Lightning Flashes: a Cinephiliac History of Classic Hollywood

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LIGHTNING FLASHES: A CINEPHILIAC HISTORY OF CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD

RASHNA WADIA RICHARDS

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2006

Rashna Wadia Richards

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their guidance and support, I would like to acknowledge my dissertation

committee members, Robert B. Ray, Greg Ulmer, Susan Hegeman, and Nora Alter. I

thank Greg for helping me frame and articulate the critical issues engaged in this project.

His constant and enthusiastic support, especially during the dissertation’s final stages, has

meant a great deal to me. I thank Susan for teaching me to view my work more critically

and to anticipate opposing points of view. Nora’s discerning critiques have enabled me to

challenge my assumptions and broaden my perspective, and I appreciate her advice and

approachability. Above all, I am grateful to Robert, whose influence on my work is

immeasurable. During a graduate seminar in the fall of 2001, he introduced me to the role

of cinephilia in film studies and taught me that experimentation and discipline can co-

exist. Since then, he has been an enduring source of wise counsel, support, and

inspiration. I feel truly honored to have spent the last five years under his mentorship.

I would also like to thank my family for their warmth and encouragement. I am grateful to my parents and my in-laws for their countless kindnesses over the years. I owe my deepest gratitude to my husband, Jason Richards, whom I met at the University of

Florida. His unwavering devotion and unfailing wit have been invaluable in navigating

the challenges and joys of being an academic couple. I thank him for sharing my passion

for the movies; for serving as a sounding board for all of my ideas; for being my biggest

cheerleader and finest critic. Without him, nothing would be possible or worthwhile.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... vi

ABSTRACT...... vii

CHAPTER

1 “LIKE WRITING HISTORY WITH LIGHTNING”: AN INTRODUCTION ...... 1

A Hollywood Beginning...... 1 The Cinephiliac Turn...... 10 Cinephiliac History...... 25 Notes...... 35

2 SHOW STOPPERS: THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH CHIFFONS...... 38

A Funny Thing Happens ...... 38 “Two Unlikely Worlds Are Suddenly Joined” ...... 44 Refus[e]ing History ...... 52 Episodes in Chiffon ...... 58 “Hey, What’s the Big Idea Anyway?”...... 74 Notes...... 76

3 LOOSE ENDS: THE STUFF THAT MOVIES ARE MADE OF ...... 80

A Telephone-Bell Rings in Darkness ...... 80 “What Was the Nickel for?”...... 85 On a Walking Tour of Hollywood...... 96 Trailing The Maltese Falcon ...... 101 “Who Ever Heard of a Wrong Number?”...... 120 Notes...... 122

4 SIGNATURE CRIMES: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE LOST SCENES (AND THE STRANGER CASE OF THE MISSING AUTEUR) ...... 128

Whodunit?...... 128 In the Name of the Author...... 134

iv Surfacing Evidence...... 150 Naming Names ...... 162 “This is Orson Welles” ...... 182 Notes...... 184

5 “THERE ARE MANY SUCH STORIES”: AN AFTERWORD...... 189

A Hollywood Ending...... 189 The Experimental Turn...... 191

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 195

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 212

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 The unmotivated overhead shot of the fur coat falling ...... 39

2-2 J. B. Ball hurls the coat from the balcony ...... 40

2-3 Mary Smith is suddenly hit by the fur coat ...... 41

3-1 A new case: “suppose you tell me about it from the very beginning” ...... 102

3-2 The partner is shot: “Miles Archer dead?”...... 108

3-3 The detective becomes a suspect: “you fellows trying to rope me made me nervous” ...... 110

3-4 An odd delivery: “why couldn’t he have stayed alive long enough to tell us something?”...... 115

3-5 The falcon turns out fake: “the, uh, stuff that dreams are made of” ...... 118

3-6 The telephone rings: all is lost...... 121

4-1 The Nazi mastermind signs his name...... 129

4-2 Hitler drawing faulty swastikas...... 182

5-1 Lights, wind, snow, steam: action!...... 190

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

LIGHTNING FLASHES: A CINEPHILIAC HISTORY OF CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD

Rashna Wadia Richards

August 2006

Chair: Robert B. Ray Major Department: English

This project proposes an experimental mode of historicizing Classic Hollywood

cinema by using moments of intense visual pleasure as prompts for cinematic research.

During its classical phase (roughly 1945–1968), cinephiles focused mainly on recapturing

euphoric visual moments—a peculiar detail, a curious gesture, an idiosyncratic trace—in

writing. Film studies’ post-1968 investment in ideological critique discredited this

discourse as quaint and irrelevant. However, following Susan Sontag’s lament that the

distinctive love inspired by a century of cinema has ended, the last decade has seen a

resurgence of interest in cinephilia, although most recent studies have either historicized the fetishistic discourse of classical cinephilia or theorized its transformation in today’s global film culture. This work differs: rather than seeing cinephilia as an uncritical buffism, I propose that cinephiliac moments hold the potential to prompt unanticipated discussions between film history, theory, and visual culture. Cinephiliac moments are like

Walter Benjamin’s “lightning flashes”: they pulsate briefly, sometimes in the margins of

vii our attention, exceeding their narrative contexts and offering unconventional points of entry into the cinematic and cultural terrain of Classic Hollywood.

The project treats cinephiliac moments as clues toward an alternative historiography, one modeled on Benjamin’s figures of historical materialism: the ragpicker, the flâneur, and the detective. After theorizing the notion of cinephilia in the introduction, each chapter issues from a Benjaminian figure, deployed both thematically and methodologically as a way to activate the excessive signification concealed in cinephiliac moments from otherwise standard studio films. Chapter 2 begins with a mysterious fur coat falling on Jean Arthur’s head in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living. Like

Benjamin’s ragpicker, I work my way through sartorial articles from 1930s Hollywood and uncover unforeseen parallels between the studio system, Surrealism, and the fashion industry. Chapter 3 imagines a flâneur’s gaze at the enigmatic objects of film noir. On a walking tour of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, I pause to look at a hand-rolled cigarette, a buzzing telephone, random wall-hangings of horses, in order to address the relationship between the striking film still and the narrative. Chapter 4 examines the rather conventional “signature” moment in Orson Welles’s The Stranger, where a former

Nazi mastermind reveals his identity by sketching a swastika on a notepad in a phone booth. Using the Benjaminian detective, I investigate the strange case of the missing auteur. Finally, Chapter 5 reflects on experimental criticism as a research strategy.

Overall, in this cinephiliac history, Classic Hollywood appears not as a consistent system with a uniform style but as an uncanny network of echoes and coincidences.

viii CHAPTER 1 “LIKE WRITING HISTORY WITH LIGHTNING”: AN INTRODUCTION

The things that have gone out of fashion have become inexhaustible containers of memories. —Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, “J [Baudelaire]”1

If we toss away an older theory like an old dress or a used car, we lose an important part of a long conversation. —James Naremore, “The Future of Academic Film Study”

Is there a theory that can make use of the concept of contingency? —Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity

A Hollywood Beginning

In the spring of 1915, a film struck America like a bolt of lightning. Technically innovative and epic in scale, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the most expensive, ambitious, and prestigious film of its day. It caused quite a stir. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War, the film sparked mass protests as well as wild applause for its adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s sentimental novel, The Clansman.2

Griffith’s film, which followed Dixon’s text closely, told the tale of the defeat of the

South in the Civil War and the reemergence of white political and social domination during Reconstruction. As an intertitle states, Griffith intended to portray “the agony which the South endured that a nation might be born.” Just as the war and its aftermath were passing from memory into mythology, the film argued that the Ku Klux Klan had risen to restore order in the post-war South, uniting it with the North and thereby signaling the birth of a nation. But, as Everett Carter points out, “Only by a singular distortion of meaning could the film be interpreted as the story of a country’s genesis”

1 2

(9). Instead, the origin that it more accurately announced was of the establishment of a

brand new form of cinema. The Birth of a Nation in fact signified the birth of narration, for its success codified once and for all the tradition of linear continuity filmmaking. It was so popular that it became the first film ever to be shown at the White House. It is quite remarkable that when this groundbreaking narrative film was screened for President

Woodrow Wilson, he reportedly proclaimed: “it is like history written with lightning.”3

For lightning can be powerful, but it is also disruptive and unpredictable.

The disruptive potential of the lightning flash is the subject of this study. More

specifically, I am interested in moments of intense visual pleasure that rupture the linear

structure of narrative cinema. These moments reveal the spark of contingency that

threatens to undercut the logical sequentiality of the narratives that contain them. Within

their causal storylines, they appear as if by accident. Rather than advancing the plot, they

distract attention from it. In short, these moments signify in excess, thereby

foregrounding the materiality of cinema at the expense of storytelling. I locate these

excessive moments within the tradition of cinephilia. In the next section, I will provide a

historical overview of cinephilia and its role in film studies; here, let me briefly identify

some key features and concerns. At its most basic, cinephilia is an obsession with a

peculiar detail, a curious gesture, an idiosyncratic trace. Especially as practiced by the

Cahiers du Cinéma critics during the classical phase of cinephilia (roughly between 1945

and 1968), it designates a fetishistic mode of spectatorship where marginal elements in a

cinematic frame can explode into moments of revelation. Cinephiliac discourse, at least

in the classical sense, amounts more or less to a serialization of pleasurable moments.

However, cinephiliac moments are qualitatively different from those that are intended to

3 be memorable. Because cinephiles adopt a mode of spectatorship that focuses on the marginal, cinephiliac moments are peripheral moments that are assigned, as Roger

Cardinal argues, “wholly ‘unreasonable’ priority or value” by their viewer (114). In that sense, cinephilia is generally regarded as a personal discourse, an attempt to capture in writing the initial encounter with the lightning flash.

Using the cinephiliac moment as a point of departure, this project attempts to draw on the spark of cinephilia for doing film studies. I employ cinephiliac moments as a way to extend the pleasure of the cinephiliac experience into an experimental practice of film criticism. In this study, cinephilia is more than the mere experience of epiphanic moments. In a dialogue with Noel King, Paul Willemen identifies cinephilia with resistance. Cinephilia is indeed a way of seeing, a posture, a personal relationship with the screen. But it can be more than that. Following Willemen’s contention that cinephilia hints at “something which resists, which escapes existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks” (231), this project proposes that cinephiliac moments hold the potential to prompt unanticipated discussions between film history, theory, and visual culture. The principal cinematic terrain where I conduct this experiment is Classic

Hollywood, where the continuity style of filmmaking inaugurated by Griffith’s Birth of a

Nation was perfected. The Institutional Mode of Representation, as Noël Burch has called it, was a rigidly standardized form of filmmaking that would not readily tolerate any manner of contingency. Therefore, disruptive behavior would cause some sparks to fly.

Yet, as Mary Anne Doane rightly argues, “because cinephilia has to do with an excess in relation to systematicity, it is most appropriate for a cinema that is perceived as highly coded and commercialized” (Emergence 226).4 What would a method that activates the

excessive signification concealed in cinephiliac moments appearing suddenly, like lightning flashes, in this highly coded and commercialized cinema look like? Or, to paraphrase Niklas Luhmann’s question cited in the epigraph, is there a critical approach

that can make use of the experience of cinephilia? Perhaps the best place to begin

thinking about this critical approach is with a moment of cinephilia. As Walter Benjamin,

whose work deeply informs this project, puts it: “In the fields with which we are

concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder

that follows” (“N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” 456).

On the cross section of an ancient sequoia, a black-gloved hand traces the passage

of a lifetime in a moment. The concentric rings on the felled trunk denote the celebrated

events of history, marking the conquest of territory, the promulgation of a charter, the

birth of a nation. But Madeleine Elster is not entranced by this imposing

dendrochronology. Her finger lingers over a gap in that grand narrative, where it

enigmatically sketches her own life and “death.” “Somewhere in here I was born. And

there I died,” she says, “It was only a moment for you. You took no notice.” The camera

now pulls back, showing Madeleine turn away from the sequoia and from Scottie in a

trance-like state. In a long shot, we see her wander away into the forest, her diminutive

figure receding into the dark, brooding redwoods. Scottie trails behind her, but in a

moment Madeleine disappears among the immense Big Basin sequoias.5

Every time I watch this scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), I find

myself surprised by its visual intensity. I am taken aback by this charged moment, but I

cannot quite point out why.6 I scan the image of the lingering finger pointing at the dead

trunk for clues. Is it the starkness of the black glove moving slowly across the white

spiraling rings? Or the equally dark shadow it casts on the cross section of the tree? Is it the mere fact that she uses her left hand instead of right? Or that slight tremor I notice as

the hand moves, echoed by the quiver in Kim Novak’s voice? I cannot quite put my

finger on the emotional intensity this moment evokes, but there is a there there.

Writing about a similar highly charged moment from another Hitchcock classic,

North by Northwest (1959), David Ehrenstein suggests that such intensities can be crucial

for film criticism. In a critical round-robin exchange with Raymond Durgnat and

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ehrenstein responds to Gilbert Adair’s comment that during the

crop-duster sequence, he (Adair) is always distracted by the color of Cary Grant’s socks.

Ehrenstein argues that Adair’s response, of “not paying attention during one of the most

famous set pieces in movie history,” cannot be easily dismissed, for such a response goes

“against the grain of the film’s affectivity” (61). What Adair’s response suggests—

interestingly, James Naremore has pointed out that many film critics have remarked on

Cary Grant’s socks being an exciting, if intrusive, detail in that scene—is that films are

more than their continuity narratives. That a film’s non-narrative elements are worthy of

analysis is a truism. But Ehrenstein’s point here is that what is particularly fascinating

about Adair’s experience is that the detail about Grant’s socks distracts him precisely

“when the economy of narrative articulation is functioning at its most ruthless pace” (61).

What can it mean that Adair, the viewer, is distracted by a seemingly marginal detail just

when he is expected to be absorbed in the plot? For Ehrenstein, it suggests a kind of

spectatorial autonomy that is very much at the heart of cinephilia itself (although he does

not actually name it as such). “What it proves,” he claims, “isn’t that Adair is nodding at

the switch . . . but rather that he’s really on the ball” (61). What Adair’s experience also

6 alludes to is the difference between a memorable and a cinephiliac moment. The famous crop-duster sequence is expected to be visually impressive and therefore unforgettable, but the detail of Cary Grant’s socks in fact draws attention away from it. The way Adair views the scene is ultimately disruptive. If Ehrenstein is correct, what can we do with

Adair’s experience, when he’s really on the ball? I’ll return to this question from a different perspective in a moment, but let me turn again to my own instance of disruption from Vertigo.

It makes sense to begin a consideration of cinephilia with Vertigo. Its narrative recounts an obsessive quest for something that, in the end, remains inexplicable.

Moreover, as Geoffrey O’Brien notes, some of its passionate viewers, whom we might call cinephiles, “seem fated to reenact Vertigo’s central gesture—the meticulous but fruitless attempt to re-create a lost object—with regard to the movie itself” (132). One such viewer O’Brien notes is filmmaker Chris Marker, who returns to the sites of Vertigo, both literally and metaphorically. In La Jetée (1962), for instance, Marker cites the Muir

Woods sequence where Kim Novak points to the dates on the felled sequoia; in Sans

Soleil (1983), he retraces the sites of Scottie’s wanderings, including Ernie’s restaurant and the San Francisco Bay. For O’Brien, these returns suggest that Vertigo might be the ultimate cinephiliac object that remains enigmatic.

Christopher D. Morris approaches the issue of Vertigo’s allure slightly differently, suggesting that the film highlights the futile search for something tenable. Drawing on

Laura Hinton’s conclusion that Vertigo both invites and frustrates a feminist reading,

Morris argues that that is because the film poses a challenge to any idea of reading or analysis itself.7 Like the opening sequence, where the policeman slips away from

Scottie’s hand and he is left holding onto nothing but air, Vertigo’s meanings are just as tenuous. Morris claims that “the credits should warn viewers that pursuit of any tenable truth of Madeleine’s profile—her hidden identity, her dark side, her role as the unrecuperable place of the mother—may end only in new shadow, in nothingness and tautology” (188–89). This is not to suggest that the insights of feminist or Marxist or postcolonial analyses of the film are not valid—Morris even claims that they are unavoidable—but that Vertigo warns film scholars against interpretation, against “the pursuit of meaning in film criticism” (Morris 189; emphasis added). What Vertigo in fact foregrounds, then, is its own unreadability through film studies’ established methods of semiotic analysis.

Cinephiliac moments, like the one I described earlier, pose a similar problem. They not only exceed their narrative contexts but also appear ultimately unreadable through a gesture of hermeneutics. As Christian Keathley rightly suggests, cinephilia seems to be

“an area of spectatorial experience that resists co-optation by meaning; indeed, if the cinephiliac moment is among the most intense of cinematic experiences, it seems to draw its intensity partly from the fact that it cannot be reduced or tamed by interpretation” (9).

So, the question before us as far as cinephilia is concerned is not only what we might say about a cinephiliac moment. That is not as significant as how we might say something about it.

Interestingly, saying something or, more accurately, writing something about these moments has always been, according to Willemen, a primary response to the experience of cinephilia. A cinephiliac moment, as I have suggested, contains the spark of contingency, “which, when encountered in a film, spark[s] something which then

produces the energy and desire to write, to find formulations to convey something about

the intensity of that spark” (Willemen 235). During the two decades following the end of

World War II until the political shift ushered in by the events of May 1968—a period that

can be considered the heyday of cinephilia—the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma were filled

with euphoric writing that attempted to recapture the intense visual pleasure of specific

cinematic moments. This discourse, Willemen notes, “reproduced in a professional and

sometimes pleasurably stylistic way aspects which the non-critics (of which I was a part

at that time) reproduced in their daily conversations” (233). That is why cinephiliac

discourse was driven by detailed descriptions of the privileged moments. In other words,

it was an idiosyncratic love of the cinema, reproduced idiosyncratically. For the writing

attempted to return to and reproduce the original, pleasurable moment of cinephilia.

Consider, for instance, François Truffaut’s description of his privileged moment from

Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932):

The most striking scene in the movie is Boris Karloff’s death. He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn’t get up; a rifle shot prostrates him. The camera follows the ball he’s thrown as it knocks down all the pins except one that keeps spinning until it finally falls over, the exact symbol of Karloff himself, the last survivor of a rival gang that’s been wiped out by [Paul] Muni. This isn’t literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema. (70)

What Truffaut focuses on here is the visual force of the moment. That the last bowling pin symbolizes Karloff as the last survivor in the narrative is only secondary to the pleasure of seeing that last bowling pin falling. This isn’t analysis. It may be a sketch or a review. It is certainly cinephilia. Truffaut’s piece confirms Willemen’s argument that

“cinephilia demands a gestural outlet in writing. . . . The excess experienced needs an extra, physical ritual, a gesture, in addition to watching and talking” (239). For a

cinephile, talking or even reading about the movies is not enough. Cinephilia desires

written discourse.

Historically, this desire to write, to find a gestural outlet, has been supported by the

establishment of the fan magazine or fanzine. But, as one might expect, cinephiliac

discourse in fanzines has been capricious, not theoretically rigorous. As Willemen notes,

cinephiliac discourse in fan magazines has the quality and tone of conversations between

film buffs. “When my school friends and I talked about the films we had seen,” he

suggests, “there was an overlap between the way we did that and the professional,

stylized public performance of critical discourse as circulated by film magazines” (232).

For cinephiliac discourse in fanzines aims mostly at articulating the pleasures of the cinematic text. That is perhaps why cinephilia is generally eschewed in film studies. In fact, this desire to write about cinephiliac moments has not seriously been taken up by academic film scholars. It is usually considered, as Doane points out, “a somewhat marginalized, furtive, even illicit relation to the cinema rather than a theoretical stance. It is the property of the film buff rather than the film theorist” (Emergence 225). The next section theorizes the concept of cinephilia in order to show that the practice of isolating peculiar details signals more than just an uncritical buffism. Although cinephilia remains at the margins of film studies, there has been considerable critical interest in it as an object of study in recent years. I will trace these developments and then locate cinephiliac moments within the tradition of other disruptive viewing practices. Then, I will show how Benjamin’s theory of historical materialism can be used as an analogical method for writing a cinephiliac history of Classic Hollywood cinema, one that provides “an escape from systematicity—both that of a tightly regulated classical system and that of its

10 vaguely oppressive abstract analysis” (Doane, Emergence 228). Cinephiliac moments, I will ultimately argue, are like lightning flashes: they pulsate briefly, sometimes in the margins of our attention, exceeding their narrative contexts and offering unconventional points of entry into the cinematic and cultural landscape of Classic Hollywood.

The Cinephiliac Turn

At the centennial marking the invention of cinema, Susan Sontag lamented the fading of what was arguably the most dynamic and influential art form of the twentieth century.8 Tracing the “life cycle” of cinema’s first one hundred years, she argued that the medium once regarded as “quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time” has now become “a decadent art”

(“Century” 118, 117). Why? Because what was once a vibrant medium of cultural expression has now fallen prey to hyperindustrialization. Back then, “[y]ou fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself” (“Century” 120). The then she is referring to is mainly the period consisting of the two decades after World War II, when cinephilia made its debut, which was “also the moment when the Hollywood studio system was breaking up” (“Century” 120). Back then, “going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion among university students and other young people” (“Century” 120). Back then, before the age of television, cinema had sweeping cultural and intellectual force. While this kind of ciné-love can be traced back to the

Impressionists and Surrealists of an earlier generation, it was the two-decade postwar period that became the moment of cinephilia. Back then, cinephiles believed that “the movies encapsulated everything—and they did. It was both the book of art and the book of life” (“Century” 118). Fuelled by an intense desire to experiment with filmmaking

11 techniques and an equally intense nostalgia for the disintegrating Hollywood studio system, “cinema appeared to be reborn” (“Century” 121).

But today, according to Sontag, that kind of passion for the movies—for both avant-garde and popular cinema—is dead. The purpose of Sontag’s centennial dirge was not just to proclaim that cinema was dead. With the balance having tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an industry, she argued, ciné-love itself has now passed away.

Cinephilia, which for Sontag was “not simply love of but a certain taste in films

(grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious past),” has not survived (“Century” 122; original emphasis). Rather than serving as the final word on this passionate mode of spectatorship, however, Sontag’s elegy sparked a resurgence of international interest in cinephilia. Since then, numerous reassessments of cinephilia have appeared, mostly from film critics, filmmakers, and independent scholars worldwide. Indeed, if the period between 1945 and the late 1960s was the moment of cinephilia, then the last decade has witnessed something of a resurrection. Cinephilia may be dead, but its ghost still lingers in contemporary writing about cinema.

Before turning to the reception of cinephilia by academic film studies, I would like to discuss another camp of film scholars, who rejected outright Sontag’s premise that cinephilia was dead and instead set about defining its transformation in today’s globalized film culture. Although the conversation about the reemergence of cinephilia a decade ago may have begun wistfully, considering what it was and mourning its alleged demise, the focus quickly shifted in some quarters to what it might yet become. In 1999, the Australian-based online journal Senses of Cinema issued an exciting collection of

essays titled, “Permanent Ghosts: Cinephilia in the Age of the Internet and Video.” This series refutes the notion of the death of cinephilia by examining it in relation to new

technologies. Confronting an earlier generation’s melancholic nostalgia, this collection of

essays, written mostly by cinephiles born after the end of classical cinephilia, explores

the transformation of international film and film culture in the era of video and the

internet. The debate for younger cinephiles is not whether cinephilia is still viable; their

assumption is that cinephilia is not dead. Their primary concern, however, is with new

forms of ciné-love in the age of new media.

The most influential recent work on contemporary cinephilia is Jonathan

Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin’s edited anthology, Movie Mutations, which consists of

five years of correspondence between film scholars and filmmakers from around the

globe, reflecting on “the changing face of world cinephilia.” Rosenbaum and Martin are primarily interested in delineating a transnational approach to contemporary cinephilia, calling for the formation of global communities of cinephiles, whose collaborations can be facilitated by new media technologies as well as international film festivals. Their

focus is on employing web-based communities and film festivals as sites for

rediscovering cinematic pleasures in independents, the avant-garde, and films from

developing national cinemas for the second generation of cinephiles. Sontag’s claims to

the contrary, the new cinephilia appears to be living up to the spirit, even frenzy, of

classical cinephilia. Rosenbaum and Martin’s anthology has been enormously significant,

inviting alternative readings of contemporary cinephilia in a transnational movie world.

Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener take up that call. In Cinephilia: Movies, Love

and Memory, they present a series of essays rethinking present-day cinephilia “as an

umbrella term for a number of different affective engagements with the moving image”

(14). Like Rosenbaum and Martin, they operate on the premise that cinephilia is thriving.

Yet, compared to their classical predecessors, the new generation of cinephiles is slightly

differently networked. The essays in de Valck and Hagener’s collection explore these

differences, tracing the global significance of contemporary film culture as well as

exploring the changes in marketing, distribution, and filmmaking that have emerged in

response to the second wave of cinephilia. The most noteworthy in the volume is Thomas

Elsaesser’s contribution on the detours and deferrals of what he calls cinephilia, take two.

“The new cinephilia,” he argues in the book’s opening essay, “is turning the unlimited

archive of our media memory, including the unloved bits and pieces, the long forgotten

films and programs into potentially desirable and much valued clips, extras and bonuses”

(41). In other words, the new cinephile has become a collector and a trader, a lover and a

savvy consumer. At once global and local, new cinephilia has embraced new

technologies, with all the benefits of file swapping, sampling, and even bootlegging, to

further democratize the pleasures of cinema.

Growing up in Bombay, India, my own initial interest in cinephilia was fuelled by

these emerging new technologies, first by the boom in video and cable television in the

1980s and then the internet (and local film festivals) in the 1990s. The coming of video

provided access to a whole new world and history of cinema. As Adrian Martin puts it,

“Video consumption completely altered the character of film cultures all over the globe:

suddenly, there were self-cultivated specialists everywhere in previously elite areas like

B-cinema, exploitation cinema, and so-called cult cinema” (6–7). For my father, an “old”

Hollywood film buff, the age of video consumption meant the possibility of owning

movies he had grown up with. His preferred genre was the B-western. He would watch

over and over John Sturges’s Last Train from Gun-Hill (1959), pausing the VCR each

time at his own privileged moments, gazing at the image, and then asking me, “Did you

catch it?”. When Truffaut remarked that “[w]hen the use of video cassettes becomes

widespread and people watch films they love at home, anyone who owns a copy of Mr.

Arkadin [an Orson Welles film] will be lucky indeed” (“Foreword” 19), he rightly anticipated the numerous possibilities for the second generation of cinephiles in the age

of video and the internet and hence the renewal of cinephilia itself. While I did go to the

movies—at the Eros Theater or the Regal Cinema, both built during the cinema boom in

the 1930s—my most vivid memories of movie-going consist of going to a friend’s house

to watch movies on video and later on DVD. What I remember noticing in those movies

are the little details. In the grainy (usually black-and-white) images of (usually low-

quality) videotape, I remember “catching,” in my father’s terms, the wall-hangings of

horses in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), the enormous coffee cup in the diner

scene in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945), and Marilyn Monroe being violently shaken

on the beach in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952).9 Years later, imagine my intrigue

when I discovered that there was a name for this way of watching movies and that it

could be a serious object of academic study.

The reason I trace this brief personal history is to show, as James Naremore puts it,

“where I came in” as well as to confess that my interest in Classic Hollywood cinema

was shaped by my experience as a cinephile before I became seriously engaged in

studying it. But what it also demonstrates is that cinephilia can be a very slippery

concept. After all, cinephilia cannot be everything that has to do with the “love of

cinema.” Moreover, recent studies of cinephilia, although in ways very different from those of the classical cinephiles, have been more or less descriptive. Either new cinephiles have focused on historicizing what classical cinephilia was, or they have tried to show how new cinephilia is (or is not) like the old one. The larger issue, one that this project tries to tackle, is this: once we have identified it, what kind of knowledge can we produce using cinephilia? How do we deploy cinephilia as a critical practice? Quite simply, what can we do with cinephiliac moments?

These questions bring us back to academic film studies and the role of cinephilia in it. The first generation of cinephiles was eager to recapture epiphanic moments in writing, but they were not able to extend their pleasurable discoveries into knowledge.

Attached to the erratic detail, their mode of writing remained invested in what Doane calls “a private, idiosyncratic meaning [that was] nevertheless characterized by the compulsion to share what is unsharable, inarticulable” (Emergence 227). That is why the kind of writing practiced at Cahiers was not embraced by film scholarship. Especially after the counter-cultural uprisings of May 1968,10 cinephiles became increasingly

political and suspicious of visual pleasure. Film scholarship, even at Cahiers, committed

itself to an unambiguously anti-cinephiliac position. We might call this moment the

semiotic turn, when the focus shifted from the cinematic experience to the cinematic

apparatus. At this stage, Christian Metz famously declared in his groundbreaking study of

cinema and psychoanalysis that

[t]o be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only have detached oneself from it by taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it. (15)

Metz’s comments suggest an underlying distrust of cinematic pleasures, especially as

points of entry into film scholarship. The task of the film scholar after the late 1960s was

to subvert the personal and eccentric cinematic pleasures in order to have something meaningful to say about cinema. Writing about the “three ages” of cinema studies,

Dudley Andrew argues that “[u]nder the moral pressure of 1968, film students aimed to theorize the political, cinematic, and academic orders and to be wary of the tricks and seductions of the establishment” (345). Although this kind of suspicion is no longer acknowledged as actively as it used to be in the 1970s, the general position of academic

film studies with regard to cinephilia, even after the turn away from “grand theory”

toward cultural studies, has not changed very much.

Even in the past decade, when the notion of cinephilia has become current again,

academic film scholars have remained mostly silent, assuming perhaps that there cannot

be much in common between the serious pursuit of cinema studies and the capricious

pleasures of cinema. Writing about the difficulty of talking about cinematic excess,

Kristin Thompson argues that the reason excessive details tend to elude analysis is

because “a discussion of the qualities of the visual figure at which we look seems

doomed to a certain subjectivity” (490; original emphasis). Likewise, because they are

subjective and capricious, cinephiliac pleasures are difficult to posit as serious objects of

study. They appear only in moments that, as my father tried to articulate, can be “caught”

in brief flashes. On a similar note, Willemen suggests that they are “experienced in an

encounter between you and cinema, which may be different from the person sitting next

to you, in which case you have to dig him or her in the ribs with your elbow to alert them

to the fact that you’ve just had a cinephiliac moment” (237). But these elusive moments

can be theorized as well. After all, as Willemen notes, “There is a theory of cinema

implicit in the dig of the elbow into the ribs just as much as there is in Metz’s work”

(237). Derived from a number of recent studies, what follows is an exploration of that

theory of cinema. I hesitate to use the term definition when speaking about cinephilia because, as suggested earlier, it is a rather slippery concept; it means too much and nothing at all. Mary Anne Doane provides one way to think about this term. It may be, she argues, “definable only negatively, as that which resists systematicity, rationalization, programming, and standardization” (Emergence 229). Here is another way: by analogy.

The theorists who have informed my understanding of cinephilia have characterized it by

thinking about what it is like, exploring its affinities with other disruptive modes of

spectatorship. While they are responding to different aspects of the cinephiliac moment,

what ties all these figures together is their recognition of a lightning flash in a visual

image.

For Paul Willemen, who started the conversation about this alternative theory of

cinema over a decade ago, cinephilia is related to a sense of revelation sparked by

cinematic excess. More than anything, cinephilia evokes the indexicality of the medium.

The cinephile shares André Bazin’s faith in the ontology of the photographic image.

