VOLUME 07 - NUMBER 02 SUMMER 1971

a other ORSON \"\\'\\TELLES filxns available: THE TRIAL CITIZEN KANE THE STRANGER THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI MACBETH

i- STAFF VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 editor SUMMER 1971 RICHARD CORLISS CONTENTS assistant editor MELINDA WARD FRONT LINES page 2 graphic designer and MARTHA LEHTOLA page 4 managing editor THE LONG TAKE AUSTIN LAMONT by Brian Henderson page 6 advertising manager NAOMI WEISS F. W. MURNAU an introduction by assistants Gilberta Perez Guillermo research MARY CORLISS page 12 design LINDA MANCINI Molly Haskell on subscriptions DIANA GROSSMAN SUNRISE page 16 editorial board GEORGE AMBERG, Chairman Richard Koszarski on Department of Cinema Studies, New York University CITY GIRL page 20 New York, New York Robin Wood on JOSEPH L. ANDERSON, Director TABU Film Program , Ohio University page 23 Athens, Ohio ORSON WELLES JAMES A . BEVERIDGE , Director an introduction by Programme in Film, York University Mike Prokosch page 28 Toronto, Ontario David Bordwell on HOWARD SUBER, Assistant Professor CITIZEN KANE Motion Picture Division, University of California page 38 Los Angeles, California Stephen Farber on THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT page 48 are those of the individual authors and do not Terry Comito on necessarily represent the opinions TOUCH OF EVIL of the editor, staff or publisher. page 51 FILM COMMENT. volume 7 number 2. summer 1971. Charles Silver on price $1.50. FILM COMMENT is published quarterly THE IMMORTAL STORY . by Film Comment Publishing Corporation. page 54 Copyright ® 197t Film Comment Pu blishing Corporation . Th is publication is fully protected by domestic and international MAX OPHULS copyright. It is forbidden to duplicate any part of th is publication by Andrew Sarris in any way without prior written permission from the publishers . page 57 Second class postage paid Michael Kerbel on at Boston. Massachusetts. LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN Subscription rates in North America: page 60 $6 for four numbers . $12 for eight numbers; elsewhere $7 for four numbers , Gary Carey on $14 for eight numbers. payable in US funds only. CAUGHT New subscribers please include your occupation and zip code . page 62 Subscription and back issue correspondence: FILM COMMENT 100 Walnut Place William Paul on Brookline Massachusetts 02146. THE RECKLESS MOMENT Ed itorial correspondence: page 65 FILM COMMENT 214 East 11 th Street Foster Hirsch on New York NY 10003 MADAME DE ... Back volumes of FILM COMMENT have been page 67 reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation BOOKS 111 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10003. The Payne Fund Studies Microfilm editions are available from reviewed by Garth Jowett page 70 University Microfilms Ann Arbor Michigan 48106. Please write to these companies for complete sales information. LETTERS page 77 . Type set by Rochester Monotype Composition Company. Wrightson Typographers and Machine Composition Company. CLASSIFIED page 84 Printed in USA by Willis McDonald and Company . National newsstand distribution by B DeBoer, 188 High Street Nutley NJ 0711 O. lnternationa l distribution by Worldwide Media Service , 150 Fifth Avenue. New York NY 10011 USA. Library of Congress card number: 76-498. on the cover: FALSTAFF. Jeanne Moreau and Orson Welles. photo: Peppercorn- Wormser

G FRDNTLINES Showdown at the Greystone Corral: a secret, is reputed to be $75,000 a year. And there an editorial is no justification for the excesses indulged in at Grey- stone, for the incredible disparity between the funds The American Film Institute is in trouble, double granted and the costs of dispensing those grants, for trouble . One problem is that it has only enough money the feeble funding of such crucial programs as film to finance the programs it really wants. The other prob- preservation, and for the present hypocritical plea of lem is that most members of the film community-film lack of funds. The money was there, once. The needs teachers on all levels, film scholars and critics, film- were there and the money was grossly misspent. If the makers , film curators and librarians-want the AFI to AFI pleads now for patience and understanding , it is finance different programs. too late. Our patience has run out. Budget crises are familiar to cultural institutions, Deep down inside the American Film Institute there especially during a recession ; so this should be nothing is something good. It was founded because it was new to the AFI. What is of concern is that there might needed; and the National Foundation for the Arts, using be more money available to the AFI today if it had spent tax dollars, was willing to start it. If the AFI dies, there its money not only with more wisdom in its priorities may never be another chance in this country to have but also with more efficiency. a film institute financed with public money. If the AFI dies, the potential to develop film as an art form in Although from the beginning the claims of AFI pub- this country will suffer, the chance to preserve our film licity have made some members of the film community heritage will become even more slender, and the lead- wary of its goals, ill-feeling peaked when the news ership the film community still desperately needs will spread last January of the AFl's inept attempt to cut not emerge. The AFI is' there and needs reform. costs by eliminating its research department. In the resulting uproar, its education department was emas- Here are a few specific ideas, framed after I talked culated . The AFl 's announced purpose is to \" stimulate with dozens of film people around the country, including and encourage progress in the film arts \" by being \" a AFI administration , staff, and former staff members: catalyst and point of focus and coordination for the 1) Film Education, one of the principal needs of this many institutions and individuals who are anxious to country , is getting short shrift at the AFI. Film educa- share [this] purpose .\" Clearly this purpose is not being tors-critics,scholars and teachers-are not adequately served by the AFI if it has no research staff and a tiny represented on the AFI Board of Trustees . The educa- education department. tors should elect their own full-voting representatives to the AFI Board. The Institute made its financial statements for 1968, 2) The Trustees should evaluate the Institute's policies 1969 and 1970 available to FILM COMMENT. Income and priorities, particularly with respect to its accom- for those three years was more than $5 million . In that plishments as \" a catalyst and point of focus and coor- same period, administration and staff salaries were dination;\" and they should establish and make public a new set of priorities with clearly defined goals and $1 ,522,533; and grants and projects were $1 ,316 ,927 . realistic budgets, and with waste, overhead , adminis- In other words , the AFI paid $250,000 more to its own trative costs, salaries and frills cut to the core. staff than it gave to the Library of Congress for film 3) The Trustees should evaluate the past performance preservation , model study sites for film education proj- and present attitude of the Institute's administration-its ects, the Community Film Workshop Council, indepen- management techniques, its relationship to the film dent filmmaker grants, student filmmaker grants, schol- community, and its commitment to the goals of the AFI. arships and fellowships, internships, support to period- Present administration should be replaced and the icals, and feature script development combined . More internal structure of the AFI changed, if necessary , to than $639 ,600 was spent on structural improvements, insure the free flow of recommendations between the furniture and fixtures, and motion picture and sound AFI administration, the AFI staff and the film community . equipment at Greystone-the Advanced Study Center in Beverly Hills-and that's just for the building . Here The AFI Trustees, administration , staff, and all others are a few other figures: consultants and their travel, associated with it are urged to do all they can to make $134 ,534 ; rent, $138,009 ; and a \" benefit\" for the AFI- and then keep the American Film Institute responsive which lost $3 ,813 . The balance, a little more than $1 .2 to the people it was created to serve. Such a change million, went for \" program support\" with only two out in attitude is less painful if those at the top are leading of the 40 other items totalling more than $100,000 each . the way. Some of these expenditures are justified , such as Austin Lamont salaries for film archivists and cataloguers and educa- managing editor tion department staff. But the director's salary, though Front Lines is a forum for polemics on any aspect of the film medium. The participation of our readers is solicited.

\\ When you're the whole show, you need the one-man camera: Bolex A man in your position can't afford Variable speed filming, from 12 to 64 f.p.s. Sync . to bother with a 16mm camera sound, with the constant speed (24 f.p.s.) motor. that's temperamental, cumbersome, incomplete, or experimental. Cinephotomicrography-without disturbing You need a hundred percent solid vibrations , because of the Bolex circula r pro camera that's proven itself shutter: Underwater filming , with the from the registration claw on out. special Bolex underwater housing . You need a Bolex. It can do Bolex is so versatile and reliable that anything you need it to do. it becomes an extension of yourself. Documentary and news filming, More than a camera. More like a friend. with the Vario-Switar 86 OE If you want the free 32 page 16mm automatic thru-the-Iens light Product Buying Guide write to metering zoom. address below: Close-up photography, with pre-set diaphragm Switar macro lenses or SOL-EX bellows extension . Available light filming , with the incredible Pai llard Incorporated, high speed Switar* f/1.1 lens. 1900 Lower Road, Linden , N.J.0703S. Special effects filming-lap Other products: Hasse!blad cameras and equipment. dissolves, fades , double exposures. Hermes typewrite rs and figuring machines. Animation and time lapse photography, accurately accomplished with single • Kern Switar lenses we re selected frame exposures and the built-in to film the moon landing . frame counter. 12 minutes of uninterrupted shooting, with the 400 foot magazine . Fast action filming with compact 100 foot load, spring wind, and automatic threading. I I

FRONTUNES A Response from and is its strength-disparate elements of the film com- the American Film Institute munity joined by a shared concern for the art of film . The executives and prominent artists are there partly The American Film Institute is an educational because they can help make it all happen , but to lim it institution . them to the size of their influence is a mistake, so too to confine Ed Emshwiller, Ricky Leacock, Francis Cop- Everything the AFI does serves education in a pola and Arthur Penn to a narrow interest in filmmaking. number of ways. The Archives program has galvanized a national effort to preserve films so that they might Film Commentofiered 750wordsand 24 hoursto reply survive for scholars to study and for new generations to broad and scattered charges. A complete report on to view. Filmmakers are being educated and supported AFI 's first four years will be issued in July. Film Com- at the same time that work is being done to expand ment's readers may write AFI for a copy . It will contain the use of films in education and , today, far from being a complete listing of all activities, all individuals and \" eliminated,\" thirty-six AFI-supported researchers and projects assisted by the Institute, audited financial data, scholars are gathering history and data. We believe and evaluations of the problems and challenges ahead. that film education relates not only to the growing community of film educators , but also to the artists Meanwhile, be assured that research is not eliminat- and the audiences who sustain the art. In this light, ed , it is stronger than ever; that the \" staff salaries \" everything the Institute engages in can be seen as to \" projects and grants\" ratio represents no incredible educational. disparity-AFI is not a foundat ion , but an operating team consisting of cataloguers, librarians, projectionists, ar- The American Film Institute, nevertheless, is proba- chivists, faculty , theatre personnel , educators, accoun- bly not as good as those of us who work for it think tants , as well as the secretaries who do all the work. it is, nor as bad as its antagonists would like to portray (The British Film Institute expends the equivalent of it. It is perhaps closer to the picture seen by objective 80 percent of its government support for staff.) The observers and critics-that of any unusually productive report will detail 5,000 American films safeguarded ; five four-year old with some triumphs and some mistakes. summer seminars for film teachers ; grants for 86 in- Yet most criticism of this four-year old questions not dependent filmmakers; annual published surveys of the quality of accomplishment, but the quantity of work university film courses; a definitive 1653-page Catalog in one area or another. Constructive debate can center of films of the twenties (the first of nineteen volumes); around these questions of emphasis, the more so if the funding of 22 oral history projects ; a film repertory polemics and misstatements are put aside. theatre ; 27 internships for filmmakers ; support for Film- facts magazine (still struggling); the founding of the Look closely at AFI 's trustees and you will find a Community Film Workshop Council; a weekly educa- serious group of people who brought it into existence, tional television program ; scholarships, fellowships; made human judgments in matters of program, priorities model film education sites; subsidies for film co-op and personnel, and raised three-quarters of its total catalogs ; and an advanced conservatory where film- funding from private sources. Having made that effort, makers learn artistic craft and discipline, and where they have been vigilant to prevent careless spending. theory and history are being compiled and refined . Perhaps this Board would be strengthened by This is only a part of what we would have liked to more educators and critics, but Arthur Knight, John do in those four years. But it has been achieved through Culkin and David Mallery have spoken forcefully for the creation of a structure which has encouraged con- education since AFI 's founding , the latter two as certed action from previously fragmented sectors of members of the Executive Committee. Yet no Board the film community . This is a big country, and we are members have spoken for a single interest. New trust- still a small organization . If you want to help and be ees or visitors to Board meetings are invariably sur- involved , write to me and we will look for a way . prised to see the depth of interest and commitment executives and actors hold for film preservation and George Stevens, Jr. film study in schools. And , less surprisingly, the educa- Director tors have found value in the study center in California . The American Film Institute This mixture of interests is basic to AFI's unique thrust (1815 H Street N.w., Washington , D.C. 20006) Front Lines is a forum for polemics on any aspect of the film medium. The participation of our readers is solicited. The fall issue will include additional correspondence on this subject. s

p Cinemasterpiece . . .. .. . ·:..•.•.••....•.•.•.•.•.....•.•.•.••....:.•.....:.•...•..•..•..•..•. ..••••••••••••••.:•••••• ••••:•• CITIZEN KAN Edited by RONALD GOTTESMAN \"Your faithful bystander reports that he has just seen a picture which he thinks must be the best picture he ever saw.\"-John O'Hara , 1941 \" The film Citizen Kane went well. The real problem was the contract, which gave me, free and clear, carte blanche . . . I had too much power.\" -Orson Welles Thirty years after its release , this masterpiece of American cinema is analyzed by Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris, Francois Truffaut, among other critics, and by the people who played key roles in making it. They reveal the impact of Citizen Kane on modern film and culture and provide an investigation of the relationship between Kane and the personality and methods of its creator. Illustrated. $2.45 FOCUS ON D. W. GRIFFITH Edited by Harry M. Geduld The words of Griffith himself, his actress-wife Linda Arvidson , and such film-makers and critics as Erich von Stroheim , Jay Leyda, and A. Nicholas Vardac trace the development of Griffith's techniques and show why many of his films rank among the classics. Illustrated. ~ $2.45 SPECTRUM I ~'BOOKS PRENTICE-HALL, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 07632 babell MOTION PICTURE LAB DIVISION SILVER TRACK APPLICATES SOUND ON EKTACHROME 7389 PRINT STOCK Now you can get KODACHROME SOUND QUALITY with the advantages of Lower Picture Contrast & Faster Service. babell MOTION PICTURE LAB DIVISION 416 West 45 St. New York 10036 PHONE: (212) 2 4 5 - 8 9 0 0 when writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT

by Brian Henderson Brian Henderson is a graduate student at the Univer- devotes a brilliant essay which nevertheless fails to answer the question .) The term is originally a sity of California at Santa Cruz, he has published ar- theatrical one meaning literally (to) put in place. It ticles in Film Quarterly and is currently working on a is , baldly , the art of the image itself-the actors . sets book on Antonioni. and backgrounds, lighting, and camera movements considered in relation to themselves and to each This article concerns stylistic aspects of the work other. Of course the individual images of montage of Murnau , Ophuls , and Welles in the light of the have or exhihit mise-en-scene. But it is generally categories of classical film theory. In \" Two Types of thought that the true cultivation and expression of the Film Theory \" (Film Quarterly, Spring 1971), I image as such-as opposed to the relation between suggested reading back the results of stylistic images , which is the central expressive category of analyses into the classical theories , in order to test montage-requires the duration of the long take (a the latter and correct them where necessary, toward single piece of unedited film , which mayor may not the ultimate goal of formulating a new, entirely constitute an entire sequence). Opinion aside , it is the adequate theory of film . Of course it is distinctive long take alone which permits the director to vary and personal styles, not abstract categories that have develop the image without switching to another meaning in the work of individual directors and image ; it is often this uninterrupted development therefore in actual films themselves . The that is meant by mise-en-scene . Thus the long take consideration of distinctive styles, however, can lead makes mise-en-scene possible . The long take is the to the recognition and analysis of new expressive presupposition or a priori of mise-en-scene, that is , categories. Indeed , the interaction between actual the ground or field in which mise-en-scene can occur. films and theoretical categories illumines both areas; It is the time necessary for mise-en-scene space . for film theory is , after all , a meta-criticism or philosophy of criticism . It is pursued to clarify and Bazin 's position on long take and mise-en-scene improve film criticism through the determination of is somewhat equivocal. The brief analysis presented basic film categories and the identification of those above would be too \" expressive \" for Bazin. Bazin is assumptions about film on which any criticism is concerned , of course, with cinema 's relation to reality; based. Thus good criticism-that which follows its hence he shies away from any account stressing the subject and its own assumptions to their independent, expressive possibilities of limits-frequently raises questions for film theory; and mise-en-scene or of any other category of cinema. film theory itself is the continual improvement and Bazin analyzes and defends the long take on very clarification of the principles and assumptions of film different grounds . He favors it first of all for its criticism . Thus in our analysis of the directors under temporal realism : the long take 's time is the event's consideration we will also be questioning , by specific time . His e xample here is Flaherty. Regarding the reference , the capacity of the classical theories spatial implications of the long take Bazin is required (espec ially , in this case , of Bazin 's theory) to elucidate to be more ingenious. Here he faces Murnau whom and account for their work. he admits is not primarily interested in dramatic time. Bazin 's answer is that Murnau 's mise-en-sc ene does Murnau , Ophuls, and Welles are celebrated not add to or deform reality , \" rather it strives to bring metteurs en scene , that is , practitioners of the art of out the deeper structure of reality, to reveal mise-en-scene. One does not lightly venture a pre-existent relationships which become the definition of mise-en-scene, cinema's grand constituents of the drama.\" It is easy to see what undefined term , of which each person, when Bazin is trying to do here-to eliminate mise-en-scene examined , reveals a different sense and meaning. (To expressivity (in any independent sense) by equating the problem \" What is Mise-en-Scene?\" Astruc it with the pre-existent structures of reality . The 6 SUMMER 1971

director therefore does not create mise-en-scene nor the directors under consideration . Finally , as we shall use it to express moods or themes or ideas , but only also see (regarding Welles) , the mi xture or to bring out the structures already present in reality . combination of long take and editing techniques Other directors force Bazin into more contorted can occur not only within the sequence but also at explanations ; thus he says of a scene in Wyler: \" The a higher level of organization: in the relation between real action is overlaid with the action of the sequences, within the whole film itself. mise-en-scene itself .. .\" The relation between mise-en-scene and long take There are many interesting and difficult problems in Murnau has been put by Alexandre Astruc in a raised by the long take and mise-en-scene-besides formulation that cannot be improved upon : those raised by Bazin 's position ; but this is not the [The image in Murnau is] the meeting place for primary direction in which stylistic consideration of a certain number of lines of force . .. brought to this Murnau , Ophuls, and Welles will take us . (Such a point of extreme tension so that henceforth only their study-that of the long take as such-must await destruction can be conceived and supported. With separate treatment.) The present article takes its chief Murnau, each image demands annihilation by another emphasis from the fact that the long take rarely image. Every sequence announces its own end. appears in its pure state (as a sequence filmed in one shot) , but almost always in combination with some And this is, I think, the key to all of Murnau 's form of editing . One can locate sequence shots in work-this fatality hidden behind the most harmless Murnau, Ophuls, and (especially) Welles, but elements of the frame; this diffuse presence of an more basic to the art of each (a fair portion of Welles irremediable something that will gnaw at and corrupt excepted) is the use of the long take and cutting each image the way it wells up behind ea\"ch of Kafka 's within the sequence. This is to say that the long take sentences. is not in itself a principle of construction (in them) , but is part of a shooting style , or characteristic How will it manifest itself? By happening in the way of shooting and building sequences. (There have sequence. [Astruc clearly means \" shot\" here; the been few shooting styles based on the sequence logic of the passage is incoherent otherwise .] Every shot-and these mainly in the present. Jancso, frame of Murnau 's is the story of a murder. The in WINTER WIND espec ially , and perhaps Skolimowski are examples ; but each also makes use of intra-sequence cuts .) It is obvious that any long take short of a sequence shot requires connection with another shot or shots to fill out the sequence. Thus a long take style necessarily involves long takes and cutting in some combination . Most analyses of long take directors and styles concentrate on the long take itself and ignore the mode of cutting unique to it-what we call below the intra-sequence cut. But such cuts or cutting patterns (one could even speak of cutting styles) are as essential to the long take sequence as the long take itself. Moreover, as we shall see , there are several kinds of cutting within the sequence-several categories, or sub-categories of the intra-sequence cut itself-which may be isolated and identified , in a preliminary way , from the work of FILM COMMENT 7

camera will have the simplest and most shocking of or renun ci ation of expressive editing is , even among roles: that of being the annunciating and prescient long-take directors , the exception rather than the rule . terrain of an assassination. Its task will be aided by all of the elements of the mise-en-scene. The shooting We must be very clear at th is point that we are not angle, the placement of the people within the frame, talking about length of shot. Astruc is careful to note the distribution of the lights-all serve to construct the that Murnau 's shots characteristically last a \" few seconds \" (which any close viewing of Murnau 's films lines of a dramatic scene whose unbearable tension verifies). Astruc does not even use the terms \"long take\" or \" sequence shot\" -and , indeed , in modern will end in annihilation. The story of the sequence is terms, Murnau 's shots do not look like long takes . The the accomplishment of that promise of death. Its operative category here is not length of shot , but temporal unravelling is no other than the definWve quality or stru (: ture of shot, and the relations between realization in time of an original plastic fatality in shots . Murnau s cinema is characterized in Astruc 's which everything that must play itself out in these few essay in relational terms ; that is, in terms of the way seconds will be given once and for all. [Emphasis that his shots-because of their structure in supplied .] themselves-relate to other shots. In Murnau , \" everything happens within the sequence\"; that is , This is why montage is practically non-ex istent for each shot begins anew and does not (plastically, Murnau, as for all the Germans. Each image is an metaphysically) depend on the shot before or carry over to the shot following . In fact , Mizoguchi's shots unstable equilibrium , better still the destruction of a are most often far longer than Murnau 's, and yet they do depend upon and relate to each other in ways that stable equilibrium brought about by its own elan . So Murnau 's shots do not. Mizoguchi uses longer shots long as this destruction is not accomplished the than Murnau and he makes important use of image remains on the screen. So long as the expressive editing , which Murnau does not. Thus the movement has not resolved itself no other image can point in question has to do with different ways of be tolerated. 1 relating and ordering shots (which are in turn-or beforehand-conceived and shot in order to be Astruc 's analysis gives body and specificity to related in certain ways) ; and these do not depend on , Bazin 's more general formulations concerning or correlate simply or strictly, with length of shot. Murnau. \" Editing plays practically no role at all in their films [Murnau , Stroheim , Flaherty] , Beyond the pure and magnificent case of except in the purely negative sense of eliminating Murnau , there are only problems. As mentioned , what is superfluous ... in neither NOSFERATU nor many or most long take Jirectors make some SUNRISE does editing playa decisive part. \"2 Bazin expressive use of cutting . Ophuls and Mizoguchi ignores those sequences of NOSFERATU in which regularly do so , Welles frequently does. This mi xed editing , though still essentially connective, establishes realm presents problems partly because each links between widely separated scenes and places. director combines the long take and cutting in a Most notable here is the sequence in which Nina (at different way, partly because film theory has largely home) saves Jonathan from Nosferatu 's power (at his ignored this area of interacticn. Both Eisenstein ian castle far away) through her spiritual influence. montage theory and Bazinian long-take theory not Murnau cuts from Jonathan in peril to Nina sitting up only ignore this stylistic area, they deny its existence , in bed , then back and forth several times until Nina 's both preferring the either/ or mentality that each sees love forces Nosferatu to withdraw.J as necessary to its own survival. Thus Bazin contrasts What we have here is an event at place \" A \" purely connective editing with the expressive editing and, essentially, a reaction shot to that event at place techniques of montage; he will not admit or address \" B,\" hundreds of miles away. It is not acci' :ental that expressive editing relations within long take the link thus expressed through editing is a mystical sequences and styles. Contrariwise, montage or spiritual one. Thus Murnau , who would never use theory will not admit the existence of any expressive a reaction shot normally (preferring to put the parties or significant cut (or cutting style) outside of the to an action in the same frame and work out the montage s e ·~uence . Stylistic combinations of long action within the shot), uses editing solely to express take and cutting techniques fall exactly between the mystical or non-spatial relations ; that is, to treat two schools, in that they combine elements of the widely-spread subjects as though they were in the favored style of each ; but they are treated as falling same frame . This is an expressive use of editing , one outside of each because each prefers not to beyond mere connection . This is also something like recognize them. This is a prime instance of serious Griffith 's parallel editing, with spiritual rather than omission in the classical film theories, indeed of an spatial co-ordinates-and with the additional entire category of film expression missing from them . difference that the conflicts generated are resolved This limitation is compounded in importance by the within the parallel format, not in a subsequent or expressive impact that editing has upon the long take culminating scene that brings the parallel strands sequence. together into one frame. The categ ory of cinematic expression we are This exception is , nevertheless , a trifling one in discussing, the crucial cut between related long comparison with the overall -truth of the Astruc-Bazin takes , might be called the selective cut or the position-for Murnau makes less use of expressive intra-sequence cut or even mise-en-scene cutting. It editing techniques than almost any other director. He must be carefully differentiated from montage. is the classic case of the Bazinian ideal: the long-take Montage is the connection or relation of two or more director who uses editing for no other purpose than shots (usually far more than two)-of entire film to link his shots. But here we encounter another pieces-in some overall format. Montage treats or difficulty , for Murnau is not typical in this respect , as arranges the whole piece, not just the end of one and Bazin frequently suggests he is . Murnau 's elimination the beginning of another. The intra-sequence cut does not relate , arrange, or govern the whole of the 1 Alexandre Astru e, \" Fire and Ice,\" in Cahiers du Cinema in pieces it joins ; it merely has a local relationship to the English, No. 1, pag es 70-71 . 2 Andre Bazin , \" Th e Evolution of Film Language,\" in Th e New Wave , edited by Peter Graham , 1968, pages 29-30 . 3 Shots 228-255 in th e Byrne shot analysis of NO SFERATU , Film s of Tyranny, Madison , 1966 8 SUMMER 1971

