"The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" - Kenji Mizoguchi (1939)

Kenji Mizoguchi was at the height of his artistic powers with The Story of the Chrysanthemum (Zangiku Monogatari, 1939), which continues the progression of his visual expressiveness shown in Osaka Elegy (1936) and Sisters of the Gion (1936). The story, based on a novel by Shôfû Muramatsu, was again co-scripted by Yoshikata Yoda, who had begun his long-term collaboration with Mizoguchi with Osaka Elegy.

As with Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, there is a focus of attention on the unsatisfactory condition and fate of women in Japanese society, although one might argue this time that the main character in Zangiku Monogatari is not a woman, but the male actor, Kikunosuke Onoue. Unlike the feisty and willful “Ayako” in Osaka Elegy and Omocho in Sisters of the Gion, who each questioned the traditional feminine roles, however, the principal female in Zangiku Monogatari, Otoku, is self-effacing and willing to sacrifice everything in loving devotion. But despite the ultimate tragedy of the story, which is a characteristic outcome of all of Mizoguchi’s films, Zangiku Monogatari is one of Mizoguchi’s most romantic and satisfying undertakings.

Mizoguchi’s films can be compared with those of Josef von Sternberg in terms of both narrative content and filmmaking technique. And Zangiku Monogatari is a particularly good example. It features sculpturally lit and carefully composed camera shots with a deep focus, often looking through environments in depth, where the principal figures are seen well behind partially obscuring foreground artefacts. There is also delicate camera tracking, dollying, and panning that follows the action of the scene without being obtrusive. In Zangiku Monogatari, Mizoguchi in fact demonstrates a mastery that even goes beyond von Sternberg, with many dramatic scenes lasing several minutes without a single editing cut. When you consider the bulky camera equipment and high demands for lighting that existed in those days, one’s admiration for the artistry of these effects is even greater.

The film opens in Tokyo in 1888 and traces the story of a Kabuki stage player over the ensuing six years. The narrative can be divided into five sections or acts.

1. Kikunosuke Faces Criticism (22 minutes). The prominent Kabuki acting troupe led by the famous actor, Kikugoro Onoe V (a real historical figure) is shown in performance. The Kabuki productions are highly stylized and full of ritual gestures, but they were apparently highly popular with the public. Kikugoro Onoe V is so famous that his family is essentially upper-class. After the performance, Kikugoro expresses contempt for the inept performance in the play on the part of his stepson, Kikunosuke, who he fears will never learn to be a good actor. It soon becomes evident, however, that Kikunosuke is the heir apparent to Kikugoro’s position, by right of his family relationship, and he is guaranteed a successful career. As a consequence, Kikunosuke is a spoiled playboy who is indifferent to hard work and who is always shielded from harsh criticism by his family and friends. One day, however, Kikunosuke runs into the family wet nurse, Otoku (who is nursing his baby stepbrother) and happens to ask her what she really thinks of his acting, since he suspects that his acquaintances won’t tell him the truth. Despite her lowly position as a servant, she politely tells him that he could be much better if he tried, and she urges him to apply himself seriously to his craft. So Kikunosuke finally realises that he is an artistic failure who is only a big shot because of his father’s fame.
2. Kikunosuke and Otoku (33 minutes). But the playboy Kikunosuke has finally met someone who is interested in him as a person, and not just for his family position. He gives up carousing with geishas in the evenings and starts staying at home in the evenings to talk to Otoku, but this leads to gossip. One evening his mother returns home and catches the two of them chatting, and the next day she summarily dismisses Otoku and banishes her from the house. Kikunosuke manages to find out where she has gone, and, in a dramatic scene, proposes marriage. But when he later faces his domineering stepfather, the very idea of marriage to Otoku is utterly rejected. Kikunosuke is reminded that, as an orphan, he is lucky to have been brought up in luxury and should not risk challenging his father. Besides, Otoku is of a lower station and is older than he is. After all, “face” is everything for people of their class, especially for performers who depend on the public’s acceptance. Faced with this rejection of Otoku, Kikunosuke refuses to bow to his father’s demands, and he stubbornly leaves home, despite the entreaties of his friend and fellow actor, Futusuke. But at the train station, where he had arranged to meet Otoku and travel to Osaka, he learns that she has been kept from joining him, so he departs alone.
3. One Year Later (20 minutes). Kikunosuke is now a struggling and still inept actor in Osaka (over 500 kilometers from Tokyo). Expressing built-up despair, he decides to give up acting for good, but when he walks out onto the street, he is shocked to find Otoku, who has finally managed to find his whereabouts and has come to him. They immediately repair to Kikunosuke’s small quarters. Otoku says that she has only come to be his servant and help him succeed, but Kikunosuke assures her that she is now his wife. With renewed determination, Kikunosuke vows to continue his acting career; but when his acting troupe’s leader passes away, Kikunosuke is suddenly out of a job, and his only option now is to join an itinerant acting crew that plays before lower-class audiences in smaller towns.
4. Four Years Later (34 minutes). Kikunosuke, still an itinerant actor and going nowhere, has degenerated to an aimless existence. Though Otoku remains loving and supportive, as always, he quarrels with her over pocket money. But after things get worse and they are out of work and money, they learn that that Futusuke’s acting company from Tokyo is playing in nearby Nagoya. Out of old friendship, Futusuke and his father give Kikunosuke a major role in their play, and there is an 8-minute sequence showing the Kabuki performance, with Kikunosuke in the starring role. He succeeds brilliantly, and the jubilant Kikunosuke and Otoku realise that they can now return to the big-time Tokyo Kabuki scene in triumph. Otoku tells Kikunosuke that she had always believed in him.
5. The Final Parting (34 minutes). At the train station, Kikunosuke again looks for Otoku and is told by his friends she cannot accompany him back to Tokyo. His father will only take him back without Otoku, and Otoku has agreed that Kikunosuke should return alone. Reluctantly, Kikunosuke leaves without her and rejoins her family. Otoku returns to Osaka and lives alone in the old room that the two of them had shared. One year later, Kikunosuke and the Onoe acting troupe happen to visit Osaka, and there is another Kabuki performance presented at length. Afterwards, Kikunosuke is informed by an old friend that Otoku is in town and dying from consumption. Kikunosuke rushes to her bedside and swears that they can now live together – his father has finally relented and accepted their union. But it’s too late for them now. Otoku, selfless to the end, urges him to fulfil his obligation to his now-adoring public and accept their acclaim by participating in the ritual river barge procession. He does so, and we see him bowing to the cheering crowds on his river barge, while Otoku passes away back in their room.