“[W]hat people like Bazin want you to relate to in their polemic,” Willemen argues, “is

precisely the dimension of revelation that is obtained by pointing your camera at

something that hasn’t been staged for the camera” (243). But even in the most controlled

production circumstances, the cinephile believes that something of the real can appear on

screen inadvertently. That is because cinephilia is sparked by moments that exceed their

representational or symbolic functions. It directs our attention to those sites “where the

18 cinematic institution itself vacillates,” pointing to “that which exceeds the logic of the film, something which is not, in that sense, part of representation as such” (240–41).

These moments are marked, according to Willemen, by a Surrealist faith in the value of chance in “the capturing of fleeting, evanescent moments” (232). They are also marked by an epiphanic potential that is not dissimilar to the Catholic discourse of revelation. For what the viewer notices, almost involuntarily, appears to be in excess of what has been programmed or choreographed. “There is a moment of potential dislocation,” Willemen argues, “of seeing something beyond what is given to you to see” (240).

But not every viewer sees something beyond what is given to see. In fact, what distinguishes the cinephile from an average viewer is that the former looks for what one is not meant to see. While narrative cinema would expect the viewer to be fully absorbed in the plot, the cinephile gazes distractedly at the margins of the screen. Inspired by peripheral details, the cinephile glimpses something that exceeds the film’s narrative context, like Gilbert Adair looking distractedly at Cary Grant’s socks during the crop- duster sequence in North by Northwest. For Willemen, cinephilia enables that distracted viewing experience, “to fantasize a ‘beyond’ of cinema, a world beyond representation which only shimmers through in certain moments of the film” (241).

Insofar as cinephilia designates the desire for fleeting moments, it is similar in form to the experience of photogénie. Photogénie was the term used by Jean Epstein to designate the marginal pleasures of the cinematic image. Among the first to describe the relationship between the viewer and the moving image, Epstein conceived of photogénie as an indefinable concept that nevertheless was a defining characteristic of cinema itself.

Like cinephilia, “Its essence lay,” as Leo Charney puts it, “in its inability to be pinned

down to graspability of a concrete definition” (286). Photogénie could only be noticed in

flashes. “On the line of communication,” Epstein noted, “the static of unexpected feelings

interrupts us” (qtd. in Charney 287). Willemen makes an explicit connection between

cinephilia and photogénie, arguing that the moment of photogénie might be considered a

precursor to the moment of cinephilia in its tendency to exceed the representational

meaning of a film. Drawing on Epstein’s famous meditation on Sessue Hayakawa’s

photogenic movement in The Honor of His House (1918), a scene I discuss in greater

detail in Chapter 3, Willemen suggests that photogénie may be considered “a momentary

flash of recognition, or a moment when the look at . . . something suddenly flares up with

a particularly affective, emotional intensity” (126). What is significant for our

understanding of cinephilia in this context is that photogénie anticipates the focus on

isolating peculiar moments that disrupt their linear narratives. These moments also point

to an alternative relationship between the viewer and cinema.

The discussion of photogénie can be fruitfully linked to the notion of “the moment” in relation to the experience of modernity itself. Among the first aestheticians to think

about the modernist moment was Walter Pater. Pater identified the sublime moment as that which could be detached from the linear logic of modernization. Like Kant before

him, Pater distinguished the sublime from the beautiful, arguing instead for seeing the sublime as a “sensuous experience” that was unique to the moment. As Charney notes,

“Pater detached sublime experience from continuity and emphasized that it could reside only inside unique moments of sensual immersion” (280). This stance was particularly evident in his seminal work of art criticism, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.

There, Pater repeatedly returned to the pleasures of the moment that strikingly anticipate

the discourse of photogénie and later cinephilia. In an essay on Giorgione, for instance,

Pater detailed the “profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a

smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment” (qtd. in Keathley 35) as the

experience of the sublime. Like the Benjaminian notion of a shock that registers a

physical sensation, which I will discuss in the next section, Pater’s sublime defined the

“category of the moment as the discrete marker of sensual experience” (Charney 280) as

well as isolated “the moment” as the distinct marker of modernity itself.

Although not explicitly, Miriam Bratu Hansen links the experience of cinephilia to

the experience of modernity. In her introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film,

Hansen focuses on the significance of cinema in modernity, specifically in relation to

“the love it inspired along with new forms of knowledge and experience” (xxxv). She

argues that due to the cinema’s dependence on photographic automatism, it has the

“ability to subject the viewer to encounters with contingency, lack of control and

otherness” (xxi). These encounters are always personal, but they offer a way out of the

bounds of traditional history. For Hansen believes that cinema’s indexicality—what

Willemen calls “a Bazinian ontological relation to the real” (243)—enables an encounter

with the “fact” of history. Therefore, she argues,

[w]hat is at stake is the possibility of a split-second meaninglessness, as the placeholder of an otherness that resists unequivocal understanding and total subsumption. What is also at stake is the ability of the particular, the detail, the incident, to take on a life of its own, to precipitate processes in the viewer that may not be entirely controlled by the film. (xxxi)

Like Willemen, Hansen suggests that, seen in this way, one finds a particular kind of

relationship between the cinema and the viewer. What this relationship foregrounds is the fact that certain brief cinematic moments have the capacity to rupture linearized,

systematized history by taking on a life of their own. This rupture is assured by cinema’s

reliance on indexicality, which secures the “medium’s purchase of material contingency”

(xxxii), which in turn sparks cinephilia.

Mary Anne Doane takes up this relationship between contingency and cinephilia

more directly in a brief section that concludes her study of the emergence of cinematic

time. “It is arguable,” Doane suggests, “that cinephilia could not be revived at this conjuncture were the cinema not threatened by the accelerating development of new electronic and digital forms of media” (Emergence 228; original emphasis). For Doane,

as for both Willemen and Hansen, cinephilia is essentially tied to an idea of contingency

that is enabled by photographic indexicality. So, the current turn to the digitalization of

images makes cinephilia impossible. Hence, cinephilia is tied to a notion of loss, the loss

of a particular kind of cinema, as well as the loss of a particular kind of experience, the

historical experience of modernity. The cinephile that Doane is also talking about relies

on the possibility of chance entering into the cinematic frame due to the camera’s

automatism. Whether the moment “was really unprogrammed, unscripted, or outside

codification is fundamentally undecidable” (Emergence 227). What matters is only the

possibility of contingency, which Doane locates in the modernist conception of time. She

argues that at the turn of the nineteenth century, in the face of an emerging fragmentation

of experience, there was a push toward the standardization of time, with the creation of

railway timetables, the replacement of local time by national or regional times, and the

regulation of the workday. This reflected a broader desire in modernity for the

containment of unpredictability or contingency. Narrative cinema, Doane argues, is one

of the systems that facilitated that containment. While early cinema allowed, even

encouraged, the entry of chance elements onscreen, narrative cinema intentionally

repressed them by controlling and trying to efface all cinematic excess. The structure of

linearity in narrative cinema worked to order and regulate time. With the advent of

narrative cinema, as initiated by Griffith, “[t]he temporal contingency celebrated by

Méliès and Lumière is tamed through its incorporation into a rigidly codified system of

producing temporality that can fully absorb the spectator” (138).11

However, Doane argues, cinephilia is also the result of this rigid codification. For it is this linear structure that “the lure of contingency” ruptures and “seems to offer a way out [of], [becoming] an anchoring point for the condensation of utopian desires”

(Emergence 228). Thus, cinephilia becomes identified not only with a fetishized mode of viewing cinema but also with the resistant and heterogeneous potential of the spark of contingency. Doane draws on both Willemen and Hansen to make her case, suggesting that this would be a good time to turn to the historical status of the ephemeral detail seized by the automatic or mechanical process of its reproduction. Cinephilia aids in clarifying that historical status, since the cinephile “maintains a certain belief, an investment in the graspability of the asystematic, the contingent, for which the cinema is the privileged vehicle” (Emergence 227). What the cinephile marvels at is not only the content of the cinephiliac moment but also the very form of the experience of contingency itself.

The encounter with contingency is similar to the prick of the punctum that Roland

Barthes describes in Camera Lucida. Barthes distinguishes the punctum, which is a tiny indexical detail that exceeds the symbolic meaning, the studium, in the image. If the studium is the intended meaning of the image, the punctum is an accidental location.

While Barthes’s focus is essentially on photography here, his evaluation of the punctum is notably similar to what in an earlier essay he identifies as the cinematic image’s “third meaning.” Drawing on stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Barthes argues that even the most carefully crafted images of that film seem to contain details that signify beyond the meaning required by the dramatic narrative. That kind of moment becomes the film’s third meaning, which, like the punctum, “is a signifier without a signified. . . . hence the difficulty in naming it” (“Third Meaning” 61). Both the third meaning and the punctum “outplay[] meaning—subvert[] not the content but the whole practice of meaning” (“Third Meaning” 62). Furthermore, the punctum is also a personal addition. An individual viewer locates a punctum that may not exist for everybody; still, the spark of what he locates is already contained in the photograph. “[W]hether or not it is triggered,” Barthes adds, “it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (Camera Lucida 55; original emphasis). What Barthes posits here—and that is what connects the punctum to cinephilia—is the ultimately personal, even idiosyncratic, relation between the image and the viewer. However, as

Doane (referring explicitly to Barthes) points out, “The content of cinephilia is never generalizable—it must be unique to the viewer—but the form of the relation can be specified” (228).

The punctum can aid us in specifying that form. For the looking relation that the punctum identifies is similar to what Benjamin called distraction, which he set up in opposition to contemplation. Writing about Atget’s photographs of deserted Parisian streets, which he compared to the “scenes of crime,” Benjamin argued that “they demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them”

(“Work of Art” 226). Why? Because, like the Barthesian puncta, “[t]hey stir the viewer;

he feels challenged by them in a new way” (“Work of Art” 226). In “A Short History of

Photography,” he linked this visual challenge unambiguously to the indexicality of the photographic image. And it is photography’s capacity to accidentally (and mechanically) signify in excess of its context that stirs the viewer.

No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long- forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. (243)

The appropriate way to respond to this irresistible urge would be through distraction,

“much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion”

(“Work of Art” 240).12 Barthes’s punctum offers a similar distraction. In an André

Kertész’s portrait of Tristan Tzara, he notices “Tzara’s hand resting on the door frame: a

large hand whose nails are anything but clean” (Camera Lucida 45). In a James Van der

Zee photograph of an African American family, Barthes fixates on the strapped pumps

worn by the sister (or daughter) in it. In other words, the focus is never on the central

subject of the image. To find the punctum, the viewer looks at the photograph

distractedly, until a tiny, marginal detail pricks him.

Kaja Silverman also writes about this mode of viewership, which she links to the

desire for “visual alterity.” She argues that Barthes’s is “a wayward or eccentric look, one

not easily stabilized or assigned to preexisting loci, and whose functioning is

consequently resistant to visual standardization” (183). Silverman further connects this

method of looking to the process of remembering, which is sparked by the punctum. This

kind of looking-that-sparks-memory, she argues, points to “the resistance which such a

remembering eye can exercise when confronted with the given-to-be-seen” (181), a

phrase that remarkably echoes what Willemen, in relation to cinephilia, calls “seeing

something beyond what is given to you to see.”

Finally, what connects the punctum to the cinephiliac moment is this similarity:

“However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic” (Camera Lucida 45). Although the detail first

appears as a prick, like lightning, it urges the viewer to develop that detail by further

association. That quality is similar to what Willemen says about the cinephiliac moment

sparking a desire to write. Like the punctum, the cinephiliac moment has the power of expansion. And the next section provides one potential method for such an expansion, which I am calling cinephiliac history. I borrow the phrase from Christian Keathley’s outstanding history of cinephilia. After tracing the intellectual history of the cinephiliac moment, Keathley makes this proposition: “cinephiliac moments are the sites of both a challenge to historiographic practice and an opportunity for its transformation” (9).13

Taking up that call, and drawing specifically on Benjamin’s work on historical materialism, this project offers one version of that transformed historiography in the form of a cinephiliac history.

Cinephiliac History

After pursuing Madeleine all day around the winding streets of San Francisco, from a flower shop on Grant Avenue to the Mission Dolores to the California Palace of the

Legion of Honor to the McKittrick Hotel, Scottie loses track of her. He returns to

Midge’s apartment, where he asks her to recommend a historian of San Francisco to him.

What he needs to know, he realizes, is not what he might find at the library, but “the

small stuff, you know, people you’ve never heard of.” Midge recommends the owner of

the Argosy bookstore, Pop Liebel. Liebel turns out to be an incredible local historian, weaving a brief but gripping tale of Carlotta, beautiful Carlotta, whose child was taken away by her rich lover. This is a story from the nineteenth century, and Liebel assures

Scottie, “a man could do that in those days.” At the loss of her child, Carlotta went

insane, roaming the streets until she died. It is a simple tale, not one Scottie would have

found in the history books. Liebel concludes, “There are many such stories.”

Walter Benjamin would have liked such stories. Carlotta’s story is not part of the

official history but of local lore. In place of the grand narrative of “color, excitement,

power, freedom” that Gavin Elster prefers, this story, as Benjamin would put it,

“brush[es] history against the grain” (“Theory” 257). It is precisely the kind of

nineteenth-century story that might belong to his unfinished Arcades Project, a text that sought to understand the experience of modernity in the twentieth century by looking back at brief moments from the previous century.

Along with other theorists of his era, Benjamin believed that modernity was an essentially different experience than earlier eras. Traditionally, experience—of not only life, but also of art and history—was governed by the logic of causality. But that dependable linearity of time was shattered with the coming of the modern age. With the emergence of the city, and its corollaries, traffic and the urban crowd, experience came to be seen in terms of a series of shocks. “Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions,” wrote Benjamin. “At dangerous crossings nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy in a battery” (“On

Some Motifs” 175). In the mid-nineteenth century, shock became a central experience of

modernity. As Richard Wolin points out, Benjamin believed that “with the advent of

shock . . . the entire structure of human experience [was] transformed” (228). What was

truly transformed was a sense of continuity due to the fragmentation of experience.

Following Freud, Benjamin argued that “in modern life consciousness must make itself so highly protective against the proliferation of aversive stimuli or shocks that the

majority of memory traces which previously registered as experience in a direct and natural way now fail to do so” (Wolin 228). The shocking moments had to be bracketed

off from reality, and they were accessible only through a kind of Proustian involuntary

memory. As Wolin suggests, “it is only experience as it arises unconsciously in the

involuntary memory that is fully capable of repossessing the wealth of those memory

traces which has been occluded by conscious memory” (229).

So, the central question for Benjamin was about how to access these involuntary

memories. Life in modernity was experienced in a fragmentary manner. But this change

in the structure of experience, he believed, could be activated for a new form of writing.

As Charney accurately points out, “Benjamin, of course, was not just prescribing []

history but writing it himself” (283). Benjamin’s history was an experiment in

articulating the history of the fragmentary experience of shocks in a form of writing that

would itself be fragmentary and shocking. In fact, Angela McRobbie argues that

Benjamin’s experimentation anticipated the kind of writing Roland Barthes advocated after the death of the author. Benjamin, she contends, “occupied exactly that space of the

writer which Barthes was later to espouse and himself represent where, as a point of

principle, criticism and creative writing merge into each other and dissolve as separate

categories, where fiction and non-fiction also overlap” (157). Before we turn to that

28 alternative historiography, let me focus on the idea of the past in Benjamin, which, expressed in terms of the lightning flash, becomes crucial to the writing of history.

For Benjamin, the presence of shocking moments in modernity led to a dramatic reconceptualization of time and particularly the role of the past in history. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin offered the most insightful account of the past through a distinction between two ways of looking at it: traditional historicism and historical materialism. The traditional conception of the past lay in its understanding as a narrative of events linked by causal connections. But modernity had destroyed such an illusion. No longer, Benjamin argued, can a historian believe that the past lies in recognizing it (or writing about it) “the way it really was.” It has now transformed itself into a fragment that

can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (“Theses” 255)

The images of the past, then, appear like involuntary memories, rising up in an instant like a lightning flash. If they are not recognized, as Benjamin put it, they might disappear forever. What the materialist historian thus understands is that “[h]istory is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now” (“Theses” 261). In writing history, this now, the present moment, becomes just as important as the past, since the present is implicated in the past and vice versa.

Traditional historicism, Benjamin finally argued, “contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history” (“Theses” 263). That is to say, traditional histories are interested in the grand events that can be linked together via a causal chain. But the materialist historian actively seeks out flashes of lightning, those

moments that do not fit the traditional histories, in order “to blast open the continuum of

history” (“Theses” 262). Lightning flashes, in other words, mark the limits of the

traditional modes of historiography, pointing the way out of the continuum of history.

While the theoretical foundation for the materialist historian is laid in the “Theses”

essay, it is the Arcades Project that shows that history in action. Here is the basic way to

proceed

(1) An object of history is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue. (2) History decays into images, not into stories. (3) Wherever a dialectical process is realized, we are dealing with a monad. (4) The materialist presentation of history carries along with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress. (5) Historical materialism bases its procedures on long experience, common sense, presence of mind, and dialectics. (AP, “N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” 476)

Historical materialism begins at a different place than traditional history. Instead of

timeless truths, a historical materialist is interested in specific objects and moments that

can be snatched out of the jaws of linear history. He must renounce the epic element in

history. Therefore, he cannot proceed in a chronological manner. As Susan Buck-Morss

puts it, “Benjamin was at least convinced of one thing: what was needed was a visual, not

a linear logic” (218). Therefore, the fragments that the materialist historian gathers are

assembled associatively, even poetically. The past is presented in a dialectical

relationship with the present, not as it actually was. Moreover, the materialist historian

gathers everything; a worthless object, like a well-worn stamp, is worth more than any

major find. As Buck-Morss notes, Benjamin “broke radically with the philosophical

canon by searching for truth in the ‘garbage heap’” (217). Finally, the method of

historical materialism consists of showing, not telling. The past is not just exhumed by

the materialist historian; rather, it is recognized and re-membered as it flashes up, blasting open the continuum of history.

Since Benjamin advocates a historiography that is substantially different from traditional history, the experiences of marginal nineteenth-century figures serve better for composing such a history than those of the traditional historian. Connected as they are to that century’s minor preoccupations, these figures have the capacity to capture and develop images that flash up from the continuum of history. In this project, I draw on three such figures of historical materialism: the ragpicker, the flâneur, and the detective, who appear over and over in the Arcades Project and other writings. While chapters 2, 3, and 4 will theorize those roles more fully, at this point let me sketch their figures and point out some overlaps. The ragpicker is a relatively minor figure in the Arcades

Project. He is the historian most interested in the refuse of the past. He collects rags, but he is not a connoisseur; instead, he uses these discarded rags to piece together a history that depends on chance. Like the ragpicker, the flâneur also navigates the nineteenth- century city. But he is distracted not by rags but by objects appearing in the arcades. First identified by Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur is a detached pedestrian, who follows a whimsical trail rather than the rules of traffic. Flânerie becomes a capricious method of traversing the city, pausing wherever an ordinary object catches his eye, in order to discover an entire history out of a single detail. The detective is a successor of the

flâneur. He appears after the flâneur’s tactics are deemed inadequate for navigating the

increasingly illegible nineteenth-century city. The detective confounds the traditional

distinctions between interiority and exteriority in his investigations. While these

characters perform different functions, they all serve the task of writing an alternative

historiography. In their own ways, they seem to anticipate the cinephile, who similarly

focuses his attention on minor preoccupations, on what Willemen regards as “something

that is dead, past, but alive in memory” (227). These Benjaminian characters are

deployed in this study both thematically and methodologically to think about Classic

Hollywood cinema. They are particularly apt for historicizing this period. If Paris, the

capital of the nineteenth century, is revealed in its multiple, marginal traces, then

Hollywood, arguably the capital of the twentieth century, may be revealed in its lightning flashes as well.

Writing about the possibilities of exploring new film histories, Thomas Elsaesser reminds us of signs that appear at French railroad crossings: “Un train peut en cacher un autre.” Elsaesser suggests that just as “one train may be hiding another,” visible only

briefly through the cracks, alternative historical discourses may also be uncovered that

way. He calls these alternative histories hiding behind the dominant mode of historiography “counter-factual” histories. That alternative conception of history “is not,”

Elsaesser claims, “the opposite of ‘real’ history, but a view prepared to think into history

all those histories that might have been, or might still be” (“Louis Lumière” 50). A

cinephiliac history may be regarded as one such counter-factual history, where

cinephiliac moments could provide the clues to an alternative history virtually hidden

behind traditional histories. It is easy to see how this counter-factual, cinephiliac history

would fit into the tradition of historical materialism. As its starting point, a cinephiliac

history would use cinephiliac moments that flash up, blasting the continuum of the linear

cinematic narrative. Instead of following the causality of traditional histories, a cinephiliac history would develop associatively, using a visual rather than linear logic.

Such a history would also bear some resemblance to the practice of new historicism. Like cinephiliac moments, the starting points of new historicism also resist traditional modes of interpretation. Indeed, as Catherine Gallagher and Stephen

Greenblatt have suggested, new historicism can be regarded more accurately as a tactic or a method, not another systematized form of interpretation. The new historicist project “is not about ‘demoting’ art or discrediting aesthetic pleasure” (12). Instead, it is interested in what Gallagher and Greenblatt call “counterhistories that make apparent the slippages, cracks, fault lines, and surprising absences in the monumental structures dominated by a more traditional historicism” (17). In fact, a cinephiliac history of Classic Hollywood could rightly be regarded as one such counterhistory. What follows is that history, narrated in three chapters. Each chapter begins with a cinephiliac moment that I am personally struck by when I watch these films. I begin, in other words, with personal memories, but the purpose of these moments is not to simply reproduce or interpret them but to expand upon them. After all, as the fictional letter writer from Sans Soleil suggests,

“we do not remember; we rewrite memory, much as history is rewritten.” In this project, that history is rewritten with lightning.

Chapter 2, “Show Stoppers: The Chance Encounter with Chiffons,” explores the accidental encounters between Surrealism and Classic Hollywood in the late 1930s through a mysterious fur coat that falls on Jean Arthur’s head in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy

Living (1937). In its formative years, the studio system happily explored the excessive

allure of couture for shocking visual effects, even at the expense of the narrative. But in

the 1930s, Hollywood filmmaking became more linearized, and those visual details that

did not fit the narratives were cut out. The idea of chance, which is central to Surrealism,

seems to have been eliminated from Hollywood. But fortuitously a surreal fur coat in a

standard screwball comedy suggests that there may be an associative link between the studio system and the avant-garde art. In order to trace this connection, like the

Benjaminian ragpicker, I fashion a history out of articles that were once quite fashionable

and have now become outmoded, in order to trace what la mode reveals about le mode,

what fashion designing unexpectedly reveals about the method of studio filmmaking itself. Along the way, fur coats and chiffon dresses form a strange network of connections between the studio system and Surrealism. What emerges from this network is less a theory about Classic Hollywood than a way of addressing a crucial issue for thirties

Hollywood filmmaking: the negotiation between detail and plot, image and script, moment and narrative.

Chapter 3, “Loose Ends: The Stuff That Movies Are Made of,” imagines a flâneur’s gaze at the enigmatic objects of film noir. At the heart of studio filmmaking is

this central paradox: temporal continuity conveyed through a rapid succession of still

images. Film noir is usually associated with a fast-paced plot that parallels the linear trail

of the railroad; conforming to studio cinema in the forties, it looks like a system driven

by forward motion, avoiding pauses, disallowing digression. Yet, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s

The Love of the Last Tycoon shows, at any moment, this linear trail can be derailed by

distracting objects—by the stuff that movies are made of. Here, I use flânerie as a way of examining that stuff which pulsates with uncommon intensity. Instead of interrogating them for what they mean, gazing at things in incidental fashion leads to an unorthodox approach to noir objects—a way of writing with the stuff of cinema and not just about

them. Thus, on a walking tour of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, I pause to look at

stuff like a hand-rolled cigarette, a luminous gun, random wall-hangings of horses.

Rather than following the narrative track, these objects redirect the trail of analysis on a

different course, in order to address the relationship between the striking film still and the

narrative.

Chapter 4, “Signature Crimes: The Strange Case of the Lost Scenes (and the

Stranger Case of the Missing Auteur,” investigates the role of the auteur in the studio

system. Following the Benjaminian detective, who complicates the boundaries between

interiority and exteriority, this chapter provides a way to rethink Orson Welles’s troubled

film The Stranger (1946). I take my cue here from Derrida’s signature experiment, where

the name of the author becomes transformed into a common noun and dispersed within

the text. The signature no longer lies safely outside the text, governing its interpretation, but its nominal effects are also scattered within it. Rather than exploring the auteur’s stylistic competence or personal vision, the signateurist detective improvises, by investigating the name itself. This approach is particularly apt for analyzing Hollywood, where names—not only of directors but of actors and characters too—were strictly

regulated. This kind of policing becomes even more crucial in the postwar landscape,

where naming names would soon result in dangerous consequences. Welles seems to

have responded to these cultural changes by making the most standard film of his career.

But the signature experiment reveals that an internal criticism is taking place, so that the

conventionality of the film turns out to be fake. All these threads come together in an

unremarkable “signature” moment in The Stranger, which opens and closes the chapter,

where a former Nazi mastermind reveals his identity by sketching a swastika on a

notepad in a phone booth.

The project concludes with an afterword that reflects on the use of cinephilia as a

research strategy. It also speculates on where we might go next in a section called “The

Experimental Turn.” Throughout, this project proceeds by connecting seemingly

unrelated images and ideas. In this cinephiliac history, Classic Hollywood appears not as

a consistent system with a uniform style but as an uncanny network of echoes and

coincidences.

Notes

1 Hereafter all references from the unfinished Arcades Project are cited as AP, followed by the title of the appropriate convolute.

2 In “Lightning, Camera, Action,” J. Hoberman suggests this analogy for understanding the impact of the film on first release: “Imagine an unholy cross between The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, combined and rendered mega-Titanic (most movies in 1915 were still only 20 minutes long), drenched in the patriotic pathos of Saving Private Ryan, and tricked out with the historical shenanigans of Forrest Gump.”

3 Birth was the first film ever to be screened at the White House. Wilson apparently enjoyed it so much that he had it screened again the next night for the justices of the Supreme Court and members of Congress. Interestingly, Wilson, who was the first Southern President since the Civil war, later retracted the comment about lightning, likely in response to the protests around the country.

4 Doane offers an excellent revision of the way film history generally distinguishes between the work of cinematic founding fathers, Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès. Rather than seeing their styles in oppositional terms, she argues that they are in fact very similar in the way they celebrate cinematic contingency. In place of the traditional distinction between Lumière-documentary and Méliès-fiction, Doane offers “[t]he celebration of the unexpected chance event—the implausibility of a Méliès film—and the risky duration of time of a Lumiére film, which opens the stage for contingency, [which] are resolutely rejected by the classical narrative system” (138).

5 Although this sequence is often referred to as the “Muir Woods sequence,” the location scenes were in fact shot at the Big Basin Redwoods State Park, located about twenty- three miles northwest of Santa Cruz. Dan Auiler points out that the “Spaniards ‘discovered’ the Big Basin redwood forest not long before building missions Dolores and San Juan Batista,” which also appear in the film (92).

6 Describing the effect of one of her cinephiliac experiences, from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Lesley Stern puts it this way:

It is always surprising this moment, this movement, always and without fail it takes me aback. Yet what can it mean to yoke these incommensurate terms—always and surprising? . . . I can’t quite put my finger on the feeling it evokes, though there is a phrase of [Jean] Epstein’s that resonates: “On the line of communication the static of unexpected feelings interrupts us.” (“I Think” 350; original emphasis) While the moments themselves may differ, the initial cinephiliac spark evokes very similar feelings.

7 Starting with Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking thesis in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Vertigo has been enormously popular (or unpopular) as a text for film criticism, but what Morris suggests, drawing on Paul de Man, is that the film ultimately renders these readings as untenable allegories. Patricia White also tends to accept this argument; although she continues to read the film from a feminist perspective, she argues in “Allegory and Referentiality” that in their attempt to uncover a “single dominant reality,” film critics have elided their own narratives (931).

8 In 1996, Sontag wrote a similar piece for the New York Times Magazine called “The Decay of Cinema,” which stimulated a lot of American critics to reflect on the status of cinema as well as the function of cinephilia. My citations here appear from the original essay, “A Century of Cinema.”

9 In Myths and Memories, Gilbert Adair offers a number of personal memories about the movies that are very similar in form to the few I list here.

10 The student and worker protests that ignited a political revolution in May 1968 initially began over the dismissal of Henri Langlois as director of the Cinématheque, and they critically impacted the development of film studies. Sylvia Harvey’s May ’68 and Film Culture provides an extensive exploration of that impact on film culture.

11 While through most of the book, Doane argues that narrative cinema sides with standardization by repressing contingency, in the last chapter, where she discusses cinephilia, the argument seems to turn on itself. Cinema, she writes has also historically worked to make the contingent legible. . . . And despite the development of stricter limitations and codes regulating the cinematically representable, the mainstream classical narrative continued to exploit the idea of the filmability of the contingent without limit, of the lush overabundance of things, of details, diversity, and multiplicity characterizing the diegesis, of its access to a time uncontaminated by rationalization and necessity, and as the antithesis of systematicity and the site of newness and difference itself. (Emergence 230) I am not sure how to read Doane’s shift at the end, but I will note that the apparent revision serves to open up the book’s central argument onto a more productive historical perspective.

12 For Benjamin, cinema encouraged this mode of viewership. “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of

37 profound changes in apperception,” he argued, “finds in the film its true means of exercise” (“Work of Art” 240).

13 Keathley himself offers the cinephiliac anecdote, a method for film analysis that also begins with the cinephiliac moment, as “the opportunity for the re-integration of the cinephiliac spirit into critical and historical writing” (9–10).

CHAPTER 2 SHOW STOPPERS: THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH CHIFFONS

Yes, do look, and you can see, in between the satins, some evidence of the secrets that already are being revealed under the gauze, under the tulle or lace. —Marguerite de Ponty, “La Mode”

What in the end does it matter to human happiness whether [in Swing Time, Fred Astaire’s] trousers do or do not have cuffs? —Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings

In my formulation: “The eternal is in any case far more the ruffles on a dress than some idea.” —Walter Benjamin, “B [Fashion]”

A Funny Thing Happens . . .

For a brief moment, a chance encounter between a Wall Street tycoon and an unsuspecting working girl takes on the spectral eeriness of a surrealist nightmare. A fur coat, thrown from a Fifth Avenue penthouse roof during a marital spat, assumes the shape of an ominous, bat-like creature. An overhead shot captures the coat as it slowly descends and seems to envelop an oncoming bus. To the extent that it triggers the coincidental encounter on which the plot depends, this moment is central to the script. But its uncanny appearance—it is a slow, almost dream-like, unmotivated overhead shot—is quite jarring and makes the shot virtually extra-diegetic. That feeling, however, lasts only for a moment. Cut to a medium shot of Jean Arthur riding on the double-decker bus as the coat falls on her head, and the plot soon resumes, unfolding through a series of comic adventures that almost causes the stock market to collapse.

38 39

Figure 2-1: The unmotivated overhead shot of the fur coat falling

What do we make of this uncanny moment appearing unexpectedly in a screwball comedy? Of the madcap comedies released during the mid-1930s, Mitchell Leisen’s Easy

Living was hardly the most ingenious. It was neither as fresh as Frank Capra’s It

Happened One Night (1934) nor as lively as Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936).

Although Paramount marketed it as a Preston Sturges comedy, trying to capitalize on the sensation he had created in Hollywood with scripts like The Power and the Glory (1933) and Diamond Jim (1935), the film was not a commercial or critical success.1 Still, as

James Harvey reminds us, everyone remembers the moment when “the fur coat falls on

the heroine’s head” (354). That is ironic because Sturges himself did not believe the

moment could even be filmed. In the script, he suggests that once the coat is hurled over

the parapet, “the falling will probably not pick up” (Horton Three More 169). But the

moment did make it to the screen. What intrigues me about it is that it is unmotivated.

