National styles in movie making predominated during the Silent Era. You could tell the nation in which a movie was made without referring to the opening titles or the street signs. Themes important to the culture of each nation accompanied the distinctive craftsmanship. The important point is that those styles and themes have not changed in the decades since. That is worth remarking on, given that so much is made of how film has become different from what it was because of technological innovation and the importance of the Hollywood-raised dollar. Well, just as there are still national styles in novels, even though novels are translated into at least the major world languages, there are still national styles in films.
French silent movies, for example, were about character, plot less important than revealing the hearts of individual people and how every person is caught up in an ensemble of other people. Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, a touchstone movie for the French cinema, shows you Joan among her tormentors, some of them more sympathetic than others, as if Job is being portrayed alongside comforters given more individual identity than they are in the Bible. No one can forget Falconetti’s haunting and expressive face, her confusion, guilelessness, determination and so much else, all captured in her glances. Dreyer does his work by providing close-ups and also by panning the camera in long takes back and forth amidst the assemblage, as if you were interactive with a Rembrandt and were thereby allowed to enter the frame and peer more closely at one and then another of its personages.
“L’Atalante” is a French silent set on the Seine that is very different in style from Dreyer because its scenes take place in very different settings and rather than the camera moving within a tableau, the camera explores different scenes in different ways. It opens with a wonderful extended shot of a walk from the rural church to the river barge in which a peasant girl will set up her new life, marriage having provided a way to fulfill her dream of escape. There is an extended scene within a restaurant; there is an extended scene on the deck of the boat. Dreyer’s unities of place and time have been eliminated. The movie ends with her return to the narrow confines inside the boat as it plies its way from one industrial port to another, rescued from the life of the cities so as to be restored to the same man she married whom she now understands really loves her. Yes, a bit romantic, though I daresay all of us live a bit in that and so romantic thoughts are as real as any others, especially when they are shown to require a number of people, a style of life, to sustain them.
And yet there is the same French style. Novelistic movement does not mean that the film engages in the sweeping movement of a Poussin, every viewer, like the man in the picture, getting out of the way of the snake in “Landscape With A Man Running From a Serpent”. Nor is there the sweep of the viewer’s eye as it moves from one part of a Cezanne cityscape to another. Rather, the movie is a set of stage sets with some movement between them, and so does not duplicate the movement found in so much French painting. Each of the scenes show how people lean on one another, sometimes literally, bend over or shrink in front of one another, the imagery suggesting and enacting the relationships.
The same point about the close in focus on the way a few characters bounce off and thereby illuminate one another can be made about an early French talkie. Jean Renoir’s “Bondu Saved From Drowning”, is set in a house that faces a wonderfully photographed river which serves as the backdrop for what goes on indoors, a book shop in front, a home for the book store proprietor and his family above. Family life is disrupted and eventually reconstituted after a bum is taken into the household somewhat foolishly by the bookseller who rescued him from drowning, but who turns out to be no fool at all: he is a model of the bourgeois gentleman, able to bend his principles when he needs to, knowing the importance of good form not as a burden but as a way to keeping what he has, which is a very complicated set of relationships. The household furnishings may seem claustrophobic and yet they fill up the owner’s castle.
The outdoors, however, is not as spectacularly exploited as one would expect from a Renoir or from someone with an American eye which wishes the camera had spent even more time there rather than treated the outdoors as the literal site of the excursions taken by the family and from which Bondu eventually escapes. That pulling back from the outdoors remains a characteristic of French films despite the fact that the outdoors had been such an important part of French painting from at least Lorrain and Le Nain on, up through the Impressionists who had so shortly preceded the coming of film, the history of which, one remembers, beginning with the short outdoor scenes filmed by the Lumiere brothers. Maybe it is that the French still think of social life as ranking people into estates and so the only outdoors are those of the formal gardens and other geographical formations which ratify that, as they do in Poussin. A river, for Jean Renoir, is the place that takes up the lowest point on the social totem pole. Bums land there and that is from where bums have to be brought back to ground, even if they finally return to the river because they no longer wish to find a place for themselves within and therefore among the estates.
