FILM NOTES Kevin Hagopian Penn State University (Others As Noted) |
A murderous sleepwalker stalks a provincial town, skulking around jagged corners and fractured archways; a creepy carnival mystic tells a young student that he will live only until dawn; an insane asylum harbors a murderer... Such are the ghoulish accents of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, the 1919 film that set off the beautifully morbid trend called German Expressionism. For a decade the giant studio combine UFA turned out from its Berlin studios a vision of human existence that seemed influenced by the fear and paranoia of Edvard Munch’s The Scream or the graphic works of Max Klinger, or the plays of Frank Wedekind. All portrayed the human mind in the thrall of dark forces whose effects were manifest in shrill, improbable images of decadence, decay, and psychosis. THE LAST LAUGH, VARIETY, THE GOLEM, DR. MABUSE - THE GAMBLER, and the genre’s grotesque monolith, Fritz Lang’s 1927 METROPOLIS -- during the 1920’s the German cinema incubated the world’s best directors, writers, and actors in this style. The crazy angles and bizarre sets, the plots that seemed to come from a psychoanalyst’s textbook, and the grimly cartoonish characters, all got their charter in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. If there is an evergreen of sinister cinema, THE CABINET 0F DR. CALIGARI is surely it.
Yet, as influential as the film was in Germany, it had its most lasting impact in the United States. The film played the prestigious Capitol Theatre in New York in April 1921 to huge crowds. There, the film included a bizarre stage show, perhaps designed to comfort American audiences not used to seeing such a bleak world view. In it, an alleged psychiatrist, “Dr. Cranford,” addressed the audience of the Capitol and assured them that Francis, the tortured hero of CALIGARI, was insane and had since been cured, completely invalidating the film’s witnessing of Francis’s lonely pursuit of the serial murderer! This may have been designed to shield naive American audiences from the implications of the experimental qualities of the film’s narrative. Yet, diagnosing the film itself as insane wound up making DR. CALIGARI even more disconcerting, for the film already had one framing story in which the events are shakily reconceived as merely a dream.
No amount of invention could explain away CALIGARI’S nightmarish implications or its haunting visuals. Hollywood films immediately began to borrow CALIGARI’s angles and shadows, if not (at least, not right away) its disturbingly neurotic plots and characters. In the 1930’s, after Hitler had cleansed the German cinema of its Expressionist urges (he preferred lighter fare, especially German versions of Hollywood-style musicals) many of the most talented members of the Expressionist cohort came to America. Their often grisly obsessions lived on, in films like DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE WOLFMAN, and 1940’s Film Noir. Today, even many of the best of the gore/splatter cinema of directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento can trace their roots back to THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. The good doctor’s cabinet has divulged, ever since l919, an inexhaustible supply of Halloween treats...
THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI
(German, 1919, 90 minutes, b/w, 16 mm)
Directed by Robert Wiene
Cast:
Werner Krauss .......... Dr. Caligari
Conrad Veidt...........Cesare
Friedrich Feher..........Francis
Crime and Punishment
A faithful recounting of the great nineteenth-century novel this is not. The 1930s era costumes and anglicized names are only some of the less obtrusive changes to the original text. Lovers of Dostoevskii’s work will be disappointed to find that in von Sternberg’s film Raskolnikov has only one victim (the pathetic Lizaveta is nowhere to be found) and that he kills her not with an axe, but with a somehow more civilized poker. Raskolnikov’s dank little attic apartment is here a fairly spacious and sun-filled room complete with portraits of Napoleon and Beethoven (?!). Perhaps most disturbing of all, the lecherous sensualist Svidrigailov has been transformed into a downright pleasant Grilov. Sternberg himself said of his film that it is “no more related to the true text of the novel than the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower is related to the Russian environment.” If any connection to Dostoevskii’s novel does remain, it is probably more to be found in certain details of the sets than in the screenplay itself. Note the icons and samovars that litter the pawnbroker’s apartment and the recurrent image of the imperial double-headed eagle, as much a sign of the Russian Empire here as a classic Sternbergian fetish. (Images of imposing black birds and dominating, feathered bird-women are typical Sternberg motifs.)
