over-

—

ripe quality is also evident in other late examples, famous like Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), or obscure like Gerd Oswald's Screaming Mimi (1958) or Harry Horner's The Wild Party (1956). (Welles' fondness for zigzagging investigations and mistaken identities also produced two unique instances of films placed outside the genre but bearing an

illuminating relationship to the

ur-film

noir

par

it

Citizen Kane,

excellence,

and

Mr

Arkadin, where the structure of film noir is projected, and perhaps dissolved, on a larger canvas.)

By 1962 film noir was already a target for spoofs (Tashlin's It's Only Money, with Jerry Lewis); in the late 60s it enjoyed a lightweight revival (Harper [U.K.: The Moving Target],

1966;

Tony Rome, 1967; Lady

in

Cement, 1968; Marlowe, 1969) which included only one film of interest Boorman's Point Blank (1967); the early 70s witnessed exercises in nostalgia Gumshoe (1971), a parody less witty than erudite, and Pulp (1972), whose model is not the classical

—

,

American Screenwriters

64

success. On, the other hand, the 40s feeling of the novel was well rendered, and little

film noir but such an already idiosyncratic

hoax as Huston's Beat the Devil (1954). Only Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Polanski's Chinatown (1974) have gone all the way. Polanski, working from a fine script by Robert Towne, actually remade a film noir, his ponderous and laboured treatment of situations and atmosphere enlivened by allowing political corruption and sexual caprice into the limelight. Altman played the Chandler novel against Los Angeles 1973 and Philip Marlowe against Elliott Gould, a sort of built-in letting the gap speak

Mitchum gave all

us the the Marlowes.

most world-weary of

The pioneering work on the film noir was Raymond Borde and E. Chaumeton's Panorama du Film Noir (Paris, 1955); it has not yet been translated into English. However, a book in' English called Film Noir, edited by Alain Silver and Elizabeth

Ward, appeared

in 1978.

—

AMERICAN SCREENWRITERS

device against nostalgia. More interesting was the fate of film noir in France. Though in the early 50s the

American-born Eddie Constantine became popular in a series of cheap thrillers as Lemmy Caution, a character from Peter Cheyney's novels, only in 1954, with Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi, were elements of American film noir rendered in terms of a thoroughly French sensibility, as in Melville's Bob le Flambeur, made in 1956. After i960, two trends were sharply defined. On the one hand, there were Godard's quotations from American usage (specifically film

A

Bout de Souffle and Alphaville, less plainly in Bande a Part), a body of rhetorical and ideological references to be crossexamined rather than aped; and also noir in

Truffaut's autobiographical affair genre, a record of romantic loners dream-like continuity (Tirez sur le La Sirene du Mississippi). On the

with the lost in a

Pianiste,

other, a

number

of films reflected a right-wing anarchistic celebration of la pegre as a stronghold of traditional virtues (courage,

great

loyalty, submission to fate) against the petty bourgeoisie of neo-capitalism. The shaping influence here is that of Jose Giovanni, novelist, scriptwriter, later director; the most talented cineaste, Melville, Jean-Pierre whose fetishistic relish for film noir resulted in the ceremonial quality of Le Doulos, UAine des Ferchaux, Le Deuxieme Souffle, Le Samurai, Le Cercle Rouge, Un Flic.

Since these lines were written, Farewell My Lovely (1975) has appeared: based on the same Raymond Chandler novel as Murder My Svoeet, this 'remake' was directed by Dick Richards, and starred Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe. Charlotte Rampling did her best to imitate Lauren Bacall, but with

Richard Corliss

The hero

of Sunset Boulevard (1950), a screenwriter drowning in the voluptuous cynicism that seems endemic to the trade, says at one point that 'audiences don't know anyone writes a picture. They think the actors t

of

make

auteur

it

up

as they

criticism,

Hollywood narrative

go along.'

as

A

applied

fiction film, has

decade to

the

brought

a sophisticatecTnew~ twisf~to that venerable

we are told, the director makes up. There's nothing revolutionary in arguing that 'the director is the author of a film'. J canard: now, it

From the early moment when he wrested executive control from the cameraman to today, when Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas or Francis Coppola can mean more to the box-office success of a picture than the actors he 'employs', the director has remained the sole movie craftsman serious critics take seriously. It only took the recent deluge of

—

and film school courses oriented, almost without exception, in favour of the director to lend cultural respectability to film books

—

the auteur bias. If auteur criticism lived up to its early claim to be truly concerned with visual style, there would be no need for any systematic slighting of the screenwriter. text, or pretext, the director

Given

a certain

could be said to

writer's design into a personal, subtext through the use of camera

weave the visual

placement and movement, lighting, cutting, direction of actors, etc. Such studies would go far towards elucidating the work of su-

perior metteurs en scene such as Michael Curtiz Mitchell Leisen, Stanley Donen and Don

_

American Screenwriters

65

But visual style is not auteur major interest. The auteurist is, film criticism; and writing essentially, themes as expressed through plot, characbelong primarily to terization and dialogue Siegel.