American films, for their part, always open up to the outdoors, from their very early days. It is not just the sweep of the epic long shot, as that was established by D. W. Griffith in “Intolerance”, because his indoor sets are also filled with large numbers of people, just as they are in Hogarth. Griffith is another of the comic artists, as Hazlitt primes us to notice, that make us laugh at every one of the distinct grotesques who fall over one another within the frames of his art. Russian movies, from the beginning, also have an epic sweep. Their focus, however, is to narrow the eye from the larger events to a foreground of an individual event, such as the baby carriage going down the Odessa steps. American films, rather, open up so that the grander context is more important than the excuse for looking at it that is provided by the action and story of the foreground. Think of Harold Lloyd’s classic climbing up the side of a building in “Safety Last”. His acrobatic antics are the suspenseful foreground while the eye is constantly distracted by the context of a bustling Los Angeles cityscape, cars and people making their way amid the grid, new buildings rising, buildings and people in the distance seen as ever so small. It is a small step from this to John Ford using Monument Valley as the setting that overshadows the cavalry (get it?) and their heroic if now belittled skirmishes with Indians, the tragedy of those made more significant precisely because people are so small and nature-- which means geology, not farming-- looms so large.
German movies also constitute a national genre. The theme, whether in “Nosferatu” or “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, is the unleashing of suppressed forces. The faces are grotesque which means, contrary to the French, who see all in the face, the German filmmaker descends within the face to see the in-turning evil. Society must be harsh if the irrepressible is to be suppressed. German silents make even crowd scenes seem narrowing, as is most clearly shown in “Metropolis”, where the hunched over workers march to work in lockstep, not looking about them at what Americans might think of as the majesty of the factory. The only places that have room in them are the offices of the elite, desks surrounded by a lot of space, while workers are crowded out by the machines they tend. The early German talkie is no different. Peter Lorre is grotesque in “M”, whether you think of him as a sexual deviant, or as a member of the working class, or as a Jew. The German horror movie takes up where it left off after the hiatus enforced on it by Nazi rule. Warner Herzog returns to the distortions of the human body and the human spirit, and so breaks with Leni Riefenstahl’s idealization of the body and the German spirit, as does Fassbinder in his “Alexanderplatz” series.
Support for this idea that there are national styles of movie making, each nation differing in the way themes are handled as well as in the way films are shot, is supplied by considering the movies made in the Thirties, the era of the Great Depression, because the uniform theme of class struggle is handled in ways that accord with the national style. The Depression is visualized and understood differently in different places.
The foremost example of the French handling of class in the Thirties is, of course, Renoir’s “Grand Illusion”. The focus is still narrow, on life in a prison of war camp, the combat that brought the French aviators down unseen. That is because the theme of the movie concerns the relationship between the crippled commandant and the prisoners, all of whom are aristocrats of the air, divided by a war, as they understand, and as been understood by film buffs ever since, that was dooming the classes that were the leaders in the war. The film is a tragedy about class.
American films, which open up the battlefield for the viewer’s observation, are not tragedies, however much they include deaths and heartbreak. Rather, they are about the building of character. Just as the silent “The Big Parade” honored the ordinary soldier who fought in France, “Sergeant York”, a film made on the brink of World War II, honors a born again hillbilly hell-raiser who quietly discusses with his officers in his quiet Gary Cooper way, the theology of whether killing in wartime is justified (not the most plausible scene in movie history) and then goes off to kill Germans in their machine gun nests. The camera provides all the vantage points necessary to see how York establishes an advantageous line of fire. “The Big Parade” was also very good at showing how troops moved up to the front lines and how they proceeded down a woody hill to meet the enemy. Americans don’t want an allusion to battle action, as if film were a theatre piece; they want “the real thing”.
Gangster movies, of course, tell stories of upward mobility. Edward G. Robinson, as Rico, dies at the end of “Little Caesar” while his old pal, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., makes it as a hoofer. I only recently caught on to the fact that “Singing in the Rain” parodies that moment. It ends with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds standing in front of a sign advertising one of their pictures, the poster awfully like the one through which the cops shoot to kill Rico. “It Happened One Night” is a close relative of the gangster film. The street wise reporter romances the uptown girl in a roadside motel before roadside motels got respectable.