Coming on the heels of the scandal over The Devil is a Woman, and his break with Marlene Dietrich, von Sternberg agreed to take over direction of an already scripted and cast Crime and Punishment as part of a two-film contract with Columbia. Sternberg gives a biting description of the cast in his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry: “As mixed a collection of human beings as can be imagined is before me ... Some are literate, some are not. Among those present are trained performers and those who have made the jump to the screen from the trampoline of a mattress.” He goes on to note that none of his actors, with the exception of Lorre, had ever read the novel and implies that some of them did not even bother to read the script. A dialogue between the director and his “pawnbroker,” the British stage actress and intimate of George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, is worth repeating:
MPC: I only want to know what I am to portray.
JVS: Your part calls for a pawnbroker.
MPC: I cannot possibly become a tradesperson; my agent said I was to be a vision.
JVS: Your agent must have read the script. You will be a vision, but before this is
possible you will end your career as a pawnbroker by being killed with an
iron poker.
Despite all its problems, the film does contain some interesting, even touching moments (such as the opening sequence in which Raskolnikov graduates with honors from the university and is admonished to “do good” in the world, as he steps out of the shadows into the light), and Lorre’s performance is if not convincing, at least admirable for its intensity and sad innocence.
Josef von Sternberg’s penultimate film with Dietrich (coming between Blond Venus in 1932 and The Devil is a Woman in 1935) has been described as his most striking, most disturbing work, the culmination of metaphoric structuring in his films, and a relentless excursion into style. Carole Zucker, in The Idea of the Image describes The Scarlet Empress as “the film in which Sternberg’s inquiries into the dimensionality of the frame receives the most extended and profound treatment; it is also the film in the director’s oeuvre that relies most heavily on its visual aspects.” Indeed, the film’s imagery is stunning. Present in almost every frame, often utilized as candle-holders or furniture, are examples of the hundreds of statues commissioned by Sternberg and created by his friend, Peter Bullbusch, a Swiss sculptor and later chief of Metro’s Special Effects Department. Bullbusch completed the statues in a few weeks from a mix of epoxy resin and plaster of paris. The effect is ghastly, to say the least, making it seem as though events take place not in the Kremlin, but in the enchanted, frozen kingdom of the evil Koschei the Deathless. Icons are also an omnipresent feature of the sets, but they are more reminiscent of Benois’s nightmarish, Symbolist backdrops for Stravinsky’s ballet Petrouchka, than Russian religious art. Giant-sized chairs, beds, and tables make the actors look like dolls or children playing house, and the Empress Elizabeth’s imperial, double-headed eagle throne looks like a devouring dragon.
Depression-era audiences were horrified by the film’s oppressive elements. The clutter of the mise-en-scene -- eerie statuary, veiled faces, tight framing, frames dissected by diagonal lines of staircases and hangings, and restrictive costumes -- led critics to accuse von Sternberg of trying to “assassinate” Dietrich. In fact, the film traces its protagonist’s trajectory from entrapment to political and sexual empowerment. In the film’s opening scene, we find a young helpless Sophia Frederica, played by Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Sieber, condemned to her bed without any toys, suffering from some kind of spinal ailment. The doctor -- who, it turns out, is actually the royal hangman -- announces that the young princess will have to wear a harness, provoking a nursemaid’s stifled comment, “What is he? A horse doctor?” Upon the doctor’s departure, young Sophia is left wondering if she might be able to become a hangman some day. This, in turn, leads to an attendant telling her stories of Russian royal executioners, the great tsars, Peter and Ivan. As Sophia listens to the tales, we are privy to her sadistic, childish fantasies of naked and semi-naked bodies being broken on the rack, burned at the stake, and used as human bell-clappers. It could be argued that the rest of the film is all an answer to Sophia/Catherine’s wish to become a hangman, to play with forbidden toys, and to break out of her “harness.” Sophia’s metamorphosis is marked not only by her change of name, but by her increasingly Russianized, increasingly masculinized costumes. At the height of her sexual and political power, we see her dressed as a hussar, riding a white stallion up the stairs of the Kremlin and ringing the bell that signals the assassination of her impotent, insane husband, Grand Duke Peter, and announces her new role as the “Messalina of the North.”
