Cinema: The saviour of modernism

What I’ve found one of the most absorbing parts of this course is discovering the way Modernism and Cinema are so interwoven, and explicit within each other. Cinema is the modern discourse, and modernism is the cinematic subject. So I just thought in my final blog I would have a small look at cinema as the ‘saviour’ of modern art.

Modernist art is fantastic, but also (in its non-cinematic forms) very elitist. It all started off okay. Manet’s work might have looked a little bit odd and flat to its viewers (in fact, they were yelling out “hey, look at me! I’m flat!”) but they were still nice-looking paintings with recognisable subjects. Here’s a pretty girl standing behind a bar…

Cezanne followed with some funny lumpy looking fruit, which didn’t look very edible, but the colours were approximately right, and the shape was recognisable – you could tell he had some kind of ability with a paintbrush…

Then something went horribly wrong.

Mondrian’s non-representational work just does not make sense from a traditional perspective on art. I can imagine what was thought of them at the time, as its still a fairly prevalent attitude when it comes to abstract art: “But they’re just lines! My kid could have drawn them!” In fact – just did a quick google and instantly found this:

“Wouldn't share your love of Mondrian or the rest of the abstract art lot. I kinda feel that art should look like something or at least represent something unambiguously. If it's just supposed to look pleasant, then that's graphic design (I think). I might be open to calling such non-representative designs artistic if they can be shown to have something ingenious about their structure or something, much like good music does.

Instead, it seems to me that Mondrian's stuff could have been generated by a relatively simple algorithm. His basic contribution seems to be to think "Hey, let's make images composed of rectangles in primary colours!", the rest being details.” http://underanorangesky.blogspot.com/2007/05/552.html

It’s simply not easy to connect with a Mondrian composition. But while I won’t go into Mondrian’s complete aesthetic theory (!! If you’re interested, google De Stijl or neoplasticism) I will say that his art has had resonances throughout the last hundred years. So while art progressed at a rapid pace, in the broader public sphere it stagnated.

What could save art?

Cinema, of course. Film, as a new and strange medium offered the artist ample opportunity to create as they wished. It required new languages and new ways of thinking, and modernism provided this.In turn, the nature of cinema made it ideal for modernist discourses – it was a medium which was transitory, open and incomplete. Cinema provides a way of delving deeper into the alienated expression on the face of Munch’s Scream. Each film was able to produce an individual vision of the world, and this, of course, was the aim of modernist theory to begin with (See Tim Woods, ‘Beginning of Postmodernism’).

Modernist cinema was also highly self-reflexive - but while modernist painters attempted to perform this by highlighting the ‘flatness’ and unreality of their work, film makers did so by turning the camera on itself: we can look to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera for an example of this. First, a shot is taken from below a moving train, and it appears the cameraman has been run over. The film then reveals its own tricks, as we see the cameraman dig his camera out from under the train tracks. Modernist cinema looked at itself and asked – what are we representing and how?

But most of all, cinema was the most effective way of expressing modernist ideologies because it was a more accessible form of art. Even the highly abstracted city symphony films of Vertov and Ruttman can be enjoyed on a simple visual level – the viewer can watch the movement of people within the piece and find comfort in some sense of normalcy.

And that is how, my friends, cinema saved modernism.

A long rant on Rand

When Ayn Rand presented the completed The Fountainhead to publishers, she was greeted with declarations that it was “too intellectual” or “too controversial” and “would not sell because no audience existed for it”. Eventually, her book was printed because one editor stood up for it – asserting that if his publishing house had no place for the novel, then it had no place for him either.

Does the story sound somewhat familiar?

