Ctva 310. History of American Cinema: Readings Dr. John Schultheiss Department of Cinema and Television Arts

Wilderness Civilization

Individualism Community

Self-interest Social welfare

Freedom Restriction

Anarchy Law and Order

Savagery Refinement

Private honor Institutional justice

Paganism Christianity

Nature Culture

Masculine Feminine

Pragmatism Idealism

Agrarianism Industrialism

Purity Corruption

Dynamic Static

Future Past

Experience Knowledge

American European

A story can be many things. To a producer it's a property that has a box office value. To a writer it's a script. To a star it's a vehicle. To a director it's an artistic medium. To a genre critic it's an objective, classifiable narrative form. To a sociologist it's an index of public sentiment. To a psychiatrist it's an instinctive exploration of hidden fears or communal ideals. To a moviegoer it can be all of these, and more.

Unlike the works of the Swedish Ingmar Bergman, the darker side of the human psyche has been consistently minimized by most American moviemakers. Except for a rare figure like Orson Welles, they tend to lack a mature sense of evil, falling back on glib and evasive formulas. Even some of the better American films can be sentimental, anti-intellectual, or stylistically overwrought.

The American cinema is also deeply romantic, like most of the best art produced in this country. Detachment and objectivity are rare. The characters and events are dramatized in a frankly partisan manner, and film artists employ every technique at their command to encourage the viewer to identify with the characters and their goals. A romantic yearning for the extraordinary is the rule rather than the exception, and this theme is frequently expressed with lyrical fervor. American movies are encumbered by few traditions of restraint, decorum, or "good taste"; genres are mixed with casual nonchalance; the fantastic and the real are fused with matter-of-fact facility. Impatient of nuances, our filmmakers prefer bold, sweeping themes and strident clashes. Even our comedies tend more toward physical mayhem than to sophisticated wit, though there are important exceptions, such as the polished comedies of Lubitsch.

There have always been important exceptions.


Reading #2

MASTERS OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA

The Cinema of Fritz Lang
FRITZ LANG MADE MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS IN BOTH THE GERMAN AND AMERICAN CINEMAS. His career fell into two roughly equal parts. The violent social upheavals in post-World War I Germany had a lasting effect on the movies he produced in that country. He was also influenced by the revolutionary art movement called German expressionism, and he was regarded as a foremost practitioner of this style in the 1920s. His German period culminated with his masterpiece, M. With the rise to power of the Nazis, Lang was forced to flee to the United States, where for many years he was widely regarded as a victim of the Hollywood studio system. Some of his American films were impersonal studio assignments which he directed only because he had no other options. He was never nominated for an Academy Award, nor was he often praised by critics, in part because he favored the déclassé genre of the crime melodrama. In the 1950s, however, Lang's American works were "discovered" by the Cahiers critics, who considered his compact American movies his finest achievements. Virtually all of them feature tight, symmetrical plots, which are constructed like machine works, inexorably grinding up their victims. His tone is cold and objective. "He touches one's nerves but never the heart," said critic Arthur Lennig. The characterization in his movies is often weak, probably because he believed that the human spirit is depersonalized by the forces that oppress it. Above all, Lang was a brilliant visual stylist, and he helped to create a new kind of cinema, called film noir by the French critics. The style might be regarded as the American cousin of German expressionism.
I think there is one thread running through all my pictures: the fight against Destiny or Fate.

––Fritz Lang

Lang's artistic sensibility was forged by the social and intellectual currents of the postwar period in Germany. Between the years 1918 and 1923, German society, which had previously been the most disciplined in Europe, was convulsed by economic chaos and clashes of violence between right- and left-wing extremists. The currency system went beserk. For example, before the war the German mark was worth about 25f. After the war its value plumeted to less than half that. By 1923 it took 4,200,000,000 marks to equal one American dollar. In Berlin especially, prewar standards of conduct were swept away by a wave of sexual permissiveness that shocked the rest of the world. Disillusioned with all forms of authority, young Germans challenged virtually all absolute values, and found them wanting. Jazz and American movies were all the rage. Freud's revolutionary theories of the subconscious were in the air, and the gloomy fatalism of Spengler's The Decline of the West had a profound effect on young artists and intellectuals.