Now one could say that Zangiku Monogatari is a story about the coming to maturity of a great Kabuki actor, who has been aided by a selfless woman who supported him and always believed in him. Certainly the events of the film closely follow Kikunosuke’s career ups and downs, from early failure to final triumph. Kikunosuke, played well by Shôtarô Hanayagi, is a sensitive, introspective individual who can be stung by criticism but who can stand up for his principles. And to the degree that there is a subjective perspective, it is that of Kikunosuke, rather than of Otoku. But in fact, the principal theme of Zangiku Monogatari is that of romantic love and the difficulty of finding a place for that in traditional society. Throughout the film there is a striking visual contrast between the rigid demands of society, symbolised by the absurdly ornate rituals and stylised gestures of Kabuki theatre, and the unearthly passions of romantic union. Otoku does not rebel against the demands of society, but instead accepts her humble position and seeks to find a way that she can serve “her young master”. She sacrifices everything for him, hoping to help him achieve his ambition, and by so doing, she unwittingly shows him the far greater possibilities of romantic love. But as in almost all of Mizoguchi movies, the male figure lacks the strength to give himself over completely to love (although Kikunosuke is more committed than most of Mizoguchi’s male characters). The final scene is heartbreaking. This is the third time in the film that he has left Otoku in order to fulfill the demands of his profession, and this time the separation is complete. While he is bowing to the cheering multitudes in a ritualistic and triumphant manner, his true love is dying in her bed alone.

There are some absolutely brilliant camera shots in Zangiku Monogatari that are worth repeated viewings. All of them feature elaborate camera and character movements that sustain the dramatic action in a fluid form of visual poetry. Here are some of them:

• In Act 1, there is a shot that lasts 4:40 showing Kikunosuke becoming fed up by the antics of two tipsy geishas who are quarrelling over his affections.
• Another particularly memorable scene in Act 1 is a long tracking shot when Kikunosuke first meets Otoku and asks her what she thinks of his acting. It is shot from a low angle, upwards towards the embankment on which they are walking back and forth, and it lasts 4:50.
• In Act 2, Kikunosuke is alone with Otoku and wants to get to know her better. He cuts some watermelon for her, while she busies herself preparing some refreshments. The shots lasts 5:20 and delicately shows their tentative and polite approaches. In the end, he tells her that he will try to be a good actor for her – she will be his inspiration.
• The dramatic encounter in Act 2 with Kikunosuke’s father during which he is told to give up Otoku lasts 5:30.
• In Act 4 there is a touching scene after Kikunosuke has abused Otoku and has struck her, taking some pocket money from her by force (she has been earning some money as a seamstress). She comes over to him and humbly apologises in an act of total submission. Trying to maintain his pride, Kikunosuke sullenly returns the money to her, admitting his wrong.
• In Act 5, after Kikunosuke has boarded the train back to Tokyo and has learned that Otoku won’t be coming back with him, there is a dramatic 4:00 scene in the railway car. Kikunosuke movingly tells Futusuke and his companions how empty his life would be without Otoku.
• The final long shot between Kikunosuke and Otoku at her bedside lasts 6:15. In it they express their happiness at his success. They are both in tears, but perhaps for different reasons. Kikunosuke is worried about Otoku’s health, while Otoku expresses the sorrow of the last chrysanthemum.

★★★★

"Bedlam" - Val Lewton (directed by Mark Robson, 1946)

Val Lewton produced Bedlam (1946) shortly after The Body Snatcher (1945), and like that previous work, it is more of a grisly historical melodrama than a horror film. Also, like The Body Snatcher, there is no suggestion of the supernatural, as there often is in other Lewton-produced films. The screenplay, to which Lewton again contributed under the pseudonym of “Carlos Keith” and on which he collaborated with director Mark Robson, was inspired by Hogarth’s series of paintings, “A Rake’s Progress”, and there are several inset stills from that work inserted into the film for inter-scene punctuation.

The film is set in 1761 at St. Mary's of Bethlehem Asylum, which is an allusion to Bethlem Royal Hospital in London and known as “Bedlam”. In those days citizens could amuse themselves by paying tuppence and entering the asylum to laugh at the lunatics that were held there. On one such occasion near the beginning of the film, wealthy Lord Mortimer and his protege, Nell Bowen, stop at the asylum for some entertainment and learn that one of the inmates has just died trying to escape. Ms. Bowen assumes upper-class airs and feigns indifference, but we soon learn that she suspects that the asylum inmates are ill-treated. Invited by the asylum master, George Sims, to inspect more thoroughly, Nell finds the conditions appalling and vows to campaign for asylum reform. This sets the narrative conflict of the film, as the spirited Nell Bowen, played by Anna Lee, confronts the cynical and cruel asylum master, played by Boris Karloff. But the film is more than a simple melodrama, because it engages in a lengthy and nontrivial moral debate over the course of the drama.

On the occasion of visiting the asylum, Nell runs into a morally upright Quaker, Hannay, who had just applied for a stonemason’s job at the asylum. They start a discussion about the proper attitude towards one’s fellow creatures that will run through the entire film. As a member of the Society of Friends, Hannay, of course, is steadfastly opposed to violence and believes that compassion and love (agape) are the only proper responses to whatever one encounters. Nell gradually becomes sympathetic but is sceptical that such naivete will lead anywhere. She does urge her patron, the rotund and foppish Lord Mortimer, to devote funds to the betterment of inmate conditions at the asylum, but Mortimer balks when he learns how expensive this will be.

Nell becomes fed up with the self-indulgent Mortimer and scornfully abandons his patronage, returning to her former occupation as a street performer. But she continues her campaign against Mortimer and the asylum, and soon the devious Sims has her forcibly committed as an inmate/prisoner in the asylum. Now inside, Nell, is terrified by the possibility of being manhandled by the population of deranged inmates. Hannay manages to pay her a visit, but he tells her that he is powerless to do anything, and in fact now that she is “inside”, she has the opportunity to use Christian love to change the behaviour of the inmates for the better.

This she does, and the inmates become docile and affectionate before her. When Sims comes around to impose his final “treatment” on Nell, the inmates turn on him and Nell escapes. Now in charge, the inmates put Sims before a mock trial. Sims pleads for his life, telling them of his own doubts and fears, and they surprisingly sympathise, but before Sims can make his escape, he is stabbed by a not-quite catatonic inmate. The inmates then use bricks and mortar to wall up the still-conscious Sims in “Cask of Amontillado” fashion, ensuring his death.

Now, at the end of the film, news of the disappearance of Sims draws Hannay and Nell back to visit the asylum. When stonemason Hannay sees the recently cemented wall, he figures out what happened, but he clams up, signaling to us that Nell's pragmatic approach has apparently won out in their own personal contest concerning ethical behaviour. Nell whispers to him that, after all, the inmates have already suffered enough, and Hannay assenting, sighs in resignation that God will give final judgement, anyway.

Despite generally good cinematography and acting, Bedlam has some weaknesses. The early upper-class frolics and witty verbal exchanges are supposed to be humorous, but they have a forced quality to them and don’t seem to lead anywhere dramatically. Anna Lee, as Nell Bowen, is excellent and magnetic, and Boris Karloff, in a strong performance as the evil George Sims, is unusually unctuous and serpentine, even for him. The strength of these two leads serves to carry the action and helps maintain the focus on the primary contest between them. The acting of the others is reasonably good, but as in Isle of the Dead, the performance of Jason Robards, Sr., is completely unconvincing.