With its fairy tale settings, lavish costumes, and music (drawing from Tchaikovsky, but also from Mendelssohn and Wagner), Sternberg’s film is saturated in the mystique of a fantasy Russia -- the Russia of Baba Yaga, Mussorgsky, gypsies, and drunken, decadent Karamazovs, yet many critics have argued that Sternberg’s “Russia” is merely a facade. As film scholar Peter Baxter has argued, The Scarlet Empress is “nothing less than a nightmare version of the American dream as Sternberg had lived it, the dream quite literally of upward mobility that overtakes its subjects, inflates them with limitless ambition, and gives them everything they could want in return for everything that they are.”
WORKS CITED
Baxter, Peter. Just Watch! Sternberg, Paramount and America. London: BFI, 1993.
von Sternberg, Josef. Fun in a Chinese Laundry. NY: Macmillan, 1965.
Zucker, Carole. The Idea of the Image. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988.
For years, Lubitsch had wanted to make a film with Garbo; here, finally, was his chance. For Garbo, Ninotchka represented her first foray into American comedy . . . it turned out to be her favorite of all her American films. Later, she would say of Lubitsch, “He was the only great director out there. Ninotchka was the only time I had a great director in Hollywood.” For Lubitsch, Ninotchka marked the beginning of his richest period in film. “Lubitsch Rides Again!” announced the critics.
Appearing during a time when “A” Westerns and historical epics dominated the American screen, Ninotchka has been called the most “historically conscious” and “timely” of Lubitsch’s films. In fact, Ninotchka was already a little out of date when it was first released. Filmed between May and July, 1939, Ninotchka was completed on the very eve of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. Before the film’s release, a new introductory title needed to be added: “This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette and not an alarm . . . and if a Frenchman turned out the light it was not on account of an air raid!”
Lubitsch (born in Berlin, l892, his father having come to Germany from Russia in the l880s) had made a trip to Russia in 1936 in search of his own roots and those of his new wife, Vivian Gaye, whose mother was Russian. There he had been feted by the head of Goskino (the State Cinema organization), Boris Shumyatsky, and found his inspiration for the characterization of Ninotchka in the person of an old friend who had become a die-hard Bolshevik. Nonetheless, what emerged from Lubitsch’s film is less a reflection of the “Russian character” (in its 1920s or 1930s manifestation) or the relation between Soviets and Westerners than a comic investigation into Lubitsch’s favorite question, “To play or not to play?”
When Lubitsch was hired on to the production, the sketch for the script read: “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevik ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all.” Yet, in the end, Ninotchka’s basic conflict is not capitalism vs. communism but sensuality vs. selflessness. Throughout the film, Ninotchka never loses her political convictions. Laughter, love, Parisian fashion, champagne -- none of these things can prevent her from standing up and proclaiming the goals of the Revolution, whether it be in Paris, Moscow, or Constantinople, a royal hotel suite, a communal apartment, or a women’s powder room. The hat that Ninotchka first sees upon her arrival in Paris, and describes as a product of the “doomed” capitalist West and which she later buys and wears is not so much a symbol of capitalism as it is a piece of pure impracticality, a symbol of silliness. The hat looks ridiculous on Garbo -- and that’s just the point.
Watching the film from the other side of history (after both the Second World War and the Cold War), the (post)modern viewer encounters moments that are -- to say the least -- uncomfortable. After Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the revelations of glasnost, it is a little painful to witness Ninotchka’s mock execution and to hear Garbo’s famous line, “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer, but better Russians.” Nevertheless, the “Lubitsch touch” still works, the witty dialogue still sparkles, and Garbo’s dead pan delivery still amazes.