'rrparjvg rpje^playing' a s their subject,

criticism's

inv olve_vario usforms qLd£cgption {Ace in the Hole [alternative title TheBig Carnival),

—

—

the writer.

Howard Koch,

dozen

for example, wrote a

the 40s that dealt, specifically or obliquely, with letters as expressions of films

in

doomed death.

love and harbingers of an ecstatic There was, first of all, The Letter

—

(1940) a love note that turned into Leslie Crosbie's death warrant; there were the 'letters of transit' in Casablanca (1942), as well as the letter Ingrid Bergman writes to Humphrey Bogart telling him to forget her;

from an Unknown which Joan Fontaine justifies her life, and which persuades Louis Jourdan to embrace an honourable, compassionate death; there was the letter that Margaret Sullavan, dying of cancer, writes to her husband in No Sad Songs for Me (1950); there was the psychopathic love-hate mail in The Thirteenth Letter (1951), Koch's adaptation of Le Corbeau. If one adds to these

there

was

Woman

the

Letter

(1948), with

specific references

such

sinister

messages as

the signals from Mars in his War of the Worlds radio play for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, the sweepstake ticket that brings disappointment, destruction and death to the

Three Strangers (1946), and the photograph of her lover that Susannah York sends to the police in The Greengage Summer (U.S.: Loss of Innocence, 1961), the result is a fidelity to

theme

that

borders on obsession.

I

once

play —whose —and discovered that

Howard Koch entitled Dead Letters

visited

latest

is

he was completely unaware of this career consistency. During a break in our conversation, we turned on his television, which happened to be showing Rhapsody in Blue (1945), a lesser Koch script. Sure enough, within two minutes, George Gershwin was receiving a telegram that announced the death of a loved one. Such are the joys of the screenwriters theory.

Howard Koch

no exception, either in theme or in the imensity investigations into it. Most is

his repetition of a

and depth of

his

^of Billy Wild^r^"scnpfs::z Faulkner's Turnabout initiated a long as,

in

with the novelist that included The Road to Glory (1936), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) and many itinerant, uncredited stints of dialogue-polishing. Charles Lederer wrote five screenplays, among them His Girl Friday (1940), / Was a Male War Bride (U.K.: You Can't Sleep Here, 1949) and The Thing (1951). Mystery novelist Leigh Brackett contributed to the screenplay of The Big Sleep, sociation

scripts

for

and stayed around to script Hawks' late Western trilogy, Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1967) and Rio Lobo (1970). Even Dudley Nichols and Nunnally Johnson wrote a few Hawks films. The director used his writers manager employs baseball rather as a specialist players: Miller was the strong starting pitcher who tired early, Faulkner the valuable pinch-hitter, Lederer the shifty base-stealer, and Brackett the relief pitcher

American Screenwriters

73

who saves the game. But there are two other screenwriters who, between them, defined the basic, antagonistic forces in Hawks' films and accumulated astonishing lists of screen credits with other directors:

—

Ben Hecht and Jules Furthman. Pauline Kael has said that Furthman wrote 'about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood', and that 'Ben Hecht wrote most of the other half. If so, 'entertainment' must comprise for Miss Kael the kind of energetic melodramas, with plots as

Kabuki scenario and 'racy' dialogue that sounds today like the tough talk of teenagers, that characterized much of Furthman's and Hecht's writing in the 30s. Furthman's career stretches back to 191 5, so his roots are lost in the movies' Nitrate Age when dozens of screenwriters most of them women were prominent enough to write 'How To' books on continuity and titling. But, as early as 1921, Furthman was beginning to explore a curious subgenre of predictable as a

—

—

American cinema

that might be called 'the adventure film'. Again and again, Furthman wrote the story of a grizzled adventurer who, through great exertions of will and the love of an equally adventurous woman, wins salvation for himself and those round him. The scene of many of these films is a remote male enclave a gold-rush town, the Sahara, a patent-medicine caravan into which a plucky young woman comes to provoke disruption and eventual regenera-

noble

—

—

and

responsibility'

The

sibility'.