Overall, Bedlam is an odd mixture and perhaps tries to do too much. It is sometimes humourous, sometimes spooky, and sometimes alarming. It is expressionistic only at times, and it never quite hits its stride as a thriller, although it does have its moments. A praiseworthy feature is the fact that it reminds us of what dramatists and filmmakers have long sought to expose: the obscenity of psychiatric practice in Western societies and the unjust way that medical staff can incarcerate people indefinitely. Bedlam stands in a line with other excellent films, such as Shock Corridor (1963), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), that have attempted, so far with very little success, to bring about an end to these practices [1].

Outside of the main conflict between Nell Bowen and George Sims, the subtextual moral debate between Hannay and Nell has its own interest, particularly because of the conclusion it reaches. The film has not finally come down in favour of literal honesty or the strict observance of a code of social morality. Instead, it follows the course of the gradual opening-up of Nell Bowen’s heart and concludes on a promising note of love. Nell has followed her own unique path and has not submitted to anything or anyone -- not to the self-indulgence of Mortimer, not to the cynicism and force of Sims, and not even to the docility and helplessness of Hannay. It is the rigid Hannay, after all, who has changed at the end of the story, not Nell. She has succeeded on her own self-styled and passionate terms.
★★★

Notes:

1. For further reflections of mental health care, see my reviews of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Shutter Island (2010).

"M" - Fritz Lang (1931)

M, filmed in only six weeks, is far and away Fritz Lang’s most popular film and his own personal favourite. It tells the story of a pathological child-killer, superbly played by Peter Lorre. The story has three main phases.

1. In the first phase the situation of conflict is established. There has been a series of gruesome child murders that have gripped the city (said to be a city of four million people, suggesting Berlin, but the real events that inspired this story took place in Düsseldorf). The police are combing the city for everything they can to find on the killer, but there are no clues. As the frustrated police increase the intensity of their search, they continually raid all the houses of prostitution and known gambling parlours, interfering with “business as usual” for the criminal underworld.
2. In phase 2, the criminal underworld decides that they, themselves, must capture the killer in order to get the police off their backs. This stage of the film tracks the parallel activities of the two groups, the police and the criminal underworld, as they work separately to hunt down the killer. Most people find this clever back-and-forth switching between parallel scenes showing the two contrasting groups working towards the same goal to be the most intriguing and satisfying aspect of the film.
3. In the third phase, the killer is cornered and eventually captured by the criminal underworld. They proceed to hold a mock trial, which seems to have about the same degree of "fair hearing" court procedures as those conducted by the government authorities. It is here that the killer, played well by Lorre, finally breaks down in a dramatic confession of his guilt.

The killer, Hans Beckert, is presented in the film with a certain amount of sympathy for the way in which he is the helpless victim of his own pathology. Because of Lang’s sensitive treatment of the killer, his characteristic fatalistic development of events gains a rare tragic intensity. This brings out a difference between Alfred Hitchcock and Lang. Hitchcock’s dramatic tension emphasises the suspense, while Lang’s emphasises the fatality of character. Lorre, as the culprit, squirms in a relentlessly encircling web. The killer, tracked down and caught like a dangerous animal, is presented as unable to check his sick urges. After each of his crimes he remembers nothing of the details and his urges. His attitude is one of utter disbelief and sorrow. With M, Lang gives a new dimension to the “dual personality” theme which has so often fascinated the German mind.

Stylistically, M is especially significant in several respects. It marks a transition for Lang as a director. Although he still uses people and objects expressionistically, he has opted, on the whole, for a more realistic depiction of character and events. Cardboard characters, monumental sets, and the grouping and movement of crowds no longer have such a complete monopoly on Lang’s attention as they did in Metropolis.

Also M was Lang’s first sound film. He immediately incorporated sound not only as an additive feature but as a separate, independent element. Long before the audience gets a first view of the main character, they hear him talking to a young girl or whistling a melody from Grieg’ (Peer Gynt Suite, Hall of the Mountain King”,) which remains his “leitmotiv” throughout the movie. Sound is also often used to tie up different elements; while the sound of one scene lingers, the camera moves through a sequence of different, but related takes. Possessed of a quickness in learning technique, Lang became a master of the use of sound in his first attempt.

Throughout the film, there is an interesting subtext conveyed by presenting the parallel activities of the police and the underworld. Both forces are led by charismatic leaders: Inspector Karl Lohmann for the police and the ruthless Schränker (himself wanted for three murders) for the underworld. Because both forces are highly organised and are undertaking the hunt in parallel, many viewers think that Lang is representing the two forces as essentially and morally equivalent. But I don’t hold to that opinion. The two forces actually represent two competing and contrasting world views, and this may have represented a commentary about contemporary German society. Throughout the film the police attempt to use science and technology in order to hunt down the killer, Beckert. They represent the Western rationalist view, including the notion that a psychotic criminal is, himself, the victim of some forces outside of his control and needs medical care, rather than punishment. On the other side, Schränker and the underworld use more traditional social operations to track down the killer. For example, they organise all the beggars in the city to follow every single school child as they walk home from school. They can be seen to represent more traditional forces of social control that are closer to mob rule than the rule-driven mechanisms of the police. This mode of operation can sometimes be more efficient in the eradication of evil-doers, but is it desirable? Their leader, Schränker, is simply the most ruthless and cunning among them, even resorting to torture; whereas Police Inspector Lohmann is more cerebral and reliant on rational procedures of evidence gathering. In the end Lohmann succeeds in locating the whereabouts of the mock trial and just barely halting what would have been a gangland-style execution. Justice has prevailed. Even today, though, viewers are likely to be divided on what really should be the ultimate fate of Beckert.
★★★½

Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: "Open City" and "Paisan"

“Neorealism is more an ontological position than an aesthetic one”

– André Bazin

Critical consideration of certain Italian post-war films referred to as Neorealist must perforce deal with rather fundamental questions concerning the nature of the cinematic experience. Unfortunately there is a lack of general agreement as to what actually constitutes Neorealism, since the films have been interpreted on several different levels. However, art movement categories frequently suffer from problems of definition, and, usually it is a case of the old logician’s problem of whether to characterize the class by its defining statement or by its individual members. In the case of Neorealist films, it seems that the weight of opinion has expressed itself in terms of the latter choice, and Neorealism is generally taken to apply only to the specific post-war films of Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Lattuada, and a few others. Such a classification would not be interesting in terms of film theory unless there were certain common cinematic characteristics among these films, and such is the case for the Neorealist films for which there is a persistent critical opinion which asserts that conditions in Italy after the war were such as to engender a common cinematic expression.

However, critics and historians express the essence of Neorealism in terms only of the social environment that spawned it. Arthur Knight [1] remarks that “drawn irresistibly to social themes, they [the Neorealists] were united by a common [social] philosophy.” Hollis Alpert [2] says Neorealism meant “the birth of a new conscience, which was translated into social awareness and a concern for the ordinary man.” And Andrew Sarris [3] observed that Neorealism “was never anything more than the Stalinallee of social realism.” While this line of analysis may be appropriate to the Communist theoreticians who dominated Italian criticism, it doesn’t go far enough to provide the aesthetic distinctions which distinguish the Italian films from other efforts at realism, such as, say, cinema verité. Indeed the importance of the aesthetic basis of the Neorealist films is likened by André Bazin to that of the Russian films of the Twenties [4]:

Potemkin turned the cinema world upside down not just because of its political message, not even because it replaced the studio plaster sets with real settings and the star with an anonymous crowd, but because Eisenstein was the greatest montage theoretician of his day, because he worked with Tissé, the finest cameraman of his day, and because Russia was the focal point of cinematographic thought. . .