beginnings and ends of the connecting shots, at the Max Ophuls is best known for his sweeping, place they are joined. graceful tracking shots and crane shots; but he also used cutting in expressive and important ways, Eisenstein characterizes montage in terms of particularly in regard to dialogue. The latter statement rhythm . It is obvious that this is the rhythm of whole should probably be qualified to read : at least in his pieces , of many shots arranged in certain ways ; one American films. Ophuls' camerawork in his American can hardly speak of a montage rhythm of two . In the films is more closely related to and centered on long-take sequence, rhythm is achieved not by the dialogue than on behavior; whereas his European lengths of the shots themselves (even where multiple), films center more on behavior, manners, movement. but rather within each shot, through movement-or In CAUGHT, he uses cutting and a highly varied lack of it-by camera , or both . In this conte xt, the mise-en-scene to integrate his camera with the action, intra-sequence cut acts to break the rhythm of the to get his camera into it via the script , that is , via the sequence and then to re-connect it on a new basis. segments and movement of the dialogue, sometimes It is a jump or leap in the sequence rhythm , that is , cutting line-by-line. Indeed , CAUGHT could be used as of the disposition / movement of actors and camera. It a teaching vehicle for the ways in which camera may is not itself a rhythmic element, as in the montage comment on and reflect dialogue and script action. sequence ; but it does affect the rhythmic elements of Ophu ls relates camera to dialogue and action in a the sequence , that is , actor-placement, camera variety of ways. Sometimes he will use an inset disposition , and mise-en-scene. close-up, either within a long take or within an exchange of medium shots, in order to underscore an Finally, our inquiry into the intra-sequence cut important line. This happens in Barbara Bel Geddes ' concerns not just the incidental interaction of two first ride with Robert Ryan , shot from two set-ups in cinerllatic categories-mise-en-scene and montage. medium shot (or medium-close). He presses her to tell There are important senses in which their interaction what she knows of him ; when he asks again \" What defines each and in which each defines the other. else?\" there is a tight close-up of Bel Geddes as she Thus the odd quality of the intra-sequence cut that it says: \" You're right,\" then back to the original set-ups. reflects back on the scene (and on mise-en-scene) and defines it or qualifies it in retrospect. The cut Sometimes Ophuls uses the inset close-up for a which ends a long take-how it ends it as well as silent reaction ; that is, he cuts in as though for a line where-determines or affects the nature of the shot and there is only a look. This is used in the psychiatrist itself. Looked at oppositely, the mise-en-scene scene, after a previous identical shot of the doctor has requires a certain kind of cut at a certain time . The been used for a line of dialogue; it occurs also in the two categories are strictly correlative . If one begins talk between Bel Geddes and Ryan after the projection talking about the one, he ends talking about the other; room fight. Ophuls also does some fiendish things to and vice versa. The cut is the limit or boundary of the traditional American cross-cutting on lines of shot and this boundary enters into and determines the dialogue . In the projection room scene itself, when nature of the shot itself. Hegel says: Ryan challenges Bel Geddes for laughing with one of the guests, Ophuls cuts between the two across the A thing is what it is, only in and by reason of its huge room , from Ryan huge in left foreground / Bel limit. We cannot therefore regard the limit as only Geddes small in right background to Bel Geddes huge external to being which is then and there. It rather in left foreground / Ryan small in right background. To goes through and through the whole of such existence. ' complete the symmetry, each stares off to the right (when in foreground , to left when in background). !!i This is shot-reverse-shot as never done before or since. Ophuls cuts here on each cryptic, dramatic :::l line, as in a tennis match. .s:: Another variant is employed in the scene between . the two doctors when Bel Geddes is gone. As each oCo stands in his doorway conversing , the camera tracks x slowly between them, pivoting on the empty chair where Bel Geddes sat. Later in the conversation , :':\"2 Ophuls resorts to cross-cutting between the two terminal positions established by the camera's An entire category of long-take or intra-sequence movement. From these positions, Ophuls moves into cutting concerns the relation of camera to script and two stages of successively closer shots of each (for dialogue. A director may cut frequently, even on every the crucial lines between them), then reverts to the line , and if he does so the result is a kind of montage, original positions, and then to the original tracking though one bound in its rhythm to the rhythm of the path itself. This is a highly interesting combination of dialogue, not itself an independent rhythm . At the camera movement (long take) and cutting elements. other extreme , he may, as Mizoguchi often does, cut only once or twice within a long dialogue sequence. These are cuts and cutting patterns in relation to If he does the latter, then his cut must be carefully speakers and their lines. There are also cuts which meditated and placed in relation to the dramatic entail comprehensive changes of the entire progress of the scene, coming at just that point at mise-en-scene, either related to dialogue or not. An which the relationships at stake in the scene have example of this kind of cut occurs in the scene in ripened into qualitative change-a change reflected which James Mason comes to Ryan's mansion to find in the new or altered mise-en-scene. Such cuts are Bel Geddes. The latter and Mason agree to meet integral to the art of mise-en-scene and to the outside; Ophuls cuts to an outside view of Mason particular long-take style of the director involved. walking past the garage; Bel Geddes appears inside in the right background ; the camera follows Mason as 4 The Logic of Hegel, London, 1965, page 173 he goes to her, then holds on a two-shot as they converse; she moves to the running board of a car and there is a cut to a different angle on the two of FILM COMMENT 9

them . Finally Bel Geddes reveals her situation: ''I'm it, whether or not to break down the event, but how pregnant.\" Just following this line Ophuls cuts to a to do so, according to what style or system . The shot of her through a ladder that appeared in differences in approach between montage and long profile in the shot before . This is a somewhat obvious take styles are great enough so that the fact of event symbol of her imprisonment, but effective just the break down need not be denied by either-as Bazin same for its suddenness and force . The shot itself does in preferring the long take to montage . contains no dialogue and is only held for a few seconds. This cut serves the purpose of transposing Up to now we have remained at the level of the the elements of the mise-en-scene at a crucial stage sequence . When we come to Orson Welles we meet in the scene 's dramatic progress. The cut rearranges another problem--that of the long take artist who is the mise-en-scene suddenly just as Bel Geddes ' also a brilliant montage director, who-indeed-uses revelation rearranges their lives and relationships, sequences of both kinds within a single film. also suddenly. (Later stages of this sequence show Ryan huge in the foreground , back to camera , literally In defending Orson Welles as a long-take director, dividing Mason and Bel Geddes who stand in the Bazin could hardly ignore the fact that Welles , in same plane in the middle ground. In another stage , KANE, also used editing techniques , and used them Ophuls follows Bel Geddes with a tracking shot as she brilliantly . Bazin 's response to this problem is paces up and down between the two men.) ingenious: In some cases a director cuts just before a crucial It is not that Welles purposely refrains from using line , in some cases he cuts just after a crucial line ; expressionist editing techniques. In fact, their it is interesting to consider the implications and episodic use, in between sequence-shots with possibilities of each type of cut. In the case of the cut composition-in-depth, gives them new meaning. following the line, the transposed mise-en-scene Editing had once been the very stuff of cinema, the represents the result or consequence of the line, the tissue of a scenario. In Citizen Kane, a series of new set of relationships that it deals. In this case the superimpositions stands in contrast to the continuity line itself belongs to the old conte xt or set of of a scene taken in a single shot; it is a different, relationships , whose logic it completes , leading to and explicitly abstract register of the narrative. making necessary a new qualitative arrangement. In Accelerated editing used to distort time and space; the case of the cut just before the line is spoken , the Welles 's editing, far from attempting to deceive us, new situation and the new mise-en-scene and the line offers us a temporal resume-the equivalent, for itself are permitted to resonate together in the example, of the French imperfect tense or the English viewer's consciousness. The change of situation frequentative. And so 'quick editing, ' 'editing by before the line is spoken, however, may seem attraction, ' and the super-impositions which the to anticipate, or even to determine, the character's sound cinema had not resorted to for ten years , found action-unless it signifies his decision to speak in a a possible use in conjunction with the temporal certain way before he does so . It is possible , however, realism of cinema without editing. 5 that the cut after the line, though perhaps logically more appropriate, may blur and confuse the viewer's Bazin 's description-analysis clearly fits the perceptions at a crucial point. The shock and Newsreel sequence and perhaps also the breakfast dislocation of an important change in relationships table montage , though the latter is not the temporal may be effectively expressed , however, in just this resume of any portion of the film outside of itself: it way , as is done in the ladder cut in CAUGHT. constitutes the process it presents , it is the tissue of the scenario for its duration . One could perhaps make (In terms of our theoretical inquiry, Mizoguchi better anti-Bazinian arguments for other sequences. would be the appropriate director to consider next. The important point, however , is that Bazin 's His films reveal many varieties of long take relation explanation applies only to the special case of KANE . within the sequence; including several important kinds Expressive editing in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI , of intra-sequence cuts that we have not yet FALSTAFF , THE IMMORTAL STORY and other Welles films discussed . These include a mode of dramatic reversal has nothing to do with \" temporal resume \" (except in in which all elements of the mise-en-scene are the sense in which all montage is this) and quite often transposed and the two-or three- [or more] part long constitutes the tissue of the scenario. take sequence , relating long takes in a continuous or narrative mode rather than a reversed or transposed FALSTAFF presents us with a complex of problems, one . Consideration of Mizoguchi in this perspective especially rich and interesting, beyond that of the will have to await another occasion.) intra-sequence cut (though there are these also): that One of Bazin 's chief objections to montage is that 5 \" The Evolution of Film Language,\" in Graham , page 46 it breaks down or analyzes the event for the viewer. Bazin exempts the American film of the 1930s from this charge on the ground that it broke the event into shots naturally and logically, that is, according to the logic of the event itself. Bazin nevertheless considers composition-in-depth and the sequence shot as improvements on the 1930s manner, because they preserve the event in its own time and space dimensions. Bazin did not consider nor admit that long take styles, short of pure sequence shot, also break down or analyze the event, and that they necessarily do this . It is clear that Ophuls and Mizoguchi do this once they decide to include even a single cut within the sequence and therefore must. decide where to put it ; that is , how to break down the scene / event . Thus the question is not , as Bazin has 10 SUMMER 1971

of the overall film construction wh ich includes both Hotspur's departure from Kate. Harry Percy reads a montage and long-take (i ncluding sequence-shot) sequences. Here the combination and balancing of letter, verbally duels with Kate, and at the same time styles takes place at a higher level of organization . Arguably, such constructions make possible far bustles about putting on his armor. He is preparing greater visual and dramatic (and visually dramatic) variety and contrast than more or less homogenous himself for battle-physically and psychologically-and long take styles . Indeed , FALSTAFF could serve as a model of sequence construction and of the richness, Welles eloquently accents the scene's rising martial variety, and imagination of sequence-style choices . Because of the formal divers ity of its sequences , the spirits by cutting again and again, and with increasing film 's construction gives rise to an additional category of filmic expression-that of the inter-sequence cut. rapidity, to rows of trumpete rs announc ing the battle These cuts, augmented by powerful sound-editing techniques-as in the cuts from raucous tavern (dark with a strident call to arms. What is c reated in this on light) to somber castle (light on dark) with heavy chamber door slamming-provide instantaneous and manner is a comple x visual and aural montage , overwhelming changes of mood , tempo , and tone , as well as high dramatic contrast. (These are , in the least alternating between images of Harry Percy in motion and narrowest definition, brilliant visual-sound equivalents for the highly-charged scene and act and images of the trumpeters in motion (turning to left changes of classical drama. Moreover, these are achieved instantaneously, and often with transposition or to right in each brief shot) , and between the ris ing of all cinematic-expressive elements: light-dark, angle, te xture , mise-en-scene, sound .) inflections of Harry and the stirring sounds of the In an otherwise helpful article \" Welles ' CHIMES AT trumpets, images reinforcing sounds, sounds MIDNIGHT \" (Film Quarterly, Fall 1970), Joseph McBride ignores the visual-sound construction of the film and reinforcing images. The sequence thus has a rising justifies this neglect by speaking of Welles' \" breaking the bounds of his tools ,\" and serving his actors with excitement that is remarkably erotic , giving life to the the camera in contrast to CITIZEN KANE 'S \" trickery \" (a term used as though it is self-e xplanatory) . This is te xt's implication that, in Harry , eros is deflected from nonsense and is hardly bettered by those critics who solemnly noted the battle sequence and nothing wife to war. more . FALSTAFF is a visual-sound masterpiece , one of the greatest stylistic achievement,s as well as one of The battle sequence is also a montage , at first the greatest films of the si xties. In it every category of cinematic ex pression is used and stretched to carry chiefly of tracking shots into the battle from all sides the burden of Welles' humanism . There are fast outdoor tracking shots in the thieving scene , done in of the surrounding area, each fresh , high-purposed hilarious long shot; there are fast indoor tracks in the tavern scenes, capturing the swirling motions of charge ending , becoming indistinguishable in the mud dance and ribaldry. There is also the remarkable textural and tonal unity of the film-provided in part and muddle at the center ; as the cen ter becomes all , by the severe Spanish landscape and the matchingly severe tavern set, the rough-textured boards, the shots become more and more static and balconies, supports, and walls of which Welles makes full expressive use (in conjunction with angle and interchangeable, as though it does not matter where actor placement). the camera looks: all is the same . The angles of the film and specifically the patterning of angles throughout the film are also In the Harry Percy scene the language of the extremely important. There is an intricate grading of angles-closely tied to the film 's dramatic written text enters into the rhythm of the visual and development. Low angle is the royal angle and therefore crucial to a film concerned with royalty , sound te xts , and vice versa . This happens also in an whether true or false, presumptive or legitimate, parodied or earned. There are somber low angles for early scene with Falstaff, Hal, and Poins, a long-take the King in his dignity ; less extreme , more tentative low angles for Hotspur, aspirant to a future crown ; sequence in which the three in their bantering and democratic straight angles for Hal , Po ins , and Falstaff-except when Hal and Jack play King and son / continually circle one another gracefully-a son and King. ThE;!n the angles become impOSSibly extreme in accord with the parodic spirit. (The latter, delightful and precise counterpoint to the lines and several other scenes, make use of a high reverse angle-that is , the royal point-of-view-but these are themselves. Following his characters with a fluid used less frequently than low angles .) There are also , of course, the final angle shots of Hal and Falstaff, camera , Welles also .moves skilfully among which are equally extreme but now fully serious. three-shots and various combinations of two-shot Overlapping these plastic categories are the film 's temporal units: its remarkable montages and long here, as one character disappears and the other two ~akes. The most brilliant montage sequence is parry then all rejoin-all within a single take. An extremely long take , divisible into four or five stages , occurs late in the film and reveals new possibilities for the long-take format as a mode of sequence construction . The scene (Henry IV, Part II , Act V , Scene III) is the one in which Falstaff hears of Henry IV's death and rushes off to greet the new king and thus to meet his destiny . In the shot's opening stage, Shallow and Silence are dancing and singing in the foreground while Falstaff paces up and down in the middle distance; Shallow and Silence go out right and Falstaff walks far back into the depth of the frame , where he sits and talks with his page for some time ; Pistol enters in a gay mood , followed by Shallow and the others, and Falstaff comes forward-all characters are now in one plane; Pistol finally announces his news, Falstaff comes far forward into the fram e (the camera tilting to take him in), gives his speech then goes out, the others following . Each of these stages realizes a different mood, distinct from that of the stage before-the melancholy gaiety of the first dancing; the sadness and solitude of Falstaff, emphasized by his smallness in the frame ; the abrupt rising of spirits on Pistol's entry; the genuine gaiety which greets his news; Falstaff's more serious expectations when he considers the implications of the news for him; his nobility and delusion as he totters out under the burden of this high purpose. This is a highly interesting use of the long take in what might be called its theatrical mode, functioning by virtue of the static camera (until the final tilt) almost as a proscenium stage , in which a sequence of actions and movements occur, which in turn realize a delicate and precise sequence of emotions. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 11



r. • An Introduction by Gilberto Perez Guillermo Gilberto Perez Guillermo is on the staffofthe Museum nau's inner nature; and one may go along with her of Modern Art and has written on films for Sight & Sound when she endeavors to demonstrate, by a close study and Revista de Occidente (Madrid). of the original scripts as compared with the finished films, the consistency in his visual e xecution of the Murnau's reputation, though higher since the French disparate materials. But one can at least understand rediscovered him than it had been for many years , still why Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler, hardly reckons rests primarily on one film . What has changed is the Murnau an individual creator at all and attributes the one film that it rests on. Murnau used to be known content of his films to such collaborators as Carl Mayer as the director of THE LAST LAUGH (1924) . That was the and Henrik Galeen. film that made his name in the twenties , the one that gets mentioned in a.1I the textbooks-though people Now I happen to believe that there is one Murnau were not sure how rrluch of the credit for it should film that stands out above all others a great master- go to Murnau and how much to Carl Mayer, the piece . This is neither SUNRISE nor THE LAST LAUGH , but scriptwriter, and to Emil Jannings who gave a celebrat- the earlier NOSFERATU (1922) . I differ about the choice ed performance . It was on the strength of the German- of film but concur nevertheless with the view that Mur- made LAST LAUGH that Murnau was invited to Hollywood nau 's stature depends primarily on one film . And I and given a lot of money to make SUNRISE (1927). concur too with those who are bothered by the erratic SUNRISE , much acclaimed and argued over in its time eclecticism of his career; I am hard put to reconcile, but subsequently fo rgotten, was the film that , in the as being the work of the same man, the simplicity and fifties, the French seized upon in their rediscovery of resonance of NOSFERATU with the kitschy grandiosity Murnau-Cahiers du Cinema put it at the top of their of a film such as FAUST . And yet, having said this , the list of the best films ever made-and by now it has come fact remains that in much of Murnau 's work , for all to replace THE LAST LAUGH as the canonical Murnau the inconsistencies and the inexplicable lapses, there film . It is, for one thing, indisputably a Murnau film ; is an encompassing unity. It is much more than a Carl Mayer, who wrote the screenplay for it too , did similarity in his visual execution of certain details. It not go to Hollywood for the production, and to my is a true imaginative unity, a singleness of spirit behind knowledge no one has claimed that he was the true the variety of surface, not, certainly, redeeming the guiding intelligence behind the picture. Furthermore, unevenness of the director's output, but underlying and SUNRISE , in passages such as the justly famous se- bringing together the splendid scattered peaks . NOS- quence of the trolley ride, attains a beauty and intensity FERATU , in my judgment the highest of those peaks , quite beyond anything in THE LAST LAUGH-which , by remains, as I see it, a precarious and astonishing contrast, though a less uneven work and a more impor- achievement, but it was not a fluke; it was the distillation tant one historically , is apt to seem today rather a and the sustained expression of a creative impulse that museum piece. One may agree then that SUNRISE is can be seen operating elsewhere, too often distracted superior to THE LAST LAUGH . Still , one may find it curious and attenuated but unmistakable in such different films that the Cahiers group, in looking into one of their as TARTUFFE and TABU . favorite directors, should have merely shifted attention from one film of his to another, rather than , as pre- Even to a cursory glance , NOSFERATU is distin- scribed by their own politique des auteurs, broadened guished, from the spooky Expressionist films made in the focus so as to encompass his whole oeuvre. It the wake of CALIGARI that it is usually grouped with , seemed to be SUNRISE, more than Murnau the auteur, by its persistent use of reallocations rather than stylized that aroused their enthusiasm. sets, and by the clarity rather than studied murkiness of its photography. There is , as Lotte Eisner remarked , Of course, part of the trouble can be laid to the an almost documentary feel to some of its sequences. contingencies of film preservation: Murnau 's oeuvre This is not a mere directorial trick, a clever way to set was just not before them whole . Too many of his films off the fantastic narrative-it is not an embellishment were lost, of the German as well as the American ones, but of the essence . Rather it is the fantastic narrative to afford any clear idea of his development; it only made (derived from DRACULA) that is incidental , and merely sense to look at the extant pictures individually and a way by which the film gets at its true subject, not not in ensemble . But didn't these , after all allowances the horror of vampires but the horror and mystery it were made, still seem unduly disparate and eclectic? discerns in that actual world on which the camera Murnau , after all, had gone from the macabre Expres- lingers. Whereas CALIGARI constructs a nightmare , NOS- sionism of NOSFERATU to the everyday Kammerspiel of FERATU discovers one where it lay unsuspected . The THE LAST LAUGH, and from that to decorative period strategies are not the same, and neither, seen today, pictures such as TARTUFFE and FAUST ; and in America , are the results : the quaintness of CALIGARI is not the after doing SUNRISE in elaborate artificial sets which incandescent strangeness of NOSFERATU . were built for him at great cost, he enlisted the docu- mentarist Robert Flaherty as a collaborator for TABU , Nor is it the strategy of NOSFERATU to evoke horror and went with him to the South Seas where they shot amidst the actual by a deployment of the grotesque. the film entirely on location. One may, with Lotte Eisner, NOSFERATU doesn 't do CALIGARI over again from nature. see in this flitting about not the nimbleness of imper- It does not (except for brief passages) distort and sonal dexterity but the tortured restlessness of Mur- manipulate; does not seize on unusual detail and press it on our attention. It sees everything from a distance. The weird and striking vampire is himself always pho- FILM COMMENT 13