lure

'the

three

films

of irrespondiscussed in

Wood's first chapter (Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, Rio Bravo) were scripted or co-scripted by Jules Furthman; of the films in the second chapter (Scarface, 1932; His Girl Friday; Monkey Business, 1952) were written by Ben Hecht. The masculine mystique commonly associated with Hawks is really an elaboration of Hecht's Chicago-pressroom camaraderie; and the 'male love story' that Hawks cast in so many genre settings was the fable upon which Hecht's fiction and life were constructed. Hecht's expansive cynicism might be mistaken for misanthropy if it weren't so

three

—

and so vital Hecht was too much

cheerful, since

compromising,

so

a part of the action

without hating himself a seemed to be saying, 'is the only game in town, so you might as well lean back and enjoy it.' Hecht lavished his sarcastic sentimentality all over Hollywood, in scripts for Lubitsch (Design for Living, 1 933)5 Hitchcock (Notorious, 1946), Wellman (Nothing Sacred, 1937), Preminger (WhirlMilestone (Hallelujah, I'm pool, 1950), a Bum [U.K.: Hallelujah, Vm a Tramp], 1933) and, not least, himself (in the sporadically dazzling Crime Without Passion, 1934, and The Scoundrel, 1935). Once, late in his career, he offered a backhanded defence of the craft he loved and the restrictions he not to love lot.

it

a little

'Prostitution,' he

as difficult to

make

a toilet seat

loathed. 'It

is

Furthman designed some of the most memorable works of Hawks (Only Angels Have Wings, 1939;

as a castle

window,' he wrote, 'even

Rio Bravo), as well as of Josef von Sternberg, for whom Furthman wrote nine crucial films (including The Docks of New York, 1928; Morocco, 1930; and Shanghai Express, 1932).

his best,

tion.

It

was upon

this grid that

extent of his contribution to the Hawks is a subject worth considerable debate and, more importantly, research; unlike most of the writers treated

The

and Sternberg worlds

one original screenplay in Sternberg-Howard Hughes Jet Pilot, 1957). For the moment, it seems that Furthman was a competent, if

here, he wrote only

the

sound

era

(the

hardly compelling, collaborator who deserves resurrection but not canonization. In his book Howard Hawks, Robin Wood identifies two concurrent but opposing strains in Hawks' work: 'self-respect and

—

view

is

ure in

if

the

During his long tenHollywood, Hecht made both. But at a bit different.'

he could make a porcelain privy

glisten like stained glass

on

a

sunny day.

One screenwriter whose collaboration with Hawks was brief and explosive was Borden Chase, who wrote Red River (1948). Hawks shot Chase's script pretty much as written, until the last few reels of the picture, when he made some story changes that, as Robin

Wood

has said, are 'weaknesses in the construction of Red River as we now have it'. Nevertheless, there is enough painterly grandeur (unusual for Hawks) and Chasean plot left to make Red River perhaps Hawks' most impressive Western and a pivotal film for the writer for here we see the fullest development of his career-long theme: the civilizing of the American West. Chase's films were

—

"4

American Screenwriters

miniature epics of westward movement and colonization, with forces of Good and Evil often battling within the same character, whether hero or villain. The stalwart figures of Montgomery Clift {Red River), Gregory Peck {The World in His Arms, 1952), Burt Lancaster {His Majesty CKeefe, 1954) and especially James Stewart {Winchester 73, 1950; Bend of the River [U.K.: Where the River Bends], 1952; The Far Country, 1955), were ideal repositories for the precarious values of civilization that Chase tested relentlessly as his cattle drives,

travelling

vendettas

wagon

headed into the wil-

derness. His Stewart-Anthony

epitomize

the

and

trains

social

(but

Mann

films

anti-socialist)

Westerns of the 50s, with each step towards an uncharted land revealing more of the characters' equally uncharted psychologies. Chase's 'message' was that only under the pressure of savagery, at a far remove from the trappings of culture, can if

man

is

truly civilized

we

ever really know if he is only a

—or

beast in a ruffled shirt.

play Frederick Lemaitre to Mankiewicz's dim-witted authors of L 'Auberge des Adrets} Or was Mankiewicz Bernard Shaw to Welles' Granville-Barker? This is a question that deserves to be settled only after the last insight has been wrung from the text (and the subtext)

The

itself.

easiest \^ay to resolve writer-director

is to concentrate on genuine filmmakers writer-directors, auteurs. In Hollywood, such a study would have to begin

disputes

—

Among the handful of screenwriters whose influence was crucial to the craft, Sturges deserves at least two fingers

with Preston Sturges.