While the shot is a crucial plot device, it exceeds its narrative function. That is, it is visually extra-diegetic; the plot would work just as well without this uncanny shot.2 If

Leisen had cut from the shot of the balcony where the coat is hurled (Figure 2-2) to the medium shot when the coat falls on Jean Arthur’s head (Figure 2-3), the missing “falling” shot would not have affected our narrative understanding of the film. Yet, the shot was filmed, and as such, it has the intensity of a cinephiliac moment, one that signifies well in excess of its narrative content. As we have seen with Roland Barthes’s argument about stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, there is something beyond the symbolic meaning that “exceeds the copy of the referential motif, [such that] it compels an interrogative reading” (“Third Meaning” 53). Unlike the look of the rest of Easy Living, here, in an instant, a fur coat suddenly appears foreboding, and, for a moment, a screwball comedy seems to surreptitiously encounter the surreal.

Figure 2-2: J. B. Ball hurls the coat from the balcony

Figure 2-3: Mary Smith is suddenly hit by the fur coat

Using a familiar object to evoke the uncanny has been quintessential to Surrealist discourse. After all, Louis Aragon acknowledged early on cinema’s ability to alter everyday objects, such that “objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings” (52). But such mysterious transformations are more likely in the phantasmic worlds of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913) or the dream-like images of

Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930).3 Indeed, the fur coat would belong more readily in the

pages of René Magritte’s Fur Catalog for La Maison Samuel. In a screwball comedy, is

such an uncanny moment just an odd interruption to be dismissed as interesting but

insignificant? Just a “funny” thing to be regarded as curious but inconsequential?

Academic film criticism has not directly addressed such moments that exceed their

narrative contexts. These moments are usually overlooked in film histories that tend to

characterize Classic Hollywood as a vertically-integrated industry modeled on Henry

Ford’s assembly line, or, as Thomas Schatz puts it, “as a body of work with a uniform

style—a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and cutting to plot structure

and thematics” (8–9). But seeing Hollywood cinema only as “a standard way of telling

stories” does not enable us to look at the disruptive details. Easy Living, for instance, has

been analyzed as a comedy of class imposture, a Cinderella story that subverts social

hierarchies and redefines femininity in relation to the Production Code. Bernard Dick

reads the film as yet another Depression-era fairy tale. Elizabeth Kendall argues that Easy

Living is a grand vision of social chaos following the Depression. Sarah Berry offers a

more comprehensive account of how consumer fashion is used to “make[] fun of class

distinctions and present[] status as a matter of appearances” (42). Therefore, Easy Living

fits quite nicely into the narrative about late thirties screwball comedies.

Let me pause here for a moment to clarify the difference between these critical

approaches and my own. While these semiotic readings are valuable in themselves, they

fail to account for the more striking, albeit somewhat inexplicable, fur coat moment. My

argument is not that semiotic analysis does not respond to specific cinematic moments in

general. I am only suggesting here that the visual effect of the shot of the fur coat falling

has been critically missed, and its appeal has not been analyzed, likely because its surrealist look does not quite fit into the film’s symbolic discussion. It is not that semiotic

approaches pay no attention to visual details; but not all details can be assimilated into

such readings, and some of them, like the fur coat moment, inevitably go undiscussed.

Ironically, this approach also inadvertently reproduces Hollywood cinema’s tendency to

linearize cinematic details for the sake of narrative continuity.

We know that the American cinema was mainly influenced by the classic narrative tradition, which emphasized a seamless flow of action. But that is not to say that details did not matter to Hollywood filmmakers. Irving Thalberg would often wonder about seemingly irrelevant details. When he wanted to get to know a character better, Thalberg would ask, “What kind of underwear does he have on? Long or short, light or heavy, clean or dirty?” (qtd. in Marx vii). But underpants never became the center of attention.

In 1923, Erich Von Stroheim was fired by Thalberg himself during the shooting of

Merry-Go-Round, reportedly for having spent too much of the budget getting the

Guardsmen extras’ silk underpants embroidered with the Imperial Guard Monogram. The film was turned over to Rupert Julian, who, like Rex Ingram with Greed (1923), had to cut out the excesses. Details, then, were apparently desirable so long as they advanced the narrative.

By the early 1930s, with the advent of sound and the onset of the Depression, the process of filmmaking was further streamlined. From then on, while the studio system of filmmaking was considered a collaborative effort, the shooting script became the key to that collaboration (Schatz 70). Anything that did not fit the script was usually left out. In

Tay Garnett’s China Seas (1935), for instance, the details of Jean Harlow’s gown—its open back and cut-out sleeves—are hardly seen on screen. As Jane Gaines suggests, “The practice of cutting films for narrative coherence and visual continuity” made filmmakers cut some stunning moments out of their films, although those shots would be used as fashion stills for publicity (“Costume and Narrative” 196). Academic film criticism has been similarly preoccupied with its own narratives, and cinematic details that do not advance the script are generally cut out. After all, the visual pleasure of Fred Astaire’s

pant cuffs matters little if it does not contribute to interpreting the relationship between,

say, dance and masculinity.

But sometimes, a single detail in a moment, like the ruffles on a dress that Walter

Benjamin privileged, has a way of unsettling these preconceived ideological narratives.

Given its surreal appearance, what everyone apparently remembers about the film is the

moment when a fur coat descends on Jean Arthur’s head. Let us think about this late

1930s screen memory, if you will, in relation to the kind we are familiar with. One of the

distinguishing features of a screen memory, as Freud defined it, is its capacity to evoke

connections to other, seemingly unrelated memories. “Its value as a memory,” he noted,

lies “not in its own content but to the relation existing between that content and some other, that has been suppressed” (126). Following that contention, we might ask, what connections does the uncanny moment in a screwball comedy like Easy Living uncover that have been suppressed by traditional histories of Classic Hollywood? What would such connections say about Hollywood filmmaking in 1937?

“Two Unlikely Worlds Are Suddenly Joined”

Like other romantic comedies, Easy Living is driven by a chance encounter

between two dissimilar worlds. When Mary (Jean Arthur) runs into Ball (Edward

Arnold), the economic and social worlds of a working girl and a billionaire suddenly collide. J. B. Ball, the baron of Wall Street, and Mary Smith, a young girl working for a little magazine called The Boy’s Constant Companion, meet cute when he throws his profligate wife’s fur coat from the roof and it lands on her. The coat becomes Mary’s, who is then assumed to be Ball’s mistress. And everyone, of course, wants to please the mistress of the “Bull of Broad Street.” She is lavished with gifts, attention, and a free stay

at the Hotel Louis. Sturges’s script, based on a short story by Vera Caspary, is full of

witty dialogue and cleverly contrived situations that unfold through comic

misunderstandings resulting from the original rendezvous, as Arthur tries to keep up with

a fast-paced, arbitrary world.4 It ends when she falls in love with a poor but charming

young fellow named John (Ray Milland), who turns out to be, in typical fairy-tale

tradition, the tycoon’s son. But it is the initial juxtaposition that is the source of the film’s

comic circumstances. For, as Andrew Horton reminds us in his practical guide to writing

comedic screenplays, incongruities always bring on laughter. Using Woody Allen’s line that his parents believed in God and carpeting, he suggests that comedy lies in

juxtapositions. In the case of Woody Allen, the combination works between “the cosmic and the daily, the sacred and the profane” (Laughing 13). Thus, when, as Horton puts it,

“[t]wo unlikely worlds are suddenly joined” by a fur coat in Easy Living, the collision produces a series of comic scenarios (Laughing 67).

In the scene that follows their chance encounter, Mary tries to return the fur coat to

Ball, who refuses to take it back and instead offers her a ride. In the car, the two sit next

to each other, “in the same frame but in different worlds” (Harvey 365). He wants to teach her a lesson in computing interest, but she is more interested in finding out if the fur coat is an authentic Kolinsky.5 The best example of their collision’s effect occurs in the

automat scene, where a mishap at the coin-operated cafeteria creates a display of zany

anarchy, as all the glass lids pop open and customers rush to get their hands on the free

food flying in the background, while Mary, still wearing her fur coat, calmly enjoys her

pot pie. The scene’s chaotic energy echoes the frenzy of mechanization gone awry in

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)—Chaplin’s film was itself a derivation of René

Clair’s A Nous la Liberté (1931)—released only a year earlier. It is worth remembering

that Antonin Artaud often praised the zany yet chaotic intensity of the comic disruptions

in silent and early sound comedies, even comparing the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers

(1930) to the “distinct poetic state of mind that can be called surrealism” (142). For

Artaud, silent and early sound comedies were considered surrealist to the extent that,

through humor, they portrayed the “destruction of all reality in the mind” (142). From

Hollywood’s point of view, such comparisons were quite astonishing. As Anita Loos

noted in her memoirs, filmmakers like Irving Thalberg would be surprised if they heard

the Marx Brothers being compared to avant-garde artists, but they would also be amused,

for “genius,” they believed, “really makes the most interesting bedfellows” (38).

Thalberg would probably be even more surprised if he realized that a Hollywood comedy

like Easy Living was being associated with Surrealism. After all, unlike Chaplin’s film,

all ends well in Easy Living. Order is restored by the end. The stock market bounces back, and the two unlikely worlds are suddenly and delightfully joined when Ball ends up becoming Mary’s father-in-law. The outcome of their chance encounter, then, is quite conventional.

But there is another kind of encounter revealed in the moment of their unplanned

meeting. And, like the unlikely connection between Mary Smith and J. B. Ball, the parties in that encounter are, as Harvey puts it, “connected in a way we can recognize even if we can’t name it” (365). By chance, in the overhead shot of the fur coat falling on

Arthur’s head, the familiar becomes fantastic. The image of the coat descending ominously hints at a connection between Surrealism and Classic Hollywood, although in

the film itself, nothing will come of this possibility. Easy Living returns to a more

predictable narrative path. But the image, and the connection it makes, persists.

That connection, the association between Classic Hollywood and Surrealism, may

seem insignificant, even implausible. But, as we will see, there are many correspondences

between these seemingly mismatched worlds. Writing about the aptness of Surrealist

research games for film studies, Robert B. Ray has suggested that “the Exquisite Corpse

more closely resembles another activity, one also relying on collaboration, fragmentation,

recombination, and (to a surprising degree), automatism, an activity whose invention

occurred simultaneously with the origin of [André] Breton’s game. That other activity is the studio system of filmmaking” (Andy Hardy 53). But this connection is usually

overlooked, likely because, positioned in opposition to the progressive politics of the avant-garde, the studio system is generally seen to occupy a vastly different cultural

terrain than Surrealism.

Even when Surrealist elements are noticed in Hollywood films, they are brushed

aside as mere accidents. Jerome Delamater, for instance, detects Surrealist motifs in the

fantasy worlds of Busby Berkeley’s musicals, but suggests that Berkeley was an

“unwitting Surrealist” because he was probably unaware of Surrealism. Martin Rubin, on the other hand, claims that Berkeley’s nonnarrative cinema, although different in style from mainstream Hollywood cinema, was extraordinarily popular, and therefore less likely to have been influenced by Surrealism and avant-gardism than by the nineteenth- century tradition of spectacle. Robin Wood goes so far as to argue that the studio system

and Surrealism were inherently incompatible. He insists that while Expressionist motifs

could easily be appropriated by Hollywood because they “proved a fruitful source of

subjective effects” that could be linearized, especially in genres like film noir or the horror film of the 1940s, Surrealism was ideologically irreconcilable with the bourgeois narrative tradition (47). When Surrealism is mentioned in relation to Hollywood cinema, it is generally in reference to Salvador Dali’s collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock for

Spellbound (1945), although Wood hastens to add that the designs were “modified by the studio and the [Surrealist dream] sequence drastically abridged” (47). In Meryle Secrest’s standard biography of Dali, his work on Spellbound is not even mentioned.6 The critical consensus, then, seems to be that the incongruous juxtapositions that so delighted the

Surrealists are incapable of being produced in the vertically-integrated studio system.

A moment in 1937, however, gives us a glimpse of the association between a pair of unlikely worlds suddenly joined: Hollywood and Surrealism. By chance, just when

Arthur was suddenly and fortuitously hit over the head by a falling coat,7 André Breton

found himself returning to the question of lucky finds. Writing about an eerie mask that

Giacometti had found at a flea market in Mad Love, Breton suggested that the lucky find,

la trouvaille, is capable of providing the shock of convulsive beauty that Surrealists

dreamed of, by breaking the stranglehold of narrative continuity. “Such images,” he

argued, “are endowed with a persuasive strength rigorously proportional to the violence

of the initial shock they produced” (88). Perhaps due to this persuasive shock, the mask

appeared to Giacometti as the perfect solution to complete the head of his sculpture.

Breton maintained that the solution is an example of the chance object’s capacity to

embody the subject’s desire, to appear as if it were the perfect solution.8 A lucky find

enables the subject to inadvertently uncover repressed desire, or, as Margaret Cohen

argues, it is capable of producing a moment “when the habitual veil of repression is rent,

49 allowing a true hidden order of things to surge forth” (135). Ironically, at the moment when Giacometti encounters his lucky find, his mask, the mask is torn away, for the order that surges forth is not one of causality—as Breton put it, a lucky find “could not come to us along ordinary logical paths” (Mad Love 13)—but of irrationality, or, we might say, of chance.

For Breton, chance was not just a singular moment that disrupted the “natural” order of things. Instead, it enabled surrealists like himself to imagine another order, wherein one gave oneself over to the seemingly arbitrary. Even as early as 1920 in “Pour

Dada,” Breton asked, “when will one give the arbitrary the place that falls to it in the formation of works and ideas” (qtd. in Cohen 134–35). Only by giving oneself over to chance can one create a new order that enables unforeseen juxtapositions. But the

Dadaists were much less interested in discovering these juxtapositions. “If the Dadas called attention to the value of chance,” Cohen rightly argues, “they did so in negative fashion, as a force capable of destroying habitual conceptual order” (135). Deeply disturbed by the mass destruction of the Great War, the Dadaists were a group of young artists and writers who worked spontaneously and collaboratively on pamphlets and publications, paintings and collages, not only to proclaim the rupture between art and logic but also to advertise a kind of destructive anarchism. From Tristan Tzara and

Marcel Duchamp, to André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Aragon, they became what

Fiona Bradley calls “the randomly christened expression of revolt which exploded into simultaneous life in Zürich, Cologne, and New York” (12). In 1920, Aragon announced,

“No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, . . .

NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING” (qtd. in Bradley 19).

Within a couple of years though, some of them became frustrated with Dada’s

inflexible negativity. This frustration was voiced by Breton in Entretiens: “The 1918

Dada Manifesto seemed to open wide the doors, but we discovered that they opened onto

a corridor which was leading nowhere” (qtd. in Bradley 19). Breton and the group of

artists who converged around him were more interested in walking down the corridor that

would open the door to new ideas, new forms, and to chance. To put it another way, as

Katharine Conley points out, they were more drawn to the “door that opens and reopens

continuously, like a door pushed by the wind or a swinging door, returning to a singular

point of departure yet ever opening new vistas of thought” (113). Early Surrealists were

much more intrigued by the logic of circularity and the thrill of the return rather than the

oppressiveness of linearity. Ten years after he closed the door on Dadaism, Breton

himself produced a work based on that logic. Nadja, a text he wanted to leave “ajar, like a

door,” opens on to a world of endless departures and returns (156).9 For Nadja is not so much a narrative as a series of unexpected encounters on Parisian streets, woven together through turns and returns that continually disrupt the linear order. His constant, if sometimes inadvertent, visits to sites where the ghosts of past insurrectional activities lie, and his unexpected meetings with Nadja, create an eerie atmosphere that Breton concedes

gives the appearance of being left “at the mercy of chance” (Nadja 19). And his repeated

fortuitous encounters—as when Paul Eluard turns out to be the same person whom he

unknowingly encountered at the first performance of Guillame Apollinaire’s Couleur de

Temps and coincidentally started corresponding with—produce a world that no longer

depends on logical connections. Instead, it becomes “an almost forbidding world of

sudden parallels [and] petrifying coincidences” (Nadja 19).

This world of chance encounters seems quite distant from the standardized world of

studio filmmaking.10 Yet, the earliest Surrealists were drawn to it. “We used to walk the

cold, deserted streets,” recalled Phillipe Soupault, “in search of an accident, an encounter,

life” (55). What the early Surrealists found, accidentally, was the American cinema,

through a sartorial detail on a movie poster, perhaps of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great

Train Robbery (1903), showing “a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, . . .

pointing a revolver at an unconcerned passersby” (Soupault 56). Like the objects in the shop windows that enchanted the young flâneurs during their walks down the old- fashioned arcades, the publicité poster evoked the capacity of an item of clothing to create a tiny shock. But Hollywood wasn’t quite as inviting. During lunch one afternoon,

Denise Tual happened to mention Luis Buñuel to L.B. Mayer, who claimed he had never heard of the Spanish director. Tual filled him in, concluding by calling Buñuel “a great director.” Tual thought it would be nice if Mayer could arrange for directors like Buñuel,

René Clair, and Jean Renoir to “work on new ideas, new ways of making films” in

Hollywood. Mayer would have none of it. Was she proposing treating Hollywood as a site for experiments? “If Hollywood needs to change its way of making films,” he snapped, “it’ll happen, and quickly. We don’t need a laboratory for that!” (qtd in Baxter

193). Once again, ostensibly at least, the association between Hollywood and Surrealism

is suppressed.

There is, of course, no straight line of influence to be traced from Surrealist Paris to

Hollywood and back. What we have are moments when the association is suddenly

revealed, as in a lingering overhead shot that makes a fur coat enigmatic in an otherwise

fast-paced, madcap plot. When it falls on Mary Smith’s head, she is sitting on the top

52 deck of the bus, focusing on nothing in particular. Suddenly, the coat envelops her.

Visibly upset, she turns around, eyeing the commuter sitting behind her incredulously, and asks, “say, what’s the big idea anyway?” He happens to be a turbaned Hindu, who, pointing to the book he’s reading, calls the unexpected article “kismet.” Looking both amused and annoyed, she shrugs off the fatalistic implications of his response, seeing her mysterious sartorial windfall—recall Jacques Derrida’s assertion that the notion of chance is etymologically linked to the idea of falling—as a lucky find.

Refus[e]ing History

In early 1937, Salvador Dali traveled to Hollywood to collaborate with Harpo Marx on the screenplay of The Surrealist Woman. Although the project never materialized, as he was wandering through the studios, Dali met an old Paris friend, composer George

Antheil, who was then working on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936), starring

Jean Arthur, who would soon trade her Calamity Jane buckskins in that film for business suits (and an enigmatic fur coat) in her next venture. When Antheil introduced Dali to

DeMille, the Spanish Surrealist prostrated himself in front of the master of mass spectacle, who was quite thrilled by that laudatory gesture. “Ah, Mr. DeMille,” Dali reportedly declared, “I have met you at last, you, the greatest Surrealist on earth.” In his

Hollywood memoirs, René Clair takes note of this meeting too: “If this scene took place as it was reported to me,” he adds, “I am sorry that I was not an eye witness” (195). It is unfortunate that there is no photographic record of their rendezvous either. What does exist, however, is a displaced picture, a series of cinephiliac glimpses, of that chance encounter.

In the introduction, I suggested that such glimpses would belong to the tradition of historical materialism. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin offered a way of thinking about isolated moments from the past that could not be linearized by traditional histories. Instead, his preferred mode of history was historical materialism, a form of writing capable of “blast[ing] open the continuum of history” and excavating an alternative understanding of the past from the “flashes” that, like unexpected cinephiliac moments, cannot be contained in any pre-existing discourse

(“Theses” 262). This history, I have argued, can be arrived at only indirectly, by focusing on marginal details rather than grand events.

One of the places where it is found is in the refuse or detritus of the past, in the rags or chiffons scavenged by the ragpicker wandering through the nineteenth-century city. I would like to resurrect the ragpicker, a relatively minor figure in Benjamin’s oeuvre, for historicizing 1930s Hollywood. Benjamin’s chiffonier provides a way out of the grand narratives of film history. The ragpicker-as-historian pursues those objects that are unattended by traditional history. He is “the most provocative figure of human misery,” because he is “clothed in rags and occupied with rags” (AP, “J [Baudelaire]” 349). He rejects nothing, drawing insights even from the most insignificant objects. The chiffonier

“collects and catalogues everything that the great city has cast off, everything it has lost, and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice” (AP, “J [Baudelaire]” 349).

And it is precisely in these rags that he finds revolutionary potential. For he does not simply hoard his stockpile of leftovers. As Irving Wohlfarth suggests, “it is precisely when they no longer circulate, as well-behaved commodities should, that things begin to

give signs of a more subversive potential” (147).11 The chiffonier rescues that potential in

forgotten objects—a series of chiffons, if you will—from the jaws of linear history, to

reveal an alternative order of things.

The ragpicker’s interest in outdated objects echoes Surrealism’s affinity for old-

fashioned things. Using Breton’s Nadja as his prime example, Benjamin argued that

Surrealism was “the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the

‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos,

the objects that have begun to become extinct, grand pianos, [and especially] the dresses of five years ago” (“Surrealism” 229). The Surrealists discovered how to release the

radical potential in these antiquated objects and create a world based on the uncanny

associations between them. Surrealism, for Benjamin, became an alternative mode of

writing, and the Surrealists became materialist historians fashioning history out of the

outmoded.

Like the Surrealists, the ragpicker picks out unattended things, “assembl[ing] large-

scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components” (AP, “N [On

the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” 461). Moreover, he echoes the surrealist

interest in chance, weaving together his rags like a mosaic, “rung by rung, according as

chance would offer a narrow foothold” (AP, “N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of

Progress]” 460). The ragpicker’s attention to outmoded details, his reliance on chance

encounters, and his ability to connect ideas and images through uncanny associations

rather than logical connections yield a method well suited for writing an associative

history, using cinematic moments that end up on the cutting room floor of the traditional

film historian. For in these moments, as in the old-fashioned fur coats of Classic

Hollywood, we might find the revolutionary potential that the Surrealists discovered in

the grand pianos and the old-fashioned dresses of an earlier generation. What, then, is the

method for writing this history? Here is how Benjamin put it: “the method of this work:

literary montage—I have nothing to say, only to show. I won’t purloin anything precious,

nor will I appropriate witty turns. But the rags, the remnants: I do not want to inventory

them, but let them come into their own in the only possible way: by using them” (qtd. in

Vinken 67). What would a history composed with the rags of 1930s Hollywood look

like?

Interestingly, Wohlfarth observes that the only place where Benjamin explicitly

portrays the ragpicker as an intellectual is in reference to film historian Siegfried

Kracauer. From Benjamin’s point of view, “what we see when we visualize [Kracauer]

going about his solitary business is a ragpicker at daybreak, impaling verbal rags, scraps

of language, with his stick” (Wohlfarth 154). As a ragpicker, the historian can afford to

dabble in rags because he no longer conforms to any predetermined ideology. While

impaling these rags, Kracauer refuses to accept history’s desire to make order out of

chaos. “Whereas academics,” Wohlfarth concludes, “vainly arrange the chaos of their

‘lumber-room’ into neat piles of facts that nonetheless accumulate like so much debris, thereby reflecting the chaos of history without reflecting upon it, the ragpicker throws all

the litter out almost without comment. He has ‘nothing to say,’ ‘only to show’” (156; original emphasis).12 Thus, even the most insignificant detail, the most undesirable piece

of refuse, makes its way into history. In that process, the ragpicker comes to embody “the

intrinsic connection between refuse and refusal” (155). For it is in the refuse that

Kracauer, the ragpicker-historian, uncovers the cinematic past by refusing traditional history.

The ragpicker is a particularly apt figure for historicizing the golden years of

Classic Hollywood. After all, one of its founding members began his career as a ragpicker of sorts. Louis B. Mayer, the executive who made MGM the Tiffany of

Hollywood, got his start in his father’s scrap metal business. From there, the young

Mayer started his own junk business in Boston, which helped transform him into a used- clothes dealer, colloquially known as a ragpicker. Like many other early Hollywood moguls, Mayer emerged from “the lower reaches of the garment industry” (Wollen 14) and changed the inchoate American film industry into an enormously popular form of mass entertainment. Among Mayer’s contemporaries who also came from the clothing industry were Paramount chief Adolph Zukor, a fur coat dealer, producer Sam Goldwyn, a glove salesman, and William Fox, a cloth-sponger. The film industry became so distinctly associated with the garment business that when Joseph P. Kennedy entered the movie industry in the mid-1920s and acquired Pathé, Marcus Loew is said to have remarked, “What’s Kennedy doing in pictures? He’s not a furrier.” “When they eventually built studios, achieved power and amassed wealth as Hollywood tycoons,”

Peter Wollen notes, “it was only natural that they should want to associate the cinema with extravagant and spectacular clothes” (14).

Indeed, the idea of the makeover, a literal rags-to-riches story, fit nicely within the narrative of American self-invention. In Hollywood, these young tycoons literally made themselves over completely, and Mayer even expressed his gratitude by adopting the fourth of July as his birthday.13 It is not surprising, then, that during the golden age of

Hollywood, the fashion makeover came to represent the way to the top. As Sarah Berry

points out, “fashion was a medium of new beginnings”: a working girl, especially in the

Depression era, could make herself over “thanks to hard work and a few Adrian outfits”

(xviii). That is certainly the narrative intention of Leisen’s Easy Living, where the fortuitous acquisition of a fur coat enables a penniless working girl to cross class lines and end up marrying a billionaire. I will return to that plot in a moment, but what interests me is the way in which, for a fleeting instant, that narrative is ruptured. Insofar as a mundane fashion accessory becomes surreal, it functions as a virtual show-stopper, arresting the screwball plot dead in its tracks. So, in the rags-to-riches tale, let us focus on

the rags for now. By unfurling the details of the fur coat that descends on Jean Arthur’s

head after its wealthy owner discards it like a piece of trash, we might accidentally

uncover a different kind of Hollywood tale.

What follows is that tale, told not as a causal narrative but as a series of moments

or episodes. I call it “Episodes in Chiffon,” because it is couture that facilitates the

encounter between the seemingly mismatched fabrics of Classic Hollywood and

Surrealism. The Surrealists were fascinated by fashion’s potential for revealing the

marvelous in the everyday—in an unmotivated manner. For Classic Hollywood, the

connection was more straightforward: fashion sells, although as the next section will

demonstrate, there is a dramatic shift from the 1920s to the 1930s in the manner in which articles of fashion are “sold” in the movies. But this is not a history of film couture.

Instead, like the ragpicker, I fashion a history out of articles that were once quite fashionable and have now become outmoded, in order to trace what la mode reveals

about le mode, what fashion designing unexpectedly reveals about the method of studio

filmmaking itself. Along the way, fur coats and chiffon dresses become unexpected

mediators between the studio system and the avant-garde art, and, for an uncanny

moment in 1937, Hollywood looks a lot less like a rational system with a uniform style,

or even a standard way of telling stories, than a strange network of echoes and coincidences. What will emerge from this network is less a theory about Classic

Hollywood than a way of addressing a crucial issue for thirties Hollywood filmmaking,

something I have been alluding to all along: the negotiation between detail and plot, image and script, moment and narrative.

Episodes in Chiffon

The element of chance was introduced in Easy Living by Preston Sturges. Sturges

had moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s from Broadway to fill the demand for talent

created by the relatively new phenomenon called “the talkies.” He saw himself above all

as a storyteller and the movies as primarily a medium for telling stories; he even moved

from Universal to Paramount solely because the latter studio allowed writers to sit in on

conferences with directors. Sturges believed that the script was the essential component

of filmmaking, often championing a kind of reverse auteurism by claiming that “directing

is best done through the writing of the script” (Horton Three More 2). As he dictated his

scripts to his secretary Bianca, his daughter recalls, he “became the characters he was

creating as he paced around the office, speaking as they would speak, moving as they

would move” (Horton Three More 3). In other words, he focused on the cast of characters

and the flow of action. When he was assigned to write the screenplay for a film based on

Vera Caspary’s short story, Sturges remodeled the story entirely.14 In place of Caspary’s

tale about a poor girl stealing a mink coat, he created a situation where the coat would

accidentally fall on her head, such that “the situation [would] carr[y] the action from

there. All Sturges had to do then was develop his characters and see how they responded”

(Curtis 110). The script, then, held the idea of chance, but for Sturges that was purely a narrative device. As we saw earlier, he did not believe chance could be filmed.

But in Hollywood chance was not just a concept, and chance encounters were not uncommon. Despite its reputation as a rational system, the story of the American film industry began with a classic accidental encounter. A year after a young fur coat dealer named Adolph Zukor successfully distributed the French film d’art Queen Elizabeth in

1912—a film that was immensely popular in the U.S. primarily because of its spectacular costumes—DeMille formed a partnership with Jesse L. Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (who became Samuel Goldwyn of MGM) to create the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company, which later grew into Paramount. Having purchased rights to the Western novel The

Squaw Man, DeMille and co-director Oscar C. Apfel went to Flagstaff to shoot on location. But they found the snow-capped Arizona mountains unsuitable for their tale.

Frustrated, they packed up, got back on the train, and rode to the end of the line. Last stop, Hollywood. Having stumbled upon this new setting, DeMille went on to transform the little-known site into a spectacular dream factory.

Soon, others followed.15 Among them was an inspired young designer named

James Mitchell Leisen. In 1919, he went to Hollywood to become a movie star. But he

was not much of an actor and spent most of his time with his family friends, who

happened to know Philip Smalley and his wife, Lois Weber.16 Let me recount his entry

into Hollywood, which was as coincidental as the meeting between Paul Eluard and

André Breton at the birth of Surrealism just a year earlier. During a party at the

Smalley’s, he talked all night with a woman whom he ran into again the next day at the

Old Ship Café at Venice pier. Although he did not realize it then, the woman turned out

to be Jeannie Macpherson, DeMille’s secretary. A day later he was hired as a costume

designer for Paramount. Leisen, an architectural designer by training, was quite surprised by the offer, but Macpherson reassured him: “You had such interesting hands,” she said,

“I knew you could do something” (qtd. in Chierichetti 20).17 Leisen’s good fortune was in

part due to the fact that Hollywood was a place where potential talent was appreciated

over training. The historian Barrett Kiesling recognized this, suggesting that “a good

architect, a fine dressmaker, an expert trainer of fleas has a better chance of getting a

position than the most delightful Bachelor of Arts who ever received a college sheepskin”

(26). As a designer, and later as a director, Leisen did not disappoint. As biographer

David Chierichetti has noted, “in Leisen’s hands [even scripts with little potential]

blossomed beyond their expectations” (2).

Leisen entered an industry attracted to spectacle. In the early twenties, Hollywood

films were governed by the happy coincidence between two currents: the emphasis on the

visual image due to the absence of sound and the post-war craving for “spectacular

glamour and display, the signifier of burning passion and intoxicating excess” (Wollen

14). The spectacle films of the period used couture not only to develop a character or

advance the plot but also to create an unapologetic visual extravaganza. In a brilliant

study of how DeMille’s pictures reflected American culture during the silent era, Sumiko

Higashi argues that “[a]s consumption became a pleasurable aspect of modernity,

[DeMille’s] compositions were less distinguished by dramatic low-key lighting to

articulate ethical dilemmas and more renowned for spectacular sets” and costumes (142).

DeMille was often heard advising his designers to accentuate the visual element, to “get it on the screen,” since “the camera has no ears” (Chierichetti 22). Coincidentally, his suggestion seems to echo Walter Benjamin’s method of having nothing to say, only to show.