What a difference four years can make. The Russians who were likable but misguided, cold and ideological on the outside but warm and romantic on the inside in Ninotchka have been transformed into full-fledged martyrs in Milestone’s film. Now an ally in the war, the Russians in The North Star seem strangely un-Soviet. While Ninotchka’s trip back to Moscow was marked by a distinct graying of the set and by posters bearing Stalin’s portrait and words like “INDUSTRIALIZATION,” Milestone’s “village” is curiously devoid of any references to the Soviet era. Lenin himself is nowhere to be found. In fact, despite Milestone’s own Slavic heritage (he was raised in Kishinev), his protagonists are suspiciously Mid-Western American. (One can't help thinking that if the Disney corporation were to create a new theme park called “Russialand”, it would look something like this.) A “Russian folk song” with music by Aaron Copland and words by Ira Gershwin says it all.
At certain points in this film, it seems as though Milestone has forgotten everything that he taught us in his anti-war masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). At other times, however, Milestone does succeed in revealing the horror and tragedy of war. The abrupt transition from a vision of happy peasants at work, at rest, at school, and at home in the midst of their families to a landscape full of smoke, destroyed buildings, burning wheat fields, and dead bodies is chilling, as are the scenes in which we watch Nazi doctors methodically bleeding Russian children to death. Again, watching this film from the other side of history, Marina’s final judgment is heartbreaking: “None of us will be the same. Wars do not leave people as they are. All people will learn that and come to see that wars do not have to be. We will make this the last war; we will make a free world for all men.”
--Diana Davies, SUNY at Binghamton
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Millichap, Joseph. Lewis Milestone. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.
Weinberg, Herman. The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study. NY: Dutton & Co., 1968.
The Hollywood film industry was enlisted by the White House to clarify murky Soviet-American relations. The films that resulted were Warner Brothers’ MISSION TO MOSCOW, MGM’s SONG OF RUSSIA, RKO’s DAYS OF GLORY, and Samuel Goldwyn’s THE NORTH STAR, and each bore the mark of many enthusiastic hands. Like the anti-communist films of the 1950s (I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI, WALK EAST ON BEACON, THE RED MENACE, THE WHIP HAND, etc.) these were works made for a patron momentarily more important even than the mighty box office: in this case, the war effort. What resulted were well meaning but often garbled conglomerations of high school world history, Book-of-the-Month Club politics, and a schlocky version of Mittel-European folk life borrowed from various horror movies and operettas.
THE NORTH STAR’s creative team was a distinguished one. Initially, Goldwyn favorite William Wyler was to direct, but Wyler’s Army service (which would culminate in THE MEMPHIS BELLE and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES) intervened, and Goldwyn was able to convince Lewis Milestone to helm the film. Milestone’s career was nearly as fabled as Wyler’s: the universally praised ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and the stylistically daring THE FRONT PAGE had been among the highlights. To write the screenplay, Goldwyn engaged Lillian Hellman, the period’s most prominent Popular Front writer. The cast was composed of Goldwyn’s most prominent young contract players (Farley Granger, Anne Baxter, Dana Andrews) and Hollywood character stalwarts like Walter Huston, Erich von Stroheim, Walter Brennan, Ann Harding, and Dean Jagger. Aaron Copland wrote the score, and Ira Gershwin supplied special lyrics to the “Russian folk songs” invented for the film. Margaret Bourke-White, who had photographed the Eastern front, was commissioned to make stills for the film.