a thumb. He created both a racy, malappropriate idiom whose deceptive ease would prove inimitable and, more important, a

and

sometimes petty, sometimes profound comic vision. His direction, especially of extended dialogue scenes, shows more control than most critics were willing to grant it. But Sturges' direction would be of only the most esoteric concern today if he had not written six or eight of Hollywood's best screenplays. His first original script, The Power and the Glory (U.K.: Power and Glory, 1933), was an eminent if embryonic precursor to Man-

The most combustible writer-director combination in Hollywood history at least, if judged by the amount of linage devoted to critical infighting was the collaboration between Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles on Citizen Kane ^1941;. Mankiewicz had been ignored so completely, from Bosley Crowther and all his contemporaries in 1941 to Andrew Sards and his more royalist acolytes in 1971, that Pauline Kael's broadside restoration of Mankiewicz had at least

Kane in its convoluted flashback approach to a dead tycoon. Sturges' fame rests on his frantically congested creation of a small-town America where Mom's apple pie was spiked with hard cider, and frenetic bit players were forever squeezing the recessive hero out of the frame (in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, 1944, and Hail the Con-

the cleansing effect of a strong disinfectant.

quering Hero, 1944).

Unfortunately Tor Mankiewicz as well as for

may be The Lady Eve

—

—

Miss KaeP, tween that

all

making

in

great fun, she

made no

a 'great fun' film

there

we can blame

is

Kane

Still,

romantic

his greatest film

(1941), a formally comedy that has

as

reactionary

real distinction be-

nothing to

and

Sturges' career did not follow that graceful directorial curve which leads, in the auteurist view of things, from the early, unpretentious etude to the final, melancholy masterpiece. leaving after simply declined Sturges

a case for

a great film. Is

to Katie, people asked. If

its

kiewicz's

it is,

shallowness on Mankiewicz.

Miss Kael's critics retorted by virtually denying the validity of her research; for Kane to be great, Welles had to have written it. Almost everyone chose to ignore the obvious answer: that Herman Mankiewicz wrote Citizen Kane, and Orson Welles directed it, and that, while these two functions can be distinguished for research purposes, they are really the inseparable halves of a work of art. Welles may be compared to an actormanager, and Mankiewicz to a playwright, who collaborate on a production. Did Welles

Paramount

recommend

in

precipitously.

—

but perfection.

tactfully,

then

in the hectic 40s,

how-

1944

Even

it

first

Sturges didn't transcend the era as as provide its most individual and incredible expression. Anyone can look at not if his best films now, and accept ever,

much

anticipate liant,

—the

—

inevitable decline of a bril-

burnt-out career.

Sturges'

screenplays

heirs —the authors —took some time

of original

to surface.

Not

American Screenwriters

75

Helen Vinson and Clifford Jones

in William K. Howard's The Power and the Glory; made from Preston Sturges' first original script, this was an 'embryonic precursor' to Citizen Kane in 'its convoluted flashback approach to a dead tycoon'.

when the industry faced a crisis conscience and pocketbook, did Hollywood realize that it could not speak to its new, young audience through adaptations of novels and Broadway plays. In the four decades before 1970, only seven films based until the 70s,

of

both

on original

Award

scripts

had won the Academy

for Best Film; in the next eight years,

four Best Films were based on originals: Patton, The Sting, Rocky and Annie Hall. And in 1977, originals accounted for four of the five films nominated for the top spot

{Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl, Star Wars and The Turning Point). This move for 'originality' was, at base, conservative: the moguls had been burnt by the excesses of star directors; by granting more power to the writer, they hoped to check these excesses. Still,

things have changed since the

Age, when Hollywood put

artistry

Golden on the

assembly

line,

and when the technicians who

became

directors were called artists, while the creative writers who went west were often

turned

into

factory

technicians.

(Irving

Thalberg saw to that.) The more prestigious authors tended to sink into a deep funk, and had little to show for their time in Hollywood but the raw material for a novel denouncing the town's excesses and imbecilities. But a surprisingly large

number of

—

others radio playwrights, high-class pulp writers for the Saturday Evening Post as well as sophisticates from the New Yorker, helped define, more than anyone else, the cynicism, sentimentality, corruption and vitality of the Hollywood movie. And, in separate but equal collaboration with their directorial peers, the best American screenwriters functioned as a crucial link and an all but missing link in the creation of the industry's lasting works of art. writers

as

well

as

—

—

— 76

Lindsay Anderson and Free Cinema

For a more extensive study of the work of

American screenwriters, see Corliss' book Talking Pictures (New York, 1974, London, 1975). Also of great interest is The Hollywood Screenwriters, edited by Corliss contains (1972). The Citizen Kane Book 197 the

(

1 )

Pauline Kael's controversial essay on the authorship of Citizen Kane, as well as the texts of the original and final scripts. For the editor's views on the writerdirector controversy, see the Introduction to this Dictionary.