The significance, though, of those Thirties genre films is not just that their themes are true to the American spirit. The point is also how they visually make their points. The gangster movies show gangsters as they saunter down avenues by day even though most of the movies take place at a night illuminated by bright lights. There are a lot of car chases. These not only serve to take up visual time, as they do on most television crime programs. The streets are the places where gangsters conduct their business, shooting up saloons and other gangsters, that business directed from the offices in the back of their own saloons. You have to hit the streets, open up the action, to see how crime works. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, for their part, are on a cheap version of the open road in “It Happened One Night”, she famously and literally stopping traffic by hiking up her skirt.
The English have their own way of coping with the Depression. There is Leslie Howard as Bette Davis’ boyfriend in the early talkie, “Of Human Bondage”, caught up in the same London fog that muffles what are already the poor lighting values of British Thirties filmmaking and the muffled sound of poor sound recording. That even romance is a joyless human relationship is a British trope well into the Forties, as in “Brief Encounter”, when the technical fog, not to speak of the atmospheric fog, has still not lifted. What “Of Human Bondage” shows as a film even more than as a novel is that you can’t expect much more of a shop girl than that she will use you and, if you are not careful, she will break your heart. What the movie emphasizes, even more than the novel, is the crudeness of the girl and the refinement of the young man who is her prey. As is also true in its literature, British moviemaking is always rich in an appreciation of social class differences.
(I happen to think that this is the theme of Steve Martin’s much more recent “Shopgirl”. It is a much underappreciated movie perhaps because it appears to present Clair Danes as the wronged one, when it was she who turned the relationship on and off because she recognized it was her one chance to make something of herself, never mind why the Steve Martin character could only premise a relationship because he bought it. Not an American enough denouement. The audience may have wanted another “Pretty Woman”.
That the British think it is not all that easy to escape class is perhaps best shown in the Thirties in what is to me Charles Laughton’s most memorable performance as the street performer in “St. Martin’s Lane” where his own inability to make it to theatrical success while he can guide Vivian Leigh in that direction is the result of his discomfort with his betters, however vainglorious he can be when he declaims. He is a sport, an uneducated idiot savant, rather than a man made sophisticated outside his performances by what he has learned through the art of performance. How different that is from another story of the theatre, the ever remade “A Star is Born”, where the old actor is brought down by drink while his discovery rises to the top.
One way of saying that the reverberations of the Depression carry pretty far even as they do not violate the boundaries of national cultural styles in movie making is to notice that the Depression is itself what is referenced in the particular genres that were born in the Depression. Think of the exquisite use of time that occurred by placing “The Godfather” as a story that takes place in the late Forties, a decade after “Scarface”, the mobsters already somewhat assimilated, the older dons either more suave or sophisticated, looking out for their families by being conservative rather than daring, Michael a throwback to his father’s youthful determination though trying to imitate the concerns of his fathers more mature years. And then following that up with “Godfather II”, which broadens out the time frame from its Fifties confirmation party, back to the old days, the relationships set up at that time to be revisited under Michael’s new dispensation which is as ruthless as his father’s but far more complex in its scope, dealing with public stage politicians and more complex matters than how to intimidate a Hollywood studio boss. It is now about how to take over a country. Or “Godfather III”, which involves meddling in the Church itself, no longer just a cover for moral decrepitude, but rather an ally in the battle to save it from its enemies and to, by the way, perhaps save one’s own soul by doing this good deed by using one’s old skills in doing bad, a tragic undertaking paid for not by the death of Michael but by something worse: the death of his son. (Not, as the critics thought, a shabby movie, either as to theme or visualization. There was just not enough money, I guess, for a really big party, only a little big one.) You say none of the three movies are about the Depression? Not so, in that they surround it. They reawaken “Little Caesar” and “Scarface” as episodes in the longer epic of ethnic assimilation that need not be retold because it either is or is presumed to be known by the viewer. In this way, the movies establish for us a canon: those movies that are needed to explain other movies, the moviegoer forever catching up on what it is necessary to know.