The Big Screen (11 page)

Actors will tell you that, no matter the evil in a role, they have to like their characters to do a good job. We honor what they say, and their experience, but that concession is a first step toward the possibility that we are all of us always acting out our selves, presenting ourselves in everyday life, and are forever unreliable or promiscuous. So we may like or dislike people, but we can never be sure of them. This is an irreversible shift in the departure from humanity or humanism, for it is not a matter of calculated deception so much as an organic, helpless pretending: I pretend, therefore I am. It is not too far from Jean Renoir's feeling that everyone has his or her reasons—or their actor's sense of a role. That thought from
La Règle du Jeu
(1939) is often considered a sign of Renoir's generosity or openness. But it also conveys an epistemological solitude and the way existence has become performance.

These days, with censorship nearly exhausted, the process on film has gone a lot further. In
The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), it is made clear enough for most tastes what Hannibal Lecter does to his victims. At the same time, his character becomes so helpful to the heroine Clarice (Jodie Foster), that a fragrance of attraction develops between them. Only a few years later, in the sequel,
Hannibal
(2001), there was what amounted to a love story between Lecter and the new Clarice (Julianne Moore). In addition, though playing no more than a supporting part in
The Silence of the Lambs
, Anthony Hopkins had won the Oscar while becoming a fond household bogeyman whom many of us took pleasure in imitating.

By then, Hopkins was so big as a star or versatile enough as an actor to resist the threat of typecasting. Peter Lorre was not so lucky.
M
was an international sensation in 1931. It established Lorre and effectively ended his theatrical career. But it also locked him into sinister or horrific parts. Like many, he left Europe in the early 1930s and kept busy in America. He had notable small roles (in
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca
), but eight times he had to play the Japanese detective Mr. Moto. He was steadily more dismayed by the way his range as an actor had shrunk; his reputation and his offers were always under the shadow of Hans Beckert. Lang never worked with him again.

Do we understand child killers better because of
M
? Or have we only picked up a taboo thrill? Did this celebrated film introduce a line of films about psychopaths—fodder for great acting, perhaps, but steps in a process whereby society was expected to digest unspeakable actions? Perhaps there is no understanding of that sort of criminal process? Perhaps the attempt to assess it only makes it seem more accessible or “normal”? I don't place any reservations on the estimate of
M
as a major work, but who can deny that it helped open up the possibility of less-austere films about chronic killers where spilled blood and the lifelike illusion of slaughter run wild? In
Dexter
, we are coming up on another season for a TV show about a serial killer (who also works to catch killers).

Lang's pessimism is signaled in his every detail and nuance, but there are now so many films about psychotics that revel in and exploit the inexplicable violence. Lang's big lie, I think, was in denying his own appetite for murderousness and film's impassive but mounting ease with it.

If you look at the new sensations of the last 120 years, their impact on us has been so drastic, exhilarating, or dangerous you can see why the state has intervened with measures of control—I'm thinking of drugs, the television airwaves, the automobile and the highways, guns and gambling. You might add compulsory education, once regarded with awe and hope. All those invasions were regulated until some of us decided regulation was alien to liberty. But the movie, in America, was left to the marketplace and free enterprise. Not that that protected the people who owned and ran the film business from fearful anticipation of government intervention.

The history of Hollywood in the 1920s is one of a rapid economic expansion coupled with wild behavior on the part of some filmmakers that led to hurried self-imposed regulation. Better have Will Hays and his code, an Academy and its prizes, than government licensing. To this day in the United States, movies are rated as G, PG, R, and NC-17, and theaters are expected to enforce those “rules.” But they are not laws, and you may have noticed that the caring system lets you take a three-year-old to
The Exorcist
,
Psycho
, or
The Silence of the Lambs
, so long as the child stays quiet. The child is said to be “with” you, or in your care—yet we all know how alone we are in the dark.

You might see that “care” as a cover for box office opportunism. It is an odd world we live in, however. If we discovered that at school our children were being taught pornography or murder, there would be outrage; there are already outcries over novels that some regard as classics. Yet on many cable packages, a home (to use that precious word) has access to pornography on some channels, after 10:00 p.m. or so, but to massive violence at any time of day. And to mindlessness and roaring advertisements always. This is taken as an American choice. It is also our decision to keep deadly weapons, loaded or unloaded, in the house against that day when the militia calls. We are on treacherous ground when it comes to care.

So it's hardly a surprise that anything as volatile and potent as the movies might have been regarded as a primed bomb in some countries. Nowhere was that pressure more exciting than in Russia, a nation of uneducated millions and an elite culture that suddenly decided “everyone” was worthy of being enlightened and moved and raised to the highest levels of citizenry.