LINDSAY ANDERSON AND FREE CINEMA

Despite which, or because of which, it is Anderson's vision than readily totcapsulate it. Much in Anderson's work, as no doubt in his private easier to assert the consistency of

is built on contradictions, a nd the beginning of his career as a critic with a clearly held body of opinion and principle as to what the film ought and ought not to be is not so much help to one's assessment

personality,

might naively be supposed. A cynica hurna nitarian, a toughly p ractical idea list, a cl assical romantic a re alist fantasi st, an l

,

c ommitted

intensely

the directors at present working in

the British cinema, Lindsay

Anderson

is

the

only one, of any generation, who immediately cuts an international figure, who can without apology or special pleading be considered in the same frame of reference as Pasolini or Jancso or Ray who is, in short, undoubtedly and unarguably an auteur. In the older generation Michael Powell, once the subject of some of Anderson's harshest criticism back in the early days of his critical writing for Sequence, was a film-maker with style, flair and a highly personal way of looking at things, consistent even in his extravagant and perverse taste; among newer comers Ken Russell has turned out a body of work difficult to like but with its own crazy consistency and certainly impossible to ignore. Single films by other directors suginteresting gest talents Albert Finney's Charlie Bubbles (1968), Ken Loach's Kes (1969), Mike Leigh's Bleak Moments (1971) which may confirm themselves with more

—

—

—

exercise in a larger context.

But from all these, and from his colleagues Fre e Cinema m ovement which was so influential as a form of activity in the mid508 Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson Anderson remains distinct. He has very con-

in the

—

siderable technical abilities, he has a sizeable

body of work to his credit, especially if one bears in mind his closely related work in the theatre, and above all he has the complex temperament, the burning necessity to express himself on film, and the consistent originality

two are anyway indistinguishmark him off as one of the world's relatively few true film creators. fact that the

able. All of these

as

John Russell Taylor

Among

mediately recognizable not only by the way it is made but also by what it says, and by the

which make any of

his films

im-

characteristic

private

man whose '

political

subject-matter

is

intensely

—the more contradictions we

pile up, the further we seem from a clear formulation of any sort. But the consistency of a personal

vision

is

something, after

rather than formulates

—

all,

if

which one

we do not

feels

exactly

murder to dissect, we are likely at least to end up our analysis with so many component parts which make sense and take on significance only

when they have been

synthesized

by the creator in the course of creation. So it is good to take Lindsay Anderson's own writings most of which, after all, appeared

—

—

over twenty years ago with, if not exactly a pinch of salf, at least a full realization that they can never be understood as a complete indication of his attitudes at the time, let alone as a literal programme he had set him-

come. however, it is still interesting and sometimes illuminating to look at Sequence and Anderson's own contributions to it, plus his various writings on film elsewhere. Anderson, like his associates in the magazine, was never hesitant to appear opin-

self for the years to

In that

light,

ionated, balancing bitter denunciations of the

commercial norm, kitsch, and virtually anything emanating from the, at that time, irredeemably bourgeois British cinema, with generous enthusiasm for favoured filmmakers and ideals of film-making. At the time Sequence was founded in 1946, Anderson was twenty-three, an undergraduate at Oxford where he had returned after a period in the Army (the time at which, in a famous phrase from a later article, he and

Lindsay Anderson and Free Cinema other junior officers 'naHe^iare^fla g to t he_ roof of the mess at the foot of Annan Parbat' to celebrate the election of a ^-abour^govern1945) to study EnghsKT His background, as he has always readily admitted, was impeccably middle-class: his father was a general, and he went to preparatory school and public school (Cheltenham College). He

ment

in

had graduated in a once familiar fashion from an uncritical, film-fan devotion to the cinema in all its generally accessible forms to a more critical and specialized interest on first contact with foreign-language cinema at Oxford, where he had also been an amateur actor and

become

interested (to a lesser extent than in

films) in live theatre.