Again and again, that desire to show overwhelmed the narrative. In Don’t Change

Your Husband (1919), for instance, DeMille drew on Orientalist motifs in costume and set design. Gloria Swanson, who is referred to as a “Lovely Chinese Lotus,” is showcased repeatedly like a mannequin. At one point, Higashi points out, “[d]elighted by a beaded gown unpacked for a costume party, she drapes the fabric around her body in a pose”

(153). Her story can wait. The moment matters much more in non-narrative terms. In

Cobra (1925), Nita Naldi tries to seduce the Italian count, played by Rudolph Valentino, who comes to America pretending to be a sheik. When the seduction succeeds, the plot literally comes to a halt, as Naldi slowly reveals her black gown. As Howard Gutner describes it, the gown’s “only embellishment [is] a lightning bolt of silver sequins cascading from the right hip to the hem like a shock of desire” (20; emphasis added). And in Madam Satan (1930), DeMille himself exploited the pleasure of couture for visual effect. In the climactic scene, where Kay Johnson tries to win back her husband by posing as a seductress at a masquerade ball, DeMille dressed her in a “volcano” gown.

Describing the gown as a visual exclamation point on screen, Jane Gaines argues that it

“could only be worn to be photographed and is never properly worn but is rather hung and stuck on the actress who becomes something like a moving mannequin” (“On

Wearing the Film” 171). What these examples illustrate is that throughout the 1920s

fashion was used not in service of the narrative but for visual pleasure. Moreover, the

effect of “getting it on the screen” sometimes looked quite surreal.

For the Surrealists, the mannequin was a familiar phantom object. While DeMille

was working on Madam Satan, Jean Cocteau was exploring the connection between the

real and the artificial through a mannequin-like statue that suddenly comes alive. In

Blood of a Poet (1930), a calcified Lee Miller is at first a surrogate for a living figure, brought to life when the poet wipes off his disembodied mouth from a self-portrait on to the Hellenistic model. As Barbara Vinken suggests, “The white beauty and majesty of antique marble and modern fashion oscillate between the animated and the inanimate: between a statue coming alive Pygmalion-like, and a living woman becoming an inanimate statue” (62). Also that year, in Self-Portrait, Herbert Bayer established the relationship between the living and the phantom object with an image of the photographer himself as a mannequin whose arm is being disassembled.18 By the mid-

1930s, at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, the role of the mannequin

in Surrealist iconography was made explicit through the display of mannequins as dream-

like sculptures at city thoroughfares. As Richard Martin puts it, in that spectacle,

“Pygmalion was meeting Freud in a dramatic encounter” (50). Thus, the figure of the

mannequin, as a fertile metaphor for the human figure, enabled the Surrealists to draw

attention to the relationship between the real and the simulacrum.

The appropriation of mannequins was part of a much wider exchange between

Surrealism and fashion. The Surrealists were not only interested in accentuating the

artificial but also in creating moments where the unreal would lead to a new order of

things. Rummaging like a chiffonier through older texts at the National Library in Paris,

Breton had discovered the nineteenth-century poet Lautréamont, whose Les Chants de

Maldoror provided what would become the paradigmatic Surrealist metaphor: “the

chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” In couture—and it was haute couture that transformed sculptures into mannequins—the

Surrealists found an ideal dissecting table where the bizarre in the banal, the marvelous in

the everyday, could be revealed. They were fascinated by couture because it seemed to

possess an air of surrealism. In Une Vague de Rêves, Louis Aragon drew attention to

sartorial details that could be transformed in an instant: “There is a surrealist light: the

moment when the cities go up in flames, it falls on the salmon-colored decoration of

stockings; . . . it lingers till late on the avenue de l’Opéra at Barclay’s, when the ties

transform themselves into phantoms” (qtd. in Ulrich Lehmann 324). And, like Walter

Benjamin, the Surrealists sought to investigate history through these fragmentary sartorial

glimpses. For sartorial objects were capable, as Ulrich Lehmann suggests, of “reach[ing] below the visual surface and evok[ing] the erotic and mysterious” (325). It was not surprising, then, that René Magritte’s Homage to Mack Sennett used clothing to evoke a kind of mysterious and instantaneous Proustian memory. The painting shows a dress in human form, hanging in a wardrobe, but the human body no longer inhabits it. What is left is an undeniable trace or memory of that body in the striking visual detail of female breasts exposed underneath the surface of the dress.

While Magritte was painting his homage, ironically, both Mack Sennett and couture’s spectacular ability of instantaneously disrupting the linear narrative were fading in popularity in Hollywood. With the onset of the talkies, slapstick comedies like

Sennett’s, whose films had markedly negligible script outlines, were succeeded by

64 dialogue-based comedies, especially of the screwball variety.19 The latter category of films was tailored to fit the preexisting logic of the narrative film, and visual elements that could not be accommodated were usually jettisoned. Naturally, the role of couture, which tends to emphasize the thrill of the moment, had to be trimmed to fit the narrative too. Costumes were designed to symbolically reinforce the narrative. The most striking example of this occurs in George Cukor’s The Women (1939), a modern comedy of manners with an all-female cast. Hedda Hopper, playing the prying columnist Dolly

DePeyster, appears in one scene wearing a sequined butterfly suit with a matching hat with antennae, probably to pick up gossip signals from the Casino roof. In fact, even the fashion show itself, inserted as an extended color sequence in Cukor’s black-and-white film, becomes part of the plot.

The fashion show was introduced to Hollywood via the revues. Although Paul

Poiret had invented the runway of models, a virtual narrative of the season’s haute couture, it was Flo Ziegfield who, through a chance encounter at the dress designer

Lucile’s, turned it into a show-business narrative with a big finish, the show-stopper. As it turned out, just when DeMille discovered Hollywood, Ziegfield made his own spectacular discovery. In 1913, he met actress Billie Burke, the toast of Broadway. The following year, the two eloped. And as any doting husband might, Ziegfield took her shopping. Burke happened to be a Lucile customer, and when Ziegfield entered Lucile’s salon, he was struck by the beauty of one of her models, Dolores. Immediately, he decided to recreate that striking moment on stage in one of his revues. “Ladies in

Fashion” became his tribute to this show-stopping beauty. The subtitle of the revue was

“An Episode in Chiffon.”

In Hollywood, the designer who most adroitly executed such episodes in chiffon was Gilbert Adrian. He juxtaposed the worlds of haute couture and Classic Hollywood, and that juxtaposition was remarkably, if inadvertently, surreal. For sometimes chiffons

have a way of stopping the show. Before Mitchell Leisen ran into him in New York and

brought him out to Hollywood to work on DeMille’s The Volga Boatman (1926), Adrian

had gained experience working with chiffon (and plenty of other fabrics) mainly through

chiffons, validating Elizabeth Nielsen’s contention that costume designing depended

more on the designer’s resourcefulness than creativity, on “a kind of spontaneous

adaptability found in individuals who because of necessity ha[d] to do something with

very limited resources” (170). As a struggling designer, Adrian had learned to assemble

designs out of the scraps left on the cutting room floor. While he was studying at the

Parsons School of Fine and Applied Arts in Paris, he decided to participate in the Bal du

Grand Prix, where designers like Paul Poiret met each year to create extravagant costumes. This was to be his “sacred rite of initiation into the Parisian world of art and

design” (Gutner 12). But without much time or money for an original design, Adrian put

together a costume by “scour[ing] the workrooms at Parsons looking for whatever [he]

might take that wouldn’t be missed” (Gutner 12–13). The result of his scouring was a

brightly-colored design that, luckily, caught the attention of Irving Berlin, who happened

to be in Paris looking for a designer for his Broadway revue with his director, Hassard

Short. When he finally moved to Hollywood and took over as designer for MGM, Adrian

brought his scouring talents with him, despite Mayer’s apparent refusal to allow the

studio to be turned into a laboratory.

Adrian’s method of designing was closer to that of the ragpicker’s, who scavenged

the nineteenth-century city for remnants of history, than to the assembly-line worker’s. In

a recent essay, Caroline Evans compares the roles of the ragpicker and the fashion

designer, arguing that “the historian/designer’s method is akin to that of the ragpicker

who moves through the city gathering scraps for recycling” (108). However, she makes

this analogy only in relation to postmodern designers, who deliberately rummage through

fashion history in order to create a pastiche by quoting previous eras. I find the inadvertent scavenging within Hollywood’s vertically-integrated, controlled system much more compelling. In Talking Pictures, an insider’s account of Classic Hollywood written in 1937, Barrett Kiesling observed that the design departments at major studios like

MGM were quite impressive, often set up “in an enormous twelve-story building, [where] some thirty thousand different costumes of every known historical period are stored”

(33).20 That kind of raw material enabled designers to stroll up and down the vertical

promenade of fashions, creating startling juxtapositions of sartorial articles, as if by

chance.

Consider, for instance, the most often cited dress in Hollywood fashion history: the

Letty Lynton dress. In 1932, Joan Crawford signed on to make Clarence Brown’s film

about a wealthy New York socialite who goes unpunished for killing her playboy lover.

Crawford had been a fashion icon since her flapper days. She often played a rags-to-

riches factory worker or shopgirl,21 but the image of the “Letty Lynton” dress has outlived that narrative. Indeed, the white chiffon organdy dress with built-up shoulders and puffed sleeves has persisted like a still from Gilbert Adair’s album of “flickers.” It became popular immediately upon the film’s release, so much so that Macy’s claimed

67 they had sold 500,000 copies of it, and an article in Vogue reported that “the country was flooded with little Joan Crawfords” (qtd. in Gutner 116). What kind of dress would create such a fashion furor across the country?

Instead of following the realistic trend in costume designing of the early 1930s,

Adrian borrowed a detail from the gay 1890s by reviving the puffed sleeves, which were ruffled at the shoulder and tight from the elbow down. The puffed sleeves would work well to cover Joan Crawford’s unusually broad shoulders. By chance, fashion historian

Jane Mulvagh notes, the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris had reintroduced the wide shoulders, “show[ing] Japanese and Balinese costumes and Bangkok temple dancers with winged shoulders and tiny waists” (112). The “Letty Lynton” puffed sleeves—also called mutton sleeves, appropriately echoing Surrealism’s penchant for the bizarre and anticipating the Surrealist-inspired Mutton Chop hat—arose out of the juxtaposition of neo-Victorian femininity and Oriental chic. To the sleeves, Adrian added other heterogeneous elements: “the Buster Brown collar, the hip treatment and the flared bottom of the skirt, both ruffled and tucked,” confessing to the Ladies’ Home Journal in

1933 that the “Letty Lynton” dress “may have seemed to have several ideas” (qtd. in

Gutner 118).

The dress, which became synonymous with 1930s Hollywood fashion and defined

Adrian’s reputation as the quintessential Hollywood designer, was in fact put together almost inadvertently as a collage, out of bits and pieces from different eras.22 Moreover,

David Wallace notes that the dress was not produced by a lone artist, Adrian, but by “a small army of up to 250 cutters, tailors, beaders, embroiderers, jewel craftsmen, feather workers, and seamstresses” (111). The result of all this collaboration was that on screen,

the starched chiffon dress signified more than the look of innocence and vulnerability

demanded by the narrative. Although Joan Crawford is supposed to look, according to

Herzog and Gaines, “demure and submissive in the frothy fantasy dress” (89), if we look

at the ruffles closely, the dress does not appear to follow the requirements of the script.

As Elizabeth Wilson points out, “when Joan Crawford stood framed in a doorway the

sleeves stood out like twin powder puffs or embryo wings” (171). The visual details of

Adrian’s collage, then, made the dress unmistakably surreal.

The Letty Lynton dress, which created such uproar throughout the country and has remained one of the most influential designs in American fashion, has ironically been missing in action since 1933. Due to legal disputes over the film’s screenplay, Letty

Lynton was put out of circulation a year after its release.23 But traces of the film have

been kept alive through George Hurrell’s photographs of the dress, which have been

reproduced in almost as many film studies texts as copies of the original dress were

purportedly sold by Macy’s. In fact, these fashion stills led to the original popularity of

the film. For, even though the plot was generally well-known, Letty Lynton was marketed

on the strength of a single dress with many details; rather than the plot, MGM publicized fashion stills of the Letty Lynton dress. Fashion stills were different from publicity stills—although they featured stars and costumes, they did not contain any “dramatic

ideas.” The dress was regarded by the publicity department as a show-stopper. Without

any narrative context, it was promoted with descriptions of details about the mutton

sleeves; the tucks and flares; “the skirt beneath . . . of flaring and circular fullness with a

series of three tucks appearing above the three-ruffled border”; and “the ruffles of collar,

sleeves, peplum, belt buckle and shirt . . . all accordion pleated” (qtd. in Herzog and

Gaines 80). So, although the film has been lost to history, the details have survived.

Coincidentally, Elsa Schiaparelli, the doyenne of Parisian high fashion, had introduced the exaggerated puffed sleeves a year earlier. In the early 1930s, haute couture responded to the somber mood following the collapse of the stock market by eschewing both opulence and triviality. Therefore, in the designs of Parisian fashion houses, conservatism prevailed. But then came along designers who were more interested in shocking their audiences than following the latest trend. At this time, Surrealism happened to gain currency in fashion’s graphic designs. First, Coco Chanel decided to revise Paul Poiret’s restrictive outfits by freeing women of the corset. William Wiser notes that Dali became one of her friends, who “could offer a surrealist touch to the

Chanel line, and contribute[] his flair and capricious whimsy to the more staid designs, as long as Coco kept him in check” (141). In 1936, Elsa Schiaparelli adapted Dali’s The

Study of Drawers for her famous desk suit, with pockets simulating a chest of drawers.

Of course, the exchange between Surrealism and high fashion was not a one-way street.

In 1935, at a lecture in London, Dali arrived wearing a diving suit to show, as Piers

Brendon argues, “that he was plumbing the depths of the human mind” (356). Two years

later, he collaborated with Schiaparelli on the Mutton Chop Hat, which oddly echoes the

Letty Lynton sleeves. As the name suggests, it is “a millinery fiction, but in order to be fully acceptable it has a white patent-leather frill on the end of the chop as if offered in proper restaurant service” (Martin 108). This hat was part of a series of sartorial articles

that Dali and Schiaparelli produced through a Surrealist juxtaposition of dissimilar

objects. That same year, around the time of the release of Easy Living, Dali and

Schiaparelli joined forces to create the “Mad Cap.” Paraphrasing Richard Martin, we can

say that fashion and Surrealism were meeting in a dramatic, often comic (might we say

madcap?), encounter.

In 1937, that dramatic encounter included one other member: Classic Hollywood.

Although Hollywood stars like Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford had been interested in

Parisian haute couture since the early 1930s, in 1937, Schiaparelli invited Mae West to

adapt her bosomy curves for a perfume bottle. When West arrived in Paris, Schiaparelli

recalls, “she was stretched out on the operating table of [her] workroom, and measured

and probed with curiousity” (qtd. in Martin 205). Based on West’s silhouette, the

Surrealist artist Leonor Fini created an hourglass-shaped flacon. In that moment, with

Mae West as a kind of moving mannequin, Schiaparelli’s “operating table” became the

charmed dissecting table where Surrealism met Hollywood through fashion, as if by

chance. The name of the perfume was Shocking.

The encounter made quite an impression on Hollywood too; and long before

Hitchcock worked with Dali on Spellbound, Surrealism was briefly invited to the studio

system. Both Chanel and Schiaparelli were asked to design costumes for MGM and

Paramount respectively. Schiaparelli did Mae West’s costumes for Every Day’s a

Holiday (1937), and Chanel even went to Hollywood to collaborate with Leisen and

Adrian. But that association did not last too long, because these designers seemed too

eccentric for the fast-paced studio system. Chanel actually faired much better with Jean

Renoir, designing costumes for bourgeois life in France in La Règle du Jeu (1939). What

Hollywood filmmakers wanted was to incorporate these Surrealist-inspired designs symbolically into their scripts, mostly for laughs. In 1939, for instance, Leisen directed

Midnight, a screwball comedy where Claudette Colbert plays an American gold-digger

who goes from being Eve Peabody of the Bronx to the Duchess Czerny of Hungary with the help of some Parisian couture. In a scene at “Simone Chapeaux,” the owner Simone

emerges wearing a centipede brooch and asks for a decidedly surreal hat, “with the stuff

on it that looks like spinach.”24 That movie, which from a narrative point of view echoes

Renoir’s film made that same year, has none of the intensity of Surrealism. The Brackett

and Wilder script does not linger on the Surrealist details; it moves swiftly along to the next joke. And we might conclude that the overt enthusiasm for Surrealism in Hollywood faded just as quickly.25

Although that connection was severed, haute couture in general and Schiaparelli in

particular were indirectly linked to Hollywood. Hollywood was a long way away for a

young flâneuse, who was accidentally discovered by the father of Parisian high fashion,

Paul Poiret. Wandering through Poiret’s salon, Schiaparelli came upon a coat she would have liked but could not afford. Poiret stepped forward to complement her and gave her the coat for free. Perhaps as confused as Mary Smith must have been in Easy Living,

Schiaparelli walked away with the coat that would change her life. Shortly afterward,

Poiret became her mentor and her ticket to the unpredictable world of Parisian haute couture.

Although Schiaparelli would have to wait a while to be discovered by Hollywood,

Poiret himself was no stranger to it. In 1912, a young fur coat dealer named Adolph

Zukor had successfully distributed Queen Elizabeth, which, as mentioned earlier, was a huge financial success due to the popularity of the spectacular costumes designed by

Poiret himself for the film’s star Sarah Bernhardt. The profits from the distribution

72 provided the seed capital for Paramount, where Zukor soon partnered with DeMille.

Among others, in 1919, DeMille hired a young costume designer for the studio. Several years later that young designer began directing movies. Since he was inclined toward fashion, in 1937, he made a film about Parisian haute couture called Artists and Models

Abroad. For the film, he sent the Paris correspondent of Harper’s Bazaar scavenging for clothes from Parisian couturiers. The correspondent gathered up clothes from Mme Grès,

Paquin, Patou, and of course Schiaparelli. In her communiqué back to Paramount, she said: “these should do the trick.” Evidently they did, because the film was very successful. In fact, it was one of Paramount’s highest grossers that year. The studio wasn’t so lucky with the other film the designer-turned-director made that year—a screwball comedy that was quite forgettable, except for a moment when a fur coat falls on a working girl’s head.

At the end of Easy Living, another unsuspecting girl gets hit by a fur coat. After the misunderstanding is finally cleared up—and according to Mary Smith, it’s no little misunderstanding—J. B. Ball finds his wife in possession of that disruptive fur coat once more. So, yet again, he throws it off the balcony, and it falls on another young girl who happens to be standing by. She lets out a slight scream. Mary and John recognize her confusion. Mary grabs his arm and walks away, saying “Johnny, this is where we came in.” This final moment was a late addition to the film. It does not appear in Sturges’s script, so we might assume that it was Leisen’s contribution. But what do we make of this return to the initial chance encounter?

Ed Sikov argues that Easy Living issues from “Sturges’s and Leisen’s glorifying appreciation of kismet” (122). Although Sturges’s script contains this sense of

predetermination, in Leisen’s hands, the film becomes a lot less predictable. In fact,

Sturges did not like working with Leisen because of the unconventional way in which

Leisen treated his screenplays. He thought Leisen “cared more about the background . . . than the scene in front of it” (Harvey 524). In fact, Leisen’s preoccupation with the details of a scene left many of his screenwriters disappointed.26 Sometimes, Ronald Davis

notes, he “might spend two hours adjusting a drape on a window, rather than rehearsing his actors” (73). But that is because Leisen’s method did not necessarily conform to the

studio system’s linear mode of filmmaking. Although his films did follow the plot,

having been a designer, he was also interested in the minutest details and would often

momentarily surrender the narrative to them. While he was known primarily for making

social satires, he did not like being restricted by the plot’s significance. “If I want to send

a message,” he would say, “I’ll call Western Union.” 27 Indeed, his films often showed

disregard for the script in favor of unplanned moments that reflected an appreciation not

of kismet but of chance.28

The initial fur coat moment can be seen as Leisen’s way of allowing chance to

appear on the screen, momentarily suspending the narrative order. The unmotivated

overhead shot takes on the qualities of what René Crevel calls “a single moment of

lyricism,” “capable of making us forget all sorts of wretched [or funny] stories” (57). The

enigmatic fur coat is certainly capable of making us forget the screwball script—but just

for a moment, because Leisen cuts back to Jean Arthur and the plot resumes. This

moment shows the negotiation that is at the heart of 1930s Hollywood filmmaking: on the

one hand, it tries to move from one joke to the next, in classic screwball fashion. On the

other hand, the moment becomes the script’s “screwball.”

Sikov notes that the term screwball came from baseball: it was coined in the 1930s

to suggest an erratic pitch meant to confuse the batter. It became especially popular when,

at the All-Star Game of 1934, New York Giant Carl Hubbell surprisingly “struck out five

future Hall-of-Famers in a row—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and

Joe Cronin—all with screwballs” (Sikov 19). The fur coat moment similarly strikes out

the traditional narrative about Classic Hollywood. Even if only for an instant, it reveals

the contradictions that lie just below the surface and between the folds. The mysterious coat becomes a perfectly fitting metaphor for the fortuitous juxtaposition of Classic

Hollywood and Surrealism, experienced not in the planned collaborations between the

European emigrés and the Hollywood natives but in the unplanned moments that happened by chance during the mid-1930s, as the world was making the transition from one chaotic disaster, the Great Depression, to another, the Second World War. In these unplanned moments, Hollywood itself begins to resemble Surrealist Paris, no longer a linear and homogenous city, but a “little universe,” where “ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies are the order of the day” (“Surrealism” 231).

“Hey, What’s the Big Idea Anyway?”

In Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a Hollywood director, displeased with the studio system of filmmaking, endeavors to make an epic about the essential meaning of poverty. John “Sully” Sullivan believes that filmmaking ought to focus more on grand themes. So, he sets out dressed in rags, which he ironically finds in the studio’s costume department, to write his substantial thesis on poverty, to be titled “O Brother, Where Art

Thou?” At first, it is difficult to leave the studio system behind and realize his riches-to- rags tale. Every time he hitches a ride out of Hollywood, he inadvertently finds his way

back. Even his crew follows him in a caravan, filming his adventures. When Sully accidentally encounters people on a freight train who might know a thing or two about

living in poverty, he asks them about the labor situation, but they walk away. They are

not so keen on discussing his “big idea.” When he discovers poverty, it appears not as a

grand narrative about social disorder, but in minor details, like a pair of tattered shoes

with the front split open and toes exposed. Even the screwball plot of the film pauses, as

Sully goes through each of these dark moments, until he becomes a ragpicker impaling

scraps in a dumpster.

Sully’s rhetorical question—the same question is posed by Mary Smith in Easy

Living—is provocative nonetheless. But the response to “what’s the big idea anyway?” is

that there ought to be none. This position is decidedly Benjaminian. Benjamin repeatedly

refused big ideas in favor of details. For him, details were more likely to yield new

knowledge than general theories. “To someone looking through piles of old letters,” he

argued, “a stamp that has long been out of circulation on a torn envelope often says more

than a reading of dozens of pages” (“One-Way Street” 91). If a stamp could say so much,

fashion might say even more. For it is that much more ephemeral. Benjamin’s fashion

formulation, about the ruffles on a dress, alludes to Baudelaire’s poem Tableaux

Parisiens. As Barbara Vinken argues, “The transitory moment versus eternity is the

crucial opposition structuring the poem: ‘un éclair, puis la nuit’”—a flash of lightning,

then the night (60). Fashion provides this flash of lightning for understanding modernity.

It is for Benjamin, as Vinken notes, “the art of the destructive but triumphant moment”

(63). In its details, fashion bears the traces of a temps perdu. But these details not only

endure, but they also enable new associations and discoveries. We might say the same

about a fascinating fur coat that helps uncover an unconventional, associative history of

1930s Hollywood. Despite Hollywood’s seeming resistance, of course, the erratic detail was extremely significant. In Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), the Sergeant asks young Woodrow to keep moving the charade along, suggesting “everything is perfect except for a couple of details.” But Woodrow does not think their narrative can last too much longer. He responds, “they hang people for a couple of details.”

Notes

1 Easy Living was made three years before Sturges was offered the opportunity to direct The Great McGinty (1940). In the 1930s, he was still known as a screenwriter, while his reputation today rests mainly on the seven films he directed at Paramount in the early 1940s.

2 In “The Return of the Uncanny,” Michael Arnzen makes a case for aligning cinema with the uncanny: “Literally embodying the uncanny in the manner in which its technology animates a series of inanimate still pictures, the cinematic eye has become a metaphor for subjectivity—from ‘mindscreens’ to the ‘male gaze’—and we haven’t ‘looked’ at the world in the same way since its emergence” (317). My use of the term uncanny here is limited to this sense of a familiar object, a fur coat, becoming unfamiliar, evoking an odd sensation of pleasure, in this overhead shot. I do not mean to invoke directly any associations with the Freudian uncanny.

3 Of course, Ado Kyrou had noted the Surrealists’ enthusiasm for cinema in general and the immensely popular serial films in particular. Most recently, Robin Walz has traced the “complex and multifaceted” affinities between Surrealism and mass culture through an examination of the surreal tendencies in Feuillade’s Fantômas.

4 In his autobiography, Sturges recalls that when he took the script to Paramount producer Michael Revnes, Revnes decided that “1936 was not the time for comedies.” But Sturges disagreed. “Any time was a good time for comedies,” he argued, then wrote a fresh script retaining Caspary’s title, and took it directly to Mitchell Leisen, who shared his enthusiasm for the tale (283).

5 These contrasting identities were recreated by Sturges only three years later in Remember the Night (1940), where an unsentimental shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck) encounters a prosecuting attorney (Fred MacMurray) during Christmas. This film was also directed by Mitchell Leisen.

6 For many of his Surrealist colleagues, Dali’s work in Hollywood was seen as selling-out to mass culture and earned him the nickname “Avida Dollars.”

7 Jean Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene, and her screen name, a quixotic combination of Jeanne d’Arc and King Arthur, itself evokes the Surrealist tendency of juxtaposing unrelated elements.

8 Of course, such a solution would always appear in excess, “a solution certainly rigorously fitting and yet somehow in excess of the need” (Mad Love 13).

9 In “Surrealism,” Benjamin refers to Nadja as a “book with a banging door” (228), which serves as an appropriate metaphor for the aural reverberations in the text.

10 I do not mean to suggest that coincidences had no place in Classic Hollywood. Indeed, coincidence was used as a key plot device in the era’s greatest films. After all, “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” Ilsa Laszlo would not have walked into Rick’s Café in Casablanca (1942) had it not been for chance. But the industry itself, whose organization was predicated not on sudden parallels but on predictable standards, seemed to discredit the value of coincidence.

11 Wohlfarth’s essay provides an exhaustive analysis of the figure of the ragpicker and his relation to other materialist historian figures, like the collector and the poet, in Benjamin’s work.

12 Following Benjamin, Wohlfarth suggests, “Not merely ‘culture’ and ‘cultural history,’ perhaps even cultural criticism, metaprattle, has to go” (156).

13 Tristan Tzara made a similar gesture of gratitude when he adopted another symbolic date in 1921. Although his date of arrival in Paris from New York was July 22, he would forever tell everyone that he arrived on July 14, Bastille Day.

14 Sturges’s adaptation is actually a rewriting, thus proving André Bazin’s point that “most of the films that are based on novels merely usurp their titles” (22).

15 The American film industry grew quite rapidly. By 1920, Hollywood was producing over 800 films a year, which accounted for almost 80% of movies produced around the world.

16 Considering that he is most often remembered as a “woman’s director,” it is noteworthy that one of Leisen’s first acquaintances in Hollywood was Lois Weber, the only female director at the time.

17 The exchange between Macpherson and Leisen is quoted in David Chierichetti’s Mitchell Leisen. Chierichetti offers an interesting perspective on Leisen’s films through a series of interviews with the director and his closest associates.

18 The appropriation of mannequins into Surrealist imagery was anticipated as early as 1919 by Man Ray, whose Aviary displays a figure that is part armless mannequin, part bird cage, to suggest the constraints of the body.

19 By the early 1930s, Mack Sennett, who had gone to Hollywood after a chance encounter and a letter of introduction from Marie Dressler, fell out of favor. Although he continued to make movies, mainly short comedies and musicals, the Keystone era was definitely over. James Agee, in his analysis of “comedy’s greatest era,” lamented the death of silent comedies, arguing that the talkies focused too much on dialogue at the expense of the comic physical performance. “To put it unkindly,” he said, “the only thing wrong with screen comedy today is that it takes place on a screen which talks” (395).

20 Even Jane Powell remembers the MGM costume department as a museum, with “a glorious collection of real and unreal [clothes], of every period, every style you could imagine” (qtd. in Davis 210). Interestingly, as early as 1937, Kiesling anticipated André Bazin, praising Hollywood’s “flawless co-operative system” (127). “Picture making is not like the manufacture of gloves, or of overcoats, or of shoes,” he argued, for it is not the production of a standardized product (94). It is, instead, “a mosaic of many different arts and vocations”; 276 of them, to be exact (4). Although the text does not account for all 276 components of that mosaic, one of the more interesting tiles in that textile is the department of design.

21 The roles Crawford played often paralleled her own rise to the top of the film industry from very modest circumstances. She was often quoted as saying that, like the dancer in Dancing Lady (1933), she too got her chance in Hollywood after her friend helped her buy something decent to wear.

22 Adrian attributed much of his success to the dress: “who would have thought,” he would amusingly exclaim, “that my entire reputation as a designer would rest on Joan Crawford’s shoulders!”

23 The film was pulled from distribution due to a plagiarism case that was filed against MGM. Letty Lynton was based on an historical incident, the 1857 trial of Madeleine Smith, an heiress accused of murdering her lover. That incident also formed the basis of Edward Sheldon’s play, Dishonored Lady. When MGM failed to purchase the rights to that play, they went ahead and made the film. In Sheldon v. MGM, the studio was accused of copyright infringement, because a few of the fictional themes from Sheldon’s play, those that were not part of the public record, appeared in the film. The appellate court ruled against MGM, and the film has disappeared from circulation since then. I confess that I have not seen it, although Charlotte Herzog and Jane Gaines report that one 35mm print does exist in the MGM vault in Culver City.

24 The Surrealist sense of seeing fashion as something bizarre became quite pervasive. In 1938, Elizabeth Hawes wrote a comparative history of Parisian and American fashion titled Fashion is Spinach.

25 According to anecdotal accounts, Paramount liked the screenplay, but decided it needed some revisions. So, they hired writers to rewrite the script. Without knowing it, the new writers turned out to Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, who sent the script back

79 without making any changes. This time the studio executives apparently loved it, because they produced it—in its original version.

26 Sturges was not the only disgruntled scriptwriter to work with Leisen. Even Billy Wilder did not appreciate Leisen’s approach, because the director “did not watch over the writers’ lines, allowing actors to make changes as they pleased” (Chandler 84).

27 This anecdote is sometimes attributed to several members of the Classic Hollywood community, including Samuel Goldwyn. As Otto Friedrich notes, with some of the stories associated with Hollywood, there are “several contradictory versions of some much-told tale” (xiii).

28 In his recent review of a Leisen film that has been forgotten, Swing High, Swing Low, David Thomson characterizes Leisen as “an intelligent man, trying to play the Hollywood game yet good enough to have raw truths breaking in” (“You and the Night” 29).

CHAPTER 3 LOOSE ENDS: THE STUFF THAT MOVIES ARE MADE OF

[O]ne might write: “The whirring blades of the electric fan caused the window curtains to flutter. The man seated at the massive desk finished his momentous letter, sealed it, and hastened out to post it.” The whirring fan and the fluttering curtain give motion only—the man’s writing the letter and taking it out to post provides action. It is of action that photoplays are wrought. —Frederick Palmer, Technique of the Photoplay

Guided by film, then, we approach, if at all, ideas no longer on highways leading through the void but on paths that wind through the thicket of things. —Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

A Telephone-Bell Rings in Darkness . . .