A total rejection of the past also characterized the arts of this period. The new tolerant atmosphere encouraged radical experiments in form, particularly in the visual and performing arts, which embraced the new idiom of distortion called expressionism, a style steeped in pessimism, despair, and alienation. "All over the world, young people engaged in the cultural fields, myself among them, made a fetish of tragedy," Lang recalled. These artists viewed themselves as romantic revolutionaries, in revolt against all forms of repression. The popular magazine, Sturm, promoted expressionism in the arts and was especially influential with writers, painters, dramatists, and filmmakers. The famous theatrical director, Max Reinhardt, became a leading practitioner of expressionism in the drama, and his ideas influenced many of Germany's movie artists, especially Lang. Expressionism was antibourgeois and antisocial. Its tone was paranoid––mired in anxiety, menace, a vague atmosphere of guilty remorse, and an overwhelming sense of fatalism. Realism was dismissed as a superficial style which could deal with only surfaces, not spiritual essences. Artists can capture the underlying truths of existence only by violating the surface realism of the outside order and by looking within for inspiration. Subjectivity, mysticism, and private fantasies are what lead to the truths of the soul. The stylistic distortion of expressionism was intended as a symbolic projection of spiritual and psychological states.

German expressionism rejected the documentary impulse in favor of an artificial stylization. Virtually all expressionist movies were shot in the studio, where visual effects could be controlled with precision, without the contaminations of nature. The style emphasized diagonal and broken lines, with deliberate violations in perspective and weird contrasts in scale. There was an emphasis on jagged, sharp, and pointed shapes, like knife blades. The lighting was dramatic, with high-contrast clashes, low-keyed atmospheric effects, and unreal configurations. Shafts of light and dark tear up the surface of the image. Often lights were placed low or in other off-beat sources, producing sinister, unexpected shadows. Actors were almost always subordinated to the mise-en-scène: Like pawns, they're trapped by their oppressive environments. Scenes were frequently photographed from extreme angles to heighten the sense of dislocation. German expressionism was also strongly symbolic and abstract. Its ideas were stark, with artistic nuances found in the richly textured style rather than the theme or characterization.

It was in this cultural climate that Lang began his movie career in Berlin. For three years he had been writing scenarios for producer Joe May. In 1919 he insisted on directing as well as writing Halbblut (The Halfbreed), which was popular with the public. In 1920 he went to work for Erich Pommer, the leading producer at Decla Studio, where Lang was a story editor and writer. In this same year Lang married the novelist Thea von Harbou, who collaborated on the scripts of all his German movies after 1920. In the following year, the three major studios in Germany merged under the umbrella of UFA, the largest production facility in Europe.

Critic Paul Jensen, who believes that Lang's German movies are superior to those he made in America, states that the 1920s was the decade of his greatest fame and influence. Though his expressionism was less extreme than that of most of his contemporaries, Lang's movies were still strongly romantic, allegorical, and exotic. They were also imbued with a sense of doleful anxiety. Beginning with Der Müde Tod (1921), released in the United States as Destiny, he became a leading figure of the German cinema, working in a variety of genres and styles. In 1922 he made a two-part movie dealing with a sinister master criminal, Dr. Mabuse. Another two-part film, Die Nibelungen (1924), was based on the thirteenth-century Germanic saga that also inspired Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The Marxist critic, Siegfried Kracauer, criticized the monumentality of these movies, which he thought represented the triumph of the ornamental over the human. Lang's science fiction fantasy, Metropolis (1927), was a big-budget project that dealt with the revolt of a slave society against its masters. Kracauer condemned this film as well, calling it an illustration of "Lang's penchant for pompous ornamentation." Spione (1928), a master criminal spy melodrama, was more realistic than his previous works. In this movie, expressionist distortions are found in the midst of reality by photographing ordinary objects in disorienting close-ups and from strange angles to make them seem more menacing. With Frau Im Mond (1929), released in America as Woman in the Moon, Lang returned to science fiction fantasy. By this time, he was the most successful and admired filmmaker in Germany, and his movies were considered major artistic events by the cultural elite. Lang's favorite movie, M, was his first talkie and introduced Peter Lorre as a compulsive child-murderer. More subdued stylistically than most of his other German movies, M is a brilliantly crafted work, especially innovative in its use of sound. It was a big commercial and critical success.