Ayn Rand’s struggle to get her book published echoes so perfectly the struggle of her protagonist Howard Roark. And like Roark, she eventually succeeded – despite negative press (we must wonder what The Banner would have made of it). The Fountainhead became popular mainly through word of mouth – selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Like Roark, it was through the individual choice of her readers – who saw something in her novel that appealled to them – that Rand was able to continue creating her art in the way she intended. Just like Roark’s commissions:

The story of every commission he received was the same: “I was in New York and I liked the Enright house.” “I saw the Cord Building.” “I saw a picture of that temple they tore down.” It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places. P533

Roark and Rand are not popular because they are populists, like the Peter Keatings of this world. Both of their aesthetics draw not from what people want but what THEY individually believe is best for humanity.

And what is best for humanity? Rand argues that to achieve a rational and emotionally connected view of life, we must reject ethics which are based on an external morality. By placing morality in the hands of religion and the masses, we denigrate the ability of the individual to achieve to their full potential. We must come to appreciate ‘selfishness’ in its positive connotations – as Howard Roark argues, the US was founded on the principle of the individual ‘pursuit of own happiness’.

For this reason, the villain Elswoth Toohey’s socialist ideals are integral to his personality (And here, looking at Toohey’s single-minded effort to destroy any world-view different from his own, “villain” is most definitely the appropriate word). Toohey sees socialism as a way to harness the power of the many to acheive his private desired ends.Toohey manipulates the power of mass thought as a means of acheiving complete power. As he tells Peter Keating “It’s the soul Peter, the soul” that must be controlled. One way of acheiving this: “Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity... Tell men that altruism is the ideal” (p665). Once every individual realises that they will never acheive true altruism, they will become highly aware of their “unworthiness” and obey the few powerful men who will create and manipulate all (Toohey flatters himself that he is one of these men). Yet although he sees himself as a ruler of the masses, Toohey is, in his own words “selfless” – he too must remain at the disposal of others, his one purpose to “keep you [the masses under his control] contented. To lie, to flatter you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity. To make speeches about the people and the common good”. (p668)

Is Ellsworth right? Can the social changes of the twentieth century (and what we’ve seen of the 21^st) be summed up under the term “collectivism”?

I suppose they can. Socialism, communism, fascism, nationalism, totalitarianism, religious movements, the welfare state. These are the political philosophies that have shaped the last 150 years of our history, and each one of them (to differing extents) is based on development “for the social good”. But does this mean, as Toohey hypothesises, that “Man has no rights”? I don’t think so.This is where I find Rand’s position highly problematic. Yes – collectivism can restrict freedom of speech, thought and action. A recent song by brit-pop act The Kaiser Cheifs makes the same arguement as Toohey regarding collectivism with the chorus “We are the angry mob, we read the paper every day. We like what we like, we hate what we hate, but we’re also easily swayed.”

Are the masses so ‘easily swayed’ as to give away all rights? Some might argue, in the current ‘war on terror’, individual rights ARE being eroded in deference to ‘the greater social good’ (and don’t get me started on definitions of the social good). But come on Rand. You can’t really expect us to give up on social collectivities. In a world where the individual reigns supreme, what happens to those of us that AREN’T Howard Roarks or Ayn Rands, have no kind of defining brilliance and in a world of meritocracy are pushed aside? Rather than losing rights under collectivity, most of us NEED some kind of group identity to acheive any kind of recognition in this world.

I’m not entirely disagreeing with Rand here, as I see my own country every day influenced by terribly biased and manipulative media sources and swayed into quite frightening mass hysterics reasonably often (John Laws, Today Tonight et al – I’m looking at you...). But surely we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, as Rand seems to advocate... Can’t we ever agree on a common good?

* I would just like to note that I am pro-union and therefore quite likely to be a communist. Please therefore disregard all the above as propoganda.

* I would also like to note that, regardless of its political philosophy, I regard The Fountainhead one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written

Soundtracks in Rose Hobart and King Kong

Its amazing how much our experience of a film is shaped by the soundtrack without us even realising. It’s such an intergral part of the 21^st century film-watching experience I barely notice what music’s playing in the background (notable exception to this rule: John Landis’ 1980 The Blues Brothers) . But imagine Jaws without “Da Dum. Da Dum.”… Kill Bill without Nancy Sinatra crooning “Bang Bang, he shot me down” or its eerie bloodstained theme music...