What resulted was “a picture about average Russians for average Americans,” as the film’s publicity had it. Unlike, say, MISSION TO MOSCOW, Warner Brothers’ tortured adaptation of Ambassador Joseph Davies’ memoirs (which ‘starred’ Stalin, Churchill, and FDR, played by impersonators), THE NORTH STAR chose to avoid the byzantine history of Soviet-American relations. Instead, the strategy of THE NORTH STAR was a simple one: to ‘deexoticize’ Soviet Russia, and make Americans recognize in an idealized portrait of Soviet village life a set of outlooks and experiences similar to their own. Thus, if the citizens of the village North Star seem to eschew political discussion, well, after all, didn’t Americans also constantly profess exasperation with the doings of politicians, and prefer to mind their own, local business?
The world of THE NORTH STAR is a nineteenth century one. The film ignores the massive 1920s and 1930s Soviet public works projects, the forced collectivization of farmlands, and Stalin’s ruthless purges of kulaks, generals, and dissidents, locating its warm, simple townsfolk in a precious-seeming countryside, and a harmonious community. Collective activity in the film seems entirely voluntary, a natural outgrowth of the villagers’ cooperative agrarian lifestyle. In particular, the account of the complicated, dark Stalinist politics of the 1930s given in the film is intentionally glib. As he dismisses his pupils at the beginning of the summer in 1941, Iakin, the headmaster in a village school, jokingly tells his young charges that he will not ruin their vacation with a political lecture, adding “But this is the summer of 1941, a solemn time. No one of us knows what will happen. I don’t have to remind you that we are a people with a noble history; you are expected to carry on that history with complete devotion and self-sacrifice.” This is virtually the only mention of Soviet (or Tsarist) history in the film, and communism itself is never properly explained. Far more important than its passing, opaque reference to Soviet politics, heavily-freighted moments such as this one put the naive Soviets in the same spiritual place as Americans, who in countless movies made during World War II are seen in flashbacks enjoying the simple pleasures of prewar life oblivious of Japanese and German treachery. Often, these incidents in THE NORTH STAR, such as a lengthy village celebration at the beginning of the film, are loaded with overbearingly folksy touches, yet they are no more indigestible than a score of films made about American village life during the war years. And the picture of Soviet Russia at war in THE NORTH STAR is remarkably unrelenting for an American film of the period, an indirect product of the admiring testimony of journalists such as Bourke-White and Harrison Salisbury. By 1943, the Soviet partisan and the Russian woman soldier were already staples of Allied wartime propaganda, as were accounts of Nazi atrocities on Russian soil. THE NORTH STAR capitalized on audiences’ familiarity with these archetypes for added sympathy.
Yet Hellman was incensed at what she believed was a dumping-down of her screenplay. The best explanatory material she argued, was being written out on the set by Milestone, or edited out of the rushes by Goldwyn. (In fact, Hellman’s ‘explanations’ of such issues as collectivization were more in the nature of vague apologies, not much clearer or more accurate than what remains in the film.) Her conflict with Goldwyn about THE NORTH STAR boiled over, and she bought out her contract with him for $30,000. The year THE NORTH STAR was released, she published her original screenplay through Viking Press, a highly unusual practice for the time, and one that guaranteed that her version of the film would be a matter of public record.
Thus began THE NORTH STAR’s strange afterlife. Like other films in the cycle, the late 1940s and early 1950s House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings used THE NORTH STAR as a club with which to beat Hollywood. Hellman’s attitude toward the committee was defiant, and both she and director Milestone were quietly ‘gray-listed’ by the industry. Rereleased in the mid l950s as ARMORED ATTACK, the film was savagely recut, and a clumsy voice-over added that made the film a narrative about the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary!
THE NORTH STAR remains a relic wholly of its time, that brief moment in World War II when America allowed itself to believe in the Soviet Union as a place not so fundamentally different from our own. THE NORTH STAR fails spectacularly as an icon about Russia, but succeeds admirably as a common anti-fascist crusade.
Tiananmen Square’s pictures are burned onto history’s retina: the faux-Statue of Liberty, fragile, brash, and deeply moving; the starving, sweating students, tough and idealistic, smiling in the sun of a new day; then, gunshots in the dawn and garbled stories from international news correspondents, the sound of fear in their breathless dispatches. And then the final moment in Tiananmen’s Chinese opera, a wordless aria of freedom: a nameless student, reedy and resolute, decides that only human will is required to hold back tyranny, and proves it by standing in front of a tank.