He was therefore a young man of very decided ideas and something of proselytizing zeal. On the one hand he was eager, very like the nearly contemporary (though seemingly unconnected) group of young French filmmakers involved with Cahiers du Cinema, to express his admiration of certain films and film-makers John Ford, Humphrey Jennings) whom he felt to be unappreciated, or insufficiently appreciated, by conventional film critics with conventional ideas of what did and did not constitute art. This appreciation therefore inevitably involved a series of revaluations, an upsetting of traditional, accepted priorities in film criticism, and so an attack on the critical establishment and the safe-playing 'tradition of quality', as Cahiers

du Cinema was to dub it. The principal grounds of attack, on critics and films alike, were these: that the attitudes and material were entirely bourgeois, conformist, middleclass and metropolitan, or at any rate southern-English; that the approach to the cinema was still almost exclusively literary; and that British cinema took itself seriously neither as art nor as entertainment. What was advocated in the place of the effete British cinema then on display was something which would be personal, with the possibility at least of individual creation rather than so many expressions of the famous British team spirit, which would acknowledge the existence of a Britain which was not middleclass, southern and 'nicely spoken', and which would have the density and complexof a poem, instead of being, as the Sequence team felt most of British production at that time to be, limited by the literary ity

11 value of

its

script,

respectable rather than

revelatory.

Of course, an element of this was the understandable desire of all y o_ung revolutionaries^^tp take over the functions and prerogatives of the establishment.

Those who

wished to remain critics wanted, naturally, to be of national influence and importance; but most of the group regarded themselves as critics only for the time being, propagandizing for a type of cinema that they wanted not only to see but to create. The first issue of Sequence, to which Anderson contributed an article on contemporary French cinema, came out in December 1946 (he became an editor on the second issue, in winter 1947). Before the magazine finally expired in 1952, before even Gavin Lambert and others from it joined the staff of the British Film Institute to take over the highly conservative quarterly Sight and Sound and make it over into a for-

ward-looking 1949,

making

—

monthly at the end of was involved in film-

critical

Anderson

small-scale film-making, to be sure, but sponsored and from the first unmistakably professional. In 1947 he had met a film-society enthusiast who happened to be married to the managing director of a Yorkshire factory making conveyor belts. The next year he was commissioned to make a film which would not just demonstrate what Richard Sutcliffe had manufactured and how, but would also convey something

of the firm's

human

context,

how

it

fitted

northern community, and what the special flavour of the firm and its workers into

its

was. The result was Meet the Pioneers (1948), the first of several sponsored documentaries Anderson made on minimal budgets over the next four years.

was

1953 that Lindsay Anderson's film-maker became known to more than the limited, specialized audience that normally got to see sponsored films, when he c o-clirected Thursday's Children with Guy Brenton. It concerns the work of the Ro yal School for the Deaf in Marga te in teaching those deaf from birth to speak. Its most notable characteristic as compared with the earlier films is a sort of toughmindedness which will never later be absent from Anderson's work. It would be pushing it, but not too far, to see some sort of comwith Bunuel, parison particularly Los It

in

abilities as a

— 78

Lindsay Anderson and Free Cinema

answer to these children's communication, the breaking down of the barrier to their private world

Aldermaston marches and, later, of Arnold Wesker's Centre 42, advocating folk festivals and the general elevation of debased popular

that deafness creates.

entertainments,

Olvidados:

problem

The

the

is

film's sureness of touch, its absolute

certainty of rhythm,

and

its

selection of detail

were so remarkable that it received an American Os£ar_£not however necessarily any gtrsfantee 'of artistic respectability) and, on the strength some commercial showing in of that, Britain more, certainly, than most twentyminute documentaries could expect. The film which Anderson directed immediately afterwards was made with no immediate intention of public or any other kind of showing, but, for the first time, just to please Anderson himself, to express something he felt a burning need to express. When O Dreamland (1953) finally put in an appearance as part of the first series of 'Free Cinema' programmes at the National Film Theatre in 1956, along with a selection of other independently made films by young film-makers from Britain and France, it was revelatory though perhaps precisely what it revealed was less clear at in relation to the effect of the whole,

—

—

that

time.

If

Thursday's

Children

showed

new tough-mindedness, O Dreamland moved over further into something very a

savagery Las Hurdes rather than Los Olvidados. It was conceived when Anderson, while working on Thursday'''s Children in Margate, visited the famous Dreamland fun fair. The film which resulted from this experience can be read in various ways, but, strangely like

enough

for

something assumed

at the outset

to be directly propagandist, defies easy

and

precise definition. In fact,

film

it

is

the

first

which brings us face to face with the contradictions and paradoxes of Anderson's nature, and the explosive effects which may be expected from them. The film has no commentary we are left to reach our own conclusions. During its ten minutes running