We’re so used to this kind of aural experience of cinema… Its hard to imagine a time when music in film was like the sound we heard in Rose Hobart: repetitive, looping sound disconnected from the visuals. And yet, there was a time when the technology to link sound and visuals hadn’t yet been developed – Rose Hobart looks back to this earlier period with its soundtracking. (The problem that filmmakers had in initially trying to link the two was quite a lovely conundrum in applied physics: while moving images can be stretched and compressed, sound exists in time and cannot be resized without changing its quality. See James Monaco’s ‘How To Read a Film’ 2000: 124-5). In this blog, I just want to have a look at how soundtrack has been manipulated to great effect in two very different films – King Kong and Rose Hobart.

King Kong makes the most of the audio technology available at the time. Although not the first film to showcase a soundtrack that moved with the film’s action, Max Steiner’s score certainly made an impact as a groundbreaker in this technology. In King Kong, the cinematic experience is enhanced by music which swells and falls in line with the film’s action. Sharp, angular orchestration is attached to battle scenes, while Ann Darrow has her own pretty musical motif – “Stolen Love”. King Kong‘s soundtrack confused critics on its release – it was referred to as part as the sound effects (rather than as a musical score) and described as comical and out of place: “How can there be a symphony orchestra in the heart of Africa? There should only be tom-toms”. (from http://www.scorereviews.com/reviews/review.aspx?id=450). However King Kong’s influence on the film industry cannot be denied, and its ‘comical’ attempt to match the music of an orchestra to a jungle setting paved the way for modern soundtracking standards.

It would have been an amazing experience, entering a cinema and for the first time experiencing a really multidimensional film, where the soundtrack itself prompts an emotional response, rather than being just background noise. The soundtrack in King Kong adds another layer to the experience and encourages that fantastic sense of escapism that the cinema experience is really all about. And, in the height of the Depression, escapism would have been a welcome occurrence.

In stark contrast to King Kong’s orchestration, the soundtrack of Rose Hobart comes across as an oddity to a 21^st century audience. It’s interesting that Rose Hobart too was made in a period when the technology WAS available to link imagery to music, but has been purposefully stripped of East of Borneo’s original soundtrack. The powerful directorial choice to disconnect the soundtrack from the visuals is as effective in creating atmosphere as the very different King Kong soundtrack. The looping music serves to highlight the sense we get from the visuals that Hobart is held in a kind of bubble, shuffling backwards and forwards within the frame of the camera’s vision, looking out of the visible scene and, from a different angle looking back in upon herself.

Which makes me wonder, what would film buffs in the period have thought of Rose Hobart’s soundtrack? Would the experience have been as strange and dislocating for them as it was for me? Or would it have been a familiar echo from a not so distant filmic past?

King Kong - what a man...

Don’t you just love Kong? His devotion to Ann is just written on his warm, human face. The way he gently caresses her as though she’s not just a plaything but a love-interest, a real ‘bride of Kong’ is just charming… And gee whiz can he fight! (Why has my language descended into thirties slang? I guess it’s just such a swell movie!) The fight with the tyrannosaurus rex was especially enjoyable – and Kong shows he’s got a bit of (Tarantino-esque) humour as well with the needlessly, ridiculously brutal snapping of the dinosaur’s head.

Why is Kong such an appealing figure? I think it’s because he’s portrayed in the movie with all the attributes of a ‘real man’ – he is a trope of the natural man.

It is only the truly wild man that can be tamed by the sexual power of Ann Darrow’s beauty. The civilised man, as signified by Carl Denham, is concerned only in her beauty for its superficial use - Denham regards Ann as the ideal prop (read: commodity) for his film. The natural man, however, desires Ann for her innate femininity. Ann is not simply A woman, she is THE woman. She represents an incursion of the feminine in the more primal world of men.