It is my purpose here to look at some aesthetic ideas appropriate to the Neorealist films and then consider two important films of this genre, Open City (Roma, Città Aperta,1945) and Paisan (Paisà, 1946), in light of those ideas. I restrict myself to the two films by Roberto Rossellini, because, though uneven, each contains sequences which are, in my opinion, expressive of the essence of the neorealistic aesthetic – this despite Rosselini’s own statement [5] that Neorealism was

“above all a moral standpoint from which to view the world. Afterwards it becomes an aesthetic viewpoint."

This merely reflects the fact that the expression of an amoral standpoint can have profound aesthetic consequences, consciously intended or not.

The most memorable scenes of the two Rossellini films, the activity in the Roman streets in Open City and the fourth (“Forentine”) and Sixth (“Po River”) segments of Paisan, are those that give, in the words of James Agee, the “illusions of the present tense.” [6] In these scenes we are presented images of unanalyzed reality – or rather, images that are one level of abstraction closer to concrete reality than those usually present on film [7]. Getstalt psychologists have determined that a certain amount of analysis takes place at the level of perception, that is, prior to cognition [8]. When one is shown four dots arranges as follows:

One perceives, in addition, the form of a square in the manner of (a), rather than (b) or (c):
In general, reality is reduced to the most simple patterns at the moment of perception. A certain “reduction” of reality takes place. Much of the history of modern painting is concerned with artists’ attempts to deal with the formal perception of the world as opposed to reality as it appears unanalyzed (as it might appear in a photograph). Similarly most of the advances in film technique have been concerned with ways of presenting a reduced or analyzed version of reality on screen – analyzed so that certain formal and thematic connections can be made by the viewer and so that the film itself can become a statement by the author.

As stated above, the important scenes in Open City and Paisan present the world in a relatively unanalyzed state and run counter to the, up to then, historic course of cinematic expression. Though at first thought this might merely seem to be a retrogression in film technique, there is another consideration. With virtually every mode of artistic expression (except music), there is a delicate balance that must be maintained between the referential reality and the language or grammar of expression. To elaborate on this, let us consider an idea from gestalt psychology – that reality is perceived structurally and this structure is the simplest possible for the circumstantial stimuli [9]. From such an idea it is quite reasonable to speculate that what we might call the most admirable “statements” about the world are those that can be applied to the greatest amount of reality and yet have the simplest attendant structure. Certainly such a principle dominates the ascendency of theories in the scientific world, and something similar is involved when we admire a Shakespearean play for its universality and profundity – here the structure of the play applies to a wealth of human situations that have existed in the world over centuries. The delicate balance between the referential reality and the language of expression means that the language should be profound (possess a significant abstract structure) and yet be directly applicable to concrete reality. The more general the abstraction present, the more widely applicable is the structure to reality, but at the same time the further removed is that structure from concrete reality. The danger exists in allowing the language of expression to become disengaged from concrete reality.

An example of this disengagement coming to pass is the American Western film, a genre which once may have had close connections with reality, but which has become progressively more mythic and self-contained. The Western is now a self-consistent but disembodied iconography; such films are merely exercises in grammatical expression, analogous to writing love poetry in Latin, and meaningful only to buffs. André Bazin was referring to this kind of imbalance when he wrote the following [10]:

[the representation of reality on the screen] is a necessary illusion, but it quickly becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with is cinematographic presentation. As for the filmmaker, the moment he has secured the unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any question of calling him a liar, because his art consists in lying.

The connection of art expression to reality is not a static condition. As an audience’s perceptual organization of the world evolves, the artist must continually adjust his language of expression so as to continue to relate to his audience’s perceptual reality. Thus a medieval painting seems unreal to modern observers, because it relates to a perceptual reality that no longer exists in the minds of its spectators. Bazin expressed an awareness of this entire aesthetic situation when he observed that “the objective nature of the modern novel, by reducing the strictly grammatical aspects of its stylistics to a minimum, has laid bare the secret essence of style.” [11]

The aesthetic ideas presented so far have been quite general, and they naturally manifest themselves differently in different art forms. When Bazin [12] says that “the cinema stand in contrast to poetry, painting, and theater, and comes ever close to the novel” , he means that the power of the film to represent reality can most closely be compared to that of the novel. There is a danger, however, in drawing this analogy too closely, because the novel’s communication through words is always a highly abstract process. Even if the novel is more concrete than poetry or theater, it still involves the author’s translation of his perceptual reality into linguistic symbols and the ensuing reverse translation by the reader into his own perceptions. Such an abstract process always involves a considerable degree of analysis by the mere use and choice of words independent of grammatical style and is thus less immediate than film. Film, however, is a medium wherein reality can be presented almost without analysis – the balance can be lost in the other direction in this case.

Some of the earliest enthusiasts of Neorealism made the mistake of assuming that the art lay in merely photographing reality outside of the studio. But this is clearly only one component of the process. Surely a film that involved no creator’s selectivity, no analysis of perceptual reality, would not be an artistic statement. It would be no different than looking randomly out the window. The vapidity of such cinema was remarked upon by Stanley Kauffman in his review of the Zavattini - De Sica film, The Roof (Il Tetto, 1956), when he complained that {13]

"they strove to make the film as much like life as possible. Therefore its hour and half contains moment of pathos and humor and excitement together with long stretches that are not particularly interesting. Just like your life and mine."

Such was the result when Zavattini tried to put his own doctrinaire theories about Neorealism into practice.

The Rossellini sequences, on the other hand, are outstanding, because they do represent a distinct point of view (the filmmaker’s statement about reality) and yet effectively root the viewer in concrete perceptions (contrary to previous films which had become increasingly abstract and grammatical). The thematic current that runs through the films is the idea that heroism consists not of accomplishment but of resignation to one’s fate, coincident with the maintenance of one’s moral commitments. When the priest and the Communist both die for their cause in Open City, they do so with a peculiar sense of peace, giving us the feeling that they have achieved, through their resignation, some degree of perhaps Christian transcendence. Critics have tended to isolate Rossellini’s form from his content. Thus Robert Warshow [14] states that “Rossellini has no intellectual defences, and when he attempts to go beyond the passive representation of experience, he falls at once into the grossest sentimentality and falsehood.” Whether false or not, Rossellini’s moral theme is inextricably intertwined with the manner of its presentation.

