Twentieth-Century America

The Intellectual and Cultural Context

Douglas Tallack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317870586
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The multi-volume Longman literature in English series aims to provide students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. This book looks at cinema, painting and architecture in 20th-century America, as well as the culture of politics.

Part One

The Politics of Culture

Chapter 1

Cinema

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

In Modern Times, a 1936 film dealing with mechanization, Charlie Chaplin belatedly confronted the cinematic machinery of sound and spoke on screen for the first time. Hearing Chaplin’s nonsensical mixture of English and Italian we are unsure whether he has triumphed over the latest technology or has been confused by it. 1936 was also the year of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, a seminal essay in thinking about the cinema. Benjamin, too, identifies the threat of mechanical reproduction to the unique ‘aura’ of the work of art and goes on to remark on the function of mass communications in the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s, a theme in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator of 1940. Benjamin nevertheless intimates that mechanical reproduction is a source of both new artistic possibilities and a revolutionary, because popular, political culture.

Cinema is founded in technology and has its beginnings in industrial production and commercial distribution. Far from downgrading cinema, in comparison with literature and painting, this points to the complexity, as well as the novelty, of the cultural form which is so much a part of the mental and material fabric of modern times. When photographs moved, and became ‘the movies’ instead of the simple magic lantern shows of cinema’s pre-history, they had enormous popular appeal. The movies seemed to capture the real thing by mechanical, scientific means free from bias and the limitations of words or painted images. The technology which permitted this dramatic advance in representation, and the commerce which distributed the results took preference over the content and certainly the aesthetics of the very first cinematic ‘events’: Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, on display at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; two years later, Louis and Auguste Lumière’s Cinématographe, which had its commercial debut in Paris at the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines; and Edison’s large-screen exhibition in 1896 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City. In 1910 there were well over five thousand nickelodeons in the United States, and by the end of the silent era there were ‘stars’ – Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, and many others – and ‘directors’, such as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim. There were also ‘studios’ – Paramount Pictures and 20th Century-Fox for example – and many critics and historians of American cinema maintain that these are the names that really count.

Technology, politics, aesthetics, and economics. These elements come together in the idea of a language of cinema, which we can follow from the silent period through the introduction of sound and the full institution, followed by the supposed break-up, of the studio system. ‘Language’ refers to how a film signifies through editing and mise en scène, by which is meant the direction on set: of actors, sound recordists and camera operators, the last of these dealing with the positioning of cameras, choice of lenses, ‘shots’ and so on. ‘Cinema’ refers, in Christian Metz’s important definition, ‘not just [to] the cinema industry (which works to fill cinemas, not to empty them)’, but also to ‘the mental machinery – another industry – which spectators “accustomed to the cinema” have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of film.’¹ By the 1920s, ‘cinema’, in both of Metz’s senses, was fast becoming synonymous with the Los Angeles suburb called Hollywood, later to be called ‘the dream factory’.

We didn’t know what we were doing: realism and modernism in the silent cinema, 1890s to 1920s

Like the silent films, with their madcap chases, congested spaces, and compressed plots, the silent era was full and busy. Working for American Biograph between 1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith alone made at least five hundred films: westerns, thrillers, gangster movies, and comedies, as well as adaptations of literary classics. The majority were one-to-three-reelers, lasting approximately ten to thirty minutes, one reason why Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation was such a milestone in 1915. It was twelve reels, lasted three hours, cost the then enormous sum of $110,000 to produce and, depending upon the method of calculation, has earned between $13 million and $100 million.

In the confused arena of silent cinema, we can discern the two main tendencies in cinematic representation – realism and modernism – which, later, would become polarized into ‘Hollywood’ and the different strands of ‘art cinema’. The ridiculous extremes of an early ‘short’ such as Edison’s Electrocution of an Elephant, and Griffith’s next big film, Intolerance (1916), demonstrate that in the former the medium appears to give way before the object, person or event, and so remains closer to the sheer amazement which greeted cinema, while Griffith’s dazzling display of camera work gestures towards cinematic modernism.