In the early 1930s, Lang, like most German liberals, became alarmed at the rise to power of the Nazi party. He claimed that he made Das Testament Des Dr. Mabuse (1933) as an anti-Nazi statement. He attacked Hitler's contempt for democracy by having criminals mouth such slogans as "The individual has no existence except as part of the machine––the individual is nothing, the machine everything." Lang believed that the Nazi state was the ultimate mechanized society and Hitler the incarnation of a master criminal. The movie was banned in the Third Reich, and Lang was summoned to the office of Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels. During their interview, Goebbels skirted the topic of The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse; instead he told the filmmaker how much Hitler had admired Metropolis and had suggested that Lang might be put in charge of the German film industry, providing he proved cooperative. Lang agreed to everything, hoping that the interview would be concluded before his bank closed: "I could only think 'How do you get out of here?' I wanted to get some money out of the bank. Outside the window, there was a big clock, and the hands went slowly round." But it was too late. Since his mother was partly Jewish, he decided to take no chances. He returned home, packed a few belongings, and fled to Paris that same night. Shortly afterward, his wife (who was already a member of the Nazi party) divorced him, and his considerable property was confiscated by the state.

In 1934, David O. Selznick, who was then a producer for MGM, signed Lang to a one-picture contract with options for future films. He arrived in the United States at the age of forty-four, speaking not a word of English. He was to remain in America for over twenty years, directing a total of twenty-two movies, mostly on short-term contracts. Though Lang's American films are less overtly stylized than his German works, his vision remained fundamentally intact, as Gavin Lambert has pointed out:
Fritz Lang's America is not essentially different from Fritz Lang's Germany (or Fritz Lang's London); it is less openly macabre, its crime and terror exist on a comparatively realistic level, but both countries are really another country, a haunted place in which the same dramas constantly recur.
But as Lang noted, his American movies are different in at least one important respect: The protagonists are not larger-than-life heroes or master criminals but ordinary mortals, "Joe Doe" types, as they were known in the trade. "Over here the hero in a motion picture should be a superman, whereas in a democracy he had to be Joe Doe. This was something I learned here for the first time, and I think it's absolutely correct." He believed that a "man of the people" is a more fitting hero for American movies. In Germany, on the other hand, such characters were unthinkable because it was a culture dominated by military traditions of order, absolute obedience to the state, and Nietzsche's philosophy of the Übermensch. After Lang arrived in the United States, he even refused to speak German and worked hard to master his new language. He also took immediate steps to become an American citizen. Like most successful immigrants, he was intensely patriotic.

Lang's sensibility was more deeply imbued by the pessimism of his native culture than he realized. He was sometimes instinctively at odds with the basic optimism of American life. He believed that negativism was appropriate to the despairing conditions in Europe but rang false in America, where everyone seemed to prosper freely. He often tried to make his art conform to his conscious convictions rather than his atavistic instincts. For example, his first American movie, Fury (1936), was praised by critics for its daring social criticism, but they also condemned its happy ending as a sop to the box office.

In The Woman in the Window (1944), Lang tried to avoid the negativism of the protagonist's defeat at the hands of fate by concluding the film with the hero waking up from a nightmare, thus undercutting the movie's power. When World War II broke out, however, the real world provided Lang with sinister menaces in abundance. He directed four anti-Nazi melodramas, which allowed him to return to the fearful atmosphere of his earlier work: Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944), and Cloak and Dagger (1946).