And (going back to the theme of my Picadilly blog) she’s a white woman – more pure than the black virgins of Skull Mountain (six times more so, according to the native chief). Jack, the ultimate man’s man, is immediately drawn to Darrow against his nature. Kong, who we see throughout the movie is not averse to mindless killing, risks his own life to save her from various giant creatures and eventually the NYPD. Ann has a power over the natural man because she represents everything which they are not. She is representative of the civilised world – which is soft and affeminate.

Kong is also a man of integrity. Why does he break free from his chains on the Broadway platform? Why- because he believed that the flashbulbs were injuring Ann. Kong may be naieve, but he is the good guy of the narrative. Kong doesn’t choose to wreak havok on New York – instead it is the greed of Denham the civilised man that leads to this misadventure and Kong’s eventual demise.

Lastly, of course Kong is appealing because he is convincing on the screen as a giant ape. The use of stop-motion animation is particularly apt for the recreation of the films giant creatures, the slightly clunky movements suggestive of giant muscles labouring under the weight of their heavy load. Kong’s skin moves effectively as well, the fingers of the animators occasionally ruffling his rabbit-fur outer layer gives the effect of muscular ripples beneath the surface. And lets be frank – Kong is possibly the best actor in the film. Kong is incredibly realistic - one of the greatest acheivements of the film, I believe, is his appearance on a Broadway stage. His body tensed against his shackles, Kong is frighteningly present in the scene – even to one as jaded by special effects as I am! The beauty of the film is its success in integrating Kong and its other fantastical creatures into live action footage.

I can see why some people may object to the film on the grounds that it has little plot, farcical scenarios and wooden acting. But the characterisation of Kong, to me, makes the film deserving of its reputation as a classic and unmissable film.

Racial Conventions in Picadilly

Picadilly really intrigued me. Partially because it cleverly portrayed London from the dirty underbelly looking up. A little because it was the fictional tale of an entertainer that resonated so closely with the true story of the actress playing the role (Anna May Wong, daughter of a laundry man, like Sho Sho rose against the odds to become ‘the star of the show). Somewhat because the performances were so fantastic – melodramatic to the extreme and just wonderfully expressive (it’s all in the eyes…). But most of all, I was amazed that an Asian woman in the 1920s was given – essentially – the lead role, and a romantic role! I started to think… maybe we underestimate our society’s past. Maybe Anna May wasn’t forced into stereotypical Asian roles (for a contemporary example look at the cook in King Kong – “me want leave this place, me no like”, for a 21^st century example: every Jackie Chan movie ever made) but had the freedom to play more exciting, individualised roles.

Anna May Wong has been quoted as saying:"I think I left Hollywood because I died so often." As an Asian actor in the ‘20s, I can’t imagine there were starring role offers rolling in. In Picadilly, though she may not have the big draw card name – that’s the queen of the shimmy Gilda Gray – she absolutely steals the show. At first I found it amazing that an Asian woman could be represented in such a powerful role. However, watching the film, and thinking about the moral message hanging around Sho Sho’s fate, I wasn’t so amazed.

When we first come across Sho Sho, the camera’s slow upward pan caresses her body in an overtly sexual way. Her dancing is natural, raw, nonchalant, but she holds the attention of the camera, her fellow dish-washers and soon Valentine Wilmott as well. Sho Sho is instantly introduced as an object of desire. ‘Object’ here is the operative word – Valentine feels her so sexually appealing he feels the need to instantly buy her, own her.

But Sho Sho is not simply seen as desirable: she constantly acts out her desirability. Her coy description to Valentine of the last time she danced – “there was trouble, men, knives” – emphasizes Sho Sho’s dangerous allure. Sho Sho emasculates men around her – notably dressing up Valentine in her stage costume. She smiles softly to herself as the various men in the piece succumb to the erotic fantasy she embodies.