CITY GIRL. tographed in long shot; and at the clima x of the film , in NOSFERATU , the absence of the vampire punctuates , when pestilence breaks out in the little Baltic town , we fill out with our subjectivity and our projections. David Torren ce and he doesn 't appear at all. What we get instead are gray Charles Farrell. distant shots of the town streets, the cheerless houses, Not because it distorts fact th rough feeling, but coffins being carried, solemn and composed mortuary because it induces in us feeling which surpasses fact, photo: Museum of proceedings ; and , in all this , never any close-ups. Close the Murnau operation , NOSFERATU and elsewhere , is Modern Art! fundamentally subjective. But it is not, as it is often vision has a tactile quality; distant objects, on the other maintained to be , a subjective operation from the point Film Stills Archive hand , appear as mere patches of light, ghosts without of view of the characters. The \" camera eye \" does not, bulk ; and that ghostliness inherent in distant vision with Murnau , belong to the characters-we don 't see serves in NOSFERATU to invest the familiar with a sense exactly what they are seeing . And what is more impor- of horror. tant, we don 't feel exactly what they are feeling , even though the camera may often , in its movement, sympa- Along with the ghostliness there is an inherent sub- thetically identify with them. In the recently discovered jectivity. Hazlitt wrote that distant objects please CITY GIRL ( much of which , like NOSFERATU and TABU , \" . . . because, not being obtruded too close upon the was shot on location, including some sequences at eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours night) the motion of the camera through the wheat field of fancy .\" In NOSFERATU they disturb for much the same alongside the arriving young couple mirrors and mar- reason . No object stands out, there is nothing solid velously evokes the fumbling excitement of their love. our eyes can grab, no place for our gaze to rest upon, Yet even here the camera retains some distance from and we are vertiginously thrown back upon ourselves the characters. It doesn 't quite keep up with their run- and our worst fears . What we perceive in distant vision , ning, and eventually it stops to take the scene in long as Ortega y Gasset pointed out, is not so much objects shot; somehow it suggests an uneasiness beyond what as the space between objects, the air, empty space. the couple might feel. It is space that we primarily look at in those persistent long shots which compose the climax of NOSFERATU ; TABU , which verges on documentary as NOSFERATU not some object removed from us, enclosed within the sometimes does , is in the end no more of a documen- frame, but a space which seems to reach out to our tary than NOSFERATU is ; there is nothing of the objective eyes , which implicates us and draws us inside it. We record about it, not even in the sense that such a lyrical are brought-and this is essential to the distinctive film as Flaherty 's MOANA is objective . Here as in NOS- operation that gives Murnau 's work its unity-into the FERATU , the Murnau operation , without distorting the space of the picture, drawn as if by the pressure of landscape , dissolves it, as it were , into an insubstantial , a vacuum into a scene which was somehow incomplete subjective space , here not so much by means of simple without our presence. Murnau's images are never bal- distance (though again there are some ghostly long anced and self-contained ; they convey , even when he shots) as by the way Murnau's shots draw our attention uses close-ups, a sense of a continuous space extend- to the space between things, to the very air that sur- ing outside the frame and including us; and our point rounds the characters; and the hostile and sinister of view is called upon to complete them . We supply quality the idyllic settings seem to acquire is not in from within ourselves what they fall short of embodying ; anything they contain but in the gaze that we turn upon \" we ,\" in Hazlitt's words , \" fill the thin , viewless space\" them , filling out the empty space as we did in NOS- of which they are largely made up-the space which FERATU. But the feelings we are induced to project are is what we chiefly experience around the revolving door not quite the feelings of the two native lovers whose in THE LAST LAUGH or the staircase in TARTUFFE , the defiance of the tabu constitutes the film 's main action . space traversed during the trolley ride in SUNRISE . That We see the Polynesian surroundings not as Reri and empty space which Murnau's films leave, and which , Matahi see them but as a tormented European sees them : the painful subjectivity that colors them belongs to the director himself. The operation , here and elsewhere in Murnau , is subjective but from the point of view of the director . In an essay on Strindberg , A. Alvarez wrote: The core of Expressionism is in an impossible in ten- sity of feeling which lies just behind the work of art but which is never quite expressed by it. You are con- stantly forced ba c k from the work to its creator. I doubt that this is true of Expressionism in general ; I don 't think it applies , for instance, to CALIGARI ; but it applies to Murnau . Nothing in his images quite ac- counts for their disturbing intensity, nothing in the physical world they display and no emotion that the characters feel. We are led to the director himself by the irreducible discrepancy between feeling and fact, by the unresolved subjectivity of the view; and we sense him as a presence outside the frame whose position in space , the space we share with the picture , coincides with our own . We seem , in Murnau 's films , to be inside the director's head : the gaze we turn toward things , charging them with an emotional significance which they don 't possess in themselves , we sense as the gaze of the director himself. The feeble realization of the characters in NOSFERATU (except for the splendidly freakish vampire) oddly turns out to work to that film 's advantage . In TABU , for example , the overriding by the 14 SUMMER1971

director of the point of view of the two lovers registers Veidt, Gertrud Welcker and Bruno Ziener. as a kind of condescension of the European toward 1921 DER GANG IN DIE NACHT (THE WALK IN THE NIGHT). the noble savage; and elsewhere the posturings and screenplay Carl Mayer, from The Vanquished , a story by Harriet Bloch; photography Max Lutze; with Olaf the forced universality of Expressionist characters too Fonss, Erna Morena and Conrad Veidt. MARIZZA, GENANNT DIE SCHMUGGLER-MADONNA often get in the way . In NOSFERATU the characters are (MARIZZA, ALIAS \"THE SMUGGLER MADONNA\") [EIN SCHONES TIER (A BEAUTIFUL ANIMAL)]; bypassed altogether and we look at the world in com- screenplay Hans Janowitz, from The Green Eyes, a story by Wolfram Geiger; photography Karl Freund ; munion with the director himself. with Adele Sandrock, Harry Frank, H.H. von Twardowski and Greta Schroder. (Released in 1922). Murnau was long considered , by his admirers and SCHLOSS VOGELOD (HAUNTED CASTLE). screenplay Carl Mayer, from the novel by Rudolf Stratz; pho- detractors alike, strictly a studio director, NOSFERATU tography Fritz Arno Wagner and Laszlo Schaffer; with Arnold Korff, Lulu Kyser-Korff and Lothar Mehnert. dismissed as a crude early effort and TABU as an ano- 1922 NOSFERATU, EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS maly in his career. ':' Lotte Eisner, in an attempt to (NOSFERATU, A SYMPHONY OF TERROR). screenplay redress this view, wrote in The Haunted Screen that Henrik Galeen, from Dracula, a novel by Bram Stoker; photography Fritz Arno Wagner; with Max Schreck, even in Murnau's studio films one senses a longing Gustav von Wagenheim,Greta Schroder and Alexander Granach. (Re-released in 1930 with a sound track added; for the open air. Certainly Murnau's cinema of empty all voices were dubbed by Hans Behal) DER BRENNEN DE ACKER (THE BURNING ACRE). space has no need for the props and constructions screenplay Thea von Harbou , Willy Haas and Arthur Rosen ; photography Fritz Arno Wagner and Karl of the studio, which could cramp him and which some- Freund ; with Lya de Putti, Stella Arbenina, Werner Krauss and Alfred Abel. times diverted him into things like FAUST or the se- PHANTOM. screenplay Thea von Harbou and H.H. von Twardowski , from the novel by Gerhart Hauptmann; quences in the amusement park in SUNRISE . But neither photography Axel Graatkjaer and Theophan Ouchakoff; with Alfred Abel , H.H. von Twardowski , Lil Dagover and did he require the actualities of location work: the space Lya de Putti. 1923 of the studio could do just as well. His TARTUFFE is done DIE AUSTREIBUNG (EXPULSION). screenplay Thea von Harbou, from the play by Karl Hauptmann; pho- in virtual stage sets, and framed as a stage performance tography Karl Freund ; with Carl Goetz, Eugen Klopfer, Wilhelm Dieterle and IIka Gruning. by an added prologue and epilogue , though the per- 1924 DIE FINANZEN DES GROSSHERZOGS (THE FI- formance is not of the Moliere play but of a coarsening NANCES OF THE GRAND DUKES). screenplay Thea von Harbou , from the novel by Frank Heller; pho- and reduction of it. Yet we enter the stage space as tography Karl Freund and Franz Planer; with Mady Christians, Alfred Abel, IIka Gruning , Harry Liedtke and we entered the space of the actual town in NOSFERATU , Max Schreck. DER LETZTE MANN (THE LAST LAUGH). screenplay and somehow this version of Moliere turns out as a Carl Mayer. photography Karl Freund; with Emil Jan- nings, Hermann Valentin , Georg John and Maly Dels- faintly comic variation on the version of DRACULA, with chaft. 1926 Jannings as Tartuffe suggesting a fat Nosferatu (to my TARTUFF (TARTUFFE). screenplay Carl Mayer, from the play by Moliere; photography Karl Freund ; with Emil taste his best performance) and a sense of unexpressed Jannings, Lil Dagover, Werner Krauss and Lucie Ho- flich. horror pervading the soft lighting and the graceful FAUST. screenplay Hans Kyser; photography Carl Hoffmann; with Gosta Ekman , Camilla Horn, Emil Jan- architecture of the sets. Such an affinity can exist nings and Wilhelm Dieterle. 1927 between vmrks so different in their external aspects SUNRISE [See following articles] as NOSFERATU and TARTUFFE, or yet again CITY GIRL and 1928 FOUR DEVILS. screenplay Carl Mayer, Berthold Viertel TABU, because they operate not so much with the and Marion Orth, from the novel by Hermann Bang; photography Ernest Palmer and L.W. O'Connell; with manifested externals, the rounded objects and asserted Janet Gaynor, J'. Farrell MacDonald, Anita Louise , Mary Duncan and Philippe De Lacy. patterns, as with the empty spaces and uncertain sub- 1929 CITY GIRL [OUR DAILY BREAD]. jectivities, the indistinct and the incomplete-not so 1931 TABU much with the visible world as with the gaze that is turned upon it. 111 11111 *In the view of one detractor (John Grierson): \"Murnau was a studio product, a manipulator of artificial effects, a manager of exaggeration, introspective, perverse: an artist who never smelt an honest wind in his life.\" F. W. MURNAU FILMOGRAPHY (1889-1931 ) 1919 DER KNABE IN BLAU (THE CHILD IN BLUE). screen- play Edda Ottershausen; photography Carl Hoffmann; with Ernst Hofmann, Margit Barnay and Georg John . 1920 SATANAS. screenplay Robert Wiene ; photography Karl Freund ; with Conrad Veidt. Fritz Kortner , Elsa Berna and Martin Wolfgang. SEHNSUCHT (LONGING) [BAJAZZO]. screenplay Carl Heinz Jarosy; photography Carl Hoffmann; with Conrad Veidt, Gussy Holl and Margarete Schlegel. DER BUCHLIGE UNO DIE TANZERIN (THE HUNCH- BACK AND THE DANCER). screenplay Carl Mayer; photography Karl Freund; with Sascha Gura, John Gottowt and Paul Biensfeldt. DER JANUSKOPF (THE TWO-FACED ONE). screenplay Hans Janowitz, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson ; photography Karl Freund and Carl Hoffmann; with Conrad Veidt, Margarete Schlegel and Bela Lugosi. ABEND ... NACHT ... MORGEN (AFTERNOON ... NIGHT . .. MORNING). screenplay Rudolf Schneider- Munchen; photography Eugen Hamm ; with Conrad FILM COMMENT 15

- SDDrise by Molly Haskell Molly Haskell is a film critic for The Village Voice . 1 SUNRISE is the crowning glory of a kind of studio cinema which went out when sound came in and which could never be reproduced or believed in again . Mur- nau 's masterpiece, made in America from a script by Carl Mayer, fused philosophic idealism and German Expressionism to create a dreamlike world of infinite extension. The spatial and dramatic integrity which Andre Bazin perceived in Murnau led him to hail SUNRISE (along with NOSFERATU) as an example of realism-an honorific concept in the Bazin lexicon, the antithesis of the trickeries of montage which he was reacting against. To call Murnau realistic is both true and false . Bazin's definition of realism-a directorial interpretation of the world which neither adds to nor distorts external reality , but discovers it, in all its ambiguity-now seems more arbitrary. Realism itself is a relative term, depend- ing on the perceptual norms of an age, and the preced- ing and subsequent ones as well . From where we stand now, the deep focus in CITIZEN KANE and the overlapping conversation of the Ambersons seem as manipulative of our attention and responses as symbolic editing or the currently-ubiquitous zoom . The ambiguity that Bazin finds in CITIZEN KANE is in the subject rather than the style; KANE is less an ambiguous film (except unin- tentionally) than a film about ambiguity. And although Murnau never employs the kind of associative montage which Bazin criticizes in Lang , he uses close-ups to produce the same metaphorical effect through shock or distortion. But in another sense SUNRISE is realistic . The para- dox of Expressionism is that through the most elaborate and visibly artificial means it creates the illusion of a continuous (and contiguous) reality, while so-called realistic films give us a universe fragmented by optical devices, analytical editing and the separate and intract- able identities of authentic locations. The realism of SUNRISE. George O' Brien and Margaret Livingstone. photo: Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive 16 SUMMER 1971

SUNRISE is ideal and magical , and it is lost forever. Its a concern with social realism and the depiction of the very evocation, as in the trolley sequence in Claude oppressed lower classes. He was more moralistic: the Chabrol's recent LA RUPTURE, serves to recall rather than bracketing of TARTUFFE within a modern instructional reproduce a spell to which we surrendered wholly while context, for example, was his idea. He is credited by recognizing its artificiality. Compared to the Murnau , Kracauer with the theme, in THE LAST LAUGH , of unifying Chabrol's sequence is not only more prosaic (which the two social classes through the authority represent- is part of its charm) , but it is also less convincing . ed by the doorman 's uniform . But, to my mind , it is Because the film is shot in contemporary Paris, the not the authority so much as the mystical power, the streetcar's intrusion immediately raises questions as incandescence of the uniform which, like the white to its whereabouts and destination . By contrast, Mur- horse-driven carriage in PHANTOM, gives the image a nau 's trolley , materializing truly out of nowhere-in the lingering impact. Mayer and Murnau were unified in middle of a forest beside a river-is phantasmagorical, their obsession with the world of the unconscious, and in perfect harmony with the semi-allegorical world issuing in what Kracauer calls the \" instinct dramas.\" of the film . Semi-allegorical, but not allegorical. Al- But Murnau's preoccupations took the form of the though the Man , the Wife , the Woman from the City, poetical and fantastic , the halluCinatory, whereas Mayer the Country and the City are all seen as universals, saw the instincts-more clinically, perhaps-as patho- they are cosmic rather than symbolic; they refer only logical and destructive. Mayer never forgot the army to themselves, to their simple yet sublime story of fall psychiatrist on whom the character of Dr. Caligari was and redemption. based, and many of his other scripts are morbid and suicidal; Murnau, whose private life was apparently no SUNRISE is surely one of the most beautiful and less disturbed, seems to move constantly towards the influential films of all time, and yet comparatively little light of grace and redemption. has been written about it. This is partly because of the nature of the film: it is elemental, its scheme and And finally Murnau seemed to thrive in the land of effects are both obvious and self-contained, and it often opportunity and big budgets, whereas Mayer was hor- operates on the ineffable level of a religious experience. rified at the whole idea of Hollywood. If he was appalled But there is also the difficulty of knowing where Carl when he saw photographs of Rochus Gliese's sets for Mayer's contribution leaves off and Murnau's begins. SUNRISE , which were considerably larger than he had Although Mayer stayed in Germany when Murnau came anticipated, one can only assume that the whole con- to America, he wrote a detailed script for SUNRISE in- ception of the film surpassed his original intention. cluding, as Mayer always did in his scripts, at least . Rotha and the HOllywood-haters were also infuriated some and perhaps a great many camera directions. by the use of Stars in the film , which is ridiculous (There is also the question of apportioning creative considering the beautifully expressive performances credit to such cameramen as Karl Freund on the Ger- Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien give under Murnau 's direction. man films and, on SUNRISE , to Charles Rosher and Karl Struss.) Whatever the division of labor, SUNRISE becomes the lyrical CUlmination of a strain of German Expressionism Mayer and Murnau collaborated on seven films, that, married to American technology, could almost including THE LAST LAUGH , TARTUFFE , SUNRISE and FOUR DEVILS . Although Mayer was considered, by Siegfried serve as a definition of the cinema. For the studio Kracauer and others, the genius of German Expres- apparatus, enabling the creation of a spiritually and sionist cinema (Kracauer even gives him credit for spatially unified microcosm, corresponds to the way \"unleashing the camera \" in THE LAST LAUGH) , only THE the mind , in Expressionism , experiences reality- CABINET OF DR . CALIGARI , of his numerous scripts, is organizing it, imbuing it with personal associations , widely known today. On the other hand, Murnau 's patterns, significances, until finally the only reality is NOSFERATU is a classic ; PHANTOM , shown at the Cine- a mental reality . Expressionism was not, as we often matheque series last summer, a small gem; and who imagine, a stylistic option. It was an inescapable way knows what might have followed the outstanding TABU of seeing the world at a certain time, no more suscepti- if Murnau had not died prematurely in an automobile ble to choice than water to a fish , or the fragmented , accident. Looking at the films he did without Mayer elliptical style to the artists of the sixties . In German as well as the ones with him, Murnau seems to have Expressionism , the mind does not impose itself on the been consistently involved with the fabrication , through world, nor does it seek objective correlatives for itself mysticism and fantasy, of a continuous dream reality. in reality ; rather it perceives the world not as a reflec- tion but as an extension of itself, and experiences Mayer, however, from the evidence of his other itself-madness, dreams, reflections-as reality . If THE scripts and his own admission , was moving consciously CABINET OF DR . CALIGARI sets into motion the idea, or away from studio artifice toward a more Marxist attitude, FILM COMMENT 17

the instinct, for seeing reality as a succession of mental states , it is the machinery of studio cinema which pro- vides the magic of continuous perception. An interesting analogue to the development of Ex- pressionism can be found in the successive stages of the script of CALIGARI. In the original scenario by Mayer and Hans Janowitz, Caligari was the tyrant-villain who was finally exposed by the student-protagonist, Francis . The version modified by Fritz Lang placed this narrative within a frame which turned Francis into a mental patient with paranoid delusions, and Caligari into his psychiatrist. Robert Wiene , who took over direction from Lang but maintained the same structure, made the final change. Instead of using a different style to distinguish between the framing and \" dream \" se- quences, as Lang had planned, he maintained the same visual style thr J ughout the film , thus unifying objective and subjective reality , and disso lving the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. (I take the Adlerian position that films , like people, become what they are meant to become and that the final version , whether it is CALIGARI or FORTY GUNS is no accident but an organic outgrowth of seemingly adven- titious elements.) Although Murnau was practically the only person around who didn 't have a hand in CALIGARI , its theme (rather than style) of the implicit continuity between conscious and unconscious forces , mediated by in- stinct (or, in filmic terms , camera movement) , finds its most perfect expression in his cinema , particularly in SUNRISE. 2 Among other things , SUNRISE is about a man los- ing-'-and regaining-his mind . The oppositions in SUNRISE (and it is dialectical on every level) are between sunrise and sunset, the country and the city, good and evil, salvation and sin, divine grace and black magic, natural and unnatural acts, and finally the blonde, beatific wife (Janet Gaynor) and the dark, sultry city woman (Margaret Livingstone) in their struggle for The Man 's soul. It is through the visualization of mental images that 1) temptation is represented-in the swinging , night- light world the city woman conjures up; 2) the possibility of murder is posed-in the image of the drowning of the wife ; 3) loss of mental control is indicated-the husband 's drifting on water ; and finally 4) sanity is restored-when husband and wife walk hand in hand across a congested traffic circle which is transformed , in the ultimate solipsism of superimposition , into a leafy bower. Thus the victory of mind over matter, love over evil, magic over logic , and film over reality. The film opens with a Bauhaus-style collage of graphics , illustrating the city in summer, a train station , posters picturing seaside vacations, dissolving eventu- ally into \" three-dimensional \" reality as the vacationers emigrate to the country. The image of the city balances the agitation of its angled , industrial architecture with a kind of excitement, and emerges more or less neutral at this stage. The values of the city, counterposed to those of the country , will change perceptibly according to the point of view. When the c 'ty woman depicts its pleasures to the husband , the images are violent, caca- phonic and sexual. The rhythm is pulsating , overpower- this page: SUNRISE. Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien. photos: Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive

ing . It can almost be heard . (No telephone has ever and the sphere expands to include normal life which rung so deafeningly as the one in DR . MABUSE , DER SPIELER which jiggles up and down .) Indeed , Murnau 's (in the form of the conductor and then a cyclist along- city often seems like a metaphor for the sound film, trying to burst into the peaceful haven of the country, side the trolley) gradually resumes, providing a relief the silent film . and preparing for the moment when they will \" hit bot- When the man and wife alight after the transitional streetcar ride , the city is at first threatening and dan- tom \" in the midst of the city. They have been brought gerous and then, after their reconciliation, submissive. The amusement park is something else again-a place together, physically if not spiritually, in a suspended where anything can happen (a pig can get drunk), and whose rhythm is represented in a dizzying repetition state of temporary grace. of circulas motifs . The theory that the fair (as in CAL- IGARI) and the circle (the revolving door in THE LAST Nothing ever quite equals that one matchless, magic LAUGH) represent , on the one hand , a regression to childhood , and, on the other, anarchy and chaos would passage-as, perhaps, the pleasure of fulfillment can apply here, but without the negative implications. The amusements are a deserved regression , a momentary never equal the exquisite anguish of anticipation-but abandonment after the tension of estrangement and the solemnity of the reunion . the rest of the film does contain its share of tender As the city is crowded, congested , sophisticated and moments and a deepening through repetitio l}. The splintered , the country is simple, wholesome, a com- munity both physically and mystically'. Not only the progression towards forgiveness and atonement is people but even the animals unite against the city woman 's enchantment of the husband. When he re- Christian . He offers her food (communion) which she turnf from his rendezvous carrying the bull rushes she has given him (to save himself in the drowning), a horse accepts; she breaks down, achieving a release; he nuzzles him violently. The wife is seen the next morning , surrounded by and feeding the chickens . In an as- gives her flowers ; she still can't face him . With the tonishing example of clairsentience, their dog dashes to the boat in an agitated effort to stop his mistress ringing of the chimes-the one link, besides the trolley, from going. And finally , as they row toward the middle of the lake , the sound of the church bells recede in between city and country-she looks at him , and it is the distance and a flock of birds resting on the river quickly disperses. then they enact, by proxy, the ceremony of marriage, There is no doubt that the spell of the city woman , thus resanctifying their own. who stalks the night and disappears with daylight, is supernatural. (It must be remembered that, in NOS- The return to the country retraces the first part of FERATU , Murnau made one of the earliest vampire films .) She has only to whistle softly outside the husband 's the film , but with the husband wanting to save his wife window , and he is galvanized . He dresses hurriedly , rushes to a designated meeting place. The camera rather than drown her, thereby undoing the spell follows him and suddenly , in a gloriously unexpected camera movement, takes a shortcut through the through action , and expiating his sin. The final act of bushes, arriving first, to behold the city woman waiting, her profile silhouetted against the moon. redemption is performed by the w ife , since it is the The man does not embrace but rather succumbs- discovery of her body, or the cry announcing it, that violently-to her. She takes the initiative, cradling him in her arms , and outlining her plan . When he returns keeps the husband from strangling the city woman. The to his cottage , he is like a man drugged, heavy, moving in a kind of stupor , as if his blood had been drained. ultimate victory of goodness is that it is infinite. He sleeps fitfully , \" drowning \" symbolically in the water in which he intends to throw his wife . The following Murnau makes full use of the expressionistic vocab- day, rowing his wife to the middle of the river, he is still under the spell. When he rises to kill her, he be- ulary: a raked dining table in the home of the peasants comes a virtual monster-deranged , wooden , his eyes dull and his body towering over her. She clasps her where the city woman is staying , emphasizing their hands in prayer. At this , he reco ils-like the vampire in NOSFERATU when confronted w ith a cross . He covers poverty and precariousness next to her; lighting which his face with his hands and the chimes ring victoriously. The moment of danger is passed ; she is saved but still gives the wife an irridescent halo and surrounds the terrified. When they reach the shore, she races up the hill, falling twice, and climbs aboard the trolley. Racing city woman in a miasmal mist. But it is in the camera, after her, he barely makes it aboard , whereupon they- and we-are swept into one of the most ecstatic move- rather than in the characters or sets , that awareness ments in all of cinema. The psychological suspension between anguish and relief is exquisitely , and physical- resides , and in which the process of discovery is initiat- ly, sustained by the breathtakingly lyrical , delirious motion of the trolley through real space. By a combina- ed . The camera's orientation is neither that of anyone tion of different camera set-ups extended through glid- ing motion , the sense of weightlessness is perpetuated character nor is it totally objective , in the manner of the omniscient third-person narrator. It is curious , even eccentric , suddenly taking off on its own , and arriving , as in the shortcut. at someth ing worth discovering . There is another instance shortly afterward . The city woman , having persuaded the husband to murder his wife, disappears. The camera suddenly focuses on the ground , where footsteps can be discerned. In an unu- sually long movement it follows the footsteps to a clear- . ing where the city woman is standing , a bunch of bullrushes in hands. The effect of such surprise is to keep the spectator off guard , in a mild state of sus- pense. It also prevents the movie from being too rigidly formal , or academically classical. In SUNRISE Murnau breathes life into an archetypal arrangement, and he raises the archetypal to a definitive expression of poetic cinema. 111111 SUNRISE 1927, Fox Film Corporation, 95 minutes. director F. W . Murnau ; screenplay Carl Mayer; from the short story A Trip to Tilsit by Herman Suderman ; photography Charles Rosher and Karl Struss; art direc- tor Rochus Gliese. CAST The Man (Ansass) George O'Brien The Wife (Indre) Janet Gaynor The Woman from the City Margaret Livingstone The Maid Bodil Rising The Barber Ralph Sipperly The Manicure Girl Jane Winton The Obtrusive Gentleman Arthur Houseman The Obliging Gentleman Eddie Boland FILM COMMENT 19