Lang's status in the American film industry in no way approached his prominence in Germany. His movies were seldom big hits, and a few lost money. Some of them he directed only because he needed to survive. About all he could do with these projects was to add an occasional directorial touch, but he had few illusions about their artistic value. He was often forced to shoot scenes according to the instructions of his producers––or "so-called producers," as he referred to them. Many of his films were reedited or included additional scenes that were shot by other directors. In none of his American movies did he have total artistic control, and he often quarreled with writers, producers, and stars. He frequently lost these battles. "Look––you sign a contract," he explained; "having signed a contract, you have to do your best." He bitterly complained that there was "no copyright for a director," for the producer ultimately controls the product. In fact, one of his most brilliant sequences, the bank robbery in the rain from You Only Live Once, was sold outright to another producer, who included it in an otherwise mediocre gangster film.

Lang's best American movies are often low-budget genre films that weren't considered important enough to meddle with. Most of them are crime melodramas, which commanded little respect from the industry and even less from the critics of that era. He learned to work quickly, for some of his movies were allowed only thirty-six shooting days. There were periods during his career when he couldn't even find hack projects. After World War II, he attempted to go into independent production. Along with the star Joan Bennett and her husband then, producer Walter Wanger, Lang and scenarist Dudley Nichols set up Diana Productions in 1945. The company produced only two movies, the superb Scarlet Street (1945) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948), which failed at the box office. In the early 1950s, he was unable to find work for a considerable period. Eventually he discovered he was on the infamous blacklist as a Communist sympathizer, because he had once signed a human rights petition. He was also a close friend of the Marxist dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, who helped write the script to Hangmen Also Die. Harry Cohn––whom Lang liked and respected––came to the rescue through the simple expedient of asking him if he was a Communist. When Lang assured him he wasn't, Cohn hired him at Columbia, where the director made one of his finest movies, The Big Heat (1953). He followed this with Human Desire (1954).

Lang valued his films according to the amount of social criticism they contained. Like his friend Brecht, he believed that the best art combined a "preaching function" with aesthetic pleasure. But Lang was more of an aestheticist than he cared to admit. Fortunately, he was less narrow and didactic in his actual practices. In discussing his movies, however, he often reduced them to clichés. For example, he claimed he made M to dramatize the dangers to children in contemporary urban society––a thumping banality, if we were to take it seriously. Paul Jensen has argued that Lang's social themes are often oversimplified. Instead of a consistent ideology he reverts to a consistent set of plot elements that interest him, and their content doesn't really matter. In fact, Jensen claims that Lang's political ideas are so superficial that he inadvertently contradicted himself from movie to movie, especially in his German period. Gavin Lambert shares this view. Lang's films are not so much about social issues, he states, as they are "dramatic abstracts of society's indifference to the outcast, whom it creates, punishes, and then forces back into crime."

Lang probably emphasized the social criticism of his films because it made him look more politically engagé––a highly admired trait, especially within the German colony in Hollywood, which was fiercely anti-Nazi and liberal in its values. Paradoxically, Lang's reputation as an arrogant authoritarian was due in part to his Germanic background. When he arrived in 1934, he wore a monocle and was haughty in his manner, recalling such lordly Teutons as the two vons (both phony), Stroheim and Sternberg, who were widely disliked in Hollywood because of their lofty airs. In fact, the entire German colony was viewed with a certain resentment, for it was commonly thought to be aloof, intellectually snobbish, and rather arty. Its members seldom bothered to conceal their contempt for most industry regulars, whose cultural yahooism was a frequent target of their sardonic wit. To be invited to one of Lubitsch's famous Sundays was considered a rare honor, for among those who gathered at his home were such distinguished personalities as Brecht, Thomas Mann, Otto Klemperer, and Bruno Walter. Only the most sophisticated industry regulars were invited, and most of them were German or Austrian in their origins, like the worldly Marlene Dietrich, and the caustic wit, Billy Wilder. Others were eminent scientists, artists, and intellectuals who had fled from Hitler's Holocaust in Europe.