We know very little of whether Anton Chekhov saw or was impressed by movies; he died in 1904. But he helps lead the way for them. I don't refer simply to the personal and social depths in his plays, but to their physicality. The stage notes to
Uncle Vanya
(first produced in 1899) begin, “A garden. Part of a house with a terrace can be seen. There is a table laid for tea under an old poplar in the avenue. Garden seats and chairs; on one of them lies a guitar. Not far from the table there is a swing. It is between two and three o'clock in the afternoon. The sky is overcast.” The stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky did his best with time of day and the cast of the light, just as he fashioned a naturalistic acting style that would affect the Actors Studio in New York more than forty years later, and the movies that grew out of it. But just to read Chekhov's stage direction is to anticipate Jean Renoir as a fit director for
Uncle Vanya
. That overcast was decades ahead of the blast of early movie light.

It was once a part of the Bolshevik history of cinema that nothing much happened in Russia before 1917. That was not so. Filmgoing seems to have been confined to the larger cities, but Yakov Protazanov (1881–1945) was a significant director in the decade before the Revolution. He made several good films in the era of D. W. Griffith's feature films, notably a version of Pushkin's
The Queen of Spades
(1916), with rich period sets, intense acting, and the influence of Scandinavian cinema. Protazanov absented himself from Russia at the moment of revolution, and for several years thereafter, which did not endear him to the new regime. Still, his
Aelita
(1924) is a quirky science-fiction picture, with dazzling constructivist sets and Yulia Solntseva (the wife of director Alexander Dovzhenko) playing the Queen of Mars.

The striking quality in
Aelita
is the bold, innocent, and amused juxtaposition of alien worlds—the contemporary Russia, shot largely in real places, with air, light, space, and the passing parade of an actual city; and the Mars that is imagined and furnished through elaborate, beautiful, but comically stylized sets and costumes. (It's like an American and a German picture of the time thrust together.) And it is the warring energy of the two styles that is most entertaining. In the Russian scenes, we meet a space engineer and his wife. But on Mars, Queen Aelita has a way of spying on Earth (and falling in love with the engineer)—a magical viewing machine—that never disturbs the reckless ultramodern style of Mars, a place where the slave population has paper bags on their heads to signal anonymity, while Aelita wears a Deco headdress of erect tendrils.

I don't mean to claim
Aelita
as a great lost film, but it is inventive and fun, absorbed in the wonder of film and its proximity to experimental theater, and alert to presence, performance, and the spaces between people. What does that mean? Two-shots, group shots, depth of vision. The film's arty design is hard to attribute now. But one name figures in costumes and set design: Alexandra Exter. We know enough about her to feel her sophistication: she studied in Paris in 1907–8, where she knew Picasso and Braque. By 1918–20 she led a production studio in Kiev that trained several future directors, and from 1921 to 1924 she was teaching in Moscow. But once
Aelita
was done, she moved to Paris, where she was a teacher and a painter until her death in 1949. She apparently never worked on another movie, but
Aelita
is sufficient proof of her talent, her cosmopolitan sensibility, and her influence. In other words, there was a tradition in Russia, essentially pre-Revolution, that thrived on the proximity of theater and film and the chances it provided for avant-garde experiment.

The thing to notice here is an alternative history to the Bolshevik orthodoxy that claimed cinema as its special child. There was production in Russia before 1917, albeit influenced by German and Scandinavian companies, with a small, sophisticated audience. Mikhail Bulgakov was writing satires for the Moscow Art Theatre. By the early 1920s, Vladimir Nabokov was in Germany, interested in seeing and writing for films, and especially delighted by the inadvertent follies of American movies—but put off by their crushing sincerity. Nabokov is an instructive case, for he shows an early appreciation of comic absurdity (as opposed to dramatic earnestness) in cinema. One could add Rouben Mamoulian (born in Tiflis in 1897), a student at the Moscow Art Theatre who was working in London and America by the early 1920s; Lewis Milestone (born in the Ukraine in 1895), educated at the University of Ghent, and in America by 1919; and Richard Boleslawski (born in Russian-controlled Poland in 1889), a director in Hollywood. Those men would make such films as
The Mark of Zorro
(1940) and
Silk Stockings
(1956),
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930), and the Marlon Brando
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1962),
Rasputin and the Empress
(1932), and
The Garden of Allah
(1936).

At other levels, the company of film people who left Russia includes not just Akim Tamiroff, Gregory Ratoff, and Maria Ouspenskaya, but also Lewis J. Selznick and Louis B. Mayer, Al Jolson and Alla Nazimova, Irving Berlin and Dimitri Tiomkin. The first-generation children of Russia in American show business could include David O. Selznick, George Gershwin, and Kirk Douglas—feel that energy.

With that as introduction, we now turn to the famous directors of the Revolution and what Stanley Kauffmann (as late as 1973) was ready to regard as a moment akin to Elizabethan drama or Italian Renaissance painting: “A new revolutionary state was born as a new revolutionary art emerged, and that combination brought forth at least three superb creators in the new art: Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, and—the most important because the most influential—Sergei M. Eisenstein.”