Out of the fading dust emerge the ghostly paraphernalia of classic noir. The dirt trail kicked up by a dead body tumbling down the hillside is still discernible when the exterior night shot of Miles Archer’s murder dissolves to an interior shot of a cluttered bedside table. With only partial lighting from the back and left of the frame, the objects slowly materialize in silhouette: an old stand-up telephone, a pouch of tobacco, a dusty ashtray, an alarm clock balanced on the edge of a book, a newspaper turned to the racing section. Curtains sway from the night breeze in the background, while in the foreground a fumbling hand reaches into the frame to grab the ringing telephone. Even after the telephone is removed, for almost thirty seconds, the camera does not move. Although a slight pan could capture the conversation that will propel narrative action—because

80 81

“when a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it”—it stays

focused on the bedside composition, as if transfixed by a few charmed objects. Bogart’s voice is heard off-screen: “Hello. . . . Yeah, speaking. . . . Miles Archer dead? . . . Where?

. . . Bush and Stockton? . . . Uh. . . . Fifteen Minutes. Thanks.” After he hangs up, the

camera pans right gradually to accommodate the star’s profile in the frame; he replaces

the telephone and turns on a lamp, illuminating the entire shot. Now the objects resume

their diegetic function: the alarm clock establishes the time of night, 2:05 am; Duke’s

Celebrated Criminal Cases of America verifies Spade’s status as a private eye; the sack

of Bull Durham authenticates his hardboiled character. Action regains precedence over

ambience, and the forward momentum will only cease when his partner’s murder has

been avenged.1

And yet, for a few seconds, the bedside arrangement in John Huston’s The Maltese

Falcon (1941) interrupts the onward advance of the plot. The moment metonymically represents the distinctive style of 1940s Hollywood—chiefly characterized by what

Manny Farber has called “puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or gesture” (Negative Space 61). There is no mistaking this portentous telephonic moment of noir for any scene from the luxurious “white telephone” films that were typical of the previous decade.2 Like the extreme close-up of a visually enormous coffee cup, which

succinctly captures the feeling of paranoiac entrapment in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour

(1945), this virtual still conjures an intriguing world from the waft of mystery, the whiff

of noir.

But the pull of the moment when the telephone rings is not only contextual. There

is a certain immediacy in its appeal. Even though the narrative is ongoing, our attention is

riveted on the stuff that movies are made of: buzzing telephones, fluttering curtains,

menacing shadows. With its sparse interior setting punctuated by a few key objects, the moment looks like an Edward Hopper painting—Office at Night, for instance, which was

painted only a year before the release of The Maltese Falcon.3 Hopper’s work enables the viewer to imagine alternative narratives invoked by its captivating objects—like the

partially visible piece of paper wedged under a desk in Office at Night—rather than

explaining what they mean. As the narrative pauses for a moment, the mysterious stuff of

The Maltese Falcon similarly retains its substantive presence in the diegesis, but it also

intimates beyond it. Or, as Kristin Thompson suggests in her analysis of cinematic

excess, “The function of the material elements of the film is accomplished, but their perceptual interest is by no means exhausted in the process” (492). That is, unlike the obviously out-of-place, visually excessive fur coat moment from the previous chapter, the shot of Spade’s bedside table is consistent with the expressionist visual conventions of noir. As James Naremore argues, “one tiny section of the room evok[es] the entire hardboiled style of life” (“John Huston” 155). Still, its appeal exceeds that thrilling plot.

As Thompson would point out, “Excess is not only counternarrative; it is also counterunity” (491). So, what do we make of this moment when the still seems to stall the tale? When the momentum lags, the camera idles?

Idling seems highly unsuitable for the universe of The Maltese Falcon. In its swift- moving world, pausing “[t]o endow with a poetic value,” as Louis Aragon might put it,

“that which does not yet possess it, to willfully restrict the field of vision so as to intensify expression” (52), would be counterproductive. Moreover, the studio would have disapproved it. As David Desser notes, Warner’s “was a studio that typically shunned

lavish productions due to budgetary constraints” (22). Having been advised by the

associate producer at Warner’s, Henry Blanke, to “[m]ake every shot count” (qtd. in

Jameson 38), Huston worked hard to tighten the narrative. To Hal Wallis’s memo about

the opening sequence being a little slow, for instance, he responded by “shrinking all the

pauses and speeding up all the action . . . making Bogart quick and staccato and taking all

the deliberateness out of his action” (qtd. in Behlmer 118). Idling, then, would have been

incompatible with the fast-paced world of noir and with the parsimonious ethos of

Warner Bros.

Indeed, idling would appear antithetical to the entire Classic Hollywood mode of filmmaking, which preferred the relentless roll of action to distracting stillness. That mode, modeled on the linear continuity of the assembly line, operated with the speed and efficiency that Mussolini claimed for his railroad system. In fact, as Lynne Kirby has effectively argued, cinema’s continuity impulse ran parallel to the forward impulsion of the railways.4 It was the arrival of a train at a station that caused cinema’s earliest

spectators, who feared the train’s onward momentum, to rush out of the way. Within less

than a decade, when momentum itself was becoming the norm, a railcar became the site

of a great robbery and, in the process, established the standard for narrative filmmaking.

For while the Lumières’ Arrival of a Train at a Station (1895) marked the beginning of

the movies’ long-running relationship with the railroad, it was Edwin S. Porter’s film that

discovered how cinematic narrative might parallel the railways’ code of continuity.

Having been fascinated with Georges Méliès’s “trick films,” like A Trip to the Moon

(1902), Porter intuited that “‘a picture telling a story in continuity form might draw the

customers back to the theaters’” and then set to work in that direction (qtd. in Musser 25).

Drawing on the railroad’s linear path as a model for preserving narrative continuity, The

Great Train Robbery (1903) became the first film to follow a single line of action. The film was enormously popular, and, as Kirby suggests, it “did much to set cinema on a firmly narrative path” (55).

With the unyielding pursuit of a mythical bird at its core, The Maltese Falcon is similarly set on a decisively narrative course. The film itself makes an implicit argument in favor of narrative continuity. All along, Spade is preoccupied with getting the story straight. Even more than the discovery of the elusive falcon, he is concerned with keeping the plot on track—of, as he puts it, keeping in touch with “all the loose ends of this dizzy affair if I’m ever going to make heads or tails of it.” By the end, he appears to succeed: the central mystery has been resolved; the partner’s murder will be avenged. Although the falcon remains missing, the plot’s loose ends are tied up. Action, in other words, leads to narrative resolution. Most critics of the film seem to agree, for they have almost exclusively focused on its swift, dramatic action. After all, idling to look at whirring fans

and fluttering curtains would be futile when it is action that photoplays are made of.5 So

when it was first released, reviewers like Bosley Crowther hailed The Maltese Falcon for

its “brisk” pace (127). This view has since been consistently reinforced in the extensive

scholarship on the film. William Luhr, for instance, analyzes it as the ideal example of

classical narration, while Richard T. Jameson draws attention to the film’s “compulsive

momentum,” suggesting that, “like its elusive namesake, [it] is eternally in motion” (46,

40). In other words, The Maltese Falcon is widely regarded as an exemplary case of

continuity filmmaking, where the plot keeps moving till the end. Nothing, not even

intriguing objects, could stall its momentum. As Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell

put it, unlike Yasujiro Ozu, “Huston wouldn’t think of cutting away from Sam Spade and

Brigid O’Shaughnessy to a shot of the coat-rack in the corner of the office unless the hats

on it ha[ve] some [narrative] significance” (qtd. in Luhr, “Tracking” 162). And yet, when

the telephone-bell rings in darkness, the camera does not cut to Spade. Even though the

scene has been choreographed, it has a cinephiliac appeal. In that moment, the narrative

fades, and the stuff of cinema takes the foreground.

“What Was the Nickel for?”

On December 21, 1940, a forty-four-year-old unemployed screenwriter died of a

heart attack. Hollywood had not been good for him. Like many others who preceded him,

he said he “came to Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted

house” (Zollo xii). And like the countless others who would surely follow, he was a

failure, an embarrassment—especially so since he had been quite successful as a novelist

before taking the train out to Hollywood. But unlike all the others, he had the unique

opportunity to return from the dead to paint an episodic, albeit incomplete, portrait of the

studio system. Nearly a year after his untimely death, around the time of The Maltese

Falcon’s release, his college friend published his unfinished novel, which offers an insider’s perspective on Hollywood. But while The Love of the Last Tycoon may be one of the finest novels about Hollywood, it is certainly not its complete tale. Projected as a series of episodes, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sketch of the studio system is composed of several quick snapshots that do not add up to a linear narrative. Due to their brevity, the tale is told “only dimly and in flashes” (3). In Fitzgerald’s view of Hollywood, moments are more significant than the plot that contains them. When we zoom in, “the whole

86 equation of pictures” (3) in effect seems like a struggle between the image and the narrative, the still and the tale.

So we find Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald’s consummate movie producer, constantly wrestling with cinema’s linear drive on one hand and the ambiguity of its distracting images on the other. It is the narrative path that Stahr points to when comparing filmmaking to railroad construction. Flying over the Hollywood hills, Stahr tells his pilot that the whole business of filmmaking depends on choosing a particular path and sticking to it. While your surveyors may offer several alternatives for running a railroad through the mountains, Stahr suggests, you pursue a single path unwaveringly, even if you are in doubt and “all these other possible decisions keep echoing in your ear” (140).6 The studio system follows a similarly steadfast path, and the railroad becomes a fitting metaphor for

Hollywood’s single-minded pursuit of narrative continuity. After all, what could be a better example of linear continuity than the railroad? Consider, for instance, what

Wolfgang Schivelbusch regards as the primary goal of railroad construction in the nineteenth century: “to achieve optimal performance with the least expenditure of energy, the rail has to run a level and straight course.” So the railroad “lay[s] a level and straight roadbed through uneven terrain” (24). Once the lines are marked and the tracks are laid, there is no possibility of divergence. There is only the singular trail of continuity to follow. Doubt, uncertainty, hesitation would lead off course.

As Stahr surveys the landscape from the airplane, studio filmmaking appears to correspond to the railroad path. From his overhead, seemingly objective perspective, the straight and level railroad parallels Hollywood’s linear trail. But Stahr is also aware of the advantages of pausing along the way. In a meeting with a writer who is having

87 trouble figuring out what the movies are made of, the producer sets this scene: “‘A pretty stenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her—idly. . . .

She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table. . . . She has two dimes and a nickel—and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside’” (32; emphasis added). Then the telephone rings. If the scene is meant to allow the viewer to view the details “idly,” then the ring disrupts that image. The plot picks up; she tells the caller, Stahr continues, “‘I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life’” (32). The narrative track has now been established, prompting the writer

Boxley’s obvious question, “‘What happens?’” (32). Rather than developing that line of inquiry, however, Stahr replies that he doesn’t know. The narrative does not seem to interest him much; he was, he says, “‘just making pictures’” (32). But then Boxley asks the more intriguing question, about a detail that has stirred his idle curiosity, even though it probably has nothing to do with the mysterious plot: “‘What was the nickel for?’” (33).

At first, Stahr seems uncertain, but then responds: “‘the nickel was for the movies’” (33).

His response ties the whole system of studio filmmaking to “the damn stuff” of cinema

(33). Even though his writer claims not to understand it, Stahr believes that, like every moviegoer, he has intuited the allure of ambiguous detail. The nickel’s appeal is not in its symbolic meaning in the scene Stahr is narrating; it lies somewhere beyond it. The nickel has crucial implications for our understanding of that other aspect of Hollywood filmmaking: the role of the stuff that movies were made of.

I have been tracking the twin paths of the studio system. Let me pause to identify them, so we know where to go from here. On one hand, Classic Hollywood cinema

paralleled the linear trail of the railroad. Its succession of framed, mobile images that told

a condensed, continuous tale resembled the onward momentum of the railways. As Mary

Ann Doane has argued, the mode of perception necessary for rail travel was “peculiarly,

entirely compatible with that required by filmic narrative, for it activate[d] the spatial and temporal ellipsis, the annihilation of the space and the time ‘in-between’ events” (43).

This is especially true of forties noir cinema, whose central premise often revolved around the solution of a puzzle or a crime. That solution required absolute adherence to a single trail; deviation could be fatal. From a distance—perhaps from Stahr’s overhead position—studio cinema in the forties looks like a system driven by forward motion, avoiding pauses, disallowing digression.

But the view closer to the screen is fairly different. The film spectator was presented with a continuous narrative, pieced together out of images flitting by at twenty- four frames per second. However, at any moment, a single frame could distract from that continuum. As the railway passenger did with the passing landscape, the spectator could

zoom in on particular objects in the scene, at the expense of the whole picture. So, while

Hollywood cinema encouraged its viewer to get absorbed in the plot, its captivating

images on screen sometimes interrupted the narrative. As Robert B. Ray notes, “although

continuity cinema’s insistence on story often reduced the immediate attraction of its

components . . . , inadvertently, as the Impressionists and Surrealists saw, the movies

glamorized everything: faces, clothes, furniture, trains” (How a Film Theory 6).7 The

still, then, had the capacity to stall the tale.

Even during moments that were carefully composed to advance the plot, the

spectator could get distracted by the stuff that movies were made of—especially when an

89 image offered that indefinable instance of visual pleasure that Jean Epstein called photogénie. As we saw in the introduction, for Epstein, photogénie was a uniquely cinematic experience revealed in brief flashes. As he put it, “One runs into a brick wall trying to define it”; for photogénie is “[t]he face of beauty, it is the taste of things” (243).

Photogénie was directly influenced by the fragmented experience of modern life, first revealed in rail travel. The spectator could feel an intense sensation about everyday commodities when they were in motion. The “static of unexpected feelings” (qtd. in

Charney 287) aroused by ordinary objects on screen, Epstein argued, interrupted the linear sequence of images temporarily. Interestingly, Epstein’s example of a photogenic moment, based on his experience of silent star Sessue Hayakawa’s performance in a scene from The Honor of His House (1918), resembles Stahr’s description of the “idle” moment in the office. Hayakawa “crosses a room quite naturally, his torso held at a slight angle. He hands his gloves to a servant. Opens a door. Then, having gone out, closes it”

(243). As in Fitzgerald’s sketch, the focus is entirely on the stuff of cinema; Hayakawa’s torso and his gloves “sweep[] the scenario aside” (Epstein 243).8 In other words, just as the idle railway traveler could get distracted by particular objects in the passing landscape, photogenic images allowed a curious spectator like Epstein to become absorbed in cinema’s details, ignoring its narrative situation.

Even The Great Train Robbery, the film that made continuity the thread tying all

Hollywood films together, contains a shot acknowledging the capacity of enigmatic images for breaking that strand. The medium close-up shot of a gunman pointing his revolver directly at the camera (or is it at the audience?) and firing it point-blank appears after the climactic showdown with the posse.9 What is intriguing about this final shot—a

virtually perfect still, used on the film’s publicity posters—is its collection of fascinating

cinematic objects.10 The curl of the bandit’s eyebrow, his hat tilted at an angle, the

handkerchief around his neck, all offer disruptive rather than narrative pleasure. They

gesture toward the other half of the equation of Classic Hollywood cinema. Paraphrasing

Siegfried Kracauer’s argument cited in the epigraph, I would suggest that narrative

cinema does not travel on highways through the void. It winds its way through the thicket

of things. What we need, then, is another way of thinking about these things—a way of

mobilizing the kind of spectatorship that Epstein privileged, and that the rail traveler

perfected, in order to address the stuff that movies are made of.

Objects, even ordinary ones, were central to studio filmmaking. As Will Hays

asserted in a radio speech, “The motion picture carries to every American at home, and to

millions of potential purchasers abroad, the visual, vivid perception of American

manufactured products” (qtd. in Eckert 5). Even when films were not explicitly

promoting specific items through tie-ups with corporations—as seen in the popular

fashion films of the 1930s11—they were implicitly showcasing items for visual

consumption. I am referring not only to the unambiguously memorable objects, like

Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but also to things like Walter Neff’s dictaphone in Double Indemnity (1944) or the tailor’s cutting shears in Ministry of Fear

(1944). Film noir lends itself particularly well to such a visual display; its expressionist mise-en-scène and chiaroscuro lighting yield mysterious stills that, like Edward Hopper paintings, highlight everyday objects capable of providing visual pleasure. In a recent essay on Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet, which deals with the fatal pleasure of a well-dressed femme fatale, Paula Rabinowitz makes the following case for objects:

Objects tell stories. In the 1960s, when feminists argued against women’s position as sex objects, demanding subjectivity, objects acquired a lousy reputation. But in commodity culture, as Marx suggested, they have something to say. (21)

The task before us is to uncover the stories that objects, especially those that appear in

film noir, might tell. For noir cinema is like “those dear old American adventure films”

that Aragon praised for their capacity to magnify objects, that is, “to raise to a dramatic

level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle

that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime” (51). Naremore

has similarly observed that, in his affection for early Hollywood’s treatment of cinematic

objects, “Aragon might well have been describing thrillers of the 1940s, which were

perversely erotic, confined largely to interiors, photographed in a deep-focus style that

seemed to reveal the secret life of things” (More Than Night 18).

But while the viewer might find the stuff of noir thrillers, like the ordinary objects on Spade’s bedside table, especially fascinating, academic film criticism has not found a

way of articulating or explaining this aesthetic fascination. Most Hollywood historians

have tended to criticize studio cinema’s conversion of everyday objects into desirable

(and consumable) commodities. As we have seen, one path pursued by studio filmmaking

led not to narrative resolution but to visual pleasure. But film historians have generally

denounced the production and consumption of visual pleasure, by, as Linda Williams

puts it, “expos[ing] the processes by which individuals fall victim to an illusory belief in

the exalted value of certain objects” (28).12 That critics of Hollywood cinema distrust the fetishistic commodity is not surprising. Speaking about the distinction between Soviet realism and American filmmaking, Orson Welles observed that the Classic Hollywood style simulated “‘a merchant’s eye,’” devoting itself to “‘lovingly evaluating texture, the

screen being filled as a window dressed in a swank department store’” (qtd. in Naremore,

Magic World 121).13 Since then, the analogy between the Hollywood screen and the

window display has become familiar, although the comparison has not always been

complimentary. Generally, film historians have found little to admire in the distracting,

exhibitionist stuff of Classic Hollywood cinema. Its spectator is likened to the passive

consumer who is seduced by the attractive shop window, or by what Charles Eckert has

called “living display windows . . . occupied by marvelous mannequins and swathed in a

fetish-inducing ambiance of music and emotion” (4). So even when Laura Mulvey, who

initiated the study of visual pleasure in narrative cinema, attempts to reconsider the role

of fetishism, her analysis of fetishistic commodities leads her “back to the society that

produced them and the obsessions and imitations that created its collective fantasy” (27).

That approach, however, is only half the equation. It is, at the very least, inadequate

for uncovering the full range of spectatorial experience of cinematic objects. What we

need is an alternative way of looking at them. For, as Daniel Miller suggests, approaches

“that quickly move the focus from object to society in their fear of fetishism and their

apparent embarrassment at being, as it were, caught gazing at mere objects” are in fact

limited in their understanding of material culture (9). Gazing at mere objects is not

necessarily an act of submission to the metanarrative of consumerism. As recent studies

of visual culture have suggested, gazing might indeed have the opposite effect, acting as a

counter-narrative strategy, so that, as Elizabeth Cowie has noted, the “linear progression

of narrative is disturbed and re-ordered by the drive of fantasy” (164). Gazing at objects in the form of window shopping—especially for the female spectator, as recent feminist studies of gazing, like Cowie’s and Anne Friedberg’s, have shown—can be an effective

strategy for seeing more than what is explicitly given for observation and for

consumption. The shop window, then, becomes a site for distracted viewing, like the view outside the window is for the idle railway traveler.

Of course, the shop window was not meant for distracted spectatorship. It came into existence in the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of an increasingly

standardized, mass-produced consumer culture. While the department store had emerged around 1840 in response to rapid urbanization,14 the shop window materialized a little

later, almost simultaneously with the invention of cinema. As William Leach points out

in his analysis of the rise of American consumer culture, “Unlike the midnineteenth

century, when it was still thought indiscreet and vulgar to stare at windows, by the

beginning of the twentieth century, people were being invited—even baited—to look”

(61). But, strangely, the shop window did more than invoke consumer desire. While it

displayed goods for sale, it also activated a mode of looking at objects that did not result

in an economic transaction. It involved gazing, as Anne Friedberg argues in her

influential history of “window shopping,” with “a speculative regard to the mise-en-scène

of the display window without the commitment to enter the store or to make a purchase”

(68).

Moreover, the display window was not a static fixture. The shop window was

introduced by a traveling salesman from Chicago. Wanting to spend more time at home

with his family, he settled upon writing children’s stories and, simultaneously, “hit upon

an idea that perfectly matched the needs of Chicago’s retailers: the creation of show

windows” (Leach 59). Later, in search of a quiet place to write, he would move to

Southern California,15 where his fantastic children’s tales eventually became perfect

94 metaphors for the “wonderful” world of Classic Hollywood. But at the end of the nineteenth century, L. Frank Baum was primarily focused on finding a new face for merchandise display. The year that he took a trip down the yellow brick road in his children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), he also outlined aesthetic techniques for captivating shoppers’ attention. In The Art of Decorating Dry Goods,

Baum argued that objects did not need to be crowded in the windows. “‘Tastefully display a single apron,’” he urged; although their purpose was to make the sale, he encouraged merchants to reveal “‘possibilities lying dormant in the beautiful goods’”

(qtd. in Leach 60). That display could invoke not only consumer desire but also, perhaps inadvertently, an experience that made the objects “‘come alive’” (qtd. in Leach 60). By animating individual objects, Baum’s show windows mobilized the shopper’s gaze.

Rather than becoming passively absorbed in the series of displays or buying into the narrative of capitalist consumerism, the shopper could look at certain details in the window distractedly. The shop window could be experienced, as Walter Benjamin puts it in relation to viewing architecture, “much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion” (“The Work of Art” 240).

The shop window and the window gazer, then, hold the potential for an alternative relation with material objects—a potential that could be activated for thinking differently about the mysterious objects of film noir. If we approach a film still like a display in a shop window—or like Epstein’s instance of photogénie—we might find a way to address the things that movies are made of. Indeed, the shop window’s capacity to activate the

“possibilities lying dormant in the beautiful goods” was fully realized onscreen, where, as

Walter Benjamin significantly remarked, “by focusing on hidden details of familiar

objects, by exploring commonplace milieu under the ingenious guidance of the camera,

the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our

lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of

action” (“The Work of Art” 236). What Benjamin conceived as the “hidden details of

familiar objects” are precisely those details that signify beyond their narrative function.

The familiar objects are things that no longer have mere use value. As André Bazin asserted in relation to Charlie Chaplin’s unconventional use of material objects—“It looks as if things are only willing to be of use to him in ways that are purely marginal to the uses assigned by society,” he suggested (146)—we might be able to employ the stuff of cinema to do other things. For “[t]oo many of the things that films do,” as Geoffrey

Nowell-Smith has rightly argued, “evade attempts to subsume them under the heading of meaning” (16). So, instead of interrogating these things for what they mean, gazing at things “in incidental fashion” could lead to an unorthodox approach to cinematic objects—perhaps a way of writing with the stuff of cinema and not just about them.

What then can we do with the thing that interrupts Stahr’s narrative? What, we might ask again, is the nickel for? The nickel acts as a reminder that Hollywood filmmaking was, from the beginning, a commercial venture, and it is this commercialism that contributed most to continuity filmmaking. The nickelodeons popularized the motion pictures—The Great Train Robbery being one of its earliest successes—not as high art but as a form of narrative entertainment. But that is not all the nickel alludes to. After all, the whole equation of pictures must also contain a certain amount of uncertainty. So, the nickel also holds that kernel of knowledge that appears, as Benjamin would put it, “only in lightning flashes.” The narrative is “the long roll of thunder” that will certainly follow

(“N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” 456). But for the brief moment

while it is in our frame of vision, the nickel distracts attention from the thunderous roll of

Classic Hollywood cinema. It encourages Stahr’s idler to stroll off the track.

On a Walking Tour of Hollywood

The original idler, of course, is Benjamin’s flâneur, the stroller of nineteenth-

century Paris, for whom, “the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labor”

(AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 453). He wanders about the city streets leisurely, “to be able to

catch the scent of a threshold or to recognize a paving stone by touch” (AP, “M [The

Flâneur]” 427). He is what Charles Baudelaire called the impassioned observer of

modernity, who is “solitary [sic] gifted with an active imagination, and always travel[s]

across the great human desert” (36). When invoking the flâneur, however, one needs to

be careful about the various incarnations of this well-known character. For he has been

known as the consumer and the detective; the urban dandy and the capitalist spy; one

who “feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect,” but also “is utterly

undiscoverable, the hidden man” (AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 420). In recent years, he has

become the kind of figure who represents the modern condition in general. Or, as Chris

Jenks observes, “though grounded in everyday life, [he has become] an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude toward knowledge and its social context” (148). At the same time, he is on occasion “identified with a certain kind of fluid, aestheticized sensibility

that implies the abdication of political, moral or cognitive control over the world” (Gluck

53).16 While all of these depictions are interrelated, and therefore remain significant for a

full understanding of his role, in this essay I am particularly interested in the flâneur who

traverses the city, pausing wherever an ordinary object catches his eye, in order to

discover an entire history out of a single detail—just as Victor Fournel was able to

reconstruct “an entire conversation, an entire existence” out of a word heard in passing

(qtd. in AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 431).

The Parisian landscape opens up before the flâneur like the interior of a room, where every facet holds the promise of a new discovery.17 He lingers along the streets,

which present a “‘world in miniature,’ ‘a grand poème de l’étalage,’ a spatial verse of

visual display” (Friedberg 74). From sidewalk to sidewalk, he crisscrosses the labyrinthine city streets—a task made more complicated and hazardous since the

regulation of street traffic—in pursuit of moments of visual rapture. Again and again,

Benjamin’s wanderer returns to the arcades, where objects have become commodities,

and loses himself in the crowd. He surrenders himself to “the intoxication of the

commodity around which surges the stream of customers” (“The Flâneur” 55). The

merchandise excites him. But his is not the excitement of a consumer. Flânerie does not

concern itself with the utilitarian value of things; the flâneur’s idle reveries do not result

in economic transactions. He is like a practicing new historicist, who, as Catherine

Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt suggest, likes “to pick up a tangential fact and watch

its circulation” (4). He does not subscribe to any particular philosophy or approach, for

his is an investment in things not theories. The flâneur finds “ever more irresistible the

magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name” (AP,

“M [The Flâneur]” 417).

Because he makes idling itself an aesthetic project, the flâneur would be an ideal

historian figure to gaze at the mysterious objects of film noir. Following the flâneur’s

path, as he elegantly “take[s] a tortoise out walking” (AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 422), might

provide the right alternative to the thunderous roll of studio cinema. For the flâneur is a

solitary walker who traverses the pavement in order to “give free rein to [his] thoughts

and let [his] ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfirmed” (AP, “M

[The Flâneur]” 453). His path is determined by aesthetic choices. He would rather adhere

to the whimsy of his own notions than the standardized rules of traffic. After all, he

“follow[s] [his] inspiration as if the mere fact of turning right or turning left already

constitute[s] an essentially poetic act” (qtd in AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 437).

And it is this poetry of his turns and returns that distinguishes the flâneur from the

casual observer. As Charles Baudelaire put it, he “has a higher aim than any mere idle spectator—a more general aim, something else than the fleeting pleasures of the

occasion” (36). Writing about flânerie in 1841, Auguste de LaCroix argued that the flâneur’s gaze gave him access “to unknown connections, to unperceived insights, to an entirely new world of ideas, reflections and sentiments” (qtd. in Gluck 70). Therefore, it would be incorrect to think of him as a cavalier onlooker. His idle gazing amounts to an aesthetic interrogation. Nor is it accurate to equate the flâneur with the physiologist. That he wishes only to make “a study of the physiognomic appearance of people in order to discover their nationality and social station, character and destiny, from a perusal of their gait, build, and play of features” is, in Benjamin’s terms, a “shabby thesis” of flânerie

(AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 430). As Mary Gluck notes, modernity for the flâneur is no longer just a social text. Its “essence [is] to be discovered not in scientific truth and classification, but in aesthetic artifice and decoration” (Gluck 78). Ignoring the linear

path of scientific realism, the flâneur follows the contours of metaphor and analogy. His

interrogation of modernity results in a lyrical discourse. Uncertainty—doubt, Benjamin

99 has argued, is the proper state of the flâneur—becomes his poetic principle. The flâneur prefers the surprise of aesthetic discovery over the conclusiveness of scientific inquiry.

Like Epstein’s moment of photogénie, flânerie begins with an instance of visual delight. Indeed, the flâneur’s gaze anticipates the distracted mode of viewing practiced by the rail traveler, the window shopper, and ultimately, the cinema spectator. Friedberg deftly demonstrates the relationship among these viewers, arguing that “[t]he same impulse that sent flâneurs through the arcades, traversing the pavement and wearing thin their shoe leather, sent shoppers into the department stores, tourists to exhibitions, spectators into the panorama, diorama, wax museum, and cinema” (94). But the flâneur does more than become entranced by fascinating objects on his walks through the city.

Just as the collector turns a commodity into a souvenir, “detach[ing] the object from its functional relations” (AP, “H [The Collector]” 207), the flâneur transforms his wanderings into an avant-garde aesthetics. On a walking-tour of Paris, he also becomes its intellectual historian. As Jonathan Mayne suggests in his analysis of the Baudelairian flâneur, “The starting point is nearly always volupté—the shock of pleasure experienced in front of a work of art; the poet-critic then proceeds to examine and analyze the pourquoi—the why and the wherefore—until finally he is able to transform this initial shock of pleasure into knowledge—the volupté into connaissance” (x). This new knowledge is different from what is acquired through traditional modes of research. It is, as Mayne argues, “charged and quickened by the pleasure which has logically preceded it” (x).

The next section attempts to make this transformation, of the initial moment of visual pleasure into knowledge, with the stuff of cinema. That knowledge would belong

100 to the second half of the equation of Classic Hollywood. What I am proposing, in other words, is a walking tour of The Maltese Falcon.18 This tour would be different from the one offered by the studios themselves. Warner Bros., for instance, currently offers a VIP tour, which includes a tram ride through old movie sets and a trip to the newly opened

Warner Bros. museum in Burbank. The museum houses some of the things from Warner classics that weren’t recycled, sold, or torn down, including that most fetishistic of all cinematic props, the “original” Maltese falcon statuette. But the studio tour stays too close to the narrative track and does not allow any divergence. Instead, starting with the narrative trail, we will visually stroll along the continuum of images, stopping to look, distractedly, at those things that invoke the feeling of volupté. This mode of viewing will be similar to the way Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator—himself akin to the flâneur in his invisibility—listens to Louis Armstrong in Invisible Man. Ellison’s narrator praises

Armstrong’s music because it “gives [him] a slightly different sense of time.” Jazz doesn’t allow its listener to be on the beat: “Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind.” “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” he says, “you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”

What the invisible man celebrates in Armstrong’s music is the singular note that “existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece” (8–9). The flâneur also appreciates these musical nodes. For him, not all images have equal appeal; rather, he isolates those that arouse his “idle” curiosity.