Cit,airl on the sacred nature of bread , on the alienation of the modern city dweller and his ignorance of the basic by Richard Koszarski sources of nature\" (my own rough translation). The idea he came up with, of a contrast between city and CITY GIRl. Richard Koszarski is a student in the Graduate country as seen dramatically in the marriage of a farmer to a woman from outside, had already been developed David Torren ce. School for Cinema Studies at New York University. He in Beaudine's THE CANADIAN (1926), in Howard ' s WHITE Charles Farrell and has written for Sight and Sound , Film Quarterly and GOLD (1927) and , most perfectly of all , in Seastrom 's Film Heritage, and is preparing a book on Erich von THE WIND (which appeared at the close of 1928, after Mary Duncan. Stroheim 's films. Murnau began production on his film). photo: Museum of In CITY GIRL Murnau was working with material he As shooting proceeded through the autumn of 1928, Modern Art! knew and loved well : the life of simple country people however, silent films became less economically viable Film Stills Archive and their intense relationship to the soil, This was with every passing week, and studio executives viewing a major theme in his middle German period , but the assembled print declared it \" too long and the peas- the unavailability of such films as DER BRENNENDE ants not American .\" Eisner quotes another letter from ACKER (1922) and DIE AUSTREIBUNG (1923) makes it Murnau to Fox in which the director indicates certain difficult to assess its exact position in Murnau's body changes he would make if allowed to work on the film of work. Still, judging from the writings of Theodore a little longer (apparently not accomplished in the print Huff and Lotte Eisner, CITY GIRL would apparently fit which now exists), but she does not give a date for in well with the sort of rural kammerspielfilm that he it. At any rate , Murnau 's contract was mutually ter- was personally quite fond of. Overlooking this aspect minated in February of 1929, and the film shelved . The of Murnau 's career in favor of his more flashy German exact reasons for the break with the company are and American productions would seem as unfortunate complex, but studio interference with his productions, as forming a critical opinion of Griffith by viewing all and a certain intransigence on Murnau 's part in regard the spectacles while ignoring the pastorals. Now CITY to talking films might have had something to do with GIRL has finally turned up , after existing as a vague it-as well as the fact that Murnau 's projected salary footnote for the past forty years, and appears as one for the final year of his contract was some $200 ,000 . of the most exhilarating and important finds in recent (John Ford, also a top Fox director at the time, recently film archeology. stated to Peter Bogdanovich, \" Actually, when sound came in we were all fired. They bought up our con-. This was Murnau 's third effort under his Fox contract tracts-supposedly we didn't know anything about which called for at least four films in four years. SUNRISE sound ... \" ) had been a succes d 'estime, and THE FOUR DEVILS , a commercial one as well , so Murnau apparently had little Fox did nothing with the film until the growing popu- to fear when he took his crew on location in the summer larity of Charles Farrell as a mild romantic lead seem- of 1928 to begin location shooting on a farm purchased ingly induced them to attempt some manner of recoup- for the occasion some 22 miles outside of Pendleton, ing their investment. So A.F. \" Buddy \" Erickson , an Oregon . Still , it was a little late to begin shooting a assistant director on the film under Murnau, was as- major all-silent release, and there had been consider- Signed to handle dialogue sequences written by Elliott able friction with the studio over insertion of talkie Lester, author of the original play on which the film sequences into THE FOUR DEVILS. Murnau 's intention was based. These were shot at the end of 1929, and with CITY GIRL was to present a \"woodcut\" of country .the retake script clearly indicates that they were meant life, and Lotte Eisner quotes him as writing to William to fit around \" footage shot by Mr. Murnau .\" The first Fox, \" This summer I would like to make a film on wheat, four reels of the silent version were lifted intact for th'e part-talkie edition , up to the first approach to the farm- house. But once inside, the retake footage began, and the final 42 minutes were compressed down to about 27, eliminating much of the motivation and background material, but introducing some rowdy harvester songs, as well as scenes emphasizing the harvester's lust for the girl and the father's efforts to break up the marriage. The 67 minute part-talkie version was released in Feb- ruary of 1930 and did play in Ch icago and certain other cities, but it never received a New York opening. And , although the press book advises that the film is available in both Movietone and silent versions , the studio has no record of the silent version ever playing anywhere theatrically. It is therefore doubly strange (but delightful) that, when the film was finally discovered , it was this ap- parently unreleased, nine-reel silent original that turned up, while the dialogue version, which seemingly saw a release of sorts, still rema ins lost. (This is just the opposite of the fate of HELLO, SISTER! , a film caught in a similar situation , where Stroheim 's original disap- peared but the revamped version was uncovered .) The original silent Murnau cut of CITY GIRL was given its first public performance in 1970 thanks to work under- taken at the Fo x studios by producer Ale x Gordon , who assigned film historian William K. Everson to seek out the hidden recesses of the company vaults and see what he coud find . Everson 's expedition turned up a 20 SUMMER 1971

horde to rival Tutankhamen 's, as \" lost\" work by Mur- that Gloria Swanson probably was im itated by such nau , Stroheim , Ford , Walsh , Borzage, Hawks and many others was uncovered; indeed, the backlog of these women , who identified with he r struggle in such films films is so great that many still have not been publicly exhibited . I must thank Mr. Everson for providing much as MANHANDLED and STAGE STRUCK . Just as Swanson of the CITY GIRL background information to me, and helping in innumerable ways to clear up the years of always dreamt of an escape from the drudgery of some mystery surrounding the film , not the least of which was discovering a print of it in the first place . menial commercial position (often to find that things The very opening shots of CITY GIRL indicate just really weren 't much better on the other side), so Kate how snugly the film settles next to SUNRISE as part of Murnau 's continuing examination of the relations be- dreams of escaping from her kitchen and one room tween country and city life. The film opens in a railway car heading out of Minnesota and into Chicago. Lem flat. The idea of someone living out a Gloria Swanson Tustine (Charles Farrell) , a farm boy sent to the big city to sell the year 's crop at the grain exchange , is movie mu st have been cons iderably more apparent seen frantically searching for his ticket (a comic in- troduction to a motif which will later reemerge in various forty years ago. She stares longingly at a cheap print forms) ; and a graceful pan leads us to the opposite side of the aisle, where his actions are being slyly of some sheep wh ich graces a nearby calendar and observed by a big city vamp, coiffed and made up to resemble Mary Livingstone in SUNRISE (whom we last sighs heavily; the only other decoration in the place saw also heading back to the c ity). But although this particular vamp tries her best to entice the country boy is a giant cloc k with \" Regulator \" written on it! he remains oblivious , for unlike The Man in SUNRISE , Lem is not one to be dazzled by the seductive promises The fact that Lem is writing sentimental postcards of the city. Rather, the film discusses the complement of this idea, and concerns itself with a girl of the city back home to his mother in Minnesota attracts her, who is fooled by her illusions of the country , and taught a serious lesson about human nature. and she asks if he is \" lonesome in the big city \" -a Just as the film itself can be seen as a contrast standard theme in many films at the time, notably one to SUNRISE, so a series of internal contrasts and parallels are developed throughout. Lem reads two letters on by Paul Fejos, as well as a comment which better sums the train: one, from his father, deals only with the facts and figures of the grain sale; his mother's letter, howev- up her feelings than his. \" Living on a farm must be er, begins, \" My dear son .. . \" and continues with a whole string of warmly solicitous admon itions . Already wonderful ,\" she ventures, again thinking only of her we know not only Lem's reason for travelling to the city , but the character of his parents as well. A cut calendar-art illusions of country life. When she goes back to the farm confirms our feelings , as we see old Tustine somberly calculating over again the sale price home that evening to dust the soot off her flower (a per bushel required for the year's crop. In his stern and righteous attitude he seems a veritable wheat hopeful geranium in the best Griffith trad ition), she fetishist: he has planted the crop right up to the walls of the house to get the maximum usage out of the stares across the elevated tracks outside her window acreage , and he berates his daughter for playing with a few stalks, pressing them carefully into the family to a billboard advertising the beauteous \" Minnetonka Bible afterwards for safekeeping. There is a premonition of disaster in a glimpse of the board at the grain ex- Shores. \" Like the other interi o rs in this film , her apart- change (revealed in a hectic right-to-Ieft tracking shot which emphasizes the turmoil of the market) where the ment is absolutely devoid of ornamentation . The Tus- price is seen sinking below that required by Tustine . tine 's farmhouse is graced with a barometer and the We meet our heroine, Kate, through another of the film 's numerous juxtapositions, which contrasts Tus- restaurant has its \" regulator,\" but otherwise the walls tine 's slicing of a bread loaf and his words \" Give us this day our daily bread \" (an evocation of the film's provide blank surfaces to group the players before, working title) with a shot of bread emerging from the slicing machine at Johnson's Place, the eatery where or cut up with shadows , and the general effect is most Kate works as a waitress. She and her friends are surprised to see someone saying grace at the counter closely akin to the spareness of a Dreyer, particularly (Tustine's son , of course) and can only think of some wise-cracks to explain the situation-one ventures that the Dreyer of JEANNE D'ARC . Kate does have a wind-up he's about to \" take a chance \" on the hash. This wise- cracking character of Kate and her friends is empha- mecr 1nical bird , complete with cage , an image even sized heavily in the restaurant scenes , pe rhaps to in- dicate the defenses which they have built up around more upsetting than the real one that McTeague kept themselves to help slough off the hazards of daily life in the cafeteria. Mary Duncan gives a most interesting dragging around with him . performance here , for she seems in these opening scenes to be doing a Gloria Swanson imita- Meanwhile, Lem has found the bottom to have tion-something which I found puzzling until I realized dropped out of the market, a discovery conveyed in a startling and typically Germanic camera movement. He is standing on a streetcorner scanning a newspaper, in the foreground and largely dominating the swarms of people we see hurrying back and forth behind him. Suddenly the camera pulls back and he is literally swallowed by the city, the camera 's false perspective making him apparently shrink away behind the rush of people that is now seen to engulf him , and he disap- pears completely behind an \" el \" support and an arriv- ing bus. The next time we see him he has already sold the crop , a key action which , typically in this film , occurs off screen . We see noth ing of his life in the city but the time spent in the restaurant, and only a few mo- ments of hers. This is all incidental material and is suggested by other means, but a less assured director might have thought it necessary to fill all this in. When he meets her at the counter the next day their attraction is seen as developing through a very awkward phase, made more difficult by the fact that he must now be leaving . He makes a hasty exit and leaves for the train , but hesitates at the station gate, toying with his ticket and finally pulling it away from the conductor as he is about to punch it (the idea of the punched ticket echoes the way meals are paid for at Johnson 's Place: by a card which is punched in various places to tally up the total , although this connection is not directly stressed). Another ticket, this one coming from a weight-and-fortune machine , has told hir:1 that, \" If you marry the one you are thinking of all will be well ,\" so r.w. he goes back to find Kate. He looks through the window at Johnson 's but cannot see her, instead viewing an IIUDADalmost abstract pattern of straight counters and revolv- .ing fans-she has gone to the station to see him , but FILM COMMENT 21

they have missed each other in a scene David Lean surfaces which Murnau has a wonderful time lighting might have appreciated . By chance they meet on the street. We do not see the wedding . On the train going with lanterns. This whole final part of the film is prac- home the film 's opening scene is reversed : here Lem is together with his city girl (they are actually sleeping) tically an exercise in lighting night scenes with move- and he no longer scrounges around for his ticket but leaves it nonchalantly in the sweat band of his hat. able light sources, as men carrying lanterns cast incredi- Back at the ranch , Father has not received the news ble moving shadows all over the place . This technique of the marriage too well (the word \" waitress\" floats out of the telegram in disconcerting fashion) but Lem here lends a strong visual style to sequences which and Kate are blissfully ignorant of the storm that awaits them. In one of the screen 's most breathtakingly ro- are patently melodramatic, and so gives each shot at mantic tracking shots, the pair runs ecstatically through the waving fields of wheat, the camera sailing with them , least the benefit of imaginative lighting and design, if now moving slightly ahead, now arcing slightly away. The sense of space comes as an explosion after the not thematic content. News arrives of an approaching claustrophobic city scenes, all of which were crowded by masses of people moving like ants back and forth hailstorm , and the men sullenly roll out into the night across the frame and around the lovers. But the exhila- ration is short lived . They stop for a moment at the on promise of overtime if they save the crop from the corner of an out building and Lem suddenly sees the farmhouse , standing in the distance like some insistent coming storm . Mac, however, hurts his hand and, when reminder. Murnau frames the shot so that Lem is seen alone, with only Kate's hand emerging from behind the he returns to have it bandaged by Kate, asks her to building-just a bare, beckoning reminder, too. They enter and meet the family , and Lem 's sister greets Kate leave with him. She refuses, but he threatens to call with a bridal bouquet of wheat. Kate has brought along her mechanical bird , which here emerges strongly as the men out and blame it on her, so she seemingly a figure for Kate herself, and is immediately threatened by a curious country cat which heralds the arrival of agrees. Tustine overhears this part of the conversation Tustine. As he enters he sees the wheat (significantly lying before the mechanical bird cage) , explodes again, and tells Lem, who confronts Ka~e with the story and and puts it away in the Bible. He then turns his attention to Kate, whom he suspects of some devious golddigging demands to know if it is true. She realizes that the scheme in marrying his boy (maybe he 's just seen SUNRISE?) . Lem is totally unable to stand up to his father, situation has now grown intolerable and sneaks off by and her illusions of country life suffer their first blow. Lem 's sister takes the bird cage out of Tustine's sight herself, leaving a note explaining her actions to Lem. and hides it. But Kate is made of stern stuff, and even though the old man slaps her across the room she Mac, meanwhile, has gotten the men to quit anyway, vows to stay on and \" make a man of Lem Tustine in spite of you .\" and Tustine is running around with a gun threatening Some time later a group of harvesters arrive who to shoot anyone who tries to leave his property. A have already heard of the couple 's difficulties. The brashest of this bunch , Mac (played in a lecherous, beautiful image here shows a sack of wheat falling over redneck fashion by Guinn \"Big Boy\" Williams) runs ahead to get first look at Lem's woman and decides and spilling out as Tustine 's own life seems to run out to cause trouble. When the men arrive they sit down for a feed and Kate is put to work waiting on table , of him now: he has become the wheat. duplicating her city duties in an uncomfortable manner. While serving the men , who do their best to take advan- In this highly charged melodramatic atmosphere tage of the strained atmosphere, Kate drops the little weight-and-fortune ticket and they gleefully appropriate Lem and Mac get involved in a fight on a runaway it as a sexual token . Then follows some of the most amazing sequences of harvesting operations ever re- wagon , and although Lem trounces Mac he is almost corded , documentary footage which would put most of the finest documentarists to shame. Ernest Palmer shot by his father , who thinks he is someone trying gives these sequences a sense of landscape hardly touched by the Pare Lorentz classics of several years to leave the property. The old man comes to his senses, later, and they alone would have made the film a com- mendable discovery. When the men line up for lunch the workers are cowed into returning to the fields, and we see them ogling Kate 's ankles in exactly the s.ame manner that two customers had eyed her in the first Lem rides off to make up with Kate . Murnau makes part of the film while she was climbing up to reach the coffee machine. The parallels are running closer of these sequences, which could easily descend to and closer, and Kate is beginning to realize it. \" I used to think people were different out here,\" she scowls banal melodramatics, a mysterious and erotic interplay at one of the lecherous rustics. of lights and shadows. Many of these sequences were That evening the harvesters and Lem-who doesn't even sleep in the farmhouse anymore-retire to the done back at the studio for closer light control after garret of the barn , a place of weird planes and inclined location work was completed, obvious evidence of the care taken with the visual style of these scenes. One can notice the shadow of the farmhouse door against the \" sky\" during the scenes where Mac returns to have his hand bandaged , and the back projection during the fight on the wagon is noticeable if not offensive. The only unpleasant effect in this conclusion is the sudden transformation of the old man, but even this can be seen to have intriguing overtones. CITY GIRL has brilliantly emerged as a major redis- covery , perhaps not something to top SUNRISE, but still a dazzling work which adds much to Murnau 's already monumental reputation . But the muse of the cinema must still be smiling at us: the latest information in- dicates that the Germans have located a print of the lost FOUR DEVILS . . . 11111111 CITY GIRL [OUR DAILY BREAD * ] 1929 (released 1930), Fox, 88 minutes. director F.w . Murnau; screenplay Berthold Viertel and Marion Orth; from the play The Mud Turtle by Elliott Lester; pho- tography Ernest Palmer; set designer Harry Oliver; editor and titler Katharine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell. CAST Charles Farrell Lem Tustine Mary Duncan Kate David Torrence Lem 's Father Edith Yorke Lem 's Mother Dawn O'Day (Anne Shirley) Marie r.w. Dick Alexander Mac MUDD Tom Maguire Matey Guinn Williams , Edward Brady, Jack Pennick Reapers \" working title 22 SUMMER 1971

Tabu by Robin Wood Robin Wood has written books on Alfred Hitchcock, o Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Arthur Penn, Satyajit Ray 's APU TRILOGY and, in collaboration, Michelangelo .\"c0 Antonioni and Claude Chabrol. Q. This article is part of a book on Murnau currently ::i in preparation, to be published by Movie Paperbacks / - Studio Vista in Great Britain and by Praeger in New CD York. The author wishes to acknowledge the influence of Michael Walker, who suggested some of the ideas ~ on which the article is built. ~ The enormous gaps in Murnau's oeuvre-indeed , it o seems more gaps than oeuvre-make any definitive identification of him as an auteur virtually impossible. ~-.......;.-- Nonetheless, the NOSFERATU-SUNRISE-TABU progression, spanning ten years and three continents, suggests that ~ he would be an ideal subject for the kind of structural .oc analysis advocated by Peter Wollen in his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (one of the few really valuable Q. books on film so far written). Mr. Wollen says of Ford, :::J \" ... it is the richness of the shifting relations between CD antinomies in Ford's work that makes him a great art- ist.\" I don't entirely accept the sentence's implications: ~ for me it is the artist's fully achieved works-mutually illuminating no doubt but ultimately self-sufficient-that establish his value. Yet striking development within the corpus of an artist's work, and a complexity of rela- tionship between individual works, constitute one of the surest indications of his importance, being the token of a human aliveness, of an ability to live and grow within his art instead of using it as an escape, an evasion or a refuge. It would be easy , even with our necessarily limited knowledge, to adapt Mr. Wollen 's sentence on Ford to Murnau. The most obvious link between TABU and SUNRISE, while not unimportant, connects only the less profound levels ('f the two films. The city / country opposition of SUNRISE is reworked in TABU as the opposition of the innocent and natural civilization of Bora-Bora to the white-dominated island to which Matahi and Reri flee, a civilization corrupted by money-values. The couple 's relationship to \" white \" civilization is very like that of their predecessors to the city: they are touched by it but not seriously contaminated, their sense of the ul- timate importance of their union preserving them from the trivializing influences to which they are subjected. The parallel becomes most explicit in the sequence where Matahi and Reri are induced to dance native- style for the somewhat patronizing amusement of the whites, just as the man and his wife in SUNRISE were persuaded to perform a peasant dance. In each case we feel some qualms about the couple's submitting to being made a spectacle-it seems a violation of their privacy, of the integrity of their relationship. YeUn each case we are reassured: the couple dance for each other, not for their audience, and the dance expresses rather than undermines their unity. FILM COMMENT 23

• This \" Romantic \" view of rural simplicity and the un- where the last two sections divide; instead , there is corrupted primitive-a view in which , given the sophis- a lengthy transition in which the struggle against the tication and the psychological complexity of Murnau 's money-debts of the white man's law and the struggle art, one feels nostalgia to play an important role-may against the more ultimate debt of tribal law run parallel, tend to connect Murnau in our minds with Wordsworth , before the film resolves itself in the overwhelming final who chose to depict \" humble and rustic life\" because sequences into its basic opposition . But, if the narrative \" . .. in that condition , the essential passions of the seems more tightly woven than that of SUNRISE , there heart find a better soil in which they can attain their is an interestingly similar split between levels of mean- maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer ing . and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coe xist in a state of Surprisingly-g iven the two films ' remoteness from greater simplicity ... and , lastly, because in that condi- each other in time and space, and to a considerable tion the passions of men are incorporated with the extent in style-the most striking links are with NOSFERA- beautiful and permanent forms of nature.\" In fact , TU ; and most of them serve , very curiously, to associate Murnau 's nature is closer to the nature of King Lear Hitu-that Establishment figure of inviolable moral than to that of Wordsworth 's idealizing simplifications: law-with the vampire . One is first alerted to this by he finds a place , in the natural scheme of things , for the sudden recurrence in TABU of one of NOSFERATU 'S Nosferatu , for the storm of SUNRISE and the shark of most unnerving and unforgettable effects: the ship TABU. Hence the relatively simplistic oppositions of moving in from the edge of the screen to dominate city I country, natural purity I \" c ivilized \" corruption , are an otherwise innocently empty image with its doom-like repeatedly undercut. presence . Hitu himself, like Nosferatu , is haggard and emaciated : persecutors, they both strike us ultimately A more important-if necessarily less specif- as victims . In the later stretches of TABU the corre- ic-parallel with SUNRISE is in the intensity with which spondences accumulate. Shown us through Reri's Murnau again makes us respond to the concept of consciousness, Hitu takes on supernatural overtones, ultimate marriage, of wh ich the union of Matahi and seeming to appear and disappear at will: after his first Reri offers the purest statement imaginable. Murnau visit to the doorway of the hut, we feel unsure at first makes no attempt to explain their absolute need for whether he was \" real\" or the girl 's hallucination. He each other-a need that over-rules all external obsta- becomes another of Murnau's creatures of darkness, cles and prohibitions-in psychological terms: he simply materializing out of the nocturnal forest as Nosferatu , presents it as a fact, whereby it takes on a mystical , on his first appearance , seemed to materialize out of natural-religious significance, in direct contradicition his cavern . When he visits Reri at night we see his to the arbitrary and artificial religion that forbids it. This shadow creeping up over her body as Nosferatu's did time there is no inner force surging up to threaten the over Nina 's. The overall movement of the film also bears couple's union: the threat seems to come exclusively some striking resemblances to that of NOSFERATU. The from outside. beginning shows us the couple in a state of innocence, and again the innocence is associated with flowers : Something like the three-part structure of SUNRISE the floral coronets with which the maidens of Bora-Bora is again discernible in TABU , though the divisions are play, one of which , slipping over the waterfall and much less clear. There is a first ' 'movement\" concerned catching on a rock, first leads Matahi to Reri. The end with the couple's efforts to preserve and confirm their of the film has Reri voluntarily surrendering herself to \" marriage,\" culminating in their escape from Bora- the creature of the shadows to save the life of her man. Bora; a middle movement showing them in contact with The parallels are indirectly strengthened by the visual the influences of the white man 's civilization ; a final association of Hitu with the moon-more consistently section which returns us to the private struggle to ominous here than in SUNRISE-which may link him in preserve the union of the couple against the external our minds with the City Woman . forces bent on destroying it. On the narrative level the three parts are much more closely integrated than the One might be tempted to talk in general terms about three parts of SUNRISE, primarily through the presence Expressionism 's concern with \" Doom\" or \" Fate,\" to in all three of Hitu : in terms of structure , it is as if the link Nosferatu and Hitu vaguely as Fate-figures , and City Woman followed the couple to the city and per- leave it at that ; which would be to evade the real issue sonally provoked the storm. In SUNRISE , from the mo- and miss the most fascinating aspect of Murnau 's de- ment the couple are \" remarried \" (perhaps even earli- velopment. When one considers the films more deeply, er-from the moment the man doesn 't murder his wife), one soon sees that in several important ways the move- the City Woman ceases to be felt as a real threat, at ment of NOSFERATU is reversed in TABU , and this be- least on the level of conscious meaning, the level on comes just as important a factor in grasping their rela- which she exists as a character rather than as some tionship as the parallels between them . I have used mysterious force . In TABU, even before Hitu 's reap- the term \" movement\" of Murnau 's films (perhaps con- pearance , his pursuit of the couple is felt as a strong fusingly) in a variety of ways, but one obvious manifes- probability. Hence, while the funfair scenes of SUNRISE , tation of movement in his work is the use of journeys. until the new perspective suddenly given by the storm , In NOSFERATU, Jonathan , after being told that wherever appear merely to wander amiably, the corresponding he goes he can 't run away from his destiny, travels sequences of TABU (Matahi 's success as diver, the into the wilds, the dark regions, the \" land of phantoms, \" ensuing celebrations, drinking and dancing) are con- where he releases the vampire-pestilence . In TABU , Hitu tinually colored by our sense of un cancelled threat, simply arrives , apparently arbitrarily , from outside. In intensified as we see Matahi getting innocently into the later sequences of the film he is presented as if debt, he.nce becoming further trammelled at a time he were a projection out of Reri's subconscious (though when he- may need the greatest possible freedom of we know he is also \" real \" ), but in the scenes before movement. In terms of overall structure , the doom-like the couple 's flight there is nothing in the images that reappearance of the Moana corresponds to the break- relates him psychologically to the ~overs in the intimate ing of the storm in SUNRISE , and it occurs much earlier way in which the \" repression \" arches relate Nosferatu in the film . If one feels an underlying three-part structure to Jonathan. The point may seem elementary, but it again in TABU , it would be extremely difficult to say is fundamental to the differences between the two films . 24 SUMMER 1971

The nature of the subsequent journeys is also quite the arrival of Hitu with his arbitrary, external and re- different. The central movement in TABU is that of flight , pressive law. and there is no flight in NOSFERATU : no one seems to think of fleeing from the vampire, and this comes across The associations TABU immediately calls to my mind as an admission of his universality, our sense of his are ~ith the poems of Blake. \" The Garden of Love ,\" arising out of the nature within as much as the nature for instance. without. The lovers in TABU can flee , and feel some hope of success ; the characters of NOSFERATU can I went to the Garden of Love, merely prostrate themselves. And saw what I never had seen: A chapel was built in the midst By minimizing certain very powerful and suggestive Where I used to play on the green; resonances it is possible to interpret TABU in terms of its Bora-Bora / white civilization opposition as a tragic And the gates of this chapel were shut, story of a necessarily doomed love. Murnau opposes And Thou shalt not writ over the door; the comparatively graceless and crude white people's So I turned to the Garden of Love dance to the native ritual dances of Bora-Bora; the That so many sweet flowers bore, corrupt money-values to Bora-Bora's \" natural\" spon- taneity within a framework of strict tribal law. The purity And I saw it was filled with graves, of the native civilization is protected by the tribal law, And tombstones where flowers should be; the sense of order and hierarchy, the superstitious And priests in black gowns were walking their concept of honor embodied in the chosen virgin . The couple, because they violate the law, become outcasts rounds , belonging to the white man 's civilization no more than And binding woth briars my joys and desires. they belong, now, to the civilization of Bora-Bora. Be- cause they have violated the law, they must be hounded Or \" A Little Girl Lost\": to their doom; the honor of the people (on which unity and continuance rest) must be preserved . The tragedy Children of the future age then lies in our acceptance of the couple 's destruction as necessary loss. Though this interpretation is inherent Reading this indignant page, in the film 's material (one might arrive at it by reading a synopsis), I doubt whether anyone will be satisfied Know that in a former time with it for long as an account of the film Murnau made, Love! sweet love! was thought a crime. any more than one can remain satisfied with an account of SUNRISE that sees it merely in terms of its country / In the Age of Gold, city opposition. The emphasis Mumau gives the film Free from winter's cold , slants it unequivocally to the lovers ' side against the Youth and maiden bright repressive law, against Hitu. To the holy light, Naked in the sunny beams delight. In all of these films-NOSFERATU , SUNRISE and TABU- we find three central figureR: a couple, and a force Once a youthful pair, that threatens to destroy them . In all three films the Filled with softest care, couple present no interpretative problems, but the Met in garden bright \" force\" remains to some extent mysterious, inacces- Where the holy light sible to neat, rational explanation , shadowy or pquivo- Had just removed the curtains of the night. cal in meaning . Much of the visual evidence suggests that Hitu is significantly related to Nosferatu ; only a There, in rising day, consideration of the old man 's role in relation to the On the grass they play; couple reveals what that relation is. For on Ihe surface Parents were afar, the connecting images are misleading: this \" creature Strangers came not near, from the shadows\" is not Nosferatu but his polar op- And the maiden soon forgot her fear. posite . Tired with kisses sweet, The innocence of Reri and Matahi is radically unlike They agree to meet that of Nina and Jonathan . There is in it nothing of When the silent sleep the strained and artificial quality that characterized the Waves o 'er heaven 's deep, relationship of the couple in NOSFERATU. It is the genuine And the weary tired wanderers weep. innocence of man before the Fall , whereas that of Nina and Jonathan is the innocence of ignorance, the illusory To her father white innocence of a repressed personality. The keynote of Came the maiden bright; the opening sequences of TABU is an unconstrained, But his loving look, unselfconscious sensuousness, the movement of Like the Holy Book, near-naked bodies in pure flowing ' water: it finds its All her tender limbs with terror shook. most vivid expression in the moment where Matahi washes the mud from Reri's limbs with his hands, after 'Ona! pale and weak! her fight with her rival. Nothing could be more unlike To thy father speak; the tense and selfconscious lovegames of Nina and 0 , the trembling fear! Jonathan. Perhaps for the first time in Murnau 's work , 0 , the dismal care! the images express a perfect harmony between the That shakes the blossoms of my hoary hair.' sensuous and the spiritual. The sense of absolute and ultimate union that develops between the lovers has Regarded from the viewpoint, TABU ceases to have r.w. its source and essential impulse in physical delight. any meaningful connection whatever with documen- Bora-Bora is a world from which everything represented tary-even with the romantic documentary of a Flaherty. II1JIlIIAU by Nosferatu is completely absent. Instead, we have It is not a film about South Seas Islanders. The real world of TABU , like those of NOSFERATU and SUNRISE, Tabu is an interior world of psychic conflict. Even the tribal law, in the specific form the plot demands it take, is not of fundamental importance, and Murnau suggests this by presenting it simply as an arbitrary decree, words on a scroll : its mechanics and its j ~stification are not analyzed . Reri 's role as Chosen Princess, too , belongs FILM COMMENT 25

essentially to the mythic form: the heroines of fairy tales total atrophy. Here it is the boy (representing, perhaps , are frequently princesses, but this doesn't limit the the son Matahi will never have) who raises him from tales' significance to members of royal families. The the ground and prepares him for the dance. This visual essential crime is the taking of Reri 's virginity . Hitu , dialectic between flux and stasis, embodying the con- like Blake 's priests , fathers and old men, is the exter- flict between unconstrained Id and paralysing Super- nally imposed Thou Shalt Not of society. Like Blake 's ego , is developed throughout the film . Unlike Nosferatu father-figures , too , he tends , though initiating in exter- (who , except when lying in his coffin , was almost always nal social-moral law, to merge with the inner, psy- seen in movement) , Hitu strikes us as a static figure. chological forces of repression such laws develop in Murnau usually cuts to him when he is already in a the individual: hence the ambiguous presentation of fixed position (enthroned , or standing in Reri's door- him in the later sequences as both a threat from outside way) , and he is seldom shown in movement, the one and a guilt-projection from Reri 's subconscious . In striking exception being his Nosferatu-like emergence Freudian terms, where the vampire count was the erup- from the forest at night. On each of Hitu's reap- tion of the suppressed Id , Hitu is the punishing , aveng- pearances Murnau gives us a \" portrait\" shot of Reri ing Superego. TABU is the inverse of NOSFERATU. stricken and immobile . This is paralleled in Matahi 's conflict with white authority. His lavish spending-or The conflict between untrammelled natural energy sign ing of bills-the flowing of champagne, the move- and freedom , and the restrictive, denying Superego, ment of dancers, leads to the moment when , attempting is expressed continuously in the style of the film-which to buy the tickets that will make possible further flight, is another way of saying that, in TABU , the opposition he is confronted with his debts. His suddenly immobile so striking in SUNRISE between film-as-music and film- body, paralyzed by an external imposition as arbitrary as-painting, between fluid movement and composed (from Matahi 's viewpoint) as Hitu's decree, strikingly stasis, reaches its fullest expressive significance. Mur- recalls the shot of Reri after the decree was read. The nau is often held up in opposition to Eisenstein as the film 's essential meaning is thus inherent in its stylistic classic exponent of camera-movement cinema as tension. against montage cinema . In fact, the camera moves less in TABU than reports would lead one to expect, It is fitting , then , that the film 's two supreme moments but it is easy to see how the misconception (and it should epitomize, respectively, the two sides of that is only superficially that) has arisen: there is so much tension, the one being essentially a static image, the movement within the frame, and with the constant other a shot whose expressive force depends wholly implication of movement beyond its edges, that the upon movement and spatial reality . The first is the image sense of camera movement is conveyed even when of the flower and the pearl dropped in the sand of the the camera is in fact static . The first shots (the young hut floor when Matahi returns to find that Reri has left fishermen with their spears) show men poised in ex- with Hitu. Strictly speaking it isn't completely static-we pectation of movement; from there on until the moment see the two objects fall-but we register the pearl and where Reri is appointed Sacred Princess , the screen flower as emblems , and it is the complex of associations is seldom still. The constant flux of movement-running , they have accumulated rather than the movement within swimming, climbing trees, rowing dug-outs-is epito- the frame that gives the image its force . mized in the running water of the stream and waterfall down which drift the flowers that lead Matahi to Reri, That force derives from the way in which the image, flowers which are to become a recurrent visual motif in its utter simplicity, draws together all the threads of throughout the film. The film 's progress is from the fresh the film. Flower imagery recurs throughout, always in and sparkling water that joins the lovers to the sombre association with Reri, and the opening identifies flowers nocturnal waves that finally separate them. with the Eden-like unashamed sensuousness of the lovers. Matahi is led to Reri by the flower garland that One is struck in TABu-particularly in the first part comes down the waterfall; after the fight , when he has of the film-by a marked change in Murnau's visual style: washed the mud from her body with his hands, he the images seem much more fluid, less \" composed,\" replaces it with another coronet, and places a single often incomplete; there is a continual sense of more bloom (exactly like the one that is to lie beside the going on beyond the confines of the screen. At times pearl in the sand) behind her ear. When , delayed by he cuts the image with a strong vertical-a tree, the his return to pick up the child , he climbs aboard the doorway of a hut-at its center, so that the eye moves Moana and sees Reri , her back to him , motionless out from this to the sides of the frame , which are open before Hitu, he breaks the \"frozen\" effect of the image and indeterminate. The \" dramatic portrait\" aspect of by casting a coronet so that it lands on her head ; it his style seems at first completely in abeyance . It ap- is cast brutally to the deck, under Hitu's dominance. pears in the film , in fact , with startling expressive force , Thus flowers (growth, fertility) are associated with mo- at the moment when Hitu reads out the decree. In the tion against the paralyzed stasis wrought repeatedly sequence leading up to that moment-the dug-outs by Hitu . At the end of the scene, we see Matahi 's going out to the Moana-the joyous movement of the shadow pass over the sunlit deck as his hand retrieves first part of the film reaches its maximum energy; one the rejected garland : an image poignantly evoking lost joy and present sorrow. Garlands play an important might single out the shot (another marvelous example part in the ceremonial dances to celebrate Reri's as- of Murnau's use of the physical reality of space within sumption of the role of Sacred Princess. When Matahi the image) where , with the Moana consistently in frame (responding to the insistence of the small boy) first in the distance, Matahi turns his boat to go back for enters the dance, he places a garland on Reri 's head; the boy and the other boats sweep past him towards he is then supposed to place one on Hitu ' s, but after the ship. Then, at Hitu's decree-the edict of the Su- approaching the old man he suddenly refuses , casting perego-movement stops . We see Reri stricken , as if it furiously on the ground at Hitu's feet. The use of the child in this sequence , innocelltly prompting Matahi r.w. paralyzed , unable to protest, unable apparently to move towards life and rebellion , again places the film strik- a limb of her own volition : she has to be brought forward ingly in the Romantic tradition . The movement/stasis by other women . The effect is repeated in the sequence opposition is especially striking throughout these of the ceremonial dances, where Murnau intercuts shots of the preparation for and beginning of the cele- brations with shots of Matahi in his hut in a state of 26 SUMMER 1971

scenes: Reri motionless, accepting her fate ; Matahi rope hanging from the side and Hitu cuts it. In effect alternating between paralyzed hopelessness and out- it is a fairly precise inversion of the shot in SUNRISE bursts of violent movement; the lovers placed in a showing the dog's leap from the jetty and pursuit of context of the continual bodily movement of the dancers the boat: the dog, embodiment of potential safety, and the shimmering play of light and shadow. When enters the image from the top of the frame and moves Matahi enters the dance again he turns it into a sort vigorously towards the boat; Matahi , also bent on res- of dance-combat, forcing out the other male dancers cuing a woman , is swept away from the boat when until he and Reri are circling each other. She suddenly the rope is cut and disappears from the image at the smiles in response-the first time her mask of stricken top of the frame . Again , the power of the emotion impass ivity has been broken since the decree. Hitu generated-and surely no single shot in any film com- promptly casts down the flower-garland he is wearing , municates desolation and loss with greater intensity- as a sign that the dance is to stop ; stasis again ; Reri depends essentially on Murnau 's refusal to cut. There is led away to the ship , a prisoner. When , near the are no \" impact \" close-ups to emphas ize the details end of the film , before going to join Hitu , Reri places of the action. The hand clutching the rope, the old the single bloom on her letter to Matahi , it is like her man cutting the rope (with a gesture the more chill ing personal signature, or more: the gift of herself even because so unhesitating , so off-hand and automatic), at the moment when she is lost to him forever. the young man disappearing from the image into a great The significance of the pearl is more complex . It dark waste of sea-all is contained within the shot, is a black pearl , evocative of mourning ; it falls to the bringing home to us overwhelmingly the sense of inex- sand (just before the blossom falls) like a tear. The orably increasing distance between Matahi and Reri . flower is white , suggestive perhaps of weddings . Thus The image is strikingly asymmetrical , bottom-heavy (the the juxtaposition of the two objects carries immediate boat and Hitu). Again , part of the effect is due to the visual overtones of life and death , wedding and funeral. incompleteness of the composition and our sense of Risking his own life, Matahi has just wrested the pearl what is beyond the confines of the frame-Reri , shut from the sea-bed where it was guarded by a monstrous away below the deck, entirely unaware of Matahi's shark: it typifies his struggle for Reri and for their lives pursuit, believing that she has saved his life by syrren- together, so that the pearl and flower side by side dering herself to Hitu and the power of the tabu ; and, symbolize the lovers ' union, now lost. But it has also by the end of the shot, the drowning Matahi. another meaning . As in SUNRISE, one senses the pres- Of course, the shot exists as part of a sequence, ence of layers of meaning Murnau himself probably and the sequence as part of a film : its emotional inten- wasn 't fully aware of and which are difficult to analyze sity, in other words , is ultimately dependent on its because they haven 't been fully worked out. What are conte xt. Matahi 's struggle to the boat, across reefs and we to make of the shark episode, and the parallels through waves , strikes us as almost superhuman , the insisted on by the repeated shots of the TABU sign? efforts of a man driven by his emotion beyond his On a simple narrative level it fits neatly enough : Matahi natural capability , and we feel through this the intensity is forced into breaking two tabus , one by tribal supersti- of his need for Reri and , beyond that again , the intensity tion , one by the white man 's money-values . His success with which Murnau responds to the concept of the in defying the former seems to depend on his success couple and ultimate marriage. Hitu , like Nosferatu and in defying the latter. But, when he has succeeded at the City Woman before him, remains a mysterious, only risk of his life in wresting the pearl from the shark's partly explainable figure, but we feel him here to be preserve , he finds it is too late, and it has all been as much victim as victimizer, less an embodiment of for nothing : Reri has gone. One soon ceases to be the Superego than its helpless agent (he, too , the plot satisfied with this simple story-level : deeper and more makes it clear, is subject to higher authority , and his potent parallels at once suggest themselves . It is own life is in question if Reri is not restored ). His face stressed that the natives believe the shark guards the is a tragic mask , impassive because he has been dead- pearl , suggesting Hitu 's guarding of Reri. The shark ened by his inability to protest rather than because emerges out of darkness like Hitu emerging from the he is himself remorseless . The lack of hesitation as forest (or Nosferatu from his cave). The act of plunging his hand cuts the rope suggests utter hopelessness the knife into the oyster and extracting the pearl there- rather than active cruelty. upon reveals strong sexual overtones : it is a symbolic Finally , there is the aftermath of the shot: Matahi 's act of defloration. Hence the whole episode of Matahi's arm , after he has all but sunk beneath the waves , still plunge down into a terrifying darkness to steal a pearl pointing towards the rapidly disappearing boat, towards from an avenging shark becomes a symbolic re-enact- Reri and the lost hope of union ; at the moment of final ment of his original crime. But here the act takes on defeat, an affirmation of the concept of supreme fulfil- the atmosphere of nightmare: one associates its fur- ment. The last moments of TABU contain the essence tiveness, its terror, the ominous darkness which sur- of tragic experience, the sense of the potential value rounds it, with the emergence of the punishing Super- of existence expressed and affirmed even through ego. As Matahi escapes, he slashes the shark's belly irreparable loss. 111111 11 with his knife ; but afterwards , Murnau shows us the TABU 1931, Paramount, 81 minutes. director F.W. Murnau ; shark surfacing , still there, as if waiting , as Hitu is at producer F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty ; story Mur- that moment waiting for Reri. nau and Flaherty; screenplay Murnau; photography Floyd Crosby and Flaherty; music Hugo Riesenfeld . The pearl and flower are linked by the cross-cutting : Reri places the flower on the letter, Matahi opens the oyster and finds the pearl. If the flower is Reri ' s offering of herself to Matahi-her token that. although she is CAST Matah i being taken away physically, yet she gives herself to Reri (Anna Chevalier) Matahi Hitu Reri him-then the pearl , symbol of her virginity, reinforces Jean Hitu Jules Policeman this meaning. . Kong Ah Captain Chinese Trader The \" movement\" image is the shot in which Matahi, swimming after the boat to retrieve Reri, clutches the FILM COMMENT 27



Mike Prokosch is a filmmaker. His criticism has ap- THE IMMORTAL STORY may seem a finger-e xercise to peared in On Film and The Harvard Crimson. those who gauge its director by the obvious signifi- cances of CITIZEN KANE. But age has apparently de- If Orson Welles' heroes cannot be fully known , it creased Welles' interest in specific motivation ; he now is because Welles refuses to explain them with psy- uses his films to describe general states of being . TOUCH chological revelations. When traumatic past experi- OF EVIL strikes a balance between films that analyze ences do enter his films , in the person of Quinlan ' s personality through dramatic conflict and films that murdered wife or the device of \" Rosebud,\" they only create atmospheres to speak of their heroes. THE TRIAL, afford the crudest understanding of his heroes' actions. FALSTAFF, and THE IMMORTAL STORY, for all their attention to personal conflicts, definitely belong in the latter Welles' characters try instead to realize themselves category. and know themselves by acting in their real surround- ings. His heroes' desires reach to the future for con- In CITIZEN KANE (1941) Welles plays a man of tremen- summation and definition. To learn what they are, we dous ambition-ambition sketchily motivated. Kane dies can only follow them as they play out their ambitions . with the word \"Rosebud\" on his lips; Rosebud turns They cannot be known in a summary phrase or a single out to be a sled taken from him during a crisis in his characteristic action; the development of Welles' childhood. Welles has since called this explanation of heroes is a process of dramatic conflict that does not Kane's restless character \" dollar-book Freud. \" The lead to neat resolutions. Every scene finds several wills epithet applies as well to the film 's other attempts at fighting for power and security. It is this continuous capsule psychoanalysis. battle that defines and redefines their personalities. The premises of CITIZEN KANE are those of Welles ' Welles' explorations of character are therefore in- later films . It sees its hero as an active being to be complete: we can see only that side of a person which followed into the future more than as an object to be conflict and action expose. No single figure can take discovered in the past. One ' s sense of bitter frustra- over the drama and turn it into his own soliloquy, tion-of a future being lost-increases as the film ap- thereby telling us for certain what he is . Welles de- proaches his death and his hopes of forcing his per- scribes his characters with the tentative means we use sonality on his surroundings disappear. But the film to \" know \" peop-Ie in our actual lives. This is why the describes its hero in words and images of instant im- method of his visual dramas is objective. Welles , noting port. Pauline Kael, in her otherwise meretricious article the scarcity of close-ups in CITIZEN KANE , remarked that on KANE, aptly calls it a series of blackout sketches. he preferred to let the audience choose what to watch. The film's visual style serves its rapid-fire Thirties- But his shots, full of tensions that express conflict and comedy script: it is a grab-bag of devices for smoothing domination between characters, do not show us every- transitions between scenes. thing ; they define and thereby limit our comprehension . We can see the isolation and opposition of various Witty juxtaposition takes the place of sustained de- figures in the frame , but this precludes our knowing velopment even in KANE'S single-shot scenes-for exam- any character in himself. ple, the discussion between Mr. Thatcher and Charles' parents. While the adults talk indoors about sending Welles puts his characters into a single unified young Kane away, the child appears in a window play- space-the mansion of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, the ing in the snow and occasionally calling out. Applying castle of MACBETH-which contains their conflicts. When Bazin, critics see a sterling example of a deep focus his heroes die this space is left as the only permanent composition that lets the viewer choose what to watch . reality. The personal reality they created in conflict is Charles ' actions, though, are not fully independent; he lost; it can only be trivialized (\"He was some kind of is not in the same space as the others and he cannot man ,\" Quinlan 's epitaph in TOUCH OF EVIL) or inade- influence them . A portrait of him on the nearby wall quately summarized (the newsreel that begins CITIZEN would have had the same sentimental effect. Charles' KANE). These deaths leave spaces which are impossibly presence in the window sets up a static ju xtaposition , cluttered (the inventory of Kane's mansion), barren (the not a dynamic interplay between separate independent mud-field of THE TRIAL), flat (the airfield in MR. ARKADIN). beings. The irony of his fixed figure becomes rather Lacking a hero to generate conflicts that reveal his obvious before the scene ends. world, we are left with material too complex and empty to interpret. When Welles' heroes die they take our This shot meets Eisenstein 's prime criterion for a means of understanding with them . montage \" cell\" or shot: it is read a single way . Little development of emotion or character occurs within it. In THE IMMORTAL STORY , Welles' latest film , the per- KANE, a montage film , makes points about its characters sonal battles of his earlier work are remarkably sub- by presenting a series of tableaux rather than by sus- dued. The characters' dignity remains the film 's subject, taining dramatic situations. and their placement in space and observable actions reveal them. But it is a cooperative aim , the enactment This fragmentation of the whole drama into distinct of a piece of fiction, that motivates every character units of clear meaning extends even to the composition in the cast. THE IMMORTAL STORY turns to itself-to a of single shots. Gregg Toland's lighting creates a dif- metaphor for filmmaking-to find reasons for its char- ferent space for each character, most strikingly during acters' actions. Kane 's confrontation with Boss Jim Gettys- in Susan Alexander's apartment. Kane silhouetted in the back- The film thereby sacrifices an' existential description ground , Gettys in foreground half-shaded, Susan and of its characters in order to integrate them into a work Mrs. Kane each with her own light and distance from of art. Whereas Welles ' earlier films realized his inten- the camera , could be on badly-matched individual pro- tions in confl ict-fi lied compositions , THE IMMORTAL STORY cess screens. One loses any sense of dynamic rela- uses color tonalities, rhythms of body motion , clusters tionships among them. The lighting's extreme stylization of sound-elements of film style that create an emo- instantly denotes each character's condition, but this tional unity. For Welles' usual bold metaphors of sort of personal description becomes static and super- space-the heroic interiors of THE TRIAL, the light-blast- ficial. ed exteriors of FALSTAFF-this film substitutes settings whose intricate texturing expresses a more limited Another example is the scene in which Jed Leland , conception of the world. in extreme background, approaches Kane , whose ex- FILM COMMENT 29