Modernism can serve as an all-purpose category for expressionism, avant-garde cinema and the other alternatives to mainstream American cinema. This broadly non-realistic cinema dates from roughly the same period as stream of consciousness, cubism and other developments in literary and painterly modernism, but where Joyce, Picasso and their contemporaries were reacting against forms of realism, cinematic modernism and its rival were not successive phases in the history of film. How could they be at a time when ‘we didn’t know what we were doing’, as Cecil B. DeMille is reported to have said of the early days of the movies.

There were realist and modernist tendencies in representation well before Griffith claimed to have invented such cinematic techniques as the close-up and the cut. Some film historians trace the two traditions back to the Lumière brothers (realism) and to Méliès (modernism). However, specific examples are more helpful. In 1903, near the beginning of his decade of pre-eminence, Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery. Where previous Edison films had mostly been a single action in a fixed frame, Porter’s explored the all-important relationship between frames, which we now take for granted, of course. For example, early in the film, there is a hold-up, during which a train passes, glimpsed through the window of the telegraph office. When the robbers reappear in the next scene and scramble on to another train the two distinct scenes are linked by a simple narrative. Narrative continuity is adhered to as a principle throughout most of the ten-minute film, though the technique of parallel cutting alerts us to a different concept of cinematic language. During the robbers’ escape, cuts to the telegraph office and to the barn-dance, the latter interrupted by news of the robbery, are not necessarily coterminous or sequential in time. Instead the editing intervenes in realistic presentation in order to comment upon cause and effect and the relationship between everyday, legal activities and the irruption of illegal violence. Cross-cut editing, in contrast, is between events taking place at, presumably, the same time in different places: in a typical 1917 Mack Sennett comedy entitled Teddy at the Throttle, the cuts are between the heroine (Gloria Swanson) chained to a railway line; an oncoming train; a precursor of Lassie; the villain looking on from behind a tree; and the rescuer-hero. Cross-cutting enforces realism, making time and place coincide (fortunately without disaster on this occasion) to the exclusion of interpretive commentary.

Then we have Porter’s full-size close-up of the leader of the bandits firing at the audience. Packaged separately, exhibitors could show it at the beginning or end of The Great Train Robbery. Since all the outlaws are killed by the posse, the exhibitor’s choice made a considerable difference to the meaning of the film. Possibly it was perceived that a close-up in which the audience was ‘addressed’ by a character could not be smoothly integrated into the realistic narrative sequence of, mostly, long and medium shots. Yet it was promoted in the Edison catalogue under the banner of ‘Realism. A life size picture of Barnes, leader of the outlaw band, taking aim and firing point blank at each individual in the audience.’² This prophetic tension is between the photographic image drawing attention to the work of narrative in joining one frame to another, while, at the same time, authorizing the realism of the film. It would be the achievement of Hollywood to arrange a marriage between realism and narrative which is still going strong.

Early American cinema was a small, as well as a busy, world and in 1907 D.W. Griffith appeared in Porter’s Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. Once with Biograph, Griffith made the transition to directing with The Adventures of Dollie (1908) and, by the time of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, which were made in Hollywood with Reliance Majestic, he had posed much more explicitly than Porter the key questions of cinematic language. Where the revolution in literary language led to the victory of modernism, in both the novel and poetry, the competing aesthetic, socio-economic, and, of course, technological determinants upon cinema increasingly pressed the claims for film as the reproduction of reality. For all the panoply of cinematic devices in The Birth of a Nation, more representative of the film as a whole is Griffith’s retention of the same shot for the long scene when confederate soldiers approach us down the main street of Piedmont, and then march away to the left. This is consistent with his use of Matthew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War, and his own efforts to authenticate the story and the sets. Another of cinema’s specific contributions to realism is apparent in the many family scenes where, within the same shot, characters, particularly lesser ones like the young Cameron daughter, are engaged in peripheral activities which seemingly continue off-screen.