Like the flâneur, I isolate several moments from The Maltese Falcon—moments where the stuff of cinema pulsates with uncommon intensity. As a series of stills, the selected images offer the most condensed version of the narrative, virtually embodying

101

what Naremore calls Huston’s “comic-strip style” (“John Huston” 156). Read in

chronological order, their captions provide the most distilled account of the film. In “The

Work of Art” essay, Benjamin argued that the trouble with captions is that they are too prescriptive; the directive a caption gives the viewer is much more explicit than, say, the title of a painting. In other words, with captions, the photographic still loses its

ambiguity. This problem, Benjamin noted, is multiplied with continuity filmmaking,

where the sequence acts as the “obligatory” caption, “where meaning of each single

picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones” (“The Work of

Art” 226). If the captions reinforce the narrative track, then the stills I have isolated lead

in different directions—to unusual sketches of Classic Hollywood. This collection of

sketches resembles Gilbert Adair’s series of “flickers,” where each still becomes an

occasion for “celebrating, and at the same time interrogating,” the cinematic image (1).

Snapped out of the noir thriller, each moment is like an unpredictable instance of

photogénie. Within the chronological narrative, it appears, as Epstein would put it, “as a

nucleus from which roads radiate elsewhere” (243). Like the flâneur, on this walking tour

of The Maltese Falcon, I take roads that lead elsewhere, prompted by the stuff that these

moments are made of. If in Hollywood, Blaise Cendrars’s “forbidden city,” “anyone who

walks around on foot is a suspect” (52),19 then the flâneur-historian might raise some

suspicion. But this trail will also uncover some secrets lying just beneath the (narrative)

surface of things.

Trailing The Maltese Falcon

The film begins with a nod to the rules of continuity filmmaking. A few stock

images of the Golden Gate Bridge establish the location of the tale in San Francisco.

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Moving from the outside in, the camera focuses on Sam Spade, who is apparently

“wait[ing] for the story to come find him” (Jameson 40). For almost five seconds,

however, the camera waits for him, as he turns his swivel chair in our direction,

concentrating on rolling a cigarette. Even when his secretary Effie announces the arrival

of a potential client, Spade is fixated on his hand-rolled cigarette. In a moment, the

narrative will get underway: Brigid will walk into the private eye’s office, ostensibly

asking for his help in locating her sister, who, she claims, has run away with a fellow named Floyd Thursby. But for now, the camera is riveted on Spade’s gestures, as he

caresses a charmed cinematic object, the cigarette.

Figure 3-1: A new case: “suppose you tell me about it from the very beginning”

How do we think about this object whose appeal is at least as elusive as that of the falcon itself? We might start by acknowledging that the cigarette metonymically evokes

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the entire ethos of hard-boiled American masculinity. As Andrew Dickos notes, along

with “watches, keys, distressingly ringing telephones, lipstick, furs, trench coats

(undoubtedly), the bent-brimmed hats of men and the modish couture of women,”

cigarettes have become an iconic part of noir paraphernalia, so much so that a single puff

can “radiate the texture and mood and often symbolize the motivations and incriminations of the characters who possess and use them” (174). But its capacity to signify the noir mood, with its mix of passion, stoicism, and danger, is not the only reason why the cigarette appears as a supercharged thing. After all, an entire generation of young cinephiles became enthralled with the American cinema due, in part, to

Bogart’s singular way of handling his cigarette—evoked in the opening shots of Jean-Luc

Godard’s Breathless (1959), where, in a familiar gesture, Jean-Paul Belmondo removes a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, holding it between his fingers while rubbing

his lips with the back of his thumb. Paraphrasing Stanley Cavell we might say, if those cigarettes did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name “Bogart” would not mean what it does.20 While the cigarette may have been a short-hand way of establishing Spade’s

tough-guy persona, the appeal of his signatory gesture exceeds well beyond the

requirements of narrative characterization. So, what does the charm of this thing that

ignites the tale hinge upon?

Employing Spade’s suggestion, let us begin again, at the very beginning. For the

cigarette has a stimulating back story that, filtered through the lens of dandyism, might

light up a crucial element of studio filmmaking. Tobacco was introduced to Europe in the

sixteenth century as a result of imperialist expansion and trade. The conquistadors

brought back cigars from the New World as an indulgence for wealthy Spaniards. Within

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a couple of hundred years though, cigarettes began circulating all around the globe,

passing enthusiastically from one culture to the next. Their circulation was further

intensified by the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. By the late nineteenth century, James A.

Bonsack introduced a machine that accelerated their production and distribution. His

invention made the practice of hand-rolled cigarettes obsolete in the twentieth century.

Now sold in packs, the cigarette was thus transformed into a mass-marketed, highly profitable commodity; it became, as Lesley Stern puts it, “one of a series, endlessly replaceable and repeatable” (“Paths” 345). That is but one way to tell the cigarette’s story.

Here is another way: In his unusual history of this “sublime” commodity, Richard

Klein contends that the cigarette’s introduction “corresponded with the arrival of the Age of Anxiety, the beginning of modern consciousness that accompanied the invention and universalization of printed books, the discovery of the New World, the development of rational, scientific methods, and the concurrent loss of medieval theological assurances.”

So acute was the jolt of modernity, he maintains, that it acted “as a drug for easing the anxiety arising from the shock of successive assaults on old certainties and the prospect of greater unknowns” (27). Far from being just another mass-produced commodity, the cigarette, according to Klein, aided the revolution in consciousness required for the transition from antiquity to the modern age. If modernity, as Ben Singer has argued, “had brought about a radical increase in nervous stimulation and bodily peril” (74), then the brief, sensual pleasure of the cigarette—“nervous stimulation” combined with “bodily peril” applies nicely to smoking—might well be regarded as the modernist experience par excellence. Thus, the French novelist Pierre Louÿs asserted that the one

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distinguishing feature between antiquity and the modern age was the cigarette, which

became “the most important thing to study, the one most worthy to occupy the attention

of the historian of culture.” The pleasure of the cigarette, he claimed in an 1896 short

story titled “Une Volupté Nouvelle,” was “the only new pleasure man had invented in

eighteen hundred years” (Klein 28). But what was so distinctive about this “volupté

nouvelle”?

Merging volupté with gesture, the mid-nineteenth century Parnassian poet

Théodore de Banville argued that the cigarette’s pleasure was primarily tactile. For

Banville, volupté was in the performance of smoking. Unlike other commodities, and

indeed unlike the cigar or the pipe, rolling tobacco became an aesthetic act. The process

might look mundane, Banville declared: “It is a pinch of tobacco, rolled in a little leaf of

tissue paper. But once the tobacco has been placed and distributed equally, the leaf must

be rolled elegantly, rapidly, with a rhythmic harmony, with a rapid, confident gesture”

(qtd. in Klein 42). The figure who perfected this aesthetic mode of smoking was the dandy, who, according to Baudelaire, “has no other occupation than the pursuit of pleasure; . . . who has no other profession but that of elegance” (54). Banville, who was influenced and admired by Baudelaire, considered the dandy ideal because he would regard the cigarette in aesthetic rather than utilitarian terms.21 And that is precisely the

appeal of Bogart’s signatory gesture as well. As the opening sequence begins, Spade sits

behind the desk, rolling his own cigarette.22 Instead of using machine-pressed cigarettes,

which would be quicker to light and hence more suited to the quick-paced noir thriller,

Spade makes his own cigarette—he pours tobacco from a pouch onto a rolling paper,

tightens the pouch string with his teeth, and begins rolling a cigarette between his fingers,

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never looking up. Like the dandy, Spade handles the cigarette as if it were “a little work

of art” (Klein 42). Interestingly, Henri Agel explicitly compared Bogart to the dandy,

observing that “[h]e knew how to reinvent, little by little, the internal elegance of the

dandy. He elevated to a sort of plastic dignity the most modest manifestations of

existence: taking off his jacket, lighting a cigarette, opening a door” (qtd. in Dickos 112;

emphasis added). In other words, it is Bogart who transforms the simple act of lighting a

cigarette into an aesthetic performance, thus illuminating, however briefly, the other half of the equation of pictures. His gesture stalls the narrative even before it has begun— recall Benjamin’s assertion that “the distracting element of [cinema] is . . . primarily tactile” (“The Work of Art” 238)—in order to indulge in a tactile pleasure. For the moment, the economy of the continuity system is interrupted by an ordinary, yet mysteriously appealing, studio prop. The mystery can wait.

After the initial puff, the detective tale begins with a bang. A rare exterior shot punctuates the mostly interior diegesis when Miles Archer is shot dead. Having accepted the new case and promised to shadow Floyd Thursby, Archer arrives at the intersection of

Bush and Stockton streets. The camera captures Archer stepping into the shot, tilts up to show him looking confused, and then a revolver appears in the frame, firing a single shot at him. Neither the murderer nor the motive is revealed. This becomes one of the mysterious threads in the film: Who killed Miles Archer? In fact, the pursuit of the falcon seems almost secondary, since Archer’s murder is the primary justification for Spade’s involvement—“when one of your organization gets killed,” he tells Brigid at the end,

“it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.” When he arrives at the scene of the crime, Spade does not even examine the

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dead body; one look at the firearm, and he knows that, despite his reluctance, he will

have “do something about it.”

The gun, we might say, is an important narrative catalyst that drives the plot

forward,23 confirming Fred Zimmerman’s point that “The fact that somebody shoots a

gun is of no interest. What I want to know is why he shoots it and what the consequences

are.” When a gun goes off in the movies, it is usually at the height of suspense. As far as

the narrative is concerned, the gun is not an innocuous accessory. Naturally, attention is

directed at the cause and the effect of the shot—or, as is the case in The Maltese Falcon,

at the whodunit. The moment the shot is fired, or the type of gun used, are not as

significant as what-happens-next. David Thomson calls this the “bang bang” effect,

where the moment of the crime is quick (and wholly unrealistic). Consider, for instance,

his anecdote about a group of seven screenwriters who are having trouble with one of

their characters. “Arthur’s a loose end,” one of them suggests. So they decide to kill him:

“We do it as a sudden epiphany.” All it takes is a ten-second scene, and “bang bang,

Arthur” (Beneath 164). Miles Archer’s murder is not much different: “The bullet goes in, and life goes out” (Beneath 173). And the plot goes on. Yet, guns themselves are exceptionally compelling cinematic objects. For, while they are primarily used as weapons of destruction, triggering the plot as soon as they are fired, guns are also icons

of seduction. Like the shot fired by an unknown gunman in The Great Train Robbery, or

the fascinating opening close-up of a revolver turning on the viewer in Fritz Lang’s The

Big Heat (1953), guns have come to signify more than violence and crime. Joseph H.

Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1949) tries to capture their allure in the opening scene, where a

young boy stares at a gun in a window display, then breaks the glass to steal it. For him,

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the revolver is not just a weapon; as his sister says in the court room sequence, “it’s something else about guns that gets him.” How do we talk about that “something else”?

Perhaps, rather than letting the shot be fired, we might freeze it.

Figure 3-2: The partner is shot: “Miles Archer dead?”

Like any event captured in medias res, like a photographic still, the shot of

Archer’s murder draws attention to its materiality: in chiaroscuro lighting, a man in a trench coat and a hat emerges from the darkness, while a gleaming revolver appears in the frame’s foreground. Since the person pointing the weapon is invisible, the gun appears suspended in midair, looking virtually detached from the narrative for an instant.

Gilbert Adair provides one way to think about the unique connection between guns and movies: arguing that “the gun remains by far the cinema’s single most ubiquitous prop,” he suggests that there is a “symbiotic” link between the gun and the camera: “both hold

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their subjects, or victims, in their sights; both ‘aim’ and ‘shoot’” (21).24 But the shot is

fictional, and that might be another way to characterize the relation between guns and

movies. The shot of a gun happily exposes the fictionality of cinema. What is appealing

about Classic Hollywood cinema is not that it approximates real life but that its reality is

fake. As in a children’s game, a gun is pointed at its subject, and “bang bang, you’re

dead.” In that, the gun might be regarded as the most cinematic prop; it is entirely

fictional. Appropriately, the gun used to “kill” Miles Archer takes this idea of cinematic

fictionality to its logical extreme. When Spade gets to the scene of the crime, Detective

Polhaus shows him the weapon used in the murder. Spade recognizes it as a “Webley

Fosbery forty-five automatic, eight-shot.” The caliber of the gun is one of the few

changes from the novel to the film version: Hammett’s Spade identifies the gun as a

“Thirty-eight, eight shot,” adding, “They don’t make them anymore.” As far as the film

version is concerned, the truth is that they never made them. For while the motivation for

the change is unclear, Peter P. Gillis notes that the revised caliber is an anomaly.

Although the thirty-eight was an eight-shot model, “all forty-fives are six shooters”; so, ironically, “the film dialogue describes a gun that is nonexistent” (30).25 But that does not

distract from the appeal of the (fictional) shot. Bang bang, Archer.

That shot is followed by another murder. Later that night, Detective Polhaus and

Lieutenant Dundy arrive at Spade’s apartment to inform him that Floyd Thursby, the man

Archer was supposed to have been shadowing, has also been murdered. But, as Spade

soon realizes, the cops are also on assignment, trying to discover if he has anything to do with the double homicide. From the moment they walk into his apartment, the scene unfolds mostly through a series of three-figured medium shots, interspersed with close-

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ups, underscoring the claustrophobic energy in the room. Whether the two cops Polhaus

and Dundy sit across from Spade, as if interrogating him, or the three characters gather

around to have a drink, the images portray the sparse interior typical of films noirs.

Spade’s apartment reveals a tough, masculine style that simultaneously emphasizes noir’s minimalist aesthetic in close interior spaces.26 Every shot is carefully composed—from

the massive leather chair that Dundy occupies rather awkwardly, to the unmade bed where Spade sits with his back to the camera, to the strategically placed lamp on a side table that permits ominous shadows, only narratively significant details appear in each frame.

Figure 3-3: The detective becomes a suspect: “you fellows trying to rope me made me nervous”

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Except for a few key objects—as Naremore puts it, “the lamps, overcoats, and

pulled-down hats that are the stock-in-trade of detective films” (“John Huston” 157)27—

the images are virtually emptied out. The lamps, overcoats, and pulled-down hats are just

enough to sustain the tense atmosphere required during this confrontational sequence in the plot. The cops’ hats and overcoats contrast sharply with Spade’s wrinkled white shirt and bare head. As the scene is about negotiating the power dynamics between the private detective and the officers of the law, the camera occupies different points of view in the room, depending on which side has the upper hand. But it always returns to a tight medium shot of the three characters, with not much else in the frame—perfect for creating the paranoid atmosphere so typical of noir. Indeed, this sequence’s most obvious trait is that it is a series of standard noir shots; we have seen this kind of scene before. But then if we follow Adair’s argument about another unexceptional noir, Fritz Lang’s

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), its usualness might precisely be the scene’s appeal.

For although one might remember Classic Hollywood in terms of epics like Gone with the Wind (139), “what going to the cinema during those years really meant was watching near-identical men in near-identical suits and hats sitting in near-identical apartment rooms and bars and black, bulbous vehicles” (124). Adair calls this “the medium’s metallic poetry” (124), a fine phrase that applies nicely to the shot of Spade’s living room.

So, what can be said about a standard shot of near-identical men trying to uncover some details to piece together yet another narrative of whodunit? If we look around, we find evidence of a somewhat different sort. When Spade first realizes he is being accused of killing Thursby, he says with a slight smirk that he feels as though he has “got up on

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[his] hind legs” as the detectives are trying to “rope [him].” In a scene where there is little

possibility of any horsing around, Spade’s remark finds an ironic visual match in the

equestrian images on the wall. While the room is almost barren, the wall does display a

number of mismatched pictures of horses and horse-riding. At first, we might assume that

the pictures serve as signifiers of Spade’s tough-guy personality. We might even argue

that they allude to Spade as a misplaced hero of a Western now confined to the close

interiors of noir.28 Unwilling to draw his guns too quick—he refuses to even carry guns,

telling Polhaus he doesn’t like them—Spade can be regarded as the reluctant “cowboy” who might yet bring order to the seemingly lawless frontier of San Francisco. While

interesting in themselves, these readings are too symbolic.

Besides, Spade’s apartment is not the only place in the film that exhibits images of

horses: there is also a horse statuette on Kasper Gutman’s mantelpiece and a similar horse

figurine on District Attorney Bryan’s desk. What could motivate the appearance of these

near-identical objects in otherwise distinct but typical spaces?29 Perhaps it is a Hustonian

signature on his first directorial venture. After all, Huston had a passion for horses. As a

boy, he became accustomed to a fairly rootless lifestyle with his mother, Rhea Gore, who

was “a feisty newswoman with a yen for traveling in general and following race horses and courses in particular” (Jameson 37). Before moving to Hollywood, Huston wrote numerous stories about horses. Writing about his attitude as a director, James Agee even

called Huston a “highly intelligent cowboy” (22). Yet, none of these auteurist

interpretations fully explains the presence of near-identical, albeit incidental, props uniting three unrelated spaces in the film either. What we need to do, then, is to set the horses on a less predictable trail.

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Even though it would come to be remembered as a place where film production

was standardized and monitored on closed sets, Hollywood did not start off being that

kind of town. It was founded in the late nineteenth century by a Kansas City real estate developer and prohibitionist, Harvey Henderson Wilcox, who, along with his wife

Daeida, retired on a huge ranch there. Although there were no English holly trees in sight,

Daeida reportedly named the place after she met a woman on a train who spoke dreamily

about her summer home in Chicago called Hollywood. When Cecil B. DeMille, along

with Oscar C. Apfel, rode to the end of the train line from Arizona and discovered that

Hollywood’s open countryside would be ideal for shooting their western, The Squaw

Man (1914), the town was still undeveloped. DeMille set up his studio in what became

the Lasky-DeMille Barn and rode to the set on horseback. The only paved road was

Prospect Avenue (now Hollywood Boulevard), and, as in most other places, horses were

more practical for travel during the town’s formative years.

But by the 1920s, the automobile arrived in Hollywood, changing not only the

mode of transportation but also its model of production. For, increasingly, Hollywood

studios began imitating Ford’s standardized production system. As Budd Schulberg

reportedly told Fitzgerald while the latter was writing The Love of the Last Tycoon,

Hollywood “was a town that turned out a product. Instead of automobiles . . . , in our

town we turned out cans of film” (qtd. in Wallace 31). Thus, filmmaking became more of

a formula, which was fully perfected in the genre films. And it was the appeal of this

formula that drove so many viewers to see near-identical men in near-identical suits and

hats sitting in near-identical apartment rooms and bars and black, bulbous automobiles.

Still, for all its similarities to Fordist principles of rationalized production, “Hollywood

114 was not making Model T’s. That ascetic vehicle, a triumph of functionalism, had succeeded by avoiding any traces of the irrational decoration that Ford portrayed as wasteful, inefficient, and ‘feminine.’ . . . [But] the movies succeeded commercially to the extent that they enchanted” (Ray 2). While it is correct, then, to assume that studio filmmaking engaged in the creation of standardized products, it also embraced “irrational decoration”—as evidenced by the incidental shots of near-identical horses in a film that is obsessed with keeping things on track for the pursuit of a mythical bird.

For over four hundred years, we are told in the film’s prologue, that bird, “a Golden

Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels,” has been at the center of an intriguing mystery. Since it was first seized by pirates in 1539, before it could be presented to Charles V of Spain by the Knight Templars of Malta, the priceless bird has passed through countless hands, turning up mysteriously in various parts of the globe at different times. It remains, the prologue concludes, “a mystery to this day.” It is this mystery that Spade inadvertently becomes involved in the moment Brigid

O’Shaughnessy walks into his office; it is this case that leads to Miles Archer’s murder.

But Spade seems far less interested in finding the falcon than in solving the murder. Even though Gutman assures him of the authenticity of the statuette—“These are facts, historical facts,” he tries to assure Spade, “not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells’s history, but history nevertheless”—Spade remains skeptical. For him, a Golden Falcon is the stuff that myths are made of. After all, a pragmatic private eye cannot believe it exists, much less expect it to simply fall into his hands. But Spade does stumble upon the

“dingus”—or rather, it stumbles upon him. Just as he is telling his secretary Effie that the tale of the priceless bird is “ridiculous,” an old man staggers into the office holding a

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package wrapped in newspaper, cryptically mumbles “you know . . . falcon,” and then collapses on a couch, dropping the package on the floor. Spade rushes to examine the fellow, whom he identifies as Captain Jacoby, master of La Paloma, the ship aboard which the falcon was supposed to have arrived from Hong Kong. Jacoby, who has apparently been shot, dies before being of any assistance in unraveling the mystery of the no-longer-missing falcon.

Figure 3-4: An odd delivery: “why couldn’t he have stayed alive long enough to tell us something?”

Along with Spade, we will have to wait for more details about the mysterious falcon, for Jacoby does not stay “alive long enough to tell us something.” Despite the dramatic entrance, Jacoby’s role in the narrative is limited to the delivery of the coveted bird. Still, when he stumbles in, something about this shot of a staggering old man

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disrupts the narrative. We know that Captain Jacoby is played by Walter Huston, John

Huston’s father. He agreed to appear uncredited; his cameo appearance was meant to

bring his son’s directorial debut good luck. The Huston charm seems to have worked.

The film was a huge success, and its director was praised, along with Orson Welles that

year, as one of the finest young directors. As a New York Herald Tribune reviewer noted,

“Mr. Huston might have been known at one time as the son of a celebrated actor, Walter

Huston. He needs no parental identification after this job” (qtd. in McCarty 38). But the

image of the elder Huston staggering into Spade’s office enables more than just an

allegorical transfer of authority from father to son.30 His cameo is also staggering in

another sense, because the recognition of Walter Huston as John Huston’s father

overwhelms the fictional exchange of the statuette. Huston’s cameo presence in Spade’s

office distracts from the long-awaited appearance of the jewel-encrusted falcon. What

makes the cameo so distracting?

Let us think about the cameo’s other meaning, as a precious gem carved in relief, or

a projecting detail on a sculpture that distinguishes itself from the surrounding plane

surface. All bundled up like the falcon himself, Huston, in cameo, similarly appears like a

precious object that stands out from the narrative background. Indeed, Michael

Anderegg’s analysis of “guest” appearances gets at this inherently disruptive aspect of the cameo. Anderegg calls these appearances “bracketed,” because they “are detached—or at least easily detachable—from the flow of the narrative in which they appear” (“Cameos”

147). Perhaps John Huston, who was otherwise always keen on staying on track, was intuitively aware of the cameo’s distracting possibilities, especially if we consider the anecdote that Lawrence Grobel recounts about the shooting of that stumbling scene.

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Although Walter intended it as a goodwill gesture, John would not let his father off easy.

John, Grobel notes, shot the scene over and over, “holding back his laughter,” as Walter

kept staggering in, falling, and dying. Walter complained that he “‘didn’t expect to have

to put in a day’s work.’” But John unapologetically chided his father for missing the

mark, saying “‘This time, try it without staggering so much’” (221; emphasis added).31

Perhaps John Huston wanted the falcon to be more staggering than its deliverer.

Curiously, when Spade finally gets his hands on the falcon, he does not unwrap the poorly packaged statuette in a grand revelatory gesture. Instead, after briefly grinning at its contents, he rushes out of his office to deposit the package at the Union Bus Station.

So, when Effie brings the falcon to Spade’s apartment in the final sequence, the statuette is still covered with the tattered newspaper that Jacoby delivered it in. Spade places the old bundle on the table, and Brigid, Cairo, and Gutman begin unwrapping it. Zooming in, the camera shows Gutman’s hands tearing away the layers of packing with a violent intensity, as if he is plucking a bird to death. When the layers have been peeled back,

Gutman places the statuette upright. As he turns it around, we see two pairs of hands touching the bird in an overtly fetishistic manner. In a close shot, the precious falcon is revealed for the first time.

Of the noir thrillers released in the forties, The Maltese Falcon—often regarded as the genre’s prototype—is the one markedly concerned with the fate of objects, with what

Spade calls “the stuff that dreams are made of.” For that purpose, the black bird is an ideal prop: even in its original, it’s a fake. From a previous scene, where Gutman recounts the history of this strange bird, we recall that the jewel-encrusted falcon acquired a coat of enamel in the nineteenth century to disguise it as “nothing more than a

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fairly interesting black statuette.” When it is finally revealed, that is precisely what the

statuette looks like: interesting but not extraordinary. To be sure, Gutman starts chipping

away at the surface with a pocketknife, but after a few strokes, he realizes that there is

nothing underneath. Exasperated, he declares, “Fake! It’s a phony! It’s lead.” The camera

now pulls back, for the narrative must go on: the quest for the real falcon will continue,

assures Gutman, although Spade will soon turn them all over to the police for the murders

of Thursby and Jacoby; for Miles Archer’s death, Brigid will take the fall. The focus will

no longer be on, as Spade tells Polhaus, “this black statuette . . . that all the fuss was

about.”

Figure 3-5: The falcon turns out fake: “the, uh, stuff that dreams are made of”

Nevertheless, as he walks off the screen with the “dingus” in his arms, Spade’s final comment leaves a different impression. When asked by Polhaus about the unusual

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object, he responds, it is, “the, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.” Lesley Brill has argued

that this allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest enables Huston to emphasize “the artifice of the cinematic performance that the audience has just witnessed and the internal fictions, the lies and acting that its figures have performed for each other” (153). But the

reference does not only draw attention to the diegetic artifice. Indeed, the line has become a popular expression signifying the power of the movies in general, transforming a

literary allusion into a virtual cliché that refers not to Shakespearean spirits but to stuff

just as ephemeral. “Hollywood’s like Egypt,” David O. Selznick had said about the

already declining dream factory in the 1940s. He predicted that, like the disintegrating

pyramids, Hollywood would “never come back.” “It’ll just keep on crumbling,” Selznick

argued, “until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands” (qtd. in Hecht

258). From our perspective at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see that

the crumbling breakdown has long been accomplished.

And yet, some of the studio props have survived, and they continue to generate

tremendous excitement. One such prop, the coveted Maltese falcon, was auctioned off at

Christie’s East for $398,000 on December 4, 1994. The statuette was one of seven made

by the prop department at Warner’s, and the amount of money raised by this fake falcon

(they were all fake, of course, even as originals) is astounding when one considers that

The Maltese Falcon itself was produced on a budget slightly smaller than that.32 What makes an old studio prop so popular? Naremore suggests that its popularity replicates the fetishization of Classic Hollywood cinema in general: “A kitschy statuette originally intended to represent a worthless imitation has been transformed into ‘the stuff that dreams are made of,’ if only because Humphrey Bogart touched it” (More Than Night

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255). In other words, the statuette has now become a collector’s item, a souvenir, whose

value far exceeds its role in the diegesis. In a way that Selznick could not have imagined,

Hollywood’s props have outlived its narratives.

“Who Ever Heard of a Wrong Number?”

In “Notes towards an Unrealized Project,” Luis Buñuel outlines the idea for a

picture, perhaps starring Adolphe Menjou and Myrna Loy. It is expected to be a comedy.

“The whole thing is under way,” he notes, “motoring as silently as a Rolls Royce, when

one of the several telephones in evidence starts to ring.” At first, the characters decide to

ignore it, but the ringing does not stop. They look to the director for help, but this is not a

prank. So, the director will be able to offer no help. By now the action has been

suspended. Menjou picks up the phone, says “Wrong number,” and hangs up. The

characters are apparently confused and dismayed. “This is a smart comedy,” Buñuel

suggests, “dependent on eleven exactly timed phone cues.” So, the telephone will ring again and again, drawing the conventional plot to a pause. Since the cast does not know

what to do, they “sit, reduced and stilled by this wretched phone.” As Buñuel puts it,

“Murder is in the air” (qtd. in Thomson, “Telephones” 26).

Buñuel’s sketch of a picture guided by phone cues captures the negotiation

highlighted at the very beginning in the portentous telephonic moment from The Maltese

Falcon—incidentally, the film, like Buñuel’s proposal, is in fact structured by a series of phone cues. On one hand, the ringing telephone draws attention to itself as a material object, because it interrupts the context. And interruption, as Benjamin has argued, “is one of the fundamental methods of all form-giving” (Understanding Brecht 19). So, when the telephone-bell rings in darkness, the narrative pauses. An outdated, stand-up

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Bell telephone turns into a promising instance of photogénie.33 Yet, the phone must be

answered. As Godard has noted, we “cannot resist it. Who can? The phone reminds us

that . . . we cannot resist the unknown future” (qtd. in Thomson, “Telephones” 27). But

when the phone is answered, we are back on the narrative track. The future, as Godard accurately suggests, cannot be resisted. So the plot must resume: the phone call initiates the pursuit of Archer’s murderer, which then gets Spade tangled up in the tale of the missing falcon.

Figure 3-6: The telephone rings: all is lost

Epstein also realized the telephone’s capacity to activate the narrative drive. While we are focused on “the curtain at the window and the handle of the door,” he lamented,

“[t]he telephone rings. All is lost” (242). Action now takes over, directing all attention to the onward momentum of the plot. Visual pleasure yields to narrative closure. Still,

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consider the potential of redirecting the call. For isn’t that what flânerie is about? Like a

playful switchboard operator, the flâneur reorders the circuits. His method is one of

redirection, where every move provides an unanticipated connection. And that is what the

previous section has attempted to do with the stuff of The Maltese Falcon. Rather than

following the narrative track, each still redirects the trail of analysis on a different course.

As Buñuel puts it, “Who ever heard of a wrong number?” (qtd. in Thomson,

“Telephones” 26).

Notes

1 Convicting Archer’s murderer, of course, is not the central quest of the film. The pursuit of the mythical falcon will not end even when the film comes to a close. For, although Spade refuses to join the expedition, the search for the elusive bird will apparently continue.

2 Among the movies made at Paramount in the 1930s, Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living would certainly qualify as a “white telephone” film. That is precisely why the uncanny fur coat moment appears to be so out of place in it.

3 The Hopper painting generally discussed in connection with film noir is Night Hawks, but I think that his interior scenes provide a much more fruitful comparison.

4 Although several film theorists have remarked on the similarities between the railroad and cinema, Lynne Kirby’s work on the “parallel tracks” of travel and early spectatorship offers the most significant evaluation of the railroad’s function in the prehistory and early history of cinema. Her important study suggests that the railroad was significant to early cinema not only because it provided the space for exploring motion but also since railroad companies often became patrons and sponsors of some of the early filmmakers.

5 I am alluding to Frederick Palmer’s argument, as cited in the epigraph. Writing as early as 1924 on the “techniques” of the photoplay, Palmer argued that Hollywood cinema favored action, “the outward expression of inner feelings,” over simple motion (qtd. in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 15).

6 While there is no direct mention of “doubt” during this scene in Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, the author’s working notes give a sense of how the incident might have developed. I am following Fitzgerald’s stated intent in his working notes, where he outlines how the entire scene was to play out, based on his recollections of a conversation with Irving Thalberg, whom Stahr is supposed to represent.

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7 Impressionists believed that instances of photogénie revealed themselves more readily in unplanned or “automatic” moments—what André Bazin later referred to as “an image of the world . . . formed automatically, without the creative invention of man” (“Ontology” 13). However, even the most meticulously crafted scenes could provoke an excessive response, a bodily reaction that is the essence of photogénie.

8 Interestingly, while Epstein delights in the way Hayakawa moves, the focus is not on movement. Like Charlie Chaplin, who fascinated the Impressionists not for his active antics but for the appeal of his photogenic face, Hayakawa, Epstein’s “tranced tragedian” (243), becomes an ideal aesthetic object for them.

9 Interestingly, the scene was not meant to be part of the narrative. It was reportedly used to either begin or end the picture.

10 This shot is also what early Surrealists found mesmerizing, when they encountered the image on a movie poster. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Phillipe Soupault writes of his accidental encounter with the American cinema through the publicité poster for, I assume, The Great Train Robbery. Soupault was captivated by cinema’s ability to capture objects on film, regarding it “the poetry of our age” (56).