Orson Welles The Amberson 's mansion encloses the characters, on the set restricting their personal development to their relations with one another. This leads to neurosis as the drama of CITIZEN KANE. develops and its scope narrows to the family alone. Welles, though , no longer needs to refer to anything photo : Museum of outside the house. More than a metaphor for the fami- Modern Art! ly 's unity, it is a dramatically self-sufficient world . Ob- jective and constant through the characters ' conflicts, Film Stills Archive it provides the means whereby every action and rela- tionship can be expressed spatially, and every charac- tremely close face fills half the frame as he types Le- ter described without referring to his past. Not that this land 's newspaper review . This shot depends for its space is a neutral void ; the mansion has a very particu- effect upon the contrasted sizes of the two characters, lar atmosphere. But its obsessively echoing quality not on any diagonal relationship between them. They takes more from the characters ' battles than it gives occupy different spaces ; the scene could as well have to them. It does not determine their actions. The only been played in crosscut one-shots with Kane in close-up values and meanings it holds for the characters have and Leland in long-shot. The wide-angle exaggeration been invested by them , just as Georgie 's insistence of their figures ' sizes fails to unify the space they on maintaining his family's social prominence is an occupy , where in the later films wide-angle twists the obsession of his own . At most the mansion provides whole space of a composition into an insane whole. a space and mood in which the Ambersons can decline .Space in KANE is rarely unified ; its characters are not and die. As such it is a model for the worlds of the described by their interaction within such a unity. In- films that follow. stead a profusion of settings and objects wittily com- ment on the characters to whom they are ju xtaposed . Up to a point the premise of THE STRANGER (1946) is that of AMBERSONS. One man , considering himself CITIZEN KANE is a film of its period . Its script and a hero, sets himself against the other inhabitants of visual narrative are based on montage conceptions. small-town America. The film moves steadily to his Each shot establishes a new point; ra ,olGr than develop comeuppance. The theme of Faustian aspiration and it, Welles cuts or dissolves to another new point. Its Christian retribution operates throughout Welles' work, compositions , while striking , gain less from Welles ' but in THE STRANGER it does not operate very success- sensibility than from Toland 's synthetic lighting and fully. distortionless deep-focus. Each scene's setting is an immediate metaphor for its characters ' situations; but The guilt assigned to its Nazi protagonist, Kindler, no metaphor is sustained , and thus none is radically never becomes personal. The film condemns him as reveal ing. the inventor of Hitler's final solution long before we see the man. We do not see his personality creating The Welles film that really embodies Bazin 's theories his guilt-his guilt is the premise from which the film of single-take deep-focus styles is THE MAGNIFICENT is built. He is a hunted man ; he does not acquire guilt AMBER SONS (1942). Its dramatic integration is complete ; freely in the present ; his struggles to avoid incrimi- its narrative and emotional progress, character devel- nation, which augment his guilt, are acts of compulsion opment and thematic intensification mesh smoothly rather than ambition. He is reacting to a threat, not because Welles stages its action over continuous time acting positively and expressing his personality-which and space . Instead of appearing in a series of tableaux , remains a cipher. He is isolated and threatened with its characters are interrelated in.sustained sequences. death, but too directly to leave his surroundings and Their emotions develop gradually until they burst into actions much ambiguity. action ; instead of interrupting them , scenes last until they run out of energy. Most of Welles ' films are continuous quests that Unity of space within the Amberson mansion makes this dramatic method possible . In its grand interiors Welles can include all the characters in one frame , or track in for a close shot , or include close-up and long-shot in a single setup-as when George and Lucy sit on the stairs during the opening party, the back- ground filled with dancers . By using long take~ , Welles maintains an overall dramatic progress while ·the indi- vidual characters express and act out their motives. 30 SUMMER 1971

follow a character through changing settings to find images. Characters ' figures are bounced off the walls DRIDI something remotely resembling his identity. This one into each others' eyes. The privacy and stability of WELLEI sets up a static opposition between Welles and his space are destroyed ; the characters , though all in the pursuer, Edward G. Robinson . The goals of both men same space, are radically separated. An obsessive are clearly defined-by the film 's detective genre, not intermingling of self-conception and perception of by the shifting internal logic of the characters . Welles ' others ' figures , at once attractive and repulsive , drives sweeping tracks, low and high angles, and contrasty the characters mad. Surrounded by reHections of each lighting fail to deepen this plot's system of character other, they try to shoot their way free and kill each relationships . other-e xcept for O 'Hara, who has r,o gun . There appears, however, a Baroque distortion of The sequence, besides capping the film 's thematic space which will become more and more important as development, completes the progress of the Lady from Welles ' career develops. The depth of THE STRANGER 'S an idealized romantic figure to a Wellesian personality. compositions is so great that it vi rtually transforms Her objectification , beginning in the park with her sitting our normal idea of spatial order. To link foreground deep in her carriage , culminates savagely in the singing characters to the extreme background , while integrat- sequence on board ship; a crane -in on her face , more ing every spatial plane in between into a coherent or less from O'Hara's point of view, idealizes her and spatial system , the space within STRANGER 'S composi- at the same time rivets her to the deck. After this she tions has to skew itself. This sen l: ~ of skewing is much begins to act as an independent entity; but the male increased by the insane camera movements which characters pu rsuing her fail to grasp this . Their ideal- propel the drama onward. Welles ' twisting of space ization of her turns , in the hall-of-mirrors sequenc e, does not spring from specific conflicts between char- into obsession . Her image is multiplied and fragmented. acters ; it is not built along lines of tension between At this juncture of hatred and mistrust, her face 's as- them . It rather includes them with their setting in a sertion of her beauty only calls forth a bullet. generally distorted unity which heightens the irrational conflicts of their own relationships. The tight budget and shooting schedule of MACBETH (1948) kept Welles from using location settings or, Michael O'Hara is not Welles ' usual protagonist, but indeed , any but minimal backdrops . THE LADY FROM a more conventional American lead-a sensitive man SHANGHAI 'S use of diverse locations , as specific meta- of action. The hero of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947) phors for its characters ' situations, gives way to a discovers himself through thwarted love, while most drama of long takes within unified spaces. MACBETH'S of Welles' films investigate personal identity through fluid blocking and camera motions shift dynamics be- egotistical drives. But these drives impel LADY'S other tween characters whenever one of them moves, gen- characters, and the film'$ consequent bitterness distin- erating a sense of real space in spite of the papier- guishes it from the usual American sentimental product, just as its characters ' actions in love become fights macM quality of the studio sets. for survival. This makes it clear that it is Welles ' use of space The film opens as a Hollywood romance , with the to realize relationships between characters, not the hero of low degree rescuing a beautiful lady (Rita nominal authenticity of his backgrounds, that makes Hayworth) from thieves , then driving her home in her his placement of characters in three dimensions and carriage. The first blow to this story's charm comes his treatment of lives and relationships profoundly ob- in a garage where O'Hara (Welles) learns his new love jective. Indeed, he uses his backgrounds more for is married ; long two-shots are invaded by men later metaphor than for realism ; each has a quality essential identified as her husband 's spy Broom and his partner to the feeling that sustains its particular film . The com- Grimsby. Next morning Arthur Bannister, the husband , bination of Welles ' objective use of space and his hires O'Hara as a seaman; a four-shot montage of his expressive use of place , central to the effect of all his sailing yacht is broken by a fat barking dachshund, films , is nowhere more apparent than in MACBETH. and a longer lyrical montage of the ship 's rigging by a shot of Bannister gulping whiskey. An iris shot of Macbeth , Welles ' first classical hero , is the first who the Lady diving off a cliff turns out to be Grimsby's consistently dominates his film's frames. (Kane was as view through binoculars. Each romantic situation is much a memory as a presence; the Amberson mansion undercut by the intrusion-the rasping voice , spying dwarfed Georgie as much as the rest of the family ; eye, or simply the proximity-of a menacing outsider. Kindler filled the foreground less than his pursuer; and Michael O'Hara was one being among many more After this the film openly elaborates a world without assertive than he.) Here, the drama literally pivots privacy whose people are linked by domination , threat , around Macbeth 's figure in the foreground . But even and voyeurism. The hero and heroine try to flee (no this domination is provisional: Macbeth is never sure matter where) to be alone. As the voyage proceeds , of his stature ; he is plagued by other terms within the though , it becomes clear that neither privacy nor secu- frame , settings and persons who, in the film's barbaric rity can be found in a place of one 's own . half- light (as in Welles' prologue to the film), could be either natural or supernatural. Macbeth rarely occupies This vicious world leads to a carnival crazy-house the frame 's center. The opposite side of the frame and a hall of mirrors. Overtones of subjectivity haunt almost always contains another term-a person, a the crazy-house sequence , in which O'Hara, alone for tower, or towards the end simply white mist-that keeps the first time in the film , recognizes the Lady 's treach- him from monopolizing the frame . ery. Faces magnified and distorted into hideous back- ground objects loom at him and gobble him up-yet Macbeth achieves his predominance by upstaging remain part of the actual setting. the others. His rule over the foreground gives each frame a vitality that conquers its virtual emptiness. Surrealist though the final hall-of-mirrors sequence Indeed, upstaging gives the film its most surprising and might seem alone , it is the logical culmination of the expressive moments. After Duncan's murder, Macbeth personal relations and spaces developed through THE stands in the foreground, Lady Macbeth behind him LADY FROM SHANGHAI. The rapidly intercut background in the center , Duncan ' s tower far back at the other mirrors fragment the frame into obsessive mental side of the frame. Macbeth, horrified at his act, FILM COMMENT 31

2 Scenes from stretches his bloody hands before him into extreme quence at the Turkish bath, where Othello's rule is foreground , and the focus of attention in regard to his absent, is completely anarchic , filled with demented CITIZEN KANE . act shifts diagonally from the tower to the foreground . characters who resemble unleashed obsessions dash- In her sleepwalking scene Lady Macbeth appears in ing across the foreground , erupting into mad action, right, the extreme background of a shot and in a single take killing each other. Orson Welles works her way, moaning , to the foreground. At this point Macbeth enters the frame in front of her. Lady Macbeth The secondary characters tend to be played as parts and looks at the true objact of her horror-transferred from to Othello's whole, as obsessions on the periphery of Dorothy Comingore. her bloodstained hands, held before her, to her hus- his musings, rather than as irreducible human beings. band , still further in front-and flees diagonally into the The consequently small importance of drastic conflict photos: background to jump from the ramparts. The sequence in the film's dramatic design is paralleled visually by Janus Films reveals a theme through which Welles interprets the Welles ' refusal to direct attention in the frame to any text; Lady Macbeth 's conception of her husband domi- figure but Othello 's, topped by his virtual refusal to nates her consciousness, whereas Macbeth conceives direct attention at all. The characters are not so much of other people merely as bodies occupying spaces at war as completely isolated from each other. OTHELLO 'S other than his. relative lack of activity gives it a clarity and thinness completely different from the violence of MACBETH and Shots where Macbeth appears in the background · MR. ARKADIN . only give him cause to move forward or, toward the end, lead to close-ups cut in. The film is based on his MR. ARKADIN (CONFIDENTIAL REPORT, 1955) apparently assuredness , his maintaining himself in the most promi- recommences Welles' search for the roots of character nent position . Welles therefore makes the attack on in the past. Its prologue , like CITIZEN KANE 'S, announces his castle an attack on Macbeth 's person ; he tracks that the film will explain the curious death of Gregory into Dunsinane with the attacking English , and in op- Arkadin , world's most powerful man. But the beginning position cuts to close-ups of Macbeth defying all men of this \" explanation ,\" set at night on the docks of born of women . When Macduff reveals his irregular Naples, is shot as confusingly as possible: figures stag- birth , Macbeth 's self-confidence leaves him; he turns ger around in long-shot, Welles cuts rapidly between to flee into the background . Recalled by Macduff's extremely-angled setups, pacing rhythms take the place taunts, he plays his part in the foreground till his death . of continuity and clarity of action. The following scenes, jumping several weeks or months, are no clearer: ac- OTHELLO (1952) puts its hero well within the frame , tions without focus and direction are organized only in mid-shot or far background . And since its frames by their immediate purpose and pace. Not until a fete are so composed that Othello is the crux of attention , in Arkadin 's castle, where Welles cuts to a shot of his their emphasis is directed away from the foreground hero above the hubbub, does the increase of confusion and its shots are far less dynamic than Macbeth 's. let up. Arkadin , however , is wearing a mask . Othello , unlike Macbeth , is past effort, having already achieved greatness. Nobody challenges his stature Through the film Welles replaces his more objective directly . Completely alone in bulk and position, he dies earlier method with this expressive, indeed gothic, more from isolation than from anyone's assaults; lago visual style . The three scenes following the fete are destroys him indirectly by attacking other characters . played in low-angle shots so deep and wide that they Placed in a vacuum , Othello is torn apart by internal distort and obscure interior space, instead of revealing contradictions; the oppositions of characters outside more to the viewer. The force of action which the him (Desdemona's beauty, lago's infamy) are hardly characters generate as they move, and balloon or more than metaphors for his own mental conflict. shrink in size , quite erases any sense of logical order. That each frame is organized around Othello be- Welles , while continuing to realize relationships in comes obvious in those sequences where he doesn 't physical action, here begins to remake \" action\" into appear. His funeral , which begins and ends the film , a purely expressive dramatic means. Where KANE, has a barren balance and deliberate pacing which especially at its beginning , presents a picture-postcard precludes really dynamic motion or conflict. The se- series of evocative images , ARKADIN and the subsequent films offer a flow of events twisted by passions and 32 SUMMER 1971

conflicts into evocative, illogical structures. Yet Welles ' with his world . The films after ARKADIN tend to confirm OTHELLO . intentions here are still the same as in KANE: to reveal this suspicion. TOUCH OF EVIL, however , integrates this character in a way which , while evoking the sense of intention with a rather objective use of camera and Orson Welles character and setting as strongly as possible , conceals setting, and thereby conceals its extreme expressive and by its very means the definite truth of that character. tendencies. Its distortions are perfectly logical in Suzanne Cloutier. terms of narrative and of character. photo : Cinemabilia Instead of confronting the hero directly with other beings, MR. ARKADIN uses a KANE-like research tech- The first image of TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) is a tightly nique carried even further . Arkadin hires an adventurer, framed bomb . The man holding it sets its timer , then named van Stratten , to find the secret of his origins , dashes out of the frame. The camera cranes high into which Arkadin claims to have forgotten . This plot prem- the air as we see his shadow running along a building i$e , .which removes Arkadin from the greater part of wall , moving forward w ith the camera. The shot holds the narrative, permits only the most oblique description as he runs into frame again , puts the bomb in a car of the film 's hero-through a TOUCH OF EVIL-like parallel trunk, and runs out of frame while the car's owner and between searcher and subject, van Stratten and Arka- a woman leave a bar, cross the street, and get in . The din, and through disjointed bits of information from camera tracks back and loses the car as it drives Arkadin 's old associates , whom van Stratten covers around the building, only to pick it up as it rounds the the world to interview. The film is fi lled with the person- corner and comes toward the foreground. For a few alities of his former colleagues , all more vivid characters minutes more the camera tracks back before the car than Arkadin himself. Each one dominates the scene in moderate high-angle , slowing and speeding with it, where he appears. They fill the frame in close-ups finally stopping as the car stops at the customs station . where Welles tilts the camera so that all the composi- The shot transfers to Vargas , a Mexican narcotics tion 's strong diagonals will reinforce their faces. The agent, and his wife passing through customs. They walk film becomes a gallery of picaresque character types. off into background ; the car starts up again, passing near Vargas and his wife . They embrace ; there is an These \" fleas of the world ,\" unsuccessful crooks and explosion, and Welles cuts to a shot of the burning swindlers, are stronger-minded than either Arkadin , the car blown ten feet in the air. crook who made good , or van Stratten , the adventurer who is still trying . These others do not have to surround Though the car stays in the frame through most of themselves with castles and guests to gain depth and this extraordinary w ide-angle shot, it is repeatedly force of character. Welles consistently plays Arkadin for masked by the passage of people, cars, and chunks his weakness and indecisiveness: morbidly sensitive of setting between it and the constantly moving camera. about his daughter, reflective when one would expect As the car approaches people one feels ,a tremendous him to be active , ludicrous at the ai rport when he most threat; as it passes, relief qualified by its continuing needs to appear serious. His personal insecurity leads existence.The car parallels Hank Quinlan-unreflective, him to slaughter his old friends when they are perfectly active, loaded with foreign material (\" these idealists willing to live and let live . The film , running parallel make all the trouble \" ) wh ich can explode at any minute to Arkadin 's shallow perception , is a series of character and destroy those around him, not out of malevolence vignettes ignoring motivation, presenting only the flavor but because of his own frustrated idealism. The dra- of each personality. matic construction of the opening sequence around the car anticipates the design of the film around Quin- Thus Welles begins to use action in a directly meta- lan , but the deepest similarity is between the camera ' s phorical and cinematic way. The anti-dramatic absence placement of the car and of Quinlan in a cluttered and personal emptiness of its hero leaves the film with setting and barren space. the richest of peripheries unorganized by any central force of character. The anarchy of narrative this yields The setting of TOUCH OF EVIL is one of Welles ' most is the anarchy of any search for character , and it radical metaphors. Peter Jaszi has written : \" The down- appears in nearly all Welles ' films . In ARKADIN , however , fall of the magnificent Hank Quin lan , crooked sheriff one begins to wonder whether this anarchy doesn 't result and tragic hero , occurs in a Me xico border town which from another intention; to create distorted atmosphere e xi sts independent of the coordinates of space realis- appropriate to the hero who can never come to terms FILM COMMENT 33

tically depicted. Production design and shooting style cast, nearly all their voices dubbed by Welles , which (emphasizing extreme angles) produce a concoction attack him without cease . Never has Welles so deliber- of dank, oppressive interiors, a motel located absolutely ately crushed a hero. nowhere, endless streets, tilting walls, and menacing fragments of industrial waste . .. This town is a piece The setting of THE TRIAL is designed for absurdity : of visual nightmare poetry, a metaphor of essential masking of motivation becomes an independent aim threat and corruption , which tells more about the with no function in character description . Due to the meaning of the action than any amount of dialogue hero's weakness, the huge distorted settings and mon- or character exposition.\" strous events assume the air of a delusion, at times a persecution mania, and become surrealistic. More- While they function metaphorically, the settings are over , K is completely alienated from his settings. He shot with a clarity one can only describe as objective . repeatedly looks through doors, glass partitions, and The absence offoreground-background separation , the cages. Long shots remove him from other characters tension and isolation between figures, and the unity and settings; when he tries to approach them-for of space persist even in those scenes not shot in example , by walkl .g up to the Advocate Welles plays- deep-focus or side-angle. Its long takes and scenes, he finds only masks . Faces in THE TRIAL'S close-ups even when crosscut, allow a more direct and complete are impenetrable, inhumanly inexpressive. acquaintance with the characters than in other Welles . In no other Welles film are dramatic and character Making the setting completely subjective reduces development integrated more tightly with the direct and THE TRIAL 'S dramatic conflict , substituting for it a purely metaphorical content of its images. cinematic distortion. The planes of its setting are self- distorting; they assault the frail K consistently and One sequence will illustrate this point: Near the end continuously. of the film Vargas begins to record an incriminating conversation between Quinlan and his partner. Rather This way of composing shots occupies a perfectly than standing still , Quinlan begins to walk away over logical point in Welles ' stylistic development. Space the nighttime wasteland; Vargas follows him to keep (with its objective uses for blocking actors) and place Quinlan 's radio-transmitting microphone within receiv- (with its metaphorical direction) have become one . They ing range . Vargas' similarities to Quinlan have been are integrated by visual distortions which cannot be strongly established ; in a brutal fight which took place separated frorr, action within the frame. The whole of a few moments before, we saw him on the verge of THE TRIAL is set in a skeleton-like structure which twists turning into Quinlan when the survival of his wife was and strains as the characters trapped inside go through threatened. Now he is obsessively tracking Quinlan , their insane , illogical actions. Welles has created a trying to find his secrets, occasionally losing sight of completely unified world or style whose qualities are his figure but retaining the sound of his voice. Quinlan Expressionist. No places are established narratively or walks onto a bridge ; Vargas goes underneath in the \" realistically;\" they appear only as points in a visual water. Quinlans' voice from Vargas' receiver sets up progression toward greater imprisonment. All actions an echo under the bridge. Quinlan hears it, but takes within this world isolate c.nd confine K further. a moment to react, and for that moment the echo is an accusation , a judgment of Quinlan's own words on K's attempts to unders,and and escape this situation himself. But the echo is also set up by Vargas, Quinlan 's are naturally unsuccessful. The heroic gesture Welles double, and by Quinlan 's treacherous friend , who car- allows him at the end-throwing back the dynamite his ries the transmitting microphone that picks up Quinlan 's captors use to kill him-is an action whose futility ap- voice . proaches mockery . ThE:: dream-metaphor goes very far and finally becomes inflexible-which shows Welles ' Despite the metaphors it establishes in this scene , determination to carry his dramatis premises to their this setting works mainly as a spatial entity. When illogical conclusion. Welles is, after all , one of the few Quinlan's voice echoes under the bridge, the setting American directors who would dare let his hero die helps express the character's interrelationships; but it with his nightmare. never determines them , and they move freely through their environment without being trapped until their final In FALSTAFF (CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, 1966) Welles aban- shoot-out. It is the characters' wills and actions that dons THE TRIAL 'S artificial integration of motive and fix their fate; the setting remains objectively detached. action . FALSTAFF 'S integration of its hero into its world is much deeper; it sustains an opposition which , far DRIDI Similarly metaphorical place and similarly grand, from feeling c'1ntrived , is inherent in the nature of WEWI Falstaff and his surroundings. This world becomes more empty space in THE TRIAL (1962) are far less successful mood than metaphor and more visual than spatial. dramatically because the film has no hero of any size. Whereas the establishment of successive characters More cinematic than dramatic, too , for Welles by dominates MR. ARKADIN'S frames , and TOUCH OF EVIL now uses action mainly as a means to atmosphere and balances the prominence of character and setting, THE spectacle . FALSTAFF is full of cutting that is totally illogi- TRIAL throws all its weight into its backgtounds, relying cal in terms of advancing narrative (the trumpet fanfare almost completely on their metaphorical overtones. The montage outside young Percy's castle) and rapid metaphor of THE TRIAL is quickly establistl€.p, and it rules tracking shots that do nothing to develop character the film relentlessly . Welles' prologue suggests that the (the robbery in the woods). The handheld camerawork setting is that of a dream-a startling idea from a direc- Welles uses inside the inn involves the audience in tor whose greatest accomplishments had depended on the thrust of the action instead of giving it an analytical the objective blocking of dramatic action . overview. All the means of distortion and stylization Welles knows here become means of generating en- Parallelling a character's obsessions by distorting ergy , in the first part of the film, and evocative images his surroundings is not a device entirely new to Welles . in the last-so that the film can have an atmosphere It does, however, destroy the main premise of his dra- fitting to its characters. matic tension : the attempt of a free , if isolated, hero to define himself in realizing a creative ambition . Welles FALSTAFF progresses toward death and downfall. describes K as \"a little bureaucrat . I consider him Welles ' FALSTAFF is a warm man in an overwhelmingly guilty.\" K 's punishment is enacted by a setting and cold setting . Iciness , personified by the elder Henry and representative of the tyranny he enforces, fills every 34 SUMMER 1971

frame of grayish stock and wintry light. Welles creates THE STRANGER. a harsh overall texture without any prevalent black Orson Welles. values ; it pushes us out of the film as if a whitish screen photo: Museum of had been placed between us and the images. Th is is Modern Art! most strongly felt in a long battle montage full of mud Film Stills Archive and mangled bodies which , grayed out, seems more THE STRANGER. crystalline than grubby. The pacing and cutting rhythms Orson Welles of the sequence also lessen the impact of this brutal and slaughter , and throw attention onto the surface te xture Loretta Young . of the shots . Welles ' substitution of gray tones for photo: Museum of potential blacks and wh ites stresses each shot's sur- Modern Art! face . Such depth-enforcing elements as Falstaff's bulk Film Stills Archive are reduced in impact by the coldness and dim inution of personal ity that flow from King Henry. FALSTAFF. Orson Welles, The contrast between the tavern and the castle Margaret Rutherford makes this struggle clearer . When King Henry rece ives and his son Hal , he stands well in the background , ga ining Jeanne Moreau . his majesty from the high walls around him. Motionless , photo : he lets the freezing rigidity of the setting work on Hal Peppercorn-Wormser until it breaks him down . Fa lstaff in th& inn , on the FALSTAFF contrary , is constantly moving , shouting , c ajoling , ap- Orson Welles proach ing Hal. Only a guest, he cannot let the tavern and work for il im; it contains too many others independent Keith Baxter. of his will. For money and favor-but even more for photo : self-e xpress ion as a way of free su rvival-he keeps Peppercorn-Wormser waddling into foreground , bullying himself into promi- nence, but never dictating the subservience of the others. Falstaff triumphs , for a time , over his surroundings ' restriction of his depth and vigor. Though growing old and increasingly unable to fill the world with his expan- sive warmth , he survives until betrayed by his protege, Prince Hal. Falstaff and King Henry have pulled the young prince in opposite directions. The King wins and Falstaff, bewildered and exiled , dies; \" And all was cold as any stone .\" Th roughout the film he has resisted the denial of self that would restrain him , freely affirming his character, creating his personal acting space with his huge body. Even after his death his huge coffin draws our attention away from the su rrounding surface of snow. Welles' earlier films define personality through ob- ject ive conflict in space , with their settings acting as metaphor for their characters ' situations. More and more , though-and especially in THE TRIAL and FAL- STAFF-a purely atmospheric and affective cinema over- rides Welles ' clear drama of interpersonal conflict. THE IMMORTAL STOR Y (1968) is especial ly designed for sen- sory synthesis: its space does not separate the charac- ters drastically , and its setting has no apparent meta- phorical implications. The film does not move toward an undefined future , but rather strives to accomplish a predetermined design . Instead of investigating its characters , the film places them in a play-a fixed dramatic structure in which each performs a given part and thereby realizes a little more of himself, as in the lovemaking around which the film is bu ilt. Welles as Mr. Clay , the merchant of Macao, echoes the heroes of Welles' earlier films-a powerful man whose desires involve control over others ' lives. But this hero becomes , for the first time , a creator more concerned with the form to be enacted than with the actions and motives of the individuals accomplish ing his design . Low-angle shots of Clay 's massive mahoga- ny-colored figure at the film 's beg inning and\" end ap- parently set him up as a controlling figure . The clerk , moreover, likens him on several occasions to God for trying to bring a work of fiction to life. Th is would make the film 's entire world of settings and actions Clay's creation . But due partly to the strong