The early 1920s was an era of intense youthful excitement over the power of the new wonder—half mechanical, half dreamy—the movies. That statement could as easily fit Hollywood after 1917 as it could the Soviet Union in the same period. But whereas in California the movies were a new business, a fast way of becoming rich and famous, and an unplanned shift in the imaginary life of the public, in Russia the stress on business was nothing compared with designs for a new world. But the assertions of contemporary history are less potent than what the future makes of them. Maybe the most profound changes in society actually occurred in the conservative America, where no one bothered much to talk or think about revolutionary art, politics, or history.

This realization—far more candid and historical than cynical or dismayed—is not to minimize the outpouring of new creative energy in Russia after 1917. Nor does it deny the stimulation that came from the new state idealists or the opportunity of film to inform and unite the far-flung but barely educated people of the new Soviet Union. Still, it is our duty to observe what actually happened as much as what people hoped for.

Consider Pudovkin first. He was born in Penza in central Russia in 1893 and studied chemistry at the University of Moscow before being drafted into the Russian army. But he was wounded in 1915 and became a prisoner of the Germans for nearly three years, a time in which he learned several other languages. After the war, he was about to start working in a chemical plant when he happened to see D. W. Griffith's film
Intolerance
.

This was hardly a casual event. In the Russia of 1917 onward there was a serious shortage of films and film stock. The Revolution halted the regular distribution business, but the authorities were so impressed by
Intolerance
that they took steps to circulate the picture as widely as possible. Indeed, it did better in Russia than it ever had in the United States. Opening in September 1916,
Intolerance
was a grandiose survey of history, sharpened by Griffith's open wounds at the adverse commentary on
The Birth of a Nation
and its racism. So it was two reels longer than the Civil War picture, and it cross-cut from four narratives: a Babylonian story (that required the construction of the biggest sets yet built in Los Angeles); a Judean story, involving Christ; a French story attached to the massacre of the Huguenots in 1572; and the Modern Story, about two lovers (Mae Marsh and Robert Harron) threatened by the execution of the man on wrongful charges of murder.

Intolerance
had cost $2 million—twenty times the cost of
The Birth of a Nation
. But whereas the first film exceeded anyone's hopes at the box office,
Intolerance
got fine reviews and a big initial audience, and then collapsed. Why did it fail? Perhaps because the audience felt no need for four stories saying the same thing—it seemed too close to a history lesson—and because it became confused and frustrated by the cross-cutting from one story to another. (Entertainment films seldom interrupt their own mood.) Some have suggested that the Modern Story released on its own would have been a hit: it is a gripping melodrama with exceptional performances (notably from Miriam Cooper as a fallen woman). In the Babylonian sequence, the set is stunning, but Griffith hardly knew what to do with it beyond having a camera in a balloon hover overhead. Dramatic events did not take place there. It did not help that the film had a recurring motif: Lillian Gish rocking the cradle of history (based on lines from Walt Whitman). Long ago, that image seemed laughable and a measure of Griffith's Victorian attitudes. But the cradle of history meant so much more in the Russia of 1917–20.

The new regime loved the didactic stress in
Intolerance
and the innocent faith in the comparability of all situations in history. More than that, it fell upon the process of cross-cutting and the dynamic of suggestion or inference that came from it, and the unproven hope that this could be educational for the masses. Of course, in history there is little evidence that the masses have gone to the movies to be educated, though there is every possibility that, blind to formal education, they are shaped by the light in the dark in ways they hardly appreciate.

If that realization requires irony, or humor, neither was in great supply in the desperate early days of the Russian Revolution. Lenin had told his cultural commissar, Anatoly Lunacharsky, that “for us film is the most important art.” Some kino enthusiasts may have been encouraged by that; others heard it as a warning. For it meant that, at the outset, film was in danger of being appropriated for education, propaganda, or thought control. So it was part of the revolutionary zeal that, very early on, a national film school was established, driven by the need to use film “properly.” Pudovkin was one of the students at that school, thrilled by the teaching of Lev Kuleshov.

Though the vital teacher at the school, Kuleshov was actually younger than Pudovkin. He had been born in Tambov in 1899, and as a teenager he was filming newsreels of the war. He, too, was inspired by the cross-cutting of
Intolerance
, and was prompted to construct an early theory about editing. There was a reason for this. At most film schools the world has ever known, the kids cannot wait to shoot film—of their girl friends, of their city, their dogs, their stories. They are captivated by the fun and the slippery trick of turning life into a screened thing. But at the Moscow school, this could not be indulged—because of the shortage of film stock. So Kuleshov began to teach his students about editing and re-editing in abstract—you can use drawings or stills, and the lessons may sink in. According to the precepts laid down in
Intolerance
, he began to establish equations, such as
a
+
b
=
something entirely different
. He cut together shots of an actor's undirected face with objects he might be thinking of and, lo, the audience “read” the connection, the linkage. The man was hungry, afraid, in love, or whatever, according to the dynamic of cutting. This theory is not incorrect, but it can turn painfully narrow and predictive. There was another power in cutting: that the audience could be removed or shifted in time, space, and story at the whim of the medium. In that opportunity there was an inherent sense of authority or violence.