Reviews of The Birth of a Nation praised the film’s capture of the unfolding panorama of battle, but sometimes protested at the experiments with camera angles, the practice of cutting between shots within a single scene, and fade-in and fade-out ‘irises’: ‘such angles dispelled the carefully built-up realism, because the audience, now participant rather than spectator, was instantly made aware of the presence of the camera’.³ Intolerance better illustrates this very revealing reaction, because identification with characters and a single narrative is impeded by the device of linking stories of intolerance among contemporary reformers, the sixteenth-century Medici, the priests of Babylon, and the Pharisees in Jerusalem. Griffith was after unity, but particularly when, later in the film, the repeated link-scene of the woman rocking a cradle gives way to direct juxtaposition of scenes from the four stories, full rein is given to the possibilities of montage.

Montage means editing; but certain kinds of editing – sometimes referred to as creative, as opposed to continuity, editing – have become virtually synonymous with the modernism of Sergei Eisenstein and Soviet cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s. The political and aesthetic turmoil of the post-revolutionary decade in the USSR was a long way from the developing consumer capitalism of the United States, but the sheer unformed-ness of the two cinemas led to some similarities. Certainly, Eisenstein’s work shows the influence of the ‘eccentrism’ which he and other Soviet modernists perceived in the new urban-industrial world emerging simultaneously in the United States and on American film. For Eisenstein montage derived from ‘the assembling of machinery, pipes, machine tools … Let units of impression combined into one whole be expressed through a dual term, half-industrial and half-music-hall’.⁴

Film stock was scarce and the first students of film, Eisenstein included, experimented by re-editing existing films. In Hollywood, formalism took second place to the hunt for more and more subjects to film. After seeing Intolerance in the Soviet Union in 1919, Eisenstein acknowledged Griffith’s pioneering work with montage but, in Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), he explored the modernist implications in Griffith. Of October, he asserts that in juxtaposing political speech-making by Mensheviks at the Second Congress of Soviets and images of harps and balalaikas, parallel montage enters ‘a new realm: from the sphere of action into the sphere of significance.’ Montage, he stipulates, is not ‘a linkage of pieces’ but ‘a collision’, which gives access to the dialectical pattern of history.⁵ Whether or not Eisenstein’s juxtaposition, in Strike, of shots of a massacre of workers with shots of an abattoir is explicable in strictly dialectical terms, his overall position departs from the realist one in its insistence that montage (but also mise en scène in certain hands) estranges the spectator from everyday assumptions (for instance about the straightforwardness of narrative), thereby demonstrating how reality, including psychological reality, is constructed. From 1920s German Expressionism onwards, other European cinemas have also fed into modernism, and by the time of the French New Wave and Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), nameless characters can be depicted caught up in decentred and enigmatic narratives.

When Eisenstein eventually had the chance to visit Hollywood in 1930, modernist cinema had been largely superseded by narrative cinema. Eisenstein’s projects for Paramount, one of them an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy, never reached the screen. It will help to crystallize what happened to this other cinema in the wake of the success of American narrative cinema, if we make use of the influential writings of André Bazin, a very different film theorist from Eisenstein and one who has paid special attention to Hollywood.

Bazin gave a different answer to his own question ‘What is cinema?’ Looking back at the silent era in such essays as ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ and ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’ he gives theoretical weight to the argument, which we have been tracing through examples, that the inherent qualities of photography and cinema overrode what he called ‘anti-cinematic’ modernism. These qualities permitted greater progress than even the nineteenth-century novel had made in the attempt directly to represent reality. This preference informs his promotion of 1920s directors Robert Flaherty, Erich Von Stroheim and F.W. Murnau. In Flaherty’s documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922), montage reverts to the basic editorial function of removing excessive footage. The scene when Nanook waits for the seal is, for Bazin, a return to the first single-shot films of the late 1890s.

Erich von Stroheim championed the cause of realism against montage, and this in spite of his declared indebtedness to Griffith. Stroheim’s first film as director was Blind Husbands (1919), with his other important films being Foolish Wives in 1922, Greed in 1925, and The Wedding March in 1928. The abstract title of Greed invites a comparison with Griffith’s Intolerance of the previous decade, but the slow-moving camera movements keep attention upon the story and the actors (rather than on the ‘idea’), while short shots record the detail which was so important to the Naturalistic novel upon which the film was based, Fran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction: Modernity
• PART ONE: THE POLITICS OF CULTURE
• PART TWO: THE CULTURE OF POLITICS
• Conclusion: Post-modernity
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index