TOUCH OF EVIL. Orson Welles. photo: Museum of Modern Art! Film Stills Archive TOUCH OF EVIL. Orson Welles, Janet Leigh and Joseph Calleia. photo: Museum of Modern Art! Film Stills Archive THE IMMORTAL STORY. Orson Welles. photo: Cinemabilia

surface qualities of the film , and partly to its dramatic stasis. So Welles fades to white-a shot without depth structure, Clay does not hold control. The dark colors of the beginning and the power of the overall color-tex- or contrast-and the film ends in oblivion. ture overwhelm the tension usually found in deep-focus shots, and make Clay's distant figure one more element As inward-turning in method as in theme , THE IMMOR- in the surface patterns of the film . TAL STORY abandons dynamic explorations of character. Clay is no more in command dramatically than vi- When the dying Charles Foster Kane dropped a glass sually. His interruption of the lovemaking sequence, like his appearance at the film 's beginning , establishes globe it shattered , its fragments a metaphor for the the film 's setting as his and its action as a description of his will. At the same time it underscores his exclu- film's attempted reconstruction of his life. When Clay sion from the actions and places he has ordained . An exhausted man unsuited for reflection , Mr. Clay drops his seashell , it does not break, but reverberates expresses his will vicariously , and dies when his design is completed . on the wooden floor. Considering Welles' latest film Moreover, although Clay directly or indirectly as autobiography, we see an artist locked into the coerces his actors into their roles , each has his own private reasons for participating . The clerk 's pogrom process of creation, fathering a work of fiction . His background, meek philosophical nature, and feelings toward Virginie incline him to the job of procureur. creation outlives him; when it, his definite goal , is con- Virgin ie , although determined to avoid Clay , is attracted and held by the fabrics and decor of his house . summated , it no longer requires his will , even though These two subsidiary characters are given more his character colors its every feature . 11111111 prominence and personal reality than the director and prime mover of the work of art. Especially in the clerk 's ORSON WELLES FILMOGRAPHY case do private motives add to the story, making its re-enactment more marvelous than the original anec- (1915- ) dote. The sailor's motives, on the other hand, are 1941 always covered by his spatial placement and ·involve- CITIZEN KANE [See following articles] ment in textures ; he is the central figure-and figure 1942 only-of the drama. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS 1946 Though each scene establishes a personal reason THE STRANGER. RKO-Radio; screenplay Anthony for playing a part that is stronger than Clay's coercion , Veiller, John Huston; from a screen· story by Victor these motives generate no lasting conflict. They push Trivas; photography Russell Metty; cast Orson Welles , the characters into the play, give their actions a per- Loretta Young , Edward G. Robinson , Philip Merivale sonal flavor , and end there . Their wills are established , then illuminated slightly-only as much as the art-work and Richard Long. needs for its fulfillment. Every act, reluctant or eager, 1947 is covered with such a load of atmosphere that all THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Columbia; screenplay conflicts of will are subordinated to the progress of Orson Welles ; from the novel If I Die Before I Wake the design-the story's re-enactment and the film 's by Sherwood King ; photography Charles Lawton , Jr.; formal completion. cast Rita Hayworth , Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders and Ted de Corsia This integration into a single design rules THE IMMOR- 1948 TAL STORY 'S visual style , which remains largely on the MACBETH. Republic ; screenplay Orson Welles; from level of immediate technique. Welles pays less attention the play by William Shakespeare; photography John than usual to the film 's dramatic plan , devoting himself L. Russell ; cast Orson Welles , Jeanette Nolan, Dan instead to the minute-by-minute construction of an O'Herlihy, Roddy McDowall and Erskine Sanford . atmosphere . In this atmosphere , the harsh skewing of space that ruled his earlier films is markedly absent. 1952 OTHELLO. United Artists ; screenplay Orson Welles; The film opens with a tight flat-on shot of Macao's from the play by William Shakespeare; photography waterfront; its pastel tones practically deny depth . Even Anchise Brizzi, G.R. Aldo , George Fanto , Obadan the most dynamic, tension-filled deep shots are tem- Troiani , Robert Fusi ; cast Orson Welles, Michael Ma- pered by dominant color values , by Welles ' cutting into cLiammoir, Suzanne Cloutier, Hilton Edwards and Mi- close shots which substitute pure rhythms across the chael Lawrence. screen for a more detached view of the whole situation , 1955 and by the slowness of the action. Numerous mirrors MR. ARKADIN [CONFIDENTIAL REPORT]. Warner reflect the surface quality of people and objects contem- Brothers; screenplay Orson Welles ; from his novel Mr. plated at leisure. The sound track is meticulously assem- Arkadin; photography Jean Bourgoin ; cast Orson bled for a continuously articulated tone quality·. Instead Welles, Paola Mori, Robert Arden , Michael Redgrave of developing conflicts across empty spaces,THE IMMOR- and Akim Tamiroff. TAL STORY fills a single space with infinite harmony . 1958 TOUCH OF EVIL [See following articles] The final shot of the porch-a deep-focus single take showing Clay 's body in the foreground , the clerk to 1962 the right and slightly in back of him , and Virginie in LE PROCES [THE TRIAL]. Paris / Europa ; screenplay the extreme background-is remarkable for its contrast Orson Welles; from the novel by Franz Kafka; pho- with Welles' past use of deep-focus. Despite the char- tography Edmond Richard ; cast Anthony Perkins, acter's separation in space , all tension is subdued by Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau , Romy Schneider and the muted colors, the deliberate pacing of the dialogue, Elsa Martinelli. and the atmosphere of a coming dawn. The texture 1966 is uniform ; the drama has reached completion and CAMPANADAS A MEDIANOCHE [CHIMES AT MID- NIGHT or FALSTAFF]. International Films Espanola; screenplay Orson Welles ; from the plays Richard II , Henry IV (Parts I and II), Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare; photography Ed- mond Richard ; cast John Gielgud , Orson Welles , Keith Baxter, Jeanne Moreau and Norman Rodway. 1968 HISTOIRE IMMORTELLE [THE IMMORTAL STORY] FILM COMMENT 37



David Bordwell, a graduate student in film at the This tandem line of development highlights the sig- University of Iowa , is at work on a critique of Carl- nificance of Eisenstein in film aesthetics . He demon- Theodor Dreyer 's films . strated that montage could assemble the raw data of THE BEST WAY to understand CITIZEN KANE is to stop the Lumiere method in patterns which expressed the worshiping it as a triumph of technique . Too many poetic imagination. Dialectical montage was an admis- people have pretended that Orson Welles was the first sion of the presence of artistic consciousness in a way to use deep-focus, long takes , films-within-films , sound that Griffith 's \" invisible \" cutting was not. The audience montage , and even ceilings on sets when these tech- was made aware of a creator's sensibility juxtaposing niques were child 's play for Griffith , Murnau , Renoir, images to make a specific emotional or intellectual Berkeley, Keaton , Hitchcock, Lang and Clair. To locate point. Eisenstein claimed to control montage of attrac- KANE 'S essential originality in its gimmir.ks cheapens tions \" scientifically\" (sometimes to the point of reduc- ing metaphor to rebus), but after Eisenstein , a less it; once we know how the magician does his tricks , didactic, more associational montage became a domi- the show becomes a charade . KANE is a masterpiece nant poetic style of the avant-garde. not because of its tours de force , brilliant as they are, but beG..lUse of the way those tours de force are con- In its own way, CITIZEN KANE also recapitulates and trolled for larger artistic ends. The glitter of the film 's extends film tradition . On a primary level, it makes style reflects a dark and serious theme ; KANE'S vision sophisticated allusions to several genres: the detective is as rich as its virtuosity. thriller, the romance, the musical, the horror fantasy, the hard-boiled newspaper film , the big-business story, The breadth of that vision remains as impressive the newsreel, and the social-comment film . But KANE today as thirty years ago . CITIZEN KANE straddles great is more than an anthology . Testing the Lumiere-Melies opposites. It IS at once a triumph of social comment tension, Welles, like Eisenstein , gives the cinema a new and a landmark in cinematic surrealism . It treats sub- contemplative density by structuring his material on the jects like love, power, class, money, friendship , and nature of consciousness. What Eisenstein does be- honesty with the seriousness of a European film ; yet tween individual shots , Welles does in the film 's total it never topples into pretentiousness , is at every instant organization . KANE 's great achievement, then, is not as zestful , intelligent, and entertaining as the finest its stylistic heel-clicking , but its rich fusion of an objec- Hollywood pictures. It is both a pointed comedy of tive realism of texture with a subjective realism of struc- manners and a tragedy on a Renaissance scale. It has ture. Welles opens a new area to the cinema because, a Flaubertian finesse of detail and an Elizabethan gran- like Eisenstein , he not only shows what we see, but deur of design. Extroverted and introspective, exuber- he symbolizes the way we see it. ant and solemn , KANE has become an archetypal film as boldly as Kane 's career makes him an archetypal KANE explores the nature of consciousness chiefly figure . \" I am , always have been , and always will be by presenting various points of view on a shifting, only one thing-an American, \" he declares , and the multiplaned world. We enter Kane's consciousness as contradictions in CITIZEN KANE echo those of an entire he dies, before we have even met him; he is less a country . No wonder the film ' s original title was AMERI- character than a stylized image. Immediately, we view CAN : like the nation , the film and its protagonist hold him as a public figure-fascinating but remote. Next contraries in fluid , fascinating suspension . we scrutinize him as a man , seen through the eyes of his wife and his assoc iates , as a reporter traces his To unify such opposites , KANE draws together the life story. Finally, these various perspectives are capped two main strands of cinematic tradition . As both a by a detached , omniscient one . In all .. Kane emerges mechanical re<;:order of events and a biased interpreter as a man-pathetic, grand , contradictory, ultimately of the same events, cinema oscillates between the poles enigmatic . The film expresses an ambiguous reality of objective realism and subjective vision . This tension, through formal devices that stress both the objectivity implicit in every film (and , as Pasolini points out, in of fact and the subjectivity of point of view. It is because every image), is at the heart of CITIZEN KANE. Faithful the best contemporary cinema has turned to the explo- to the integrity of the external world, the film is simulta- ration of such a reality that Kane is, in a sense, the neously expressive of the processes of the imagination. first modern American film . As the ancestor of the works of Godard , Bergman , Fellini , Bresson, and Antonioni, KANE is a monument THE OPENING twelve minutes of CITIZEN KANE cap- in the modern cinema , the cinema of consciousness. sulize its approach and scope. At the very start, Welles uses a basic property of film to establish KANE 'S Since Lumiere, motion pictures have been attracted method and pays homage to the two founts of cine- to the detailed reproduction of external reality. Still ma-the fantasy of Melies and the reportage of Lu- photography, the literary school of Naturalism, and the miere. elaborate theatrical apparatus of the nineteenth century gave impetus to the documentary side of film . Thus The camera glides slowly up a fence. \"No Trespass- most of the films made before 1940 reflect th is sort ing, \" warns a sign. Immediately, the camera proceeds of objective realism in their mise-en-scene. But running to trespass. It is a tingling moment , because the driving parallel to this documentary trend is a subjectivity that force of cinema is to trespass , to relentlessly inves- uses film to transform reality to suit the creator's imagi- tigate, to peel back what conceals and confront what nation. From Melies' theatrical stylization and cinematic reveals . \"The camera,\" writes Pudovkin , \" as it were , sleight-of-hand come the distorted decor of CALIGARI forces itself, ever striving , into the profoundest deeps and the camera experimentation of the European avant- of life; it strives thither to penetrate, whither the average garde. spectator never reaches as he glances casually around FILM COMMENT 39

BITIZEI him . The camera goes deeper. \" Cinema is a perfecting ing house: these parallel the moment in Kane's child- of vision because the eye of the camera, unlike that hood when his parents sent him away with Thatcher. KAlE of the spectator, cannot be held back by fences or That man himself is seen immediately, condemning walls or signs ; if anything interferes with the steady Kane as \" nothing more nor less than a Communist \" progress into the heart of a scene , we know it is an suggesting his distrust of Kane , which is explored lat~r artificial and temporary obstacle . Thus it is this for- in the film . ward-cleaving movement , begun in KANE 'S first scene, Instantly we are shuttled to Union Square, where that is completed at the climatic track-in to the Rosebud a demagogue denounces Kane as a Fascist; and imme- sled . diately Kane himself asserts that he is only an American. The quick linkage of these various opinions of Kane Immediately, the imagery becomes dreamlike: a establishes the method of the film-a comparison of colliding viewpoints, the conflicting judgments that castle, a light snapped out and mysteriously glowing portray Kane and his life. Bernstein 's story, primarily centering on Kane 's journalistic career, is paralleled back to life, a man 's lips, eerily sifting snow, a shattered by the section , \" 1895 to 1941-AII of these he covered , many of these he was .\" We see Kane 's support of the crystal, a tiny cottage. Dissolves languidly link huge Spanish-American war and Roosevelt's campaign, cor- responding to the era presented in Bernstein's story . close-ups ; space is obliterated; the paperweight The newsreel goes on to cover the material in Le- smashes but makes no sound; a nurse enters, distorted land's narrative: Kane's marriage to Emily, his affair with Susan , and his political career. Then we see the in the reflection . We then see the deathbed dark against 1929 closure of several Kane papers and Kane 's trip abroad in 1935; these shots plug the gap between an arched window, and the shot fades out. The se- Leland 's narrative and the final stage of Kane's life. Shots of Xanadu return and suggest Susan's narrative. quence is a reprise of the dream-structure of the Euro- Finally, glimpses of the old hermit on the grounds of his estate evoke the years of decay and loneliness pean avant-garde films , especially CALIGARI, UN CHIEN which Raymond 's story will verify later. The newsreel closes with the Times Square marquee: \"Latest ANDALOU, and BLOOD OF A POET. Welles celebrates the News-Charles Foster Kane is dead.\" magic of Melies and stresses , in both the content and Thus in eight-and-a-half minutes and 121 shots , the entire progress of the ensuing film is mapped out and the juxtaposition of the images, the subjective side of an enormous amount of information is given-about Kane, about the climate of the country, about the meth- cinema. od of the film. Interestingly, this extraordinary device is prefigured in the \"War of the Worlds\" radio play, But suddenly, in one of the most brilliant strokes in which Welles and writer Howard Koch molded their narrative to the specific shape of the radio medi- in film, the \" News on the March\" sequence bursts on um. At the beginning, a conventional music program our eyes, history fills the screen , and we are confronted is interrupted by a bulletin announcing a meteorite 's landing; the music show resumes, to be cut off again with the Lumiere side of cinema, reality apparently by an on-the-scene-report, and so on . This device made the fantastic plot plausible enough to jam highways unmanipulated. The stentorian announcer, the corny with fleeing listeners. Just as \"The War of the Worlds \" mimicked the form of radio broadcasting to persuade sensationalism, the Time style, and the histrionic music its audience of a Martian invasion, \"News on the March\" imitates the uniquely cinematic form of the announce the newsreel's affinity with the popular newsreel to corroborate the existence of Charles Foster \" March of Time \" shorts . (It is still the funniest parody ~ane . of mass-media vulgarity ever filmed.) Furthermore, We accept the newsreel's argument too quickly, though. Welles immediately points out that the Kane since each shot looks like period footage , \"News on of \"News on the March \" is literally only an image. The newsreel's final fanfare is abruptly cut off, the screen the March \" virtually recapitulates the technical devel- goes blank, and we are yanked into the screening room , where we are privy to the shadowy manipulations of opment of cinema from 1890 to 1941 . Scratches on the 1940 media-men. Their talk dispells the hypnotic au- thority of the newsreel, reminding us that facts are not emulsion, jerky movement, jump cuts, overexposures, the truth, that data can be shuffled in any order. One side of us shares the boss 's demand for a key that handheld camerawork, insertion of authentic newsreel will impose a pattern on life; the other side suspects that life will not submit to tidy arrangement. Objective clips, the use of different filmstocks and cameras-each fact invites subjective interpretation, and several such interpretations will be supplied in the rest of the film. frame is historically persuasive . Glimpses of Cham- HENRY JAMES described the structure of The Awk- berlain, Teddy Roosevelt, and Hitler are immediately ward Age as \" a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance around a and indelibly convincing . Thus as the first sequence central object. The central object was my situa- tion . .. and the small rounds represented so many had given us a private, poetic image of Kane, so this distinct lamps ... the function of each of which would be to light with due intensity one of its aspects .. .\" sequence supplies the public, documentary side of him . If we substitute \" character\" for \"situation,\" we have In clashing the two together, Welles immediately es- tablishes the basic tension of KANE (and cinema itself): objective fact versus subjective vision , clearness and superficiality versus obscurity and profundity, newsreel versus dream . By making us question the very nature of experience, this clash of forms and styles produces the tension between reality and imagination that is the film's theme. \" News on the March \" does more, though . Jumping , skittery , grainy, the sequence is the narrative hub of the film , the Argument of the story, simultaneously running through Kane's life and outlining the story we are about to see. It builds our curiosity, plants a handful of clues, establishes the film 's leaping, elliptical form , and, anticipating a major tendency of contemporary afilms , reminds the audience la Brecht's \" A-effect\" that it is an audience and that it is watching a film. Structurally, \"News on the March \" is the whole of CITIZEN KANE in miniature , a subliminal preparation for the narrative to come . It opens, as does the film proper, with shots of Xanadu-this time giving us detailed back- ground information . Abruptly, Kane's death is referred to in the shots of pallbearers , and a montage swiftly reviewing Kane's wealth suggests the summarizing function that the newsreel itself serves in the entire film . Then we are shown two faded photographs, one of Kane beside his mother (hinting at the importance of their relationship) and another of Mrs. Kane's board- 40 SUMMER 1971



aRlaN a good description of the structure of CITIZEN KANE. of his life, yet each takes his estimate of Kane as The film is like one of Susan 's jigsaw puzzles ; each definitive. To Thatcher, Kane is an arrogant smart aleck MWI piece contributes someth ing essential, but some pieces who became \" nothing more nor less than a Commu- are missing. nist. \" Bernstein 's Kane is a man of high principles , with a sharp business sense and a love of the common man. Two parts of KANE'S structure act as summations . Leland 's Kane , only \" in love with himself,\" is a man The first, the \" News on the March \" sequence, maps of no convictions , a betrayer of the masses. Susan sees out the course the film will take. But by the end of Kane (in imagery that recalls Caligari and Svengali) the film , the personality depicted in the newsreel has as a selfish but piteous old man . And Raymond 's story been reduced to mere objects. The second summation, of Kane as a lonely hermit betrays the cold detachment the final scene in Xanadu , balances \" News on the of his own nature . Each narrator judges Kane different- March .\" We already know Kane 's life story, but Welles ly, and each judgment leaves out someth ing essential. gives us a reprise-the piano Susan played , the \" Wel- As T. S. Eliot puts it in The Confidential Clerk: \" There 's come .Home \" loving cup, the statuary , the bed from always someth ing one 's ignorant of / About anyone , the Inquirer office , the stove in Mrs. Kane 's boarding however well one knows him; / And that may be some- house. The camera tracks ominously over these from th ing of the greatest importance.\" the most recent to the most remote, backwards through Kane 's life, to settle on the symbol of his childhood : The effect of seeing so many conflicting assess- the Rosebud Sled . The uninterrupted flow of this ex- ments is to restrain us from forming any opinions of travagant sequence reassembles the life that has been Kane we might take as definitive. As each character presented in so fragmented a fashion . tells his story , the reporter's search for an accurate judgment is taken up by the audience as well. Thomp- Between these two summations the film rests. Told son , whose face we never see , is a surrogate for us; from the viewpoints of five different people , the movie his job-voyeuristic and prying , yet ultimately disinter- uses the thread of the reporter Thompson 's search for ested and detached-is the perfect vehicle for the the meaning of \" Rosebud \" to stitch the stories together. curiosity without consequences that film uniquely gra- The sections are for the most part chronological and tifies. The more we see of Kane , the harder it becomes overlapping ; with the exception of Thatcher, each nar- to judge him ; understanding passes beyond praise or rator begins his story a little before his predecessor condemnation . This complex frame of mind in the audi- ended and carries it past the point from which the next ence is central to much of contemporary cinema, from narrator will begin . Some events , then-such as Susan 's VERTIGO to LA CHINOISE , and is a major source of KANE 'S rise and fall as an opera singer-are shown twice , but originality. Its multiple-narration structure warns us not from different perspectives. to look for conventional signals of recognition and resolution . A film that opens and closes with \" No Tres- KANE 'S multiple-viewpoint form has a simpler but passing \" and that completes its dialogue with \" I don 't startl ing antecedent in William K. Howard 's THE POWER think that any word can explain a man's life\" suggests AND THE GLORY (1933). In that fi 1m, after the burial of that the authors mean no simple judgment can be final. Thomas Garner, a railroad tycoon , his story is told by The portrait of Kane that has emerged is contradictory Henry, his best friend-but not in chronological order. and ambiguous. \" The point of the picture,\" Welles has When Henry's wife makes an accusation against remarked , \" is not so much the solution of the problem Garner, he counters with a remembered incident in as its presentation .\" Garner's defense. As a result, chronology is violated-a scene of Garner ruling his board of directors precedes The problem may have no solution but it does have a scene of young , illiterate Garner working as a track a meaning. The structure of the film , while discouraging layer-and we are shown the play of conflicting opinion easy judgments, leads us down a path of widening surrounding a famous man 's career. Like Kane, Garner insight. The newsreel surveys Kane's public career but is a grand figure , both loved and hated , and Henry does not penetrate to his soul. Thatcher s narrative is qualified to reveal the private side of a public man. offers us our first clue, hinting at matters of love, child- Scripted by Preston Sturges from an original idea, THE hood, and innocence. Bernstein 's story renders Kane POWER AND THE GLORY remains a daring experiment in sympathetically, suggesting that \"Rosebud \" may be the narrative method Welles and Herman Mankiewicz \" something he lost. \" Leland 's narrative prickles with would refine. his urge to puncture Kane 's reputation , but his invective doesn 't obscure a further clue : \" All he ever wanted But Welles brought to KANE his own special interest was love.\" Finally, Susan's narrative demonstrates that in point-of-view. His first, never-realized project for RKO Kane bought love from others because he had no love was to be Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS , in which the of his own to ~ive . Thus we are led , step by step, to narrator Marlow was not seen on screen . It may not confront an ego bent on domination; like Elizabethan be too much to see in this the genesis of the moral tragedy, the film proposes that action becomes an complexity Welles infuses into KANE 'S subjective egotistical drive for power when not informed by love. points-of-view. \" I believe it is necessary to give all the characters their best arguments,\" he has remarked , Love is the key to KANE and Kane . Sent from home \" . .. including those I disagree with .\" as a child , raised by the cold Thatcher, Kane lost forever the love symbo lized by the Rosebud sled and the snow- But KANE should not be seen as a RASHOMoN-like storm paperweight containing that little cottage that exploration of the relativity of fact. At no point does resembles his mother's boarding house. The sled isn't Welles suggest that Kane 's story is being distorted, really the cheap Freud some (including Welles) have wilfully or unconsciously, by any narrator. In fact, we claimed ; although it stands for the affection Kane lost are sometimes made to feel quite differently from the when he was wrenched into Thatcher's world, the sled narrator (as in Thatcher's and Leland 's narratives) and is clearly not to be taken as the \" solution \" of the film . the narrator's presence is so little stressed during each It is only one piece of the jigsaw puzzle, \" something segment that sometimes scenes are included which he couldn 't get or something he !ost. \" The Rosebud the narrators were not present to witness . There is thus sled solves the problem that Thompson was set-\" A no doubt about the facts which are revealed. dying man's last words should explain his life \" -but by the end Thompson realizes that the problem was a false The film's complexity arises from the narrator's con- flicting judgments, their summing-ups of Kane. Each one sees a different side of him at a different stage 42 SUMMER 1971