That moment ranks as one of the most expressive in the history of democratic aspiration, but it was essentially a silent one, and directors Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon recognized that as Tiananmen Square’s June 1989 climax began to lose its immediacy, it was time to restore the voice to those from whom it had been stolen, the students themselves. The theft of that voice, of course, had been the vile project of the Chinese dictatorship from the beginning. Thus most of THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE is told in the quiet, stirring words of those who led the attempt to make a new China.
The film knits the complex prehistory of the Chinese democracy movement into the events of April to June, 1989. The film presents Tiananmen as the last act in a tragedy whose plot had grown relentless. Moderate desires for reform are met with some respect within the government, only to be rebuffed as hard liners assume national political power. Students, workers, and intellectuals are hopeful, then frustrated, as they hear themselves spoken of as plotters and saboteurs in a conspiracy allegedly aimed at dismembering the country. In response, the democracy activists harden their own methods in a dangerous chess game played out on Tiananmen’s vast concrete plain. We learn much more than a chronology here -- we discover the little-analyzed (in the west) “third way” of Chinese political reform, a soft path to political change that was crushed, along with so much else, under the tracks of Tiananmen’s tanks.
The film itself became part of the dialectic of reform when its showing at the New York Film Festival prompted Chinese leaders to retaliate by not allowing director Zhang Yimou to attend. Director Carma Hinton was determined, though, that her film, while extraordinarily evenhanded in its treatment of the opposing forces in contest at Tiananmen, would restore their own narratives to the dissidents: “The number-one concern we had was for the film to be a forum for the range of different voices talking about what China needs. One thing that struck me was that hardly any Chinese got to speak” in other Western accounts of the uprising. “Mainly it was American anchors or reporters explaining what the Chinese wanted or did or didn’t do. . . You could hardly hear any Chinese voices finish an idea, or even a sentence.” In order to get to the point of correcting this imbalance, Hinton and Richard Gordon used seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities to, as their grant put it, “push the frontiers of scholarship” in modern China studies. The sheer amount of misinformation about Tiananmen, says Richard Gordon, made this preparation necessary, as did the competing versions of history told by the different participants.
Director Carma Hinton was born in China and lived there until she was 21, the daughter of China scholar William Hinton, whose studies of the land reform in the rural village of Low Bow are classics in rural sociology. Her husband, Richard Gordon, is also an experienced China specialist. Together with a team of scholars and participants, they sorted through hundreds of hours of footage dating back to the 1920s, and thousands of photos and posters. One result was the creation of the most complete archive on the events of 1989 in China ever assembled.
Logistics were astoundingly complex, not merely for obtaining footage (CNN, says Richard Gordon, was “just a nightmare to deal with”) but for shooting and researching in China. Only by playing one bureaucrat off another, and by conducting clandestine interviews, were Hinton and Gordon able to complete their labors in China with such success. Indeed, they were so amazed at the bravery of some dissidents still in China that they “pulled the plug” on several interviews which might have put the interviewee’s life and liberty in danger. Meanwhile, while the film was in progress, second-hand accounts of its content drew attacks from the dissident community, several of whom felt that the film went too easy on the Chinese government. It is precisely this ideological stiffness, on both sides, which the film criticizes, though its sympathies are clearly on the side of the protesters.
It is the material shot for the film, especially interviews with participants in exile, that is the most powerful. The heroes of Tiananmen are reserved and quiet, gentle people with small, soft voices. Who could have believed that they could topple a mighty edifice like the Chinese ruling regime, with all its iron strength? We see the activists as leaders in their new homelands, but we also sense a strong feeling of displacement and loss as they tell us of their lives since 1989. How much stronger would their own country’s heart beat if their blood were still in China’s veins?