—

we are presented with a picture of the English working class taking their pleasures glumly. In Dreamland fun fair Anderson

time,

cuts in impressionistic fashion between the apathetic spectators and the tawdry, cheap,

often naively sensational sideshows. In the context of the rather simple-minded

left-wing idealism in vogue in the the era of Protest, Look

Back

in

lat e r 50s,

Anger, the

the

film

could

readily,

superficially be read as a denunciation of the

exploitation of the working class in a consumer society where rubbish such as we see

was all that was offered as cheap popular entertainment. But the film does not feel like that. Despite the opening shots of a chauffeur polishing a Bentley, it is hard to feel that the film-maker's attitude to the people he shows is entirely compassionate; often it is hard to see it as compassionate at all. Maybe they are victims, but it hardly seems in Anderson's nature to feel or enjoin for ourselves

much sympathy

for victims so passive, so

ready to accept their lot. The film contains in microcosm much of the later Anderson his

—

humanity and

his savagery, his pity

and

his

anger, his impossibility to be pinned down in any simple formula. O Dreamland is im-

mediately recognizable as a work from the

same hand as //. 1956 was important as the year of Free Cinema. Important in what way, one might .

.

Despite the flurry of publicity at the time, the importance of the moment is more ask.

symbolic than actual. It seems that the notion of the season at the National Film Theatre was a passing idea of Karel Reisz, then programme director of the theatre, using as keynote a phrase coined by Anderson in

The

show a selection of made films from various countries the six programmes included, as well as the films by new British directors, Sequence.

idea was to

independently

—

works

Truffaut, Chabrol, Franju, by Polanski and Lionel Rogosin with no too defined common programme, though most of them were of that awkward medium length between twenty minutes and an hour. In all, eleven British films were shown, the best remembered being Momma Don't Allow (1955), a study of a teenage dance by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) by Karel Reisz, and the three films Anderson was directly connected with: O Dreamland, Every Day Except Christmas (1957), both of which he directed, and Together (1955), directed by Lorenza Mazetti, on which Anderson was supervising editor and did some extra shooting. The film-makers were united by friendship,

—

— Lindsay Anderson and Free Cinema several of

them worked on and

79

off for the

Film Institute, and the technicians on the films worked also on various other films British

The

in the series.

impression created

is

of, at

that time, a quite tightly knit group, but not

necessarily

which

one

had

any

kind

of

ideological uniformity.

Nevertheless, the films did have certain things in common. Most obviously there was their acceptance of other classes than the middle class as worthy to be taken seriously in film. Journalistic statements suggesting that before Free Ci nema the British working class had never been seen on film were as overstated as some of the exaggerated claims made for the post-Osborne British drama. But all the same there is something new in Momma Don't Allow and We Are the Lambeth Boys a ready, unquestioning acceptance of the working-class boys from South London as people in their own right, with no need to place them socially first, to establish their position as worthy of sociological study. (Possibly this has something to do with the presence of an outside eye, that of Czech Karel Reisz, who may be supposed to have come to the cinema without the social hang-ups an English contemporary might evidence in dealing with the same kind of subject-matter.) Lindsay Anderson's contribution, Every Day Except Christmas, comes in a rather different category. If the two Karel Reisz films have a refreshing

—

them,

Anderson's film, though made on the same sort of basic assumption and co-produced by Karel Reisz, has a very different flavour. Though the surface is realistic enough, the overall tendency is

objectivity

about

to mythologize. It

is

a

forty-minute documentary about

Covent Garden fruit and flower market and who work there. It takes us, in a

himself

an

anachronism,

but

Lindsay

Anderson is anything but, and the film cannot but seem profoundly irrelevant to the fast-developing talents of the man who, only six years later, was to make as his next major film This Sporting Life.

Anderson's

first

feature film, This Sporting

Life (1963) initiated two collaborations that were to be important in his working life: with

the actor Richard Harris and, longer and more fruitful, with the writer David Storey. The film which resulted from this collaboration was at the time of its appearance unique in the British cinema, and if there is anything to compare it with since it is only in the work of Anderson himself. The film's most im-

mediately striking quality is its unashamed emotionalism. Here is no stiff-upper-lip understatement; when the characters suppress or repress their emotions, it only produces an even more powerful charge of violence every scene in the film is charged with the passion of what is not said and done, as

—

well as what

is.