The racial filmic conventions of the day are very much upheld in the film and particularly in the characterization of Sho Sho. Sho Sho was not the first Asian woman to be portrayed as a hussy in a film. The Hegelian idea of ‘otherness’ when attached to the non-white man is one thing. The ‘double otherness’ of the non-white woman in a industry where the dominant discourse is overwhelmingly phallocentric has always been a potently powerful meaning to attach to the Asian woman in film. If woman has a dangerous sexual power over men – the femme fatale factor – and the Asian other threatens white purity, then the Asian woman is seen as a suspiciously sexual and predatory figure. There is a tension here between Sho Sho’s sexual power over white men and the way this sexuality is represented as illicit and dangerous.

The transgressive nature of Sho Sho’s relationship with Valentine is echoed in another scene, where a white woman is thrown out of a club for dancing with a black man. The film allows Sho Sho to rise to dizzying heights of stardom, but her transgression of racial codes in her implied sexual relationship with the nightclub manager is solved with her death. She is re-instated to the ‘victim’ position which is aligned with the female Asian identity.

Sadly, although Anna May Wong is indeed the star of Picadilly, the nature of filmic and racial convention means that her character Sho-Sho never really stands a chance of getting her Hollywood fairy-tale ending.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

While watching Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, I couldn’t help but feel I’d experienced something similar before. Looking up various online articles online (in an attempt to validate my experience of the film through the opinion of others) I noticed several articles comparisons between the film and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Which I thought was a wonderful comparison, considering the fragmentary nature of both works - fractured insights into the lived experience of the cities of Berlin and Dublin respectively. Consider this (quite random) sliver from Ulysses –

“He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade’s timberyard. Piled balks. Ruins and tenements. With careful read he passed over a hopscotch court with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill… And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame’s school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis’s. And Mr? ...” *

Leopold Bloom’s narration as he walks through the city is quite personal. Seeing the child playing marbles, he is reminded of his own childhood in these same streets. Yet there is also a strong sense that Bloom’s experiences reflect less about him, and more about the life of Dublin itself. Harry Levin compared Bloom’s mind to a film – a montage of shots edited “to emphasise the close-ups and fade-outs of flickering emotion, the angles of observation and the flashbacks of reminiscence” (Quoted in The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature). It is unsurprising that Joyce considered Walter Ruttman to create a film version of Ulysses. In Berlin, the city is likewise presented in a series of representations of individual experiences – one notable example is the brief flirtation between two strangers on the streets of Berlin. However, the repetition of patterns in the movement of individuals in the city space work together to present a unified holistic sense of ‘a day in the life of the city’. It is not a film about the lives of Berliners, but a film about the life of Berlin.

If Ulysses is the quintessential modernist novel – with its self-conscious internalisation of, and complete messing up of, the traditional storyline - then Berlin must surely be its filmic equivalent. For the city – particularly the city expressed as a collection of fragments as it is in these two works - is the ultimate experience of modernity. Berlin reads to me as the city exploring itself. In The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature, Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls quote Ezra Pound (1922) “The life of a village is a narrative… In the city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, overcross, they are cinematographic”. This is so appropriate in regards to Berlin: Symphony of a Great City – the constant overlap of images, each echoing the one before. One of my favourite series of images opens Act II, where a series of doors, gates and shutters, then books and desks fly open across the city, linking its inhabitants together as they open up to the working day. But the images don’t simply intersect, but cross over each other – a train motif throughout the film works to present this idea of intersecting paths. In particular I noticed a series of shots in the first act showing the connection and shifting of train tracks to divert a train’s path across the city. The city is a place of flows and dynamics: it reveals its tangled, intricate, self-aware 'thing-ness' through the collective experience of its inhabitants.

Berlin is more than simply a beautiful collection of images of the city (although I can’t deny its aesthetic appeal, particularly in the still images of the first act). It is an intensely modern exploration of the life of the city which explores the relationship between individual experience and the collective whole.

* (Didn’t intend quote to be quite so long, but Joyce isn’t exactly sparing with words – Ulysses being 800 pages – and it seems a dishonour to copy down any less than I have here. Sure hasn’t made Word’s grammar-check happy though)

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