Moreover critics take exception to Rossellini’s essentially melodramatic narrative form [15]. Yet this melodramatic style is an essential quality for Rossellini. Rossellini organizes the plot around key events, highly dramatic events involving life and death. In the best sequences (the “Florentine” and “Po River” episodes of Paisan), the audience is given no background, no reason for the event. The unanalyzed event takes up the entire action. There are certain relationships among the characters which the audience would find useful to know, but the narrative does not point these out or slow down for audience comprehension. The action itself seems to exist independent of the filming of it, and the camera has no time to examine details. Robert Warshow points out that American films devote considerable screen time to the establishment of characterization in order that the characters, who are really abstractions, can be given the necessary background detail so that they can be individualized and so that the action can be explained in terms of the individual motivations of the characters. Rossellini, keying only on the action of a highly charged event, achieves the unanalyzed and unexplained immediacy he wants, but he does so only by being melodramatic. That is, by having such unrelenting dramatic action, Rossellini appears melodramatic. The failures, (a) in Open City of scenes involving Bergman and his coterie and (b) in Paisan of the episode involving the three American chaplains, arise from Rossellini’s use of symbolic characters, i.e. his deviation from the successful melodramatic-event narrative style.

The remarkable “Florentine” and “Po River” episodes of Paisan work because they are melodramatic. The viewer is constantly perceiving violent and fragmented images (not fragmented artificially, but as they would come to a bystander) which he must assemble coherently in his mind. The analysis, performed by the viewer, would not even be undertaken if the event itself were not of sufficient dramatic intensity.

In the “Florentine” episode a woman is looking for her lover in a contested part of the city. The camera maintains a consistent third-person perspective. There are no cuts to closeups. Indeed the camera seems to be somewhat wary of the danger present in the situation. The viewer thus feels himself part of the action. When two fascists are captured, they are rushed up almost too close to the camera for comfort. One feels like taking a step backwards when watching. This sense of immediacy is maintained until the woman learns of the death of her lover and the episode ends. The viewer’s knowledge of the woman and whatever her lover meant to her is constructed consistently of what can be drawn from her actions during the event. This is a limitation, but at the same time the event is so real that it seems as rich as life itself – so full of possibly meaningful, briefly glimpsed detail that still awaits our minds’ attentive reflection. This overall effect is enhanced by the elliptical succession of images. Important actions are not even shown, and the viewer must fill it in for himself, because the action is racing ahead. The entire “Po River” sequence is put together in this fashion. Also, because the viewer is putting together some of the action in his mind, the unseen events make their presence felt in succeeding scenes, just as they do in real life. An example of this shadow casting of an event is the effect of Pina’s death on the subsequent scene in Open City.

The passive, eye-level camera techniques, the newsreel editing, and the naturalistic acting ultimately bring about the active perceptual participation of the viewer. The necessity of the viewer to continually analyze the event and keep up with the action harmonizes with Rossellini’s moral purpose. The various deaths reported in the “Forentine” and “Po River” episodes of Paisan seem so random and brutal, so subordinate to the larger context of the war and the rest of the real world, that we, the viewers, can only reflect upon them in our own time. Yet at the same time the characters who participate in these events are struggling on behalf of their ideals. This combination is what gives the strength to what is best in Rossellini’s films. The moral attitudes of the characters and the concrete context in which they are depicted each give substance to the other. And this is the crucial point that is missed by Bazin and Warshow and which the foregoing argument has been an attempt to justify: that the potency of Rossellini’s realistic cinematography depends aesthetically on the melodramatic narrative style and the moralistic message – whether one is in sympathy with that moral message or not.

[See also "Subjective Realism in the Italian Film"]

Notes:

1. Knight, Arthur, The Liveliest Art, The New American Library (1957), p. 225.
2. Alpert, Hollis, The Dreams and the Dreamers, Macmillan (1962), p. 183
3. Sarris, Andrew, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969, Simon and Schuster (1971), p. 30.
4. Bazin, André, What is Cinema?, Volume II, University of California (1971), p. 25.
5. Rossellini, Roberto, Interviews with Film Directors, ed. by Andrew Sarris, Avon Books (1967), p. 475.
6. Agee. James, Agee on Film, Volume I, Grosset and Dunlap (1969), p. 301.
7. I am, of course, presuming that there actually is a concrete reality and that all of us are referring to the same thing when we use the phrase. Moreover, I am overlooking such linguistic issues, as what exactly Gertrude Stein meant when she said, “there’s no there there.”
8. See, for example, Rudolph Arnheirm’s book, Art and Visual Perception. (1974).
9. “The basic law of visual perception. . . asserts that any stimulus pattern tends to be seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as the given conditions permit.” – Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, University of California (1954), p. 45.
10. Bazin, André, op. cit., p. 27.
11. Ibid., p. 31. In connection with realism and the recent course of modern literature, there is an interesting article by Tom Wolfe in the December 1972 issue of Esquire, entitled, “Why they aren’t writing the Great American Novel Anymore”, which generally supports the aesthetic outline in this article.
12. Ibid., p. 26.
13. Kauffmann, Stanley, A World on Film, Delta (1966), p. 292.
14. Warshow, Robert, The Immediate Experience, Atheneium (1962), p. 257.
15. “Unfortunately the demon of melodrama that Italian film makers seem incapable of exorcising takes over every so often, thus imposing a dramatic necessity of strictly foreseeable events.” – André Bazin, op. cit., p. 31.

Film Aesthetics

Film Aesthetics

• Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan
• Bogart and Brando - The Maltese Falcon (1941) & The Wild Ones (1954)
• Cinematic Expression in L'Avventura
• Existentialism in Film 1
• Expressionism in Film
• The Seduction of Florence in Chabrol’s Les Cousins
• Subjective Realism in the Italian Film
• The Tour of the Fortress in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion – a Scene Analysis
• The Visit to the Radar Installation in Red Desert
• Phenomenology and Red Desert

"Sisters of the Gion" - Kenji Mizoguchi (1936)

Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion (Gion No Shimai, 1936) was made directly after his Osaka Elegy (Naniwa Erejî, 1936) and shares a number of similarities with it. Once again an original Mizoguchi story about women being used by men was scripted by Yoshikata Yoda, and many of the cast members in the preceding film reappeared in Sisters of the Gion. In particular, Isuzu Yamada, who played the defiant Ayako in Osaka Elegy, reprises her role of an independent woman, this time in the role of Omocha. If we compare the two films, however, we see that Sisters of the Gion exhibits a number of advances over its predecessor.

The film is set in the famous Gion neighborhood of Kyoto, which was well-known for its upscale geisha district. The story concerns the affairs and struggles of two sisters who are both geisha girls, and it drew public attention to the legitimacy and social acceptability of the entire profession and institution of geisha (in the Gion district, the full-fledged geisha are called, “geiko”). The older of the two girls, the no longer youthful Umekichi, is gentle, considerate, and accepts the limitations that society has placed on her position. Her younger sister, the pretty Omocha, is a feisty charmer who is out for all that she can get. As far as Omocha is concerned, all men are selfish and only look after their own interests; they deserve to be “used” and exploited, since they, themselves, are always using geisha girls. The plot of the film has four basic segments:

1. Introduction to the Two Sisters (11 minutes). The opening scene features a 66-second long tracking shot the overlooks the auctioning off all the assets to Shimbei Furusawa’s dry goods business. The once wealthy businessman is now penniless, and after a bitter quarrel with his shrewish wife, goes to visit his faithful geisha woman, the demure and gentle Umekichi. Furusawa has been her long time special patron. Umekichi's younger sister, Omocha, soon appears, wearing modern dress and displaying rude and impudent manners. Umekichi, who genuinely loves Furusawa, agrees to have him move in to their household, even though the two sisters have very little means. Immediately after he leaves to get his things, Omocha expresses her disgust with the idea of taking in such a loser, and this leads to a lengthy argument between the modern, school-educated Omocha and her older sister, who has had a more traditional upbringing, concerning how one should treat old acquaintances. The argument extends to the next day and includes a glorious 160-second tracking shot as the two sisters walk in the park and discuss their differences. Umekichi insists that she should be loyal to her long-time patron, whereas Omocha says he isn’t owed anything: he always got what he paid for. You should simply use men, just like they use us, she says:

   “A geisha’s only purpose is to give men pleasure. They pay us to be their playthings. We’re bought and sold like common goods.”

2. Omocha’s Scheming Manoeuvers (24 minutes). Now Omocha takes action to exploit the men around her. First she flirts with a clothing shop clerk, Kimura, in order to get him to steal an expensive kimono for her sister, a needed accoutrement in order to attract a new, wealthy patron. Then she meets Furusawa’s colleague, Mr. Jurakudo, and charms him out of some cash that she can use to send Furuawa packing. Finally, she meets Furusawa in private and tells him that his sister wants to get rid of him and gives him some of the cash from Jurakudo to find other digs. Umekichi is then told that Furusawa has left town.
3. Omocha’s Success (14 minutes). Kimura, the dry goods shop clerk who stole the kimono for Omocha, is found out by his proud and dictatorial boss, Mr Kudo. Kudo goes to visit Omocha to get the kimono back, but after Omocha turns on the charm, he is also soon seduced. At the end of this act, Omocha is seen admiring her ill-gotten gains (a new dress) in the mirror and boasting to Umekichi, who is now being pressured by her sister to accept the wealthy Mr. Jurakudo as her new patron.
4. The Sisters’ Downfall (20 minutes). But Omocha’s triumph is short-lived, and the pace quickens. Kimura stops by while Omocha is out and innocently informs Umekichi that Furusawa is still in town. Omocha and Kudo show up and Kimura, shocked to learn that Kudo is now Omocha’s patron, calls Omocha a tramp. Omocha haughtily dismisses him. Umekichi rushes out, finds Furusawa, and arranges to leave her lying sister's quarters and move in with him at his new place. In short order all of Omocha’s lies have been exposed. The consequences will now have to be paid. A car, allegedly from Kudo, comes to pick up Omocha, but once inside the car, she learns that she is being kidnapped by the revenge-minded Kimura and his thug friend. She winds up in the hospital with severe injuries, and Umekichi rushes to her side. She gently scolds Omocha, telling her that this is what happens when you mistreat people, but soon she, too, faces mistreatment from a man. She has been abandoned by her soul-mate, Furusawa, who has been offered a factory manager job in his wife’s home village and has suddenly left in a rush. His departing message to Umekichi, conveyed to her by the serving girl, is “go find a better patron”. The final scene in Omacha’s hospital room shows both sisters lamenting the abusive and selfish way they have been treated by men.

In the end both the two sisters’ approaches towards men have received rebuke. Omocha has tried to wend her way in the dog-eat-dog world of acquisitiveness, but she has been simply overwhelmed by brute force. Women are always at a disadvantage when the terms are dictated by savagery and physical violence. Umekichi’s contrasting approach of compassion and kindness has hardly brought her any better fate. She tries to console herself that she at least tried to bring some happiness to her man, even though her kindness was only taken for granted. In fact his only concern was material gain; when an opportunity appeared, he abandoned her without a second thought.

It is interesting to compare Mizoguchi’s film aesthetic with that of von Sternberg, who Mizoguchi has acknowledged to be one his major influences. Both directors have focussed their attention on women and how they relate to men. But von Sternberg’s vision of women is seen through an extremely romantic and Expressionistic filter. His women are beautiful as well as unfathomable and unearthly beings who either offer or demand absolute submission to love. In Mizoguchi's films, on the other hand, there is also something deep and unknowable about women, too – but his women are seen more intimately and with greater sympathy. In his universe, women are always forced to play a game with the deck stacked against them. And there is more variety to his women. Omocha is not simply a passive victim, but a person who has tried to figure out how to make her own way in a soulless and hypocritical world, where high values are espoused but conveniently ignored. Her character is more richly drawn and complex: even though her behaviour is problematic, we see how she is trapped, and we can sympathise with her plight.

In contrast to the women, Mizoguchi’s men, although they sometimes put up a manly front, seem to be spineless or helpless in connection with their behaviour towards women. Compared to Mizoguchi’s selfish male players, though, Von Sternberg’s men (at least some of them) are more romantic and self-sacrificing. Nevertheless, it is interesting that despite the almost uniform worthlessness of the male characters in Sisters of the Gion, they are generally a bit more than simple, one-dimensional stereotypes – we recognise (and perhaps even slightly sympathise with) them from our own experiences. In fact the overall view of men as "slackers" and women as "strivers" has now become a prominent thread in American movies, too, as remarked by David Denby in his article, "A Fine Romance". So what we see in Sisters of the Gion is by no means exclusive to Japanese society. But Mizoguchi's films are probably not exclusively attacking one sex in favour of the other, but instead are critiquing an overarching social order that channels the behaviour of both men and women in an unsatisfactory manner.

Both Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion show women struggling to survive in unfair circumstances. They both offer more sophisticated characterisations than the typical Hollywood screen stereotypes depicting innocent women victimized by cruel masters. In the two Mizoguchi films, the narratives present situations which, even though contrived, are not so artificially one-sided and can be seen more circumspectively. This suggests a response to a possible objection to Mizoguchi's approach. One might criticise Mizoguchi and Yoda for exaggerating the manipulative nature of Ayako in Osaka Elegy and Omocha in Sisters of the Gion, and thereby diminishing their innocence -- they got what they deserved, one might argue. But by casting these characters as they have done, the filmmakers have distanced the viewer from constant identification with any single character, and this places the larger social context into a sharper focus. This kind of distancing effect is stronger and the social message more forceful in Sisters of the Gion than in its predecessor.

The cinematography in Sister of the Gion is also more fluid and sophisticated than that of Osaka Elegy. Most of the camera shots are artfully composed and have durations of more than one minute, with careful framing maintained by means of subtle panning and dollying. There is a memorable shot of of this type lasting 3:06, when Omocha meets privately with Mr. Furusawa and tells him he has become a burden and that he should move out. Omocha’s flirtation with Mr. Kudo is a such shot, lasting 3:20, and it has perfectly motivated and unobtrusive camera movement. The fluid cinematography is actually the outstanding feature of this film, and it will become even more of a Mizoguchi trademark in his subsequent work.
★★★★

Kenji Mizoguchi

About Kenji Mizoguchi:

• Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), Conversations About Great Films: Akasen chitai/Street of Shame, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, XIX:6, The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (29 September 2009).

Films of Kenji Mizoguchi:

• Osaka Elegy - Kenji Mizoguchi (1936)
• Sisters of the Gion - Kenji Mizoguchi (1936)
• The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum - Kenji Mizoguchi (1939)
• The 47 Ronin - Kenji Mizoguchi (1941-42)
• Women of the Night - Kenji Mizoguchi (1948)
• The Lady of Musashino - Kenji Mizoguchi (1951)
• Life of Oharu - Kenji Mizoguchi (1952)
• Ugetsu - Kenji Mizoguchi (1953)
• Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi (1954)
• Street of Shame -  Kenji Mizoguchi (1956)

"Osaka Elegy" - Kenji Mizoguchi (1936)

Kenji Mizoguchi, who was born in 1898, was already directing silent films in Japan at the age of 25 and by the time he was 38 had some sixty credits to his directorial resume. But none of those earlier films, which must perforce have been shot on very limited budgets, have survived, and today there are only post-1936 films of his available. Since Mizoguchi came to be known as Japan’s greatest director, this figures to be a considerable loss, but at least we can be reassured by Mizoguchi’s later observation that his career as a serious director didn’t really begin until the making of Osaka Elegy (Naniwa Erejî) in 1936. This film already featured a number of Mizoguchi’s characteristic narrative themes and also marked the beginning of his long-time, fruitful collaboration with scriptwriter Yoshikata Yoda.

The plot of the film, based on an original story by Mizoguchi, himself, concerns the misfortunes of a young woman who sacrifices her position in society and her chances for future happiness in order to provide financial assistance to her male family members. It seems to parallel some of Mizoguchi’s personal history, since his own father’s failed financial investments ultimately led to his elder sister being sold into prostitution as a geisha. This sister then helped provide financial support for her teenage brother who was about to enter the film industry and achieve everlasting fame.

The narrative line of Osaka Elegy can be viewed as comprising four basic sections:

1. Establishing Ayako’s Dilemma. In the opening sequence, which is very static, Sonosuke Asai, owner of the Asai Pharmaceutical Company, is shown in his wealthy home demonstrating his general irritability and dissatisfaction with his domestic life. He and his wife make no bones about being unhappy with each other. The action cuts to the Asai Pharmaceutical office, where Ayako, a pretty telephone operator works and is admired by handsome young coworker Susumu. In addition, she is not only admired but also discretely propositioned for sexual favors by two senior managers, Mr. Fujino and Mr. Asai, himself. Although the early domestic scene shows that traditional Japanese dress is worn in the homes, everyone wears Western clothing at the workplace. This signifies the split personality that upscale Japanese life was experiencing. But Ayako has a pressing problem. Her father embezzled money from work and made some disastrous financial investments, and now must pay it back or face jail. She asks Susumu, the man she loves, for help, but he doesn’t have the money. Back home, the sharp-tongued Ayako criticises her father for irresponsibly jeopardizing the family, and after a bitter quarrel, she leaves home.
2. Ayako Takes a Desperate Action. Act 2 opens on a modern apartment room, where Ayako is sitting bored and smoking cigarettes. She has left the pharmaceutical company and become Asai’s secret concubine in return for money to help her father out of his jam. Soon she is attending the theatre in the company of Asai, with her hair coiffed like a married woman. One day she runs into Susumu at a department store, and while sharing a tea, he proposes marriage. This is what she has always wanted, but she can’t accept his proposal in her present situation, and she runs away without giving her answer. As was inevitable, Asai’s wife eventually learns of her husband’s amorous liaison, and she imperiously orders her timid husband to return home and end his affair.
3. Ayako’s Appeal to Susumu. Ayako, now free to go to Susumu, asks her maid whether she should tell him about her affair. The maid responds by saying if Susumu really loves her, he will understand. But just then Ayako learns that her brother, Hiroshi, who has been studying at the university, is desperately in need of money to pay his final tuition. So, addressing the new financial problem, she flirts with her other senior admirer, Mr. Fujino, and gets him to pay her money that will be used to cover Hiroshi’s tuition. Ayako then rushes to meet Susumu, innocently telling him everything and begging him to marry her. Susumu’s response is hesitant, but Ayako seems confidant everything will work out.
4. The Final Breakup. Mr. Fujino next shows up at the apartment, demanding her affection in payment for his financial contributions. Ayako, now confidant that she has Susumu behind her, rudely and triumphantly dismisses him. But the couple is soon arrested by the police: Fujino has formally accused them of soliciting. During a brutal cross examination at the police station, the fearful Susumu betrays Ayako, saying that she is a fallen woman who deceived him. Ultimately the police let her go, but when she returns to her family, she finds that they all now reject her as a disgraceful “delinquent” and turn her out. She is now completely abandoned, and the final shot shows her walking alone at night on the street facing her uncertain future.

Osaka Elegy, which was apparently shot in only twenty days, features a number of hallmark Mizoguchi features. The very carefully composed camera frame always covers a relatively large scope, with almost no closeups. Many of the shots are filmed through a scene with considerable depth, with environmental artifacts in the foreground and well-crafted, dramatic lighting of the subjects that heighten the ambience and sense of environmental context. There is also some excellently contrived camera movements, but nothing like those of his later works.

The men in the film are uniformly timid and dominated by their circumstances. They unquestioningly identify with their social institutions and seem reluctant to think for themselves and take initiative. Ayako, by contrast, is naive, but also spirited and relatively enterprising. She is not simply an idealised victim of society, but is instead a more richly developed and believable character that presents an unusually sympathetic examination of the life of a woman in contemporary Japan. In the story told, she has tried to live up to society’s traditional demands for helping her family in difficult circumstances; but while her menfolk seem useless in this regard, she has taken her own initiative and managed to find the needed money. In the end, though, all her efforts are rejected by the hypocrites around her. This will be a recurring theme for the rest of Mizoguchi’s career: Japanese society has only idealized and highly restricted roles for women; there is no place, no support, and no refuge for women who would like to, or need to, live outside of those boundaries. Nevertheless, it seems that despite the prejudicial and unjust society in which she lives, Ayako’s spirit is still unbroken at the end of the film. True, she has become hardened and more cynical by her experience. But she is still a fervent, unbowed human being walking forward to face life’s further vicissitudes.