one: \" I don't thin k that any word can explain a man 's Thatcher's manuscript dissolves to the whiteness of BITIZEN life.\" The appearance of the sled presents another Kane 's winter childhood days. The beloved sled is KANE perspective on Kane , but it doesn 't \" explain \" him. His covered slowly by snow at the end of that winter scene ; inner self remains inviolate (\" No Trespassing \" ) and cut to the whiteness of a package wrapping as a harles enigmatic. The last shots of the sign and of Xanadu receives a new sled from Thatcher. Bernstein tells his restore a grandeur to Kane 's life, a dignity born of the story of a girl dressed in white , with a white PClrasol : essential impenetrability of human character. \" Do you know, I bet there hasn 't been a single month when I haven't thought of that girl. \" Wh ite suggests Part of Kane ' s love problem is bound up with his a lost love and innocence-\" something he couldn 't get mother. Hinted at throughout , this is made explicit in or something he lost\"-but it is also the color of death . the scene in which Kane , having just met Susan, talks The cold whiteness of the marble and alabaster of with her in her room . Here, for the first time in a charac- Xanadu contrasts ironically with the nostalgic warmth ter's narrative, the snowstorm paperweight is seen-on of the whiteness 'of Kane 's childhood , and the women Susan 's dressing table, among faded childhood snap- in his life-Emily and the blonde Susan , both of whom shots. Kane tells her he had been on his way to a are first seen dressed in White-have given way to the warehouse \" in search of my youth ,\" intending to go professional nurse in her white uniform . through his dead mother's belongings: \" You know, sort of a sentimental journey.\" But now, with Susan's reflec- Accompanying the whiteness motif is that of the tion behind the paperweight, he decides to remain here; snowstorm paperweight, first seen as it falls from the all the elements are present for a symbolic transfer hand of the dead Kane and smashes on the floor. The of Kane 's love to this new mother-figure. And when paperweight enters Kane's life in that crucial scene Susan tells him that her desire to sing was really her in Susan 's apartment on the night he first meets her. mother's idea, the transfer is complete Kane quietly Later, on the morning after Susan 's premiere, the pa- agrees that he knows how mothers are. perweight can be glimpsed on the mantlepiece, but no attention is called to it. We see it for the last time Kane seeks love from anyone-Leland , Bernstein, when Kane, after wrecking Susan's room , stumbles up Emily, Susan , \" the people of this state\" -but the film to it , clutches it, and mutters, \" Rosebud .\" Thus the traces a growing-apart, through imagery of separation, paperweight links three crucial scenes in the Kane- as Kane 's life , from the moment he leaves home, be- Susan relationship, in the meantime becoming a symbol comes haunted by lovelessness. His relations with his of Kane'g lost childhood . Kane's treasuring of the pa- wives typify this : the intimacy of the honeymoon supper perweight suggests that it recalls both the night he first yields to the distance of the long breakfast table and, met Susan and the day he lost his innocence. e'!entually, to husband and wife shouting across the halls of Xanadu . The movement is from crowdednE;ss In making a film about a man possessed by an (the busy Inquirer office) to emptiness (the hollow vaults overriding egotism , Welles uses acting and dialogue of Xanadu) ; from cheerfulness (Kane as a young editor) to suggest the legend that the character fabricates to despair (after Susan has left); from true friendship around himself. But he also embodies Kane 's myth in (Bernstein and Leland) through gradually materialistic arresting visual symbols. Xanadu is the primary one : relationships (Emily and Susan) to sheerly mercenary decaying, uncompleted, hollow, filled with objects and companionship (Raymond); from a qu ick tempo (the empty of love, it embodies the grandeur and tragic shortSightedness of Kane 's vision . Its name suggests liveliness of the Inquirer's crlJsades) to a funereal one he is \" Kubla-Kane \"; Xanadu is indeed \" a sunny plea- (the picnic cortege and Kane 's final , deadened walk); sure dome with caves of ice.\" Kubla Khan and CITIZEN from self-sacrifice to selfishness; from the brash open- KANE are both about the recreation of reality by the ness of youth to the cancerous privacy of \" No Tres- Imagination; like Coleridge's narrator, Kane tries to passing \"; from intimate joking with Leland to shouts incarnate his vision of \" a damsel with a dulcimer.\" The in a mausoleum and long silences before a huge fire- process works for Coleridge and Welles, and the result place . Kane 's degeneration parallels these shifts in is \" a miracle of rare device \"; it fails for Kane , and \" the relationships : his contacts with people f.lough off in pool becomes a mirror.\" proportion to the accumUlation of his material goods until, solitary and friendless , only cherishing a cheap Thus the vault of mirrors that encases the aged Kane at the end of the film is the culmination of the K-images snowstorm paperweight, he is engulfed by infinite ex- which enclose him throughout. A K surmounts the gates of Xanadu , and is carved in ice at the Inquirer party, tensions of his ego. wrought in metal as a stickpin , sewn in gilt monogram In the central portion of CITIZEN KANE, then , the on a bathrobe, and stitched into campaign ribbons. Even Kane 's son is seen only as a miniature version various points-of-view balance the stream-of-con- of his father. The name, in itSelf harsh, crisp, and sciousness of the opening and the detachment of powerful , is constantly pounding at the spectator, from \" News on the March .\" Charles Foster Kane is observed the first sight of the screen-filling title to the final shot from various angles, making the film more kaleidoscopic of Xanadu with the K-gate looming in the foreground . portrait than straightforward plot. But the matter is Welles utilizes every chance to flood the screen with complicated because Kane's character changes with a picture of a man filled with his own importance. time, as does that of each narrator. Thus the clash of fact and bias, objectivity and prejudic\"!, interweaving Welles also uses musical allusions and motifs to through the history of a personality, creates a world make thematic points. For example, Susan's singing that is nearly as complex as reality and yet as unified \" Una voce poco fa \" from The Barber of Seville eco- as great art. nomically evokes the play's themes of youth imprisoned by age and of the abuse of personal authority. Another THAT COMPLEXITY and unity are achieved in large example is the recurring tune , \" It Can 't Be Love .\" Sung part by the use of symbolic motifs, which both rein- at Kane 's Everglades picnic, its melody is heard earlier force the realism of the milieu and accent the subjective as a mournful piano version in the two scenes with flow of the narrative. Susan at the nightclub. The repetition ironically links three bleak scenes. Whiteness, for instance, takes on strong symbolic associations. From the beginning, the white window One could trace other motifs: Bernstein in front of of Kane 's castle is a focal point toward which our eye is relentlessly drawn. The white of the window dissolves to the snow in the paperweight. Later, the white of FILM COMMENT 43

a small fireplace over which hangs a portrait of Kane- his mistress or fight his opponent . Welles ' arrangement Kan e in front of a larger fireplace on the morning after of actors in the frame and his timing of the cuts brilliantly Susan's premiere-K ane in front of the colossal fire- articulate the drama of the scene. The material seems plac e at Xan adu ; the repeated associations of Susan to be objectively observed (no close-ups or first-person and rain ; the waltz music accompanying Kane 's return points-of-view), but the structure of each shot and the from Europe whi c h is heard again , mockingly , in the pacing of the editing inject subjective attitudes. breakfast-table sequence; the movement from the chil- liness of the opening to the blazing furnace of the finale . Welles can also use the moving camera to efface Each detail , entirely realistic in itself, gathers meaning the director's controlling hand by choreographing the and force as a symbol. material in fluid , unobtrusive patterns . Take , for in- stance , the scene in which the boy Charles is sent from By NOW it should be clear that KANE ' S stylistic pyro- home. (1) In long-shot we see the boy playing in the technics are not just meaningless virtuosity, but snow. (2) A snowball hits the sign over the porch. (3) rather aural and pictorial expressions of the tension The camera travels back from the boy in the snow, between reality and imagination at the heart of the film . through the window as his mother closes it, and back Objectively, the wide-angle lens renders every plane from her, Thatcher, and Mr. Kane as they advance to of a shot , from the nearest to the most distant, in sharp the desk, where the papers are read and signed; the focus . Thus there is no stressing of one image by camera then follows them back to the window. (4) We throwing its context out of focus ; ambiguity increases are now outside the window, and after the camera when all characters and objects are equal in definition . travels back to the snowman and Charles, the scuffle As Andre Bazin puts it, \" The uncertainty in which we between the boy and Thatcher takes place in the same find ourselves as to the spiritual key or interpretation shot. (5) A close-up of Charles and his mother closes we should put on the film is built into the very design the scene . In a sequence of several minutes , we have of the image.\" There are scarcely a dozen true close- five shots, two of negligible length. Yet the shots seem ups in the film , and most appear at the very beginning , realistically observed because Welles has intricately as an abstract procession of images which contrasts moved his actors and his camera; despite the complex- with the spatial authenticity of the rest of the film . ity of the set-ups , we gain a sense of a reality-actual, Montage , which stresses the ju xtaposition of images unmanipulated , all of a piece. more than the images themselves, always implies the shaping hand of a creator, but the compression of Yet the moving camera can suggest the drift of multiple meanings into one shot can seem to efface subjective interest too, because it is also a tool of the director, giving the illusion of un arranged reality. discovery. Again and again the camera probes like an Thus the compositional detachment of each shot cor- inquisitive reporter, nosing relentlessly to the center roborates the film 's pull toward realism. of a scene, gradually stripping away extraneous dra- matic matter. Welles' tracking shots imitate the process Keeping all the action in the frame may suggest a of investigation itself-a gradual narrowing of the field kind of objectivity, but camera angle belies the de- of inq uiry-so that the progress inward, toward the heart tachment by expressing attitudes toward the action. of a mystery, becomes the characteristic camera For instance, when Kane is a child , the viewpoint is movement. The opening dissolves which draw us usually that of the adult looking down . But as Kane 's deeper into Xanadu ; the slow dolly up to the flashing career progresses , he is often shot from an increasingly \"EI Rancho \" roof sign and then between the letters low angle, not only to indicate his growing power but to the skylight; the imperceptible closing in on Bernstein also to isolate him against his background as he be- as he begins his narrative; the diagonal descent to comes more and more lonely. In Xanadu , though , Kane Susan and Kane meeting on the street; the sudden, is again seen from a high angle which points out his curious rush to Susan's door when Kane shuts it; the smallness within the cavernous crypt he has erected. traveling shot over the heads of the audience at Kane's Within the objectivity of the single frame, Welles' angles speech ; the implacable track to Kane and Emily stand- (unlike , say, Hawks') suggest subjective bias and ing at the door of Susan 's house-all these are prep- point-of-view. arations for the portentous tracking shots through the costly rubbish of Xanadu , coasting slowly over Kane's Welles ' mise-en-scene modulates the drama's flow belongings to settle on the Rosebud sled-the answer with great subtlety, using angle to indicate patterns of to the quest. domination. Recall the climactic scene when Kane confronts Boss Jim Gettys in Susan 's apartment. Gettys ' Welles ' use of sound is indebted, intentionally or entrance is as thunderous as a kettledrum roll: Kane , not, to Lang 's M and Clair's A NOUS LA LlBERTE. In the Emily , and Susan are on the staircase , light is pouring latter film, a policeman outdoors saying, \" We must out of the doorway, and quietly Gettys' silhouette steps all- \" cuts to a teacher in a classroom saying , \" -work.\" into the shot; for once someone has the upper hand Welles called these \" lightning mixes,\" in which the over Kane; Nemesis has caught up with the hero. (In sound continues (although from a different source) Welles ' MACBETH, Macduff storms out of a smoking while the scene cuts or dissolves to a new locale and beam of light on a similar mission.) Inside Susan's time . A shot of Susan at the piano in her shabby bedroom , the angles crisply build the tension . First, a rooming house dissolves to a shot of her, much better- shot frames Emily in the foreground , Susan in the dressed, at a finer piano in a more elegant house, while middle ground, and Gettys and Kane facing each other she continues to play the same piece. Kane's applause deep in the shot. But as Gettys explains the power he immediately dissolves to a crowd's applause of Leland 's has over Kane, he advances to the foreground, dwarf- harangue. Thatcher says to the child Kane, \" Merry ing his rival ; Emily says that apparently Kane's decision Christmas, Charles,\" the boy answers, \" Merry Christ- has been made for him ; Kane, in the distance, seems mas-\" and the story leaps ahead seventeen years to overpowered by circumstance. But when Kane decides Thatcher saying, \" And a Happy New Year.\" Leland's to assert his will , the shot cuts to an opposite angle: promise to a street crowd that \" Charles Foster Kane ... entered upon this campaign-\" cuts to Kane IIITIZEI he dominates the foreground , and Gettys, Susan, and himself in a huge auditorium bellowing , \" -with one Emily taper off into the background. Then, a head-on purpose only ...\" Scenes Eisenstein would have linked KAlE shot, with Kane in the center, Susan on the left and by visual metaphor Welles links by the soundtrack; Gettys on the right, capsulizes his choice: he can save 44 SUMMER 1971



IIITIZEN Eisenstein would have announced the presence of a personal life (Emily or Susan , which will he choose?) KANE manipulating directorial intelligence, while Welles sug- and of his political career (the love of \" the people \" gests the interlocked imagery of mental-association of the love of his family and mistress?). Surprisingly, processes. Gettys turns out to be more sensitive and humane than Kane . He was led to blackmail Kane by the newspaper We should not overlook Welles' celebrated tours de cartoons Kane printed of him, which humiliated him force, those moments of sheer cinematic pluck that before his children and , significantly, his mother. Unlike everyone cherishes in KANE . When Kane , Leland , and Kane , Gettys distinguishes between attacking a man Bernstein peer in the Chronicle window, the camera personally and attacking him politically; thus he gives moves up to the picture of the Chronicle staff until it Kane a chance ( \" more of a chance than he 'd give me \" ) fills the screen ; Kane 's voice says, \" Six years ago I to avoid personal embarrassment. Gettys assumes that looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspaper Kane places the same value on personal relations that staff ... \" and he strides out in front of the same men , he does. posed for an identical picture, a flashbulb explodes, and we are at the Inquirer party . Another famous set- He is wrong . Up till now Kane has always defined piece is the breakfast-table sequence , in which the himself by telling others what to do, by bossing Mr. deterioration of Kane 's marriage is traced in a number Carter, Leland, Bernstein, Emily, and Susan . Now mo- of brief scenes linked by a whirling effect (swish pans rality demands that Kane give in and for once define over the windows of the Inquirer building). The music himself by placing others' welfare above his own . But pulsates in the background , rising in tension , and the Kane cannot relinquish the role of an autonomous mounting pace of the cutting gives impetus to the final power: \" There's only one person who's going to decide surprises: Mrs. Kane reading the Chronicle and the what I' m going to do, and that's me. \" It is the voice length of the breakfast table. of the bully, but also that of the tragic hero. By sacrific- ing others to his delusion of moral onmipotence, Kane These , then , are the techniques Welles drew on in commits his energy to an idea of himself that has KANE . EXCiting in themselves, they coalesce into a uni- become divorced from human values. How can he fied style by expressing the film 's juxtaposition of reality accept \" the love of the people of this state\" when he and imagination. The spatial and temporal unity of the will not show love for his family and mistress? This deep-focus, the simultaneous dialogue, the reflections refusal of imagination to recognize reality constitutes and chiaroscuro, the detached use of the moving cam- tragic recklessness, but Kane's punishment brings no era, the intrusion of sounds from outside the frame-all recognition . Gettys is prophetic : \" You 're gonna need increase the objectively realistic effect. These are cor- more than one lesson, and you 're gonna get more than relatives for the way we seem to see and hear in life. one lesson.\" The inquisitive camera movements , the angled com- positions, the \"lightning mixes\" of sound and image- After his defeat at the polls, Kane's career declines. these suggest subjective attitudes and the workings His image shattered , he constructs a new one : Susan 's of narrators' memories. They are stylistic equivalents singing career. He announces, \" We 're going to be a for the way we seem to channel our thoughts in life. great opera star\" ; as his alter ego, she may find the The cinematic traditions of Lumiere and Melies become public acclaim in art that he couldn 't find in politics. surrogates for an epistemological tension. Here are the At the opera , Kane in the balcony dwarfs the tiny Susan facts; here are subjective interpretations. Alone, neither onstage like a harsh god overseeing his creation. From has value. Can we then ever know \" the\" truth? Thomp- Singing lesson to opera rehearsal , Susan is not an son's final remark \" I don't think any word can explain identity in her own right, only an extension of himself. a man 's life,\" the enigma of the Rosebud sled, \" No But again Kane fails to win the love of \"the people\"; Trespassing,\" the black smoke drifting into a gray the public 's response to Susan 's premiere is symbolized sky-these , finally, unmistakably, convey the film's by the judicious grimace of the stagehand high in the answer. flies . So, when Susan attempts suicide , Kane must change his persona again . AT BOTTOM , the film 's reality / imagination tension radiates from the hero's own nature. CITIZEN KANE The next image Kane constructs is on a mammoth is a tragedy on Marlovian lines, the story of the rise scale. He builds Xanadu , a miniature world , which he and fall of an overreacher. Like Tamburlaine and Faus- stocks with every kind of animal. This parody of God's tus, Kane dares to test the limits of mortal power; like act of creation gives a blasphemous dimension to them , he fabricates endless personae which he takes Faustus-Kane 's galactic vision of power. Yet in the end as identical with his true self; and , like them , he is a this god is swallowed up by his own universe. Since victim of the egotism of his own imagination. he can breathe no life into his creations, he gradually becomes an object like them . Appropriately , the last Up to a point, Kane ' s career rises steadily. He is time we see Kane is as an image: a zombie moving a rich, successful publisher, he has married well, he stiffly against an endlessly receding tunnel of mirrors , has a chance to become governor. But his flaw 'is that mocking duplicCltions of his own self-absorption . Dying, he sees love solely in terms of power. His friends, he can only clutch the icon of love and innocence: Leland and Bernstein, are also his employees; his wife his last moment becomes a final assertion of imagina- Emily is the President's niece. He expands his idea tion in the face of the ultimate reality of death. of love to include \" the people,\" his aspiration to public office is a confirmation of his confusion of love with KANE MAY NOT be able to reconcile the tragic dis- power. Thus his liaison with Susan (whom he calls cord between his inner vision and the outer world , \" a cross-section of the American public\" ) represents but Welles ' creative imagination is larger than Kane's the pathetic side of his desire, the need for affection sterile one. The conflicts we noted at the start-between which his mother aroused and which Emily could not social realism and surrealism, tragic seriousness and gratify. Ironically, it is this weakness which undoes him, comic high spirits, rich detail and complex superstruc- for in the end , Kane's immense vision of love as power ture-are contained by Welles ' broad vision of aspira- falls tragically short of basic humanity. tion and waste. The turning point of Kane's life is the confrontation To my way of thinking, that vision was not permitted with Gettys in Susan 's room. It is the climax of his utmost scope again until 1965, when Welles completed 46 SUMMER 1971

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. He has called Falstaff \"the most the coronation and Hal's repudiation of him, in which aRsal completely good man in all drama, \" but the film 's hero is far from the sentimentalized sack of guts of a (happily, angle shots have expressed the new king 's sovereignty WELLES dying) critical tradition . Like Kane , Falstaff is admirable because of his appetite and his imagination, but his over his former companion , Falstaff leaves Shallow, fall is observed with no less objectivity. Welles (and Shakespeare) have it both ways: Falstaff is both the walking off into a distant corridor-like Kane , dwarfed Pan of mythology and the Vice of the morality plays, and Prince Hal may love him but he must reject him. by real forces his imagination could not control. CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT is as morally complex as CITIZEN Welles ' imagination , though , is large enough to make KANE , but here cinematic traditions are not analogues for epistemological modes. CHIMES ' style and form are great art of his heroes' defeats. Joseph McBride has translucent, like THE IMMORTAL STORY 'S, but without that later effort's crude parody of the reality / imagination argued that Hal's rejection of Falstaff and his declara- theme. In CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, Welles concentrates straightforwardly on a set of characters symbolizing tion of war with France label him a villain and Falstaff the alternatives surrounding the problem which ob- sessed Kane: the connection between personal and a victim . This underestimates Welles ' irony. Hal is a political power. practical politician. Like Kane, he must eventually Prince Hal must choose among three ways of life- that of king , warrior, and roisterer-as represented by choose between political and personal virtue, but (more his father King Henry IV, his distorted mirror-image Hotspur, and his adopted father Falstaff. Henry, though sensitively than Kane), Hal struggles to keep them regal and commanding , struck in a chilly shaft of light that suggests divine authority , is nonetheless aloof and distinct, publicly humiliating Falstaff only to aid him solitary , entombed in cold gray stone . Hotspur is vigor- ous and manly, but also crude, hotheaded, and notably privately later. Hal will mock him with Poins, but he solitary . Falstaff is a vulgar buffoon , but he inhabits a glowing world of comradely merrymaking. The three will hide him when the king 's men come . He will bur- worlds rotate on the same axis : Falstaff lives by robbing, Henry has usurped the throne, and Hotspur seeks to lesque him before the tavern crowd , but he will give steal the crown from Henry. By a music motif (Henry summons musicians to salve his illness, Hotspur's him a post in his army. And even after the rebuff at trumpeters blast pompously and phallically while he ignores the blandishments of his lovely wife , and Fal- the coronation, Hal privately (in an inserted text from staff calls for music to ease his melancholy), Welles suggests that each way of life has become sterile. The Henry V that originally did not refer to Falstaff) orders whole of medieval England-king, fighter, and de- classe-is sick, barren, dying. his counselors to \"enlarge\" (!) Falstaff: \" If little faults , Hal, man of the Renaissance , becomes almost cyni- proceeding on distemper / Shall not be winked at, how cally adept in all three worlds . He bests Falstaff at thieving and lying ; he wins his father 's respect by stately shall we stretch our eye/ When capital crimes, chewed , eloquence ; and he vanquishes Hotspur in battle. Su- preme in all three arenas , Hal becomes their synthesis. swallowed, and digested / Appear before us?\" He Like the sun he compares himself to, he is a source of the power that will revivify England . tempers the inevitable wickedness of his repudiation Still , he cannot live permanently divided. He must with a measure of regal mercy. Welles sees public choose among the court, the battlefield, and the tavern. Since possessing the crown permits him to legislate ethical problems as private ones writ large, yet between his wisdom in the other areas , he must sooner or later renounce his dissolute life, which comes down to re- the two is an irreconcilable tragic tension. Nym summa- nouncing Falstaff. Hal 's \" I know you all \" speech is a soliloquy in the original play , but Welles makes it Hal's rizes the complexity of the problem as Falstaff lies direct warning to Falstaff. Henceforth , fat Jack should expect to be abandoned . And when , in the comic dying : \" The King is a good King . But it must be as crowning scene at the Boar's Head , Falstaff begs not to be forgotten-\"Banish plump Jack and banish all . it may.\" the world \" -Prince Hal reminds him of his fate in a reply that reverberates like a thunderclap: \" I do, I will. \" Thus the final words from Holinshed, \" ... and so Since CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT , like KANE, is about per- human withal that he left no offence unpunished, nor sonal and political authority, Welles again creates the drama of power within the shot by means of camera friendship unrewarded,\" reverberating over the shot angle. When , at Justice Shallow's house, Falstaff has been meditating on his death , a deep shot shows Fal- of Falstaff's coffin , constitute not a sarcastic dig but staff sitting stonily in the distance, for once positively miniscule. Pistol bursts in to announce Henry's death , a sublime irony. CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, like CITIZEN KANE , and suddenly Falstaff lumbers into the foreground, filling the frame , towering like a colossus as he gasps , shows both sides-public good and private misery, \"What? . .. Is the old king-dead? \" The shot depicts his vision of the power he has dreamed of. But after heroic ambition and tragic necessity, pragmatic reality and alluring imagination-sympathizing with each but, finally , presenting both honestly. The irony is the richest and most basic one of man 's experience, so vast that usually we must split it into tragedy and comedy . That Welles art is able to serenely contain and transcend ~oth might be the final estimate of his genius . 11111111 CITIZEN KANE 1941, RKO-Radio, 119 minutes. producer Orson Welles for Mercury Productions; original screenplay Herman J. Mankiewicz; photography Gregg Toland; art direction Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson ; editing Robert Wise , Mark Robson ; special effects Vernon L. Walker; music Bernard Herrmann. CAST Joseph Cotten Jedediah Leland Dorothy Comingore Susan Alexander Kane Everett Sloane Mr. Bernstein George Coulouris Walter Parks Thatcher Ray Collins Jim Gettys Ruth Warrick Emily Norton Kane Erskine Sanford Mr. Carter William Alland Thompson I newsreel narrator Agnes Moorehead Kane 's mother Paul Stewart Raymond Philip Van Zandt Rawlston, the newsreel editor Fortunio Bonanova Signor Matiste Gus Schilling John, headwaiter at the EI Rancho Buddy Swann Kane, aged 8 Harry Shannon Kane 's father Sonny Bupp Kane 's son Orson Welles Charles Foster Kane FILM COMMENT 47

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Agnes Moorehead. photo : Cinemabilia THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. Agnes Moorehead and Tim Holt. photo: Cinemabilia 48 SUMMER 1971