It

now seems incompre-

hensible that This Sporting Life tended to be

misjudged on its first appearance as another semi-documentary picture of life in the north, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (i960) or A Kind of Loving (1962). It would be more to the point to compare it with Wuthering Heights, a book Anderson and Harris planned to film immediately realistic,

afterwards

—the

same elemental drama of same kind of obsessive

souls in conflict, the

passion which racks the superficially unlikely pair of principals, young, beefy footballer

Frank Machin and landlady,

Mrs

his

dowdy middle-aged Though real

Hammond.

enough and believable enough, this kind of amour fou is remote indeed from what the staid middle-class British cinema would gen-

those

erally consider as realism.

simple, easy but tightly plotted progression, through the daily cycle, from the setting out of a load of mushrooms from Sussex for the

key to the film's method comes near the when a terrible, nightmarish football match, shot in slow motion as the players wrestle in the mud like prehistoric animals (an effect echoed in the last battle sequence of Welles' Chimes at Midnight) leads into the sequence of Mrs Hammond's death, in which Machin returns to the house to find her missing, carried off to hospital with a stroke which seems almost like her last, defiant line of defence against him, follows her there and arrives in time to see her die. Everything is

market to the

last

of the sales in mid-morning

ladies. Every Day Except Christmas, for all its technical skill, its cunning assemblage of vivid, vivifying detail, is just that little bit too bland and rosy to be altogether true. It is rosy realism which does not come over as quite felt, a distinguished piece of film-making, but an anachronism not a bad thing in itself, if the creator were

to the

West End flower

A

end,

8o done

Lindsay Anderson and Free Cinema in a ruthlessly exterior

way

—the

bare

hospital room, the trickle of blood from a

corner of

Mrs Hammond's mouth, and

a

emotion which cannot be expressed when Machin smashes a spider on the clinically white wall with his fist. From here, back to the football field, with Machin running away from the camera to join in a remote game at the far end of the field, fading from our view as he begins what we presume to be his downward course as a football pro, out of everyone's sight and back, violent resolution of

maybe, start.

to the coal

The

mine where we saw him is symp-

structure of this sequence

tomatic: the boldly symbolic use of the detail of the football games, the sandwiching of the crucial scenes of Machin's private relationship between two football scenes, the crystallization of emotion not in words but in the action of killing the spider. The whole film works by similar juxtaposition, conveying

emotion and attitude by a complex net of references and implied equations or substitutions. It remains true to David Storey's conception, but at the same time takes on the quality of an auteur work, the unmistakable expression of Lindsay Anderson's own tender, violent temperament in images of unshakeable power. In Anderson's next film, The White Bus (1966), the tenderness is uppermost. It is a forty-six-minute long short story shot mostly in black and white, with occasional brief deviations into colour, based on a script by Shelagh Delaney, which is obviously semiautobiographical, depicting as it does the return of a young girl to her native town in the north (Manchester being used as the location). Right from the start it establishes the mood of light-hearted yet slightly barbed fantasy, when among the ordinary, realistic shots of the girl working late in a London office

is

inserted one shot of her hanging

from the ceiling while the cleaners go about their work taking no notice. This surrealistic touch carries us at once into another, more magical realm than This Sporting Life, where even the boldest symbolic touches never break wholly with reality. And the whole of The White Bus has the quality of a fairy tale for grown-ups, funny and sad and sharp, using the girl as a focus for our attention, so that we see the town as she sees it, with a level, interested, unflinching, unalarmed gaze.

The White Bus is a charjning minor work. Anderson's next feature W7y> (1968), is an extraordinary film, a filrn which virtually defies ordinary verbal description because it works as only the cinema can, on the indistinct border bet ween fantasy which has the solidity of Tangible experience and real ity whic h seems a^ r emote and elusive as ""^ dreamNOne cann ot even fall back on comfortable formulas to describe what it is (^bou Pp It is about, to use the fa shionable wordof the time, a (confro ntation^ but of whom precisely, and on what grounds, it woul d be impossible to specify without mis.

^

rggre^gixtijig^th e film's richly^suggeStivd^airT^

Jpigu ity.jjhe action 01 the original screenplay )y

uavid Sherwin and Lindsay Anderson fic tional public sc hool. Dur-

takes place in a

ing the first half we observe the progression of three natur al rebels through te rm, with its a bsurd rituals, its in tricate h ierarchy, its d esultoryle arning and passionately seriou s ntrigu e! Eis part is entirely believable,-^

T

i

and gives

a truer, less sentimentalized pic-

life than any I can any medium. Even that old stumbling-block, adolescent sex, is handled with a clear-eyed precision which does not prevent the film at moments from being quite

ture of boarding-school

remember,

in

touching.

But that

is not all there is to it. Little_by the film edg es over into fantasy or rather(jant asy penetrate*s^)more and more li ttle

,

its reality.VTne boys dream of and gradually the thought is embodied n (actionT^ the padre sho t, a store of ammunition foun d in the c ellars^ a fin al despera te battle with parent s and principalimown down by tEe young revoluties

deeply vjnto

ff evolt^

i

scno ol root.

t ionaTTgS

fiuin

tne

they_for?

What

are they~agains t?

w_e

st and?

impossible. plex,

Impossible to say

The whole

film

What

are

W here_ do