There are cultural and situational aspects to the setting in Osaka Elegy about which one can only speculate. This was 1936, when the world economic situation was not promising, and economic tensions may have been particularly intense. Ayako, who smokes cigarettes and wears Western dress, is a modern woman in a Japan that was undoubtedly experiencing tensions between modernity and the traditional cultural values of feminine modesty. There is in all this a suggestion in the film that even the liberating contributions of modernism appear to provide no secure and respected place for women in Japan. This discouraging social assessment was recognised by the wartime Japanese government, which banned Osaka Elegy as decadent and unsuitable for the national spirit. And yet in my view, the film shows a striking sympathy for the passionate and unvanquishable character of woman.
★★★½ 

"The Threepenny Opera" - G. W. Pabst (1931)

During the filming of the The Threepenny Opera (Die Dresigroschenoper or Die 3 Groschen-Oper, 1931), a celebrated lawsuit was initiated by the author, Bertolt Brecht, and the music composer, Kurt Weill, against the production. Brecht had very successfully produced his own play previously in Berlin and was not about to allow G. W. Pabst to make his substantially altered screen version. Brecht lost the case, but unlike most such instances, the film’s alterations did not destroy the power of the artists’ original work. Pabst and his excellent cameraman used sophisticated shooting angles and swirls of dust and smoke to create a very moody, well-felt atmosphere for the players, most of whom were the original stage actors. For once Pabst, the “realist” of The Joyless Street and The Love of Jeanne Ney fame, chose Expressionistic filming devices to elicit the contrasts between the Edwardian bourgeois and the Soho slums.

The plot, set in an imaginary, fantastic London at the turn of the century, features three rogues – Mackie Messer, a leader of a gang of criminals, Peachum, the beggar king, and Tiger Brown, the police commissioner. Peachum, furious over Mackie’s impetuous engagement with his daughter, threatens to disrupt the imminent coronation of the Queen with a beggar’s demonstration, unless the police commissioner sends Mackie to the gallows. This sets the stage for Brecht’s vigorous plot machinations as well as his pungent comments on the inherent corruption of a capitalistic society.

Kurt Weill’s songs, which were reputedly based on a few notes whistled by Brecht, were the very pivots of the play and gave it much of its impact. The film is more cinematically motivated, i.e. its movement through time id dependent more on purely cinematic values. Thus the music appears less fundamental in the film than in the play. It might be added that Kurt Weill, after the court case was over, cooperated with Pabst and adapted his songs to the exigencies of the screen.

This film, Pabst’s first completely successful integration of image and sound, is also noted for the create use of the illusionary possibilities of photographing through glass to enhance the bizarre character of interiors. The numerous screens of glass in the café scene (Mackie’s courtship) are designed to transform the crowded and smoking room into a confusing maze. Another time, Mackie is shot entering a brothel behind a glass partition, which gives him a rather provocative halo.

The film version . . . differed much from the play, but on the whole preserved its social satire, genuine lyricism and revolutionary colouring.

– Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler

★★★½ 

"The Love of Jeanne Ney" - G. W. Pabst (1927)

G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927) is not an Expressionist film, but like the Expressionists, Pabst never managed to reject a shot which was both forceful and picturesque. The theme was similar to The Joyless Street (Die Freudlose Gasse, 1925), except instead of depicting Vienna in turmoil, Pabst took on the whole of European postwar society.

Pabst was forced to work under some distressing pressures. First, the American films were already having a deleterious box-office effect on the German film industry, and Pabst was instructed to stage his picture “in the American style.” Second, he was also under pressure to match the recent successes of the Russians Eisenstein and Pudovkin. And finally, Ufa studios insisted on an outrageously bowdlerized version of Ilya Ehrenberg’s original story, altering the social, sexual, and political implications. The result was a masterpiece. Rotha, regarding the film even better than The Joyless Street, observed that

Jeanne Ney developed from sequence to sequence with breathtaking power. Mood succeeded mood, each perfect in its tension and its understanding.

Fritz Arno Wagner, now at the height of his cinematographic powers, achieved in his smooth travelling and panning shots and in his natural lighting a technical tour de force.

The cutting of the film has become a textbook example of unobtrusive effectiveness. Every cut was made on actual movement, so that at the end of a shot somebody was moving and at the beginning of the next shot the action was continued. The eye, following the movement, scarcely notices the actual transposition. This style was in sharp contrast to Eisenstein’s montage, which was deliberately used to shock the spectator. There is one scene in The Love of Jeanne Ney that, though lasting only three minutes, has over forty cuts – though the eye scarcely notices them. This short sequence has been used for pedagogical purposed in filmmaking courses.

Iris Varry, writing for the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, says,

Pabst’s work here is in no sense picturesque, it is photographic. His settings and his individual scenes are quite as carefully composed as those of the more obviously artistic German films, but the craftsmanship is less apparent, the spectator is led to feel “how true”, rather than “how beautiful”.

★★★½ 

"The Last Laugh" - F. W. Murnau (1924)

Carl Mayer, the outstanding German script writer whose first triumph was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), had planned The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924) to be the third part of a trilogy he had been working on with the director Lupu Pick. A disagreement between the two brought in F. W. Murnau as the director, a circumstance which proved to be historic.

With the illustrious Karl Freund at the camera, Murnau fashioned one of the great cinematographic achievements of the silent era. The film, shot entirely without titles, was an extremely Germanic Existentialist tragedy, though not clearly an Expressionistic one. It recounts the social destruction of a doorman, who, upon losing his uniform, loses his being-in-the-world. Having grown too old to carry luggage, the doorman must exchange his braided coat for a simple white jacket and be the attendant in a men’s lavatory. The resulting dishonor ruins the old man, played by Emil Jannings, (he also starred in The Blue Angel, 1930) as well as his entire family. The full tragic implications of a film like this can only be understood in a country where uniform is king. The film abounds in skilful use of symbols, which are so well integrated to the action that they need not be noticed to appreciate the film. In particular, the revolving door, whose movements the doorman is so proud of controlling, becomes a symbol for the swirl of life itself.

The Last Laugh is a showcase of camera technique. Lupu Pick claimed to be the first to use the moving camera in 1922 and Wegener’s cinematographer, Boese, insisted he used it for The Golem (1920). But for Murnau, the camera moving on a dolly was no longer enough: he tied it to his cameraman’s chest and had him follow Jannings step by step with each camera angle chosen for perfect expressive and pictoral composition. Freund’s camera plays with beams of the nightwatchman’s torch, moving to and fro in a fashion characteristic of the German filmmaker’s fondness for light play on surfaces. Yet each shot is well motivated.

The inclusion of Expressionist style in a film depicting psychological developments in a middle-class atmosphere seems impossible, but Murnau does it with the exquisite drunken dream sequence, wherein the daily torture of the doorman comes out in all its horror. The panels of the revolving door, now gigantic and Expressionistically distorted, collide with the sleeping man’s brain and split it in two: a precise image of the schizoid nature of all dreams.

The concern for details slows the pace down and occasionally disconcerts modern audiences who are unaccustomed to viewing films in which the psychological development is conditioned by each meaningful but minute detail. The freedom of the mobile camera and the title-free narrative enables Murnau to explore the characters in great depth. In fact Eisner (The Haunted Screen) asserts that the ponderous pace of the film is essential to this investigation into the Germanic world and gives it the ultimate meaning [1].

Mayer and Murnau were forced by their producers to have a happy ending. They did so ingeniously, without sacrificing the film’s artistic merit, by taking on a facetious ending, an epilogue, essentially, which is even more biting in its commentary than the original ending and is, indeed, the last laugh.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (1974), University of California Press.