11 Jane Gaines’s essay on the Queen Christina tie-ups offers an interesting analysis of the “numerous ‘opportunities’ for tie-ups with a range of consumer products” (38). These tie- ups were not limited to the marketing of fashion, but also extended to things like a half- price flatware sale, which, Gaines argues, “secured the meanings of the film and resolved its fluctuations for heterosexuality” by reinforcing traditional roles for its female spectators/consumers (50). As Mary Ann Doane accurately points out, “Although there were . . . a very large number of commodity tie-ups which were not gender specific— from watches to toothpaste, to desks, typewriters, and cars—the glamour, sheen, and fascination attached to the movie screen seemed most appropriate for the marketing of a certain feminine self-image” (“Economy” 26).

12 Working from a traditionally Marxist perspective, academic film critics by and large deride cinema’s ability to turn objects into fetishized commodities, whose attractive sheen conceals the exploitative means of their production within the industrial capitalist system. They associate Hollywood cinema with what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer named as the failings of “the culture industry.” What Adorno and Horkheimer disparaged was the way in which the mechanical reproduction of images made the spectator into a passive consumer, “leav[ing] no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience” (9). The cinema, they argued, reinforces the mechanisms (and narratives) of industrial capitalism. The spectators “are so absorbed by the world of the movie—by its images, gestures, and words—that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening” (9–10). Following Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis, film historians tend to view its glittering objects with suspicion, discrediting visual pleasure for the masses as an instance of “false consciousness,” focusing instead on the systemic exploitation that results from consumerism. On the other hand, drawing on the

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psychoanalytic paradigm, feminist critics have disparaged the ways in which women themselves are commodified by Classic Hollywood cinema. Although there is a difference in the Marxist and Freudian approaches, as Linda Williams argues, there is also a convergence of disregard for the economic and psychic value of the fetish.

13 That comment might seem strange coming from Welles, whose films virtually overflow with such objects—the snow globe from Citizen Kane (1941) being a perfect example. But Naremore argues that Welles’s style unites the Hollywood camera’s affection for mysteriously captivating objects with Soviet realism, “combin[ing] what he calls ‘moments of exclamatory and resonant beauty’ on the level of eloquence with the dominant tradition of psychological realism” (Magic World 121).

14 As Anne Friedberg suggests, “The department store as a building type emerged as a corollary to the dramatic changes in urban retailing between 1840 and 1870. . . . [It] posed a new design objective: the display and sale of a high volume of mass-produced goods to large numbers of consumers” (77).

15 Paul Zollo points out that L. Frank Baum arrived in Hollywood from Chicago in 1910, apparently “to escape those icy blackhawk winds off of Lake Michigan in the winter to enjoy the peaceful sunshine of Southern California” (16–17). Although he would posthumously become famous for the MGM version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum himself created The Oz Film Manufacturing Company and became a producer and director in the fledgling silent film industry.

16 Mary Gluck’s essay presents an astute analysis of the various forms of flânerie, and especially of the distinctions between the popular flâneur, who “came to embody the ideals of a dynamic urban culture and sensibility,” and the avant-garde flâneur, who “gave expression to the aestheticist vision of innovative artists and poets” (54). Moreover, she cautions that “[p]otentially, any social type could be mistaken for the flâneur and the list of false flâneurs was theoretically endless” (67).

17 Anne Friedberg notes that “architectural innovations and the introduction of outdoor gas lighting” enabled the flâneur to reprivatize public space (64). Here is Benjamin’s version: “the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 417).

18 There is even a “Maltese Falcon” tour led by Hammett fan Don Herron in San Francisco. In a recent LA Times article, Scott Martelle notes that this walking tour comprises of visits to spots that Spade frequents in Hammett’s novel, including Spade’s apartment (which was also Hammett’s apartment from 1926 to 1929) on Post Street, Brigid’s hotel overlooking Union Square, and the spot where Archer is murdered at the intersection of Bush and Stockton.

19 Of course, for Cendrars, that is literally true. He recalls that one late evening while he was in Hollywood, he decided to walk back to his hotel on foot “as it was a splendid moonlit night and the hotel wasn’t too far away” (52). He was strolling rather happily,

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“not thinking of anything in particular,” when he was stopped by the police (52). Not having a car to zip around Hollywood had raised suspicion. Apparently, a similar thing happened to the English aviator Mollison, whom the police officers assumed to be a lunatic, “unable to imagine that so famous a man, whose name was all over the newspapers, might be walking the streets on foot like a pauper” (55).

20 Cavell is in fact referring to the films noirs themselves, starting with The Maltese Falcon. “[I]f those films did not exist,” he suggests, “Bogart would not exist, the name ‘Bogart’ would not mean what it does” (28). He argues that Bogart’s persona is so tied to the noir thriller that he would not have existed—he certainly would not have existed as Bogey—without them.

21 That is why Banville lamented, however hyperbolically, the passing of the cigarette dandy in an essay written just before Bonsack’s machine automated cigarette production in 1895. Machine-pressed cigarettes, Banville argued, made the cigarette dandy obsolete. If the cigarette had to be “ceaselessly remodeled, rolled again, according to the particular genius of whoever [was] smoking it,” then “to smoke packaged cigarettes, mechanically made” was totally “inartistic” (qtd. in Klein 42).

22 Just after Spade receives the phone call about Miles Archer’s murder in the novel, Hammett describes the process of rolling a cigarette at great length, concentrating on how Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth. (13–14)

23 Perhaps that is why the scene of Archer’s murder, a rare addition to the script that is otherwise a faithful adaptation of Hammett’s novel, was filmed rather than implied. As Jameson points out, “Somehow the visual medium of cinema demands that such a decisive event be seen” (42; original emphasis).

24 Adair suggests that the gun is so ubiquitous in cinema that “it’s difficult to name a virginally ‘gunless’ filmmaker” (21). He names Yasujiro Ozu as a possibility, but, as Freida Freiberg has discovered, one of Ozu’s earliest films was Dragnet Girl (1933), a film about the problematic relationship between a gangster and his moll that was influenced by the Hollywood gangster films of the early 1930s. Freiberg argues that in this film, “[i]nstead of washing on the line, telegraph poles, kettles and vases, Ozu uses hats, guns, billiard cues, punching bags, items of jewelry, records, suitcases, and a coffee pot as recurrent visual motifs.”

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25 Gillis suggests that the caliber may have been changed because the thirty-eights were an extremely rare model. “Given its rarity,” he argues, “it was too valuable a piece to be toted in the overcoat of a character the likes of Floyd Thursby” (30).

26 As Manny Farber, who has called the director “the Eisenstein of the Bogart thriller,” suggests, Huston “rigidly delimits the subject matter that goes into a frame, by chiaroscuro or by grouping his figures within the square of the screen so that there is hardly room for an actor to move an arm” (“John Huston” 31).

27 Naremore adds that Edeson’s cinematography “invest[s] all this paraphernalia with uncommon intensity” (“John Huston” 157), but he does concede that there is nothing visually exceptional about this sequence.

28 Before he began playing ambivalent noir heroes, besides the 1930s gangster films, Bogart had appeared in several Westerns before his breakthrough performance as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936).

29 Although he does not notice the horses, Naremore points out that “[m]ost of the action takes place inside four rooms—Spade’s office, his apartment, and the hotel rooms of Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Kasper Gutman. These rooms are roughly the same size, and the last three contain ornate mantelpieces of the same proportions but with different designs, as if Huston and his decorator were stressing a parallel to establish a basic contrast” (“John Huston” 153).

30 Writing about the symbolic violence of the Oedipal narrative, Lee Edelman has argued that “[t]he sequence in which Huston’s father appears, which marks the falcon’s first appearance in the film’s diegesis as well, can thus play out the Oedipal logic that results in the patriarchal transfer of phallic authority from father to son” (80). The Maltese Falcon, of course, is not the only time Huston deals with the Oedipus complex. In Freud (1962), he returns to it explicitly, with the protagonist Dr. Freud saying of Oedipus: “the shadow of this doom lies over us all.”

31 Of course, John Huston also meant for the whole shoot, along with the repeated falling and dying, to be a joke. An obviously upset Walter left the set at the end of the day, but John wasn’t finished with him yet. “The next day he had Mary Astor call Walter, pretending to be John’s secretary,” asking his father to reshoot the scene. Whether he realized it was Astor or not, Walter was not willing to go through it again. “Astor held the telephone receiver out so everyone could hear,” while Walter screamed: “‘You tell my son to get another actor or go to hell! He made me take twenty falls, and I’m sore all over, and I’m not about to take twenty more’” (Grobel 221).

32 Luhr reports that the film was shot on a modest B-movie budget of $381,000 (“Falcon” 3).

33 Based on the illustrations in Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey’s history of telephones, the one in Spade’s apartment appears to be from 1920 (32), which seems rather out-of-

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date, considering there are more contemporary models in other places in the film, as in Spade’s office.

CHAPTER 4 SIGNATURE CRIMES: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE LOST SCENES (AND THE STRANGER CASE OF THE MISSING AUTEUR)

Goethe? Shakespeare? Everything they put their name to is supposed to be good, and people rack their brains to find beauty in the silliest little thing they bungled. All great talents, like Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Michelangelo, created not only beautiful works, but things that were less than mediocre, quite simply awful. —Leo Tolstoy qtd. in Bazin, “On the Politique des Auteurs”

Yet something, many things, blocked satisfying development [of Mr. Arkadin]. The failure was not in talent, certainly, but in control over the circumstances in which the talent had to work. —Robert Garis, The Films of Orson Welles

When I happen to go to the movies in America, I go see B-pictures. First of all, they are an expression of the great technical quality of Hollywood. . . . I also think that B-pictures are often better than important films because they are made so fast that the filmmaker obviously has total freedom; they don’t have time to watch over him. —Jean Renoir, qtd. in Dixon, “The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut”

Whodunit?

Strike One. The scene that marks the former Nazi’s identity is rather unremarkable.

Standing in a phone booth at a local drug store, Charles Rankin draws his signature,

almost inadvertently, on a notepad hanging on the wall. There is no mistaking this

symbol. What he signs is not his personal name but the moniker of Nazism itself. A

standard over-the-shoulder shot captures Rankin sketching a swastika on the notepad,

while he faintly whistles “Deutschland über Alles.” Then, just before his wife Mary

appears at the other end of the line, shown by a quick cross-cut, he begins to cancel the

signature with brief diagonal strokes that distort the sign’s symmetrical design, ending

with an X across the page.

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Figure 4-1: The Nazi mastermind signs his name

While intriguing in itself, this revelatory moment from Orson Welles’s The

Stranger is unexceptional. It has none of the poignancy of the close-up shot of quivering lips slowly whispering “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane (1941) or the solemnity of the long shot of a fading artist walking off into an apocalyptic evening in F for Fake (1973). Nor does it have the flamboyant, innovative flair of the hall of mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1948). Indeed, the “signature” shot in The Stranger is highly unlike a classic Wellesian moment. The entire scene comprises of standard medium shots of

Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) waiting in a phone booth, doodling his signature as he urges his wife Mary (Loretta Young) to meet him at the church tower, where the film’s denouement will unfold. The notepad, which is not the focus of the shot, is in the lower right corner of the frame. It competes with another, slightly larger sign in the background, evidently also in Welles’s handwriting, that matter-of-factly urges callers not to “deface

130 walls” and instructs them to “use pad.” As the phone conversation ends, Rankin tears the signature sheet off the notepad, and the camera tracks him in profile out of the phone booth.

The erased signature is a rather heavy-handed illustration of Rankin’s identity. By this point in The Stranger, it is obvious that Charles Rankin, a history professor at a boys’ prep school in Harper, Connecticut, is in fact the escaped Nazi mastermind, Franz

Kindler. Although the townspeople consider him “above suspicion,” his actions leading up to this scene—especially his strangling of fellow-Nazi fugitive Konrad Meinike

(Constantin Shane) as well as his fierce insistence that Marx was not a German but a

Jew—have left no doubt about his identity. So, the delayed revelatory signature shot does not seem to reveal much.

But the signature moment was to occur right at the beginning of the film.

Strike Two. A few quick strikes would have revealed that the former, high-ranking

SS officer and architect of the Final Solution, Franz Kindler (also Orson Welles), had indeed transformed himself into Charles Rankin. The moment was to occur during the opening Latin American sequence, when the Allied War Crimes Commission releases

Konrad Meinike, a Nazi bureaucrat, with the hope that he might lead them to the fugitive

Nazi mastermind. While elements of this expressionist sequence remain in the released version of the film, some details have been lost. In search of Franz Kindler, a schizophrenic Meinike was to travel to Argentina.1 In a moment that would have eerily anticipated Harry Lime’s acclaimed entrance in The Third Man (1949), Meinike was to appear shuffling anxiously down a cobblestone path, wanting to deliver a message “from the All Highest.” He was to come in contact with the “Nazis of 1932 . . . plotting for

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1952,” who would assume he had been sent by the Führer and therefore guide him to a morgue attendant specializing in fake passports.2 Besides issuing counterfeit travel documents, the attendant would “take a paper from [Meinike] with Franz Kindler’s name on it and draw a series of diagonal lines through the letters F, Z, D, L, E, R until it spell[ed] Rankin” (Heylin 178).

But in the released version of The Stranger, only snippets of this expository episode have survived. After being allowed to escape, and unaware of being followed by a female agent who is presumably working for the Allied War Crimes Commission, we see Meinike sneaking into a morgue in a vaguely Latin American country. Although the expressionist mood still prevails—heightened by the low-angle photography during the chiaroscuro exchange between Meinike and the photographer—the sequence is abridged to report only the most essential dramatic details that will lead to the escaped convict’s journey to the United States in search of the transformed Nazi war criminal. While being photographed for his fake passport, Meinike demands to know the whereabouts of Franz

Kindler. After some hesitation, the morgue attendant hands him a postcard of Harper,

Connecticut. There is no mention of Rankin’s name, since Meinike claims he knows

Kindler’s current identity. The scene cuts to the picture postcard of a bucolic old town with a Gothic clock tower at its center; then a fade out suggests the change in location as the town itself springs to life.

The long Latin American segment, which the director saw as an opportunity to explore “a whole series of very wild, dreamlike events” (qtd. in Welles and Bogdanovich

186), was apparently edited by producer Sam Spiegel in collaboration with editor Ernest

Nims. Up to thirty minutes of footage was reportedly deleted from the introduction, never

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to be restored, thus cutting out almost entirely what Welles considered the signature sequence of the film. For the studio, as Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni explains, “a dreamlike sequence around South America did not necessarily smell like box office—especially in the mid-1940s” (96). Welles himself often spoke of the clashes with the studio over the opening sequence in The Stranger. While admitting that the majority of the deleted segment was not central to the plot, he told Barbara Leaming that Nims was “the great supercutter, who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the

story” (312). Since the identity of the Nazi mastermind is revealed more directly later on,

these striking wild and dreamlike images did nothing to develop the plot. Hence, they

were expunged.

But the opening sequence may have been lost even before it was even filmed.

Strike Three. Clinton Heylin notes that according to the shooting schedule there

were days assigned for all the scenes in the shooting script. But then, he points out, the

schedule “has a series of lines drawn through the scenes deleted from the film, perhaps

suggesting their elimination at the outset” (175). In other words, The Stranger may have

been pre-edited. Welles would insist that the opening scenes were shot and deleted later,

even claiming “a deep wound” in his leg that occurred when he “stepped on a baby’s

coffin” while shooting in Latin America, a wound that would “always remind[] [him] of

what was lost from the movie” (qtd. in Leaming 312). But whether the sequence was

altered during pre- or post-production is not the most significant piece of this puzzle.

Unlike the recently recovered film It’s All True, another Latin American project that

Welles worked on just before The Stranger, these originals scenes, if they ever existed,

have been lost. What we have in their place is a generic Hollywood opening that, as

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James Naremore puts it, “barely deviates from industry habits” (125). The final authority seems to have ended up in the hands of the great supercutter.

Welles had in fact signed an extremely restrictive contract, giving Ernest Nims the license to edit any part of the film “in the interest of telling its tale as simply and swiftly as possible” (Leaming 311). Following the much-publicized struggle with RKO over The

Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles had developed the reputation for being an unbankable director. Therefore, on September 20, 1945, he signed what would have seemed to be quite an unpleasant deal with International Pictures to direct a film that was then titled “Date with Destiny,” based on Victor Trivas’s story called “The Trap.” Heylin regards the contract as “Hollywood’s ultimate revenge on the Boy Wonder of 1939”

(170). The terms of the agreement required Welles to surrender control over the finished product, he argues, “depriving him of many little strokes he’d planned to apply to his thematic canvas” (190). “Just four days after inscribing his moniker on the dotted line,”

Heylin tells us, “he delivered a 164-page final shooting script which bore telltale thumbprints on every page” (174). But it seems that as the shooting proceeded, a number of these thumbprints began getting erased. For the final product reflects all the elements of Classic Hollywood filmmaking: a linear plot, continuity editing, and a neat (if predictable) resolution of conflict at the end. Indeed, cuts to the opening sequence were apparently only the first in a series of edits3 that transformed the film into what is unanimously regarded as a standard studio product.

So, in the case of The Stranger, the auteur appears to have struck out.

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In the Name of the Author

On November 21, 1864, Abraham Lincoln, believing that she had lost all five of

her sons in the Civil War, wrote a letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby of Boston. The brief missive

was meant to offer condolences, but it also acknowledged “how weak and fruitless must

be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so

overwhelming” (308). Along with the Gettysburg address and the second inaugural

speech, the Bixby letter is regarded by many Lincoln biographers as a masterpiece and is

often cited as evidence of his literary genius.4 Intriguingly, the letter is treated by just as

many historians with skepticism, not for the quality of its prose but for doubts about its

authenticity. As it turns out, the letter is historically inaccurate, for Mrs. Bixby only lost

two sons in the war; of the remaining three boys, one deserted the army, the other was

honorably discharged, and the third may have either deserted or died a prisoner of war.

These facts have led some historians to suggest that the extant letter may be a fake.

Others have speculated that John Hay, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, may have composed the letter, imitating the president’s voice and perhaps even forging his signature.

Noteworthy in this debate, as Michael Burlingame points out, is the use of the word

“beguile,” which evidently appears repeatedly in Hay’s correspondences but never in

Lincoln’s.5 On the other hand, noted biographer Roy Basler has argued that the letter is

comparable “to the best of Lincoln’s lyrical passages” from the Gettysburg address and

the farewell address. Basler is convinced that “the internal evidence of style seems to

mark the letter as Lincoln’s” (qtd. in Burlingame 64). But the “original” Bixby letter has

been lost—it was apparently destroyed by Mrs. Bixby, who was a Confederate

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sympathizer. Yet several “copies” of the letter have been in circulation. Therefore,

uncertainty over its authorship persists.

The debate over the Bixby letter, especially since the death of its purported author, has been similar in form to that engaged by connoisseurs when trying to validate the

originality and authority of works of art. The dispute over this letter foregrounds the

issues surrounding the vexed idea of authorship, including its relation to originality,

authenticity, and authority. It also reminds us, as Michael North rightly suggests, that

“authorship has never been an unassailable concept, and modern doubts about it, radical

though they may seem, recast in new form an uneasiness that has always haunted literary

creation” (1382). While authorship has always been fraught with anxiety, it becomes

even more complex with the invention of mechanical means of (re)production. The

anxiety over the Bixby letter, due in large measure to the existence of multiple copies

with seemingly no clear original, in effect parallels the problems of authorship that the

rise of photography engendered in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed,

Roland Barthes argued in Camera Lucida that photography—and, we might say by

extension, cinema—caused a “disturbance (to civilization)” (12). Therefore, debates over

authorship have been particularly contentious in film studies. I’ll return to that elusive yet

controversial figure of the auteur in a moment, but let me first trace a brief history of the

birth, death, and continued survival of the author.

The notion of authorship as a site of creative autonomy, and that of the author as a romantic genius, are relatively recent ideas. At least until the early modern period, literary authority rested in the classical past, and the auctor was a craftsman whose work consisted of “sifting, recasting, or engagingly imitating ideas that had been common

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property as long as ideas had been written down” (North 1380; emphasis added). Writing

in the thirteenth century, for instance, St. Bonaventura suggested that a book may be

produced by a scribe, compiler, or commentator, all of whom would have worked

collaboratively (Woodmansee 17). Until the Renaissance—the word author first appears

as a variant of auctor circa 1550—authorship was limited to transcribing ideas that were

handed down by tradition. “From the Middle Ages right down through the Renaissance,”

Martha Woodmansee argues, “new writing derived its value and authority from its

affiliation with the texts that preceded it, its derivation rather than its deviation from prior

texts” (17).6 But this attitude began to change in the early modern period. Imitation was

no longer regarded as a servile reproduction of ancient texts and ideas. Instead, it was

infused with the spark of originality, such that authorship became an act of imitation that,

drawing on Petrarch’s definition of imitation as “the resemblance of a son to his father,”

Jacqueline Miller calls the addition of a “mysterious something” to the original (121).

However, while the “author” may have been born circa 1550, he did not fully come to life until later.

For even after authorship wrested itself from the pull of antiquity, it continued to be a collaborative activity. As Woodmansee notes, even Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the

Poets, which helped create the notion of individual authorship, was itself a collective and collaborative composition “between Johnson, the poets he immortalized, the London booksellers—and countless others” (18).7 Yet, Johnson’s text went a long way in

“establishing a pantheon of great authors whose ‘works’ differ[ed] qualitatively from the

sea of mere writing” (Woodmansee 18)—a gesture very similar to early auteurism

practiced at Cahiers du Cinéma—and helped foster the myth of the solitary genius. What

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also contributed to the transformation of authorship were the rise of print culture and the

subsequent development of copyright laws.8 Print regulated the relation between author

and text, thereby bringing into sharp focus the role of the individual writer and his/her

proprietary right over the literary work. The work was no longer merely rhetorical: it was

an object that had to have a creator. And it is precisely this reconceptualization of writing

as intellectual property that led to the Romantic revolution, when the modern author was

born.

If the emergence of a mass market for printed texts and the consequent

formulations of copyright lent materiality to those texts, they also recast the idea of

authorship. By the mid-eighteenth century, after print had transformed writing into a

commercial act, knowledge came to be regarded in terms of individual property.9

Therefore, authorship itself became radically reconceptualized. No longer was a writer a mere scribbler of handed-down, communal truths. Genuine authorship, especially since it now merited legal protection, could no longer be found in adaptation, imitation, or reproduction. Instead, the notion of originality became the basis for establishing authorship and authority. In 1759, Edward Young argued in Conjectures on Original

Composition for a new way of thinking about writing, suggesting that “an Original . . . rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labor, out of preexisting materials not their own” (qtd. in Rose 62; original emphases). Young’s thesis about literary independence was enormously influential on an emerging profession of writers, especially in Germany, where it contributed to the development of Romanticism.

“[I]n a country where youthful writers were chafing at the long subjection of the native

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literary tradition to foreign models and rules,” M. H. Abrams has argued, “Young’s

suggestion that a great work of literature grows out of the impenetrable depths of the mind of genius” became very appealing (The Mirror and the Lamp 202).

Nearly two centuries before another generation of young writers would denounce the “tradition of quality” in favor of the individual artist, German theorists from Herder to

Goethe to Kant formulated a new literary tradition in which the author was reborn as a

Romantic genius. In 1815, William Wordsworth declared that genuine authorship was not the imitation of life but “the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe.”

Genius was that which “was never done before” (qtd. in Woodmansee 16). At the turn of the nineteenth century, authorship became redefined as individual expression. Thus, the modern author was born.

It was this author that the critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma invoked when they

contended that even a Hollywood director might be considered an auteur. Interestingly,

Courtney Lehmann points out that “the word ‘auteur’ is actually an etymological

precursor of the word ‘author,’ appearing in Old French well before the English variant

‘author’ emerged in the sixteenth century” (56). But even if the auteur had been around for centuries, he gained particular authority after World War II. As the title of Irving

Pichel’s article in the November 1946 issue of the Revue du Cinéma declared, “Creation must be the work of one person” (qtd. in Hillier 5). This provocative contention assigned the attributes of Romantic authorship to directors who expressed their personal vision through thematic and stylistic consistencies, in spite of the constraints of the studio system. True authorship in cinema was no longer collaborative production but individual self-expression. As Helen Stoddart suggests, an auteur became the name for a director

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who “was distinguished by the presence in each film, above and beyond generic variations, of a distinctive personality, expressed as a world-view or vision, which would thereby constitute a trace or ‘personal stamp’ of the director’s presence in the film and therefore within their oeuvre” (40). The emphasis on tracing that personal stamp implied that an auteurist critic could discover, across a diverse body of films, a single thread that tied those films together.

But the auteur theory was more than just a question of style. Using such studio directors as Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray as their test cases, auteurist critics, as John

Caughie has suggested, worked “to discover the director within the given framework, to

find the traces of the submerged personality” (12; emphasis added). In this sense, the

auteurists seemed to closely resemble the Romantics, who came to dominate aesthetic and literary criticism throughout the nineteenth century. M. H. Abrams has characterized

their discourse in terms of detection; if artistic genius was an expression of individual

personality, then the literary critic would dig deep to unearth traces of that submerged

personality. “Furnished with the proper key,” he argued, “the romantic extremist was

confident he could decipher the hieroglyph, penetrate to the reality behind the

appearance, and so come to know an author more intimately than his own friends and

family; more intimately, even, than the author, lacking this key, could possibly have

known himself” (“Literature as a Revelation” 21). At the Cahiers du Cinéma, where the

politique des auteurs was formulated, the auteurist critic was similarly a detective

uncovering the deep, dark mystery of cinematic auteurs.10 In his essay on “The Genius of

Howard Hawks,” for instance, Jacques Rivette argued, “Hawks is a director of

intelligence and precision, but he is also a bundle of dark forces and strange fascinations;

140 his is a Teutonic spirit, attracted by bouts of ordered madness which give birth to an infinite chain of consequences” (128). And later, “His marvelous blend of action and morality is probably the secret of his genius” (128). On the other hand, for Rivette, the genius of Hawks is not a major mystery to those who believe in him: “The evidence on the screen is the proof of Hawks’s genius” (126). What Rivette accomplishes here goes beyond an analysis of Monkey Business, which is ostensibly the subject of this piece.

Instead, his essay demonstrates what Richard Routt likely means when he argues that auteurism is more “a point of view or a critical regard” (42; original emphasis). Here, as

Rivette demonstrates, auteurism is not so much a theory as a polemical way of looking, a way of finding evidence of the auteur’s genius.11

In his seminal piece translating the politique des auteurs for American film criticism, Andrew Sarris made a similar observation, arguing that the most significant identifying feature of auteurism was at the crucial third level, which was concerned with

“interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. . . . It is not quite the vision of the world a director projects, not quite his attitude toward life” (50–51). While it was connected to these, the interior meaning was not expressed in terms of technical competence (first level) or even worldview (second level). The interior meaning was produced by that creative tension between the auteur and the apparatus. In fact, interior meaning was indefinable; it was “that intangible difference between one personality and another, all other things being equal” (Sarris 51). From Sarris’s perspective, auteurism appeared to be a quasi-mystical unearthing of that which was “imbedded in the stuff of cinema and [could] not be rendered in non-cinematic terms” (51). Ultimately, it was this notion of interior meaning that transformed a metteur-en-scène into an auteur, for an

141 auteur could reshape cinematic materials—that is, the stuff of cinema—into his own image. Therefore, the auteur theory, especially as practiced by the Cahiers critics and translated by Sarris, enabled the reevaluation of popular cinema in aesthetic terms and, at least for a time, conferred considerable critical authority on even commercial filmmakers by reexamining them in terms of Romantic authorship.

This kind of auteurism appeared disruptive almost as soon as it was formulated.

Long before the auteur became a promotional strategy, and even before Roland Barthes pronounced the author dead, declaring that “it is language which speaks, not the author”

(“Death” 143), the auteur had already come under attack. In fact, although the characterization of the author in terms of originality and genius became widely accepted in the nineteenth century, anxiety over authorship did not dissipate even then. For photography destabilized the relationship between authorship and ownership, between intention and authority—causing, in Barthes’s words, a disturbance to civilization. First, it collapsed the difference between the original and the copy. The multiple, imitative images weakened the notion of uniqueness, which, as we have seen, was so important to the Romantics. Writing as early as 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, feared that photography was changing our perception of originality. In an intriguing passage, he argued that even though there is only one Coliseum or Pantheon, we would no longer be interested in what is within them. Instead, we would “hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth” (qtd. in Wells 28; original emphasis).12 With multiple copies available, the originals would no longer matter. Thus, as Liz Wells points out, with the advent of

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photography, “what is called into question is the originality of authorship, the uniqueness

of the art object and the nature of self-expression” (29).

But photography also caused a disturbance in civilization in a more direct fashion, by undermining the very foundation upon which modern authorship was erected. As

Michael North argues, “Arriving just as Wordsworth phrase[d] in its most uncompromising form the Romantic claim of individual authorship, photography establishe[d] a counterregime, one in which authority and authorship [were] set at odds”

(1382). A photograph, it seemed, could be produced without human intervention. When

he invented the Daguerreotype, Louis Daguerre evidently argued that the camera could

not be protected by the laws of copyright.13 Due to what the Surrealists later called its

“automatism,” photography, rather than revealing the depth of individual genius,

appeared to limit—if not entirely erase—the role of the human intermediary. A photograph is not as wholly dependent on its artist as, say, a painting. That is why Susan

Sontag has argued that a painting might more readily be “signed” than a photograph.

“The very nature of photography,” she has noted, “implies an equivocal relation to the photographer as auteur” (On Photography 133–34).14

A similar argument was initially made by André Bazin too, who became the first to

attack the politique des auteurs. For Bazin, the process of producing a photographic, and

by extension cinematic, image was so completely different than it was in the other arts

that it complicated the notion of personal expression. In “The Ontology of the

Photographic Image,” Bazin had argued that since a photograph is produced

“automatically,” the personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only insofar as he selects the actual

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object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect something of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played by that of the painter [or the writer]. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. (13)

This position overturns the assumptions of the auteur theory. Rather than focus on the creativity of an individual director, Bazin emphasized “the impassive lens” of the camera, capable of re-presenting reality “in all its virginal purity to [his] attention and consequently to [his] love” (“Ontology” 15). Even though the photographer made the choice of object to be photographed, it was the mechanical process of photography that triumphed. For Bazin, then, the automatism of the cinematic apparatus was more important than the genius of this or that auteur.

That is not to say that Bazin did not value individual directors, especially those working within the studio system. After all, he inaugurated the Cahiers critics’ enthusiasm for popular cinema through the work of Hollywood directors, an enthusiasm that directly led to the articulation of the politique des auteurs. As Colin MacCabe has argued, “If Bazin presented them with Welles and Rossellini, then the young critics [at

Cahiers] would present their master with Hitchcock, Wyler and Hawks” (152). But these directors, Welles especially, energized Bazin to turn to an appreciation of the studio system. “For all film-lovers who had reached the age of cinematic reason by 1946,”

Bazin remarked, “the name of Orson Welles is identified with the enthusiasm of rediscovering the American cinema” (Orson Welles 33). For Bazin, American cinema seemed to have gone through a renaissance during the war years. “[S]till more,” he argued, Welles “epitomized the conviction, shared by every young critic at the time, of being present at a rebirth and a revolution in the art of Hollywood” (Orson Welles 33).

But for Bazin, the rebirth of that cinema, which ultimately led to the development of his

144 theory about the genius of the system, was far more significant than the genius of Orson

Welles himself.

What Bazin decried was the Cahiers critics’ blind faith in individual expression, arguing against François Truffaut’s famous remark: “There are no works, there are only auteurs.” In his most vigorous critique of the auteur theory in “On the politique des auteurs,” he challenged the young Cahiers critics for exclusively focusing on “the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference” (255). Unlike the later poststructuralist attack on the very notion of authorship, arising out of the dismantling of

(Romantic) subjectivity, Bazin was not opposed to celebrating auteurs.15 His chief objection to the politique des auteurs was that according to this theory, “any old splash of paint [could] be valued according to its measurements and the celebrity of its signature”

(255). As Christian Keathley correctly argues, “While it is true that Bazin’s history of style encroached on connoisseurship in that it clearly privileged one stylistic tendency

(realism) over others, that privilege was rigorously justified in terms of film’s ontology, and not just according to his individual taste” (18). In other words, what he disapproved of was the obsession with the author at the expense of the cinematic text. The exclusive practice of auteurism, he believed, led to the danger of “the negation of the film to the benefit of praise of its auteur” (258). As Sontag put it several years later, “the act of artistic creation [was] more uncertain and vulnerable in the cinema than elsewhere” (On

Photography 258). The trouble with auteurism was that a film was judged a success or failure based solely on how closely it resembled the critic’s conception of that particular auteur—or how nearly it represented what the auteurist considered what Andrew Sarris later termed the “élan of the soul” (“Notes” 51).16

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I admit that this particular approach to authorship has since been discredited in film

studies. Since the death of the author, such pronouncements about creative authority have been associated with a naïve intentionality and appropriately dismissed. But although the

author may be dead, the auteur has survived. He has now been transformed into an

industrial auteur. While there is no longer the baggage of Romantic expressionism, the

“commerce of auteurism,” as Timothy Corrigan puts it, “guarantee[s] a relationship

between audience and movie in which an intentional and authorial agency governs, as a

kind of brand-name vision that precedes and succeeds the film, the way that movie is

seen and received” (102). Grounding their critiques in cultural and reception histories,

this new auteurism raises valuable questions about the auteur’s role in an industrial and

economic context, questions that had been largely ignored by the earlier generation of

auteurists. The new auteur has become an extratextual authorial agency, whose body of

work gains meaning by the virtue of his signature. That is to say, the film is a “Coppola”

film, and is interpreted as such, because it has been signed by Francis Ford Coppola. As

Corrigan argues, “the auteur-star is meaningful primarily as a promotion or recovery of a

movie or group of movies, frequently regardless of the filmic text itself” (105). So, while

we are no longer talking about the élan of an auteur’s soul, the tendency is still toward

establishing a coherent authorial figure, whose (extratextual) presence informs our

understanding of all of his films. As Thomas Leitch puts it in his analysis of the way

Hitchcock criticism has changed and yet remained the same, “poststructuralists, who

ought to have no truck with Hitchcock the auteur, have found not only his films but

‘Hitchcock’ the director as a paradigmatic figure, equally useful” (34). In other words,

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even the later approach pulls together all the films made by a director under the name of

the author.

But what about individual films that do not conform to that author’s signature?

What about those happy accidents that are not the result of an authorial agency, whether

that is a product of the creative personality or the marketing structures that define it? It

was exactly these questions that bothered Bazin, who ended his rebuttal of the politique

des auteurs by arguing for a reevaluation of the notion of auteurism itself. Rather than

focusing on this or that director, he wanted to reassess auteurism as a discourse. “This

does not mean one has to deny the role of the auteur,” Bazin posited, “but simply give

him back the preposition without which the noun auteur remains but a halting concept.

Auteur, yes, but what of?” (258).17

This question becomes especially difficult to answer in the case of The Stranger.

Orson Welles is a good test case for Bazin’s rebuttal of the politique des auteurs. He is

widely regarded as an auteur, even the auteur. That is to say, Welles is usually

considered, as Richard Macksey suggests, the “presiding model of Romantic genius, the

myth of the explosive, comprehensive talent challenging corporate power and ultimately

becoming the victim of its own genius” (2). However, partly due to the contingencies of

production over the course of his career, his oeuvre does not cohere as neatly as Alfred

Hitchcock’s or Howard Hawks’s. If anything, Welles seems to resemble Sontag’s model for a “corporate rather than individual authorship,” which is a term she uses to consider

those photographers whose work is too diverse or inconsistent (On Photography 134).

But even that is not an adequate explanation for Orson Welles. For not all of his

films can be praised in the name of the author. In fact, The Stranger poses exactly this

147 problem. The Welles film that led to a renewed enthusiasm for Hollywood after the war was not the one released that year (in 1946), The Stranger, but the original Wellesian film, one that all his later films would be measured against—and the one in relation to which all other films would be found deficient—Citizen Kane. Ironically, then, while

Bazin was rediscovering Hollywood studio filmmaking, and detecting the genius of that system, Welles himself was making the most generic film of his career. For The Stranger does not display well the three levels of auteurist expression. Moreover, it is generic in another way; its finished/released version is a standard genre film. That is to say, it is unlike the more trenchant postwar noirs that exhibited an existential anxiety reflecting the moral ambiguity of the times. So, how do we think about this un-auteurist film, released in the same year that Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton identify as the turning point in American film history, “evolving toward a more authentic and often more brutal art” (30)?

On the surface, The Stranger is a mediocre film, a generic detective thriller with some noirish accents. It is considered a Wellesian failure. Therefore, it can be easily explained in terms of this familiar tale: a lone artist, consistently working against the system, is finally trapped by it. His authority is undermined, his signature style overturned. The auteur does not prevail. In a sense, there is no mystery here. The

Stranger seems to be a straightforward case of the triumph of the vertically-integrated studio system. The film came in under budget and on time, and it was the only Welles venture that was successful at the box office upon first release. But it is widely regarded as a critical failure.

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Following Bazin himself, who declared that The Stranger is a “parody” of a Welles film, film critics have paid scant attention to it, almost unanimously dismissing it as the

“worst” work in the director’s oeuvre. Peter Cowie, for instance, notes that “the film is as uncomfortable an experience to watch as it must have been for Welles to make” (95).

Writing about its conventional linear structure, Barbara Leaming argues that this was

Welles’s “least personal film,” because “[m]issing was the disjunctive cinematic style that Orson had made his signature in Kane” (315).18 And while Joseph McBride allows that it may not be as bad a film as it seems upon first viewing, he still finds The Stranger

“a disappointing piece of work” (Rev. ed. 100). Even James Naremore, who investigates the Welles canon more deeply than any other historian, concludes that the artist has been so completely suppressed here that it “could have been directed by anybody” (125). In fact, the film has been of little interest to Welles scholars. Aside from lamenting the censorship of artistic vision, especially in the lost scenes, critics have found little that is even worthy of discussion. This attitude toward the film is best summed up by Robert

Garis’s recent pronouncement that “The Stranger has been generally condescended to, mostly because it deserves to be” (96). The film, he argues, “isn’t very interesting and doesn’t matter very much, particularly to people who value Welles’s work highly” (97).

Thus, The Stranger is not an important film. It doesn’t matter very much, for it is ostensibly the farthest from authorial intent.

To a certain extent, Welles is himself responsible for this sort of reception. In an interview with André Bazin, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi, he proclaimed, “There is nothing of me in that film” (74). Stressing that he had little control over the script or the editing, he argued that the film “had absolutely no interest for [him]” (74). For it was,

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he added, “the one of my films of which I am least the author” (74). Welles’s desire to

disassociate himself from the film seems to anticipate the Allen Smithee phenomenon.

Allen Smithee, of course, is the pseudonym used by directors who wish to disown films

when they feel that creative control has been wrested from them by the Hollywood

machine, which values profit not art. This practice didn’t begin until two decades after

Welles had signed his name to a restrictive contract for The Stranger that, as Heylin

points out, “tied him tighter than a Victorian corset” (169). Considering the production struggles over his first Hollywood venture since the public showdown with RKO over the mid-shooting cancellation of It’s All True, one can imagine that Welles might well have disowned the film, and asked that his name be struck from its credits, if that convention had been available at the time.19 But, we might ask, as Peter Conrad does in a recent reassessment of the stories the self-proclaimed genius told about his life, “how could

Welles—who as usual directed it, acted in it, and wrote a good deal of the script—leave himself out?” (223).

Here’s another way to think about Welles’s supposed absence. Welles would often claim that he stayed on the picture to show that he could work within the studio system, that he could “say ‘action’ and ‘cut’ just like all the other fellas” (qtd. in Megahey 189).

In other words, this may not be a case of suppressed authorship after all. For Welles sometimes asserted as well that with The Stranger he had intended to make a picture worthy of the institutional mode of filmmaking, almost to debunk the myth of the romantic genius and show that he “didn’t glow in the dark” (qtd. in Heylin 171). While I do not want to privilege one strand of directorial commentary over another, especially when talking about someone as mercurial and self-contradictory as Orson Welles, I

150 highlight this point because it is often left unaddressed in any assessment of the film. As mentioned earlier, most critics have assumed that The Stranger is the least Wellesian film, characteristic of the oppressive regime of the studio system, where ultimately, as

Andrew Sinclair puts it, “his genius was put in a straightjacket” (44). That is to say, citing the “lost” scenes as evidence, they have established that this is the one Wellesian film of which Welles is not the auteur. That is why the film has not mattered much in the debate over Welles’s authorship.

Yet, The Stranger is deeply concerned with questions of authorship and authority.

For, even though Welles-playing-Kindler-playing-Rankin strikes off the swastika on the notepad, his/their authority is not obliterated. Indeed, in that conventional moment, his signature is intentionally erased. Still, The Stranger continues to be cited as an Orson

Welles film. So, while the most striking scenes may be lost and the genius may be missing, in this case, an ostensibly un-Wellesian film has significant implications for the role of the auteur in the studio system. What we need in this case is a different way of thinking about auteurism and the name of the author.

Surfacing Evidence

Here is a story about another missing letter. This is a simple mystery, for the criminal is known to all. He has stolen a letter and is now using it to blackmail its author, who is a person of prominence. This should be a fairly straightforward case to solve: if the police retrieve the letter, the extortion ends. So they launch a series of systematic investigations, but to no avail. Despite their best efforts, the police are unable to unearth that letter. The crime remains unsolved, the letter unfound—perhaps because of the simplicity of the thing itself. While the police are frantically digging away to find clues

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that might lead them to the original dispatch, the criminal and the letter are in fact hiding

in plain sight. Having seemingly exhausted all possibilities, they approach a private

detective. A month later, the detective has already recovered the letter by stealing it back

from the original thief. He claims that the reason the police could not find it is because it

was hidden in the most obvious place. Of course, the letter is then returned to its original

author, and the blackmail, we assume, promptly ends.

The detective I am referring to is, of course, C. Auguste Dupin, who solves the

mystery of that infamous purloined letter. Along with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is usually

seen as inaugurating the detective genre. Indeed, Poe himself is credited with authorizing

the modern detective, an intuitive intellectual who examines evidence and resolves

mysteries using a process that is quite different from the standard practice employed by

the police.20 In that sense, Poe’s detective story is a reflection on method. As Dana Brand notes, the detective is “a new urban spectator” who invents “new models for reading and consuming the modern city” (79). What Poe invents with the detective story, then, is an alternative manner of investigation.

Consider, for instance, how Dupin recovers the purloined letter. The tale begins with Monsieur G—, the Prefect of the Parisian police, visiting Dupin with a specific problem that has him “a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles

[them] altogether” (209; original emphasis). The Prefect’s problem is that a letter of utmost importance has been stolen from the queen’s quarters, in her presence, by

Minister D—, who has now acquired undue political power and is using it to blackmail the queen. During the course of his investigation, the Prefect claims that he has searched

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“‘every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be

concealed’” (211). He then proceeds to describe the systematic, almost mathematical,

fashion in which his agents have explored the interior of Minister D—’s apartment, rummaging through every potential hiding space, believing that “‘to a properly trained

police-agent, such a thing as a ‘secret’ drawer is impossible’” (211; original emphasis).

Still, as we know, the letter remains missing.

Thus stumped, the Prefect now approaches Dupin, who is not so interested in the

search. Instead, he asks for a detailed description of the stolen object itself. He is

intrigued not only by the letter’s internal content but especially by its external

appearance. According to Dupin, the Prefect does not focus enough on the particulars of

this purloined letter. It is not that the Prefect has conducted a less than thorough search.

But his method is flawed because “he has taken it for granted that all men proceed to

conceal a letter, not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg, but, at least, in some

out-of-the-way hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a

man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg” (216; original emphasis).21 In

other words, Dupin argues that the Prefect employs the same method for every case,

assuming (incorrectly, of course) that every criminal would try to hide a stolen object by

burying it in the deepest recess. However, as Dupin soon discovers, Minister D— has

hidden the letter in plain sight.

Dupin detects the purloined letter in the most unlikely place. Rather than scouring

Minister D—’s apartment for hidden clues, the detective inverts the Prefect’s

expectations and looks for the letter in plain sight. And he finds it there: inserted

carelessly into a card-rack made of pasteboard. At first glance, the letter appears soiled,

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crumpled, and torn; it does not conform to the specifications offered by the Prefect. It

also looks rather common, not something that would involve a royal personage, and therefore for Dupin it is “‘suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document’” (221). What Dupin finds most intriguing is that it does not ostensibly resemble the original purloined letter, for Minister D— has succeeded in hiding the letter in plain view of every visitor by having “‘turned [it], as a glove, inside out, re-directed and re-sealed’” (221). The detective recovers the letter by stealthily replacing it with a facsimile of the purloined letter, appropriately turned inside out. Dupin succeeds where the Parisian police have failed precisely by not making their fatal error of

equating truth with depth and eschewing all that seems superficial. As James Verner

correctly notes, “If, as Dupin points out, truth is not always found ‘in a well,’ but is

frequently discovered on the ‘surface’ of a situation, then the ability only to plumb the

‘profound’ and ‘deep’ detail of an event’s intricate ‘recesses’ amounts to blindness, no

matter how adept the viewer is at this type of scrutiny” (15). Thus, the detective’s method of investigation entails inverting the clues, or turning them inside out, such that exploring simplicity itself becomes his (complex) strategy.

In an interesting analogy in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin discusses his method by likening it to gazing at a star. He proposes that the way to look at a star is “‘by glances . . . by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior)’” (153; original emphasis). Arguing that

“truth” is often discovered in the frivolous, he suggests that looking at a star

“superficially” enhances our perception of it. “‘By undue profundity,’” Dupin maintains,

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“‘we perplex and enfeeble thought’” (153). Therefore, the method of detection involves

subverting the opposition between depth and surface, between inside and out.

The three Dupin stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie

Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter,” demonstrate Poe’s most complete realization not

only of how the detective functions in modernity but also of his ability to remain outside

modernity in order to critique it. In these tales, detection amounts to a method of reading

clues that destabilizes the bourgeois boundaries between interiority and exteriority. The

detective, in other words, functions on the threshold. And it is precisely this liminality—

the ability to be “neither in nor out,” as suggested by the subtitle of an earlier Poe story,

“Loss of Breath”—that attracted Walter Benjamin to the detective.

For Benjamin, the dialectical relationship between the interior and exterior becomes vital for analyzing modernity. Starting in the late eighteenth century, coinciding with the birth of the modern author, Benjamin observed that the “private individual

makes his entrance on the stage of history” (AP 8). This individual is defined primarily in terms of his ability to oppose his private home from his public place of work. Since the city begins to be defined as a place of terror out there, the individual tries to feel secure by believing that the interior is absolutely segregated from the exterior space. However, such orderly distinctions are no longer possible. As Dana Polan correctly argues, the detective is “a figure who can show the ambiguities of place, the aggressions that lie beneath the surface of an ordered society” (237). That is exactly what Poe’s detective fiction demonstrates: the terror lies as much within as it does without. Moreover, if, as

Polan argues, “Baudelaire’s Paris is the site of a certain reversibility of meanings” (236; original emphasis), then ultimately the detective is hardly distinguishable from the

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criminal, an idea that Poe was himself partial to, as evinced by the distinct similarities between Dupin and Minister D—.

That is why Benjamin regards Poe as “the first physiognomist of the domestic interior” (9). Indeed, even the arcade presents itself as an external space configured as interiority. In an interesting exploration of the arcade’s spatial dialectic, especially as observed by the flâneur, who, we will see, gets transformed into the detective, Benjamin suggests: “It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room”

(AP, “M [The Flânuer]” 417). But, as Tom Gunning points out in a recent essay on the arcades, “the opposition between street and intérieur does not form a simple dichotomy; the significance of the arcade lies partly in its simultaneous embodiment of both aspects of this apparent contradiction” (109–10). Like the domestic dwelling, the arcade provides a space for interpenetration of exteriority and interiority, which undermines the traditional division between exterior and interior upon which bourgeois society is founded, wherein the private is walled off from the public, wherein the individual exists undisturbed by the community. Gunning argues that Benjamin locates the significance of

the detective story in precisely its ability to stage this interpenetration. While he accepts

Carlo Ginsburg’s contention that the detective story originates with the scrutiny of the

indelible trace as a clue, Gunning suggests that, for Benjamin, the key to the detective’s method is “the optical exchange between interior and exterior” (110). What the detective

foregrounds in his investigation is the uncertainty of the intérieur. For the nineteenth

century interior “disguises itself—puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of

moods” (AP, “I [The Interior]” 216). Moreover, in this new interior, “[w]here doors and

walls are made of mirrors, there is no telling outside from in, with all the equivocal

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illumination” (AP, “R [Mirrors]” 537). It is this alluring interweaving of interior-exterior

that the detective investigates.

But the detective is also implicated in this interpenetration, for he does not posses a

panoptical view of interiority. The detective gaze is often equated with a Foucauldian

optics of surveillance, one that is able to observe the scene of the crime from a detached,

exterior perspective. Benjamin does suggest that in the panopticon, “not only does one

see everything, but one sees it in all ways” (AP, “Q [Panorama]” 531). In “A Case of

Identity,” for instance, Sherlock Holmes similarly fantasizes with Dr. Watson about being

able to see everything in all ways. He wishes to “‘fly out of that window hand in hand,

hover over this great city, gently remov[ing] the roofs, and peep[ing] in at queer things

which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the

wonderful chains of events’” (191). However, that is a limited understanding of the

Benjaminian detective. For the detective gaze is always already caught up in the optical

dialectic between exteriority and interiority. What his gaze activates, according to

Gunning, is “the complex dialectical optics of modernity” (127). The detective “not only observes and investigates but also—at least potentially—investigates his or her point of view” (110).

The detective has often been linked to the flâneur. He is sometimes considered the rightful heir of the flâneur, while others regard him as the opposite of that idling character whom we encountered in the previous chapter. Benjamin himself saw the detective being

“preformed in the figure of the flâneur” (AP, “M [The Flâneur]” 442). I would argue, as

Dana Brand does, that the detective is not so much a contradiction of the flâneur as a

“dialectical adaptation of him” (105). The flâneur enjoyed his Parisian glory days in the

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1830s, and just as he was beginning to drift away, Poe began authoring his detective tales. In fact, there is one short story that traces the transformation of the metropolitan stroller into the modern detective.

Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is that story, which exists at the threshold between these two figures. In his analysis of that transformation, Benjamin ties the story to the rising impact of photography by calling it “an x-ray picture of a detective story” (“The

Flâneur” 48). It begins with idle flânerie and shows how the flâneur’s sketch might develop into an investigation. In the opening scenes of “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe offers a remarkable portrait of the flâneur, who observes London life from behind a coffeehouse window. He waits there, detachedly surveying the crowd, confident that he can read, “even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (478). The flâneur believes the city and its crowd to be legible, until he notices a man in that crowd who cannot be analyzed or figured out. He is, he says, “singularly aroused, startled, fascinated” by the stranger (478), who appears, for the first time, to be a threatening mystery. This is where the flâneur encounters his fundamental problem: “How to gain knowledge yet remain unchanged; how to witness, yet remain unmoved?” (Shields 76).

He is so intrigued by the stranger that he decides to give up his invisibility, pursuing the odd individual as he traverses the city, which suddenly becomes, like a strange city in a film noir, illegible. The flâneur concludes that his mode of interpretation is inadequate in relation to the man of the crowd, whom he now considers “‘the type and the genius of deep crime’” (481). After this stage, Benjamin believes, “No matter what trail the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime” (“The Flâneur” 41). Thus, the detective comes into being in order to investigate the strange genius of deep crime by

158 disturbing the boundaries between depth and surface. His method, as we have seen, involves turning the clues in the investigation inside out.22

In the following section, I would like to draw on the detective’s method to investigate the strange case of Orson Welles’s The Stranger. The name “Orson Welles” is usually regarded either as a mark of genius or as a sign of failure. Both camps employ tactics similar to those used by “the investigative reporter Thompson’s staff editor in

Citizen Kane,” who is, as Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests, “bent on finding a single formula for explaining a man’s life” (376). But no such single formula exists. That is where the detective comes in. As a historian, the Benjaminian detective would be highly appropriate for investigating the varied ways in which Welles, especially in a film such as

The Stranger, navigates the tensions between the auteur and the apparatus as well as explores the relationship between autography and authority. But this would be a different kind of investigation than the wildly romantic discourse of the Cahiers critics, one that, as Naremore has noted, “formed canons and fixed the names of people we should study”

(“Authorship” 21; emphasis added). But what if we un-fix these names? What if, instead of considering the directorial signature as a source of interior meaning and auteurism as a way to uncover his submerged personality, we turn his name inside out?

Like the purloined letter, the name of the author is actually “hidden” on the surface of the text. As Dudley Andrew puts it, “Always a problematic and very special sign, the signature of the author is a mark on the surface of the text signaling its source” (83). It is this problematic sign that the detective can explore by inspecting the significance of the name, its meanings, associations, and variations. If the detective-historian were to explore the signature as a clue, the investigation would be similar to the way Jacques Derrida

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examines literary texts through the name of the author. In Signsponge, Derrida proposes a

way out of the Romantic form of literary criticism by demonstrating how unstable the

name, the proper noun, can be. The signature experiment involves inverting the name into

a common noun. By doing so, Derrida argues, you “lose the identity, the title of

ownership over the text: you let it become a monument or part of the text, as a thing or a common noun” (56). The loss of identity also results in a loss of a set of values or characteristics that is taken for granted by the auteurist critic. In the case of Welles, what is lost is the assumed “Wellesian” signature.

But what is gained from that loss is the multiplicity of meanings generated by the common noun, which the signateurist then employs for an alternative investigation of the text. “While auteurism centripetally (and misleadingly) gathers filmmaking’s disparate work into one proper noun (‘Hitchcock,’ ‘Capra’),” Robert B. Ray suggests, “a book like

Singsponge works centrifugally, amending structuralism’s ‘death of the author’ by perversely using the author’s name to scatter his effects” (Andy Hardy 182). Rather than an individual who stands outside the text and confers meaning on it, which is the auteurist approach, the name of the author now becomes an integral part of the text. As Robert

Scholes, Nancy Comley, and Gregory Ulmer have argued, the signateurist approach enables “the proper name [to] move[] from designating a particular individual to becom[ing] the key to a general theory of how texts are constructed” (257). This kind of move, they add, “reminds us of an ancient belief in the similarity or correspondence between the world outside and the interior life or a person, between the macro and micro worlds” (240). Thus, using names as clues, the signateurist critic engages in an interpenetration of interiority and exteriority that the detective himself first introduced.

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For the signature is an articulation on the threshold. It exists outside the text but its

resonances can be found within it. It is, as Peggy Kamuf has noted, “the mark of an articulation at the border of life and letters, body and language” (39). Moreover, the

signature pulls in both directions, “appropriating the text under the sign of the name, expropriating the name into the play of the text” (Kamuf 13).

But how exactly would the detective move between these spaces? How does he

proceed from one clue to the next if indeed clues were to be discovered in signatures?

Common names have a tendency to proliferate; therefore, detection would not amount to

a one-to-one correspondence between names and their meanings. As the reporter

Thompson concludes near the end of Citizen Kane, when he cannot find a singular,

satisfying solution to “Rosebud”: “I don’t think any [single] word can explain a man’s

life.” In thinking about the detective as a historian, Julian Lethbridge suggests that the

method here is what one would use while doing a crossword puzzle: “one must begin

somewhere, but in the logic of the solution there is no starting point; each answer offers a

growing confirmation of others” (104). The investigation in the following section does

not proceed (chrono)logically either. Instead, since there are multiple entrances into the

text, there are also multiple investigations that fold onto each other. Therefore, there will

be many conclusions. “Writing,” Foucault has argued, “unfolds like a game that

inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind” (116). The writing

of the signature experiment similarly unfolds like a game, until its rules are left behind.

The signateurist method, Ray points out, is a “readymade research technique—in

Derrida’s words, ‘what can be done with a dictionary’” (Andy Hardy 194).

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The signateurist approach is particularly apt for analyzing Hollywood, where

names—not only of directors but of actors and characters too—were strictly regulated.

As Ray notes, in the studio system, “all slippages between proper and improper names

were to be anticipated and policed” (Andy Hardy 186). This kind of policing becomes

even more crucial in the postwar landscape, where naming names would soon result in

dangerous consequences. In fact, the Waldorf Statement, a joint declaration from all the

studio heads outlining the industry’s policy of not knowingly employing any Communist,

was released just a year later. The Statement would open the way to the naming of the

Hollywood Ten. While 1946 was the most financially successful year for Hollywood, it

also signaled troubles that were just on the horizon. Ultimately, these postwar shifts

would result in enforced anonymity for several prominent writers and directors, who

would not be able to sign their own names to their projects for many years to come. As

Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten, put it: “Cashing a check made out to an

imaginary person is not a simple matter when your own name cannot appear as an endorser” (qtd. in Dick, Radical Innocence 228).23 Welles himself seems to have responded to these cultural changes by making the most standard film of his career. In this context, following the detective, I would like to investigate the signatures in and of

The Stranger. The detective’s method will enable us to circumvent the traditional

auteurist approach of digging deep for interior meaning. This may also be particularly

relevant in the case of Orson Welles, who, Gilbert Adair argues, “was the sole American

filmmaker to have created, as director and actor, a set of characters whose names, as well

as faces, we continue to remember” (Flickers 94–95; original emphasis). The next section

will remember the name of Orson Welles, but we will also forget it in order to rediscover

162 it as something else. So, if, as Poe suggests, “‘Truth is not always in a well’” (“Murders”

153), then the detective-historian can look at the surface for clues and uncover “truths” that might be hiding in plain sight.

Naming Names

The Stranger is a model detective tale. It chronicles the pursuit of a Nazi war criminal, Franz Kindler, by detective Wilson (Edward G. Robinson, after Welles lost his bid for Agnes Moorehead in this role), an officer with the Allied War Crimes

Commission. But unlike Goebbels or Himmler, Kindler apparently “had a passion for anonymity.” Before leaving Germany, he has “destroyed every evidence, down to the last fingerprint.” Therefore, tracing him will not be an easy task. Wilson’s only clue is that the notorious Franz Kindler has a “hobby that amounts to a mania”: he has an avid interest in antique clocks. His trail leads Wilson from Germany to a quiet New England town called Harper, which has a highly conspicuous, eighteenth-century gothic clock tower at its center. When Wilson arrives there, he expects to investigate an ex-Nazi who has gone underground in this sleepy American town. He decides to proceed systematically, by scrutinizing every stranger who has arrived there in the last few months. By a literal process of elimination—striking off names of new arrivals in Harper in the past year, Black, Maynard, Young, Shepard, Sudder—he is left with the one name that oddly echoes Kindler’s, Rankin. To his surprise, what he discovers is that the stranger is the beloved new history professor at the boys’ prep school, Charles Rankin, who is about to marry Mary Longstreet, the daughter of a state Supreme Court justice, the most respected man in town.

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Several clues begin to point to Rankin, but the most obvious one is his fixation on clocks. Rankin is obsessed with trying to fix the church clock. Mary even wonders what

would happen to Harper if the clock ran again, suggesting that “the clock’s hands have

never moved.” Near the end, he succeeds in fixing the clock, and even though that is a

strange development for the folks in Harper, he is regarded merely as an odd enthusiast.

Nobody except Wilson suspects Rankin. Interestingly, the former Nazi mastermind has

not chosen to conceal himself at all. Except for a slight name change, he is hiding in plain

sight. This becomes an abrupt revelation for the outraged townspeople at the end, when

Rankin is shown to be the former SS officer Franz Kindler. The viewer, of course, has

known all along. During the thrilling finale, Rankin is discovered hiding in the clock

tower. As he tries to escape, he is impaled by the sword-carrying figure in the tower, and

the stranger falls to his death. Wilson seemingly reasserts control over the town,

proclaiming it “V-Day in Harper.” Ostensibly at least, all’s well that ends well(es).

Although the criminal element is destroyed at the end, however, anxiety over

authority becomes clear in The Stranger right in its opening credits. Over the backdrop of

a gothic clock tower, where the film’s thrilling conclusion will unfold, the title sequence

displays the names of people involved in the making of the film on both sides of the

camera. The directorial credit, which appears at the very end, after the producer, is rather

unusual.24 While the production credit is listed as “Produced by S. P. Eagle,” for the

director, the title only reads, “Direction Orson Welles.” Curiously, the preposition by,

which would confer directorial authority, is not available to him in the credits. One might

say that the signature is not very firmly moored to the film. Thus unfixed, we can now

use the name of the author to disperse its effects in the text. Fortunately, the name Welles

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connotes multiplicity. Unlike other auteurs, such as Ray or Ford or Hitchcock, whose

names allude to the singular, Welles indicates plurality. Therefore, I would like to initiate this signature experiment by claiming that it is difficult to define Welles; the name of the auteur refuses to follow the path of auteurist criticism. To put it differently, while there is a brand called “Welles,” the brand-name will not be so singularly dependable. So what is this thing called welles?

To begin with, Welles’s name signifies depth. We can ignore the second e for now, since Welles is just “his own fancier, more quaintly olde English spelling” (Conrad 17) of

Wells, which was his family name in previous generations. Of course, there is also another connection here, to H. G. Wells, whose War of the Worlds Welles adapted for the radio in 1938, and who, according to Simon Callow, considered suing Welles for

“unauthorized changes” (520). That “unauthorized” adaptation was a notorious broadcasting disaster, although Welles would always wonder how the listeners did not recognize the voice that always opened with “Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Orson

Welles.” But it was also that disaster that brought Welles’s name to the attention of RKO chief, George Schaefer. Interestingly, when in 1940 Wells met Welles, whom he called his “little namesake,” the former “challenged Orson to drop the supernumerary, affected

‘e’ in his surname, and said he could see no reason for it” (Conrad 17). Orson himself didn’t, except in a brief instant when signing his name on a painting in F for Fake, but let us momentarily take up Wells’s challenge. If we think of this signature in terms of an enclosed, deep space that extends vertically, such as a well or an abyss, then we find that the name corresponds to the traditional understanding of Welles as a profound genius.

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Further, his genius was primarily defined in terms of his use of deep focus

cinematography. So, the well may be taken as our clue to the auteurist signature.

We need only recall the oft-cited scene from Citizen Kane where Susan Alexander

(Dorothy Comingore) attempts to commit suicide, in order to think about how the use of depth of field exemplifies the Wellesian signature. After suffering a humiliating opera debut, Susan tries to commit suicide, but Charles Foster Kane and another man break into her bedroom to save her. There are several planes of depth, all in focus. In the foreground, we see an enormous glass with a spoon in it as well as a medicine bottle, which together occupy at least a quarter of the screen. The bed where Susan is assumed to be lying, is located in the middle ground, but it is barely visible, overshadowed by the

objects in the foreground. However, we are made aware of this plane due to the sound of

her weak breathing. Except for all kinds of distracting objects, where the viewer’s eye

may democratically wander, the large bedroom is, from the narrative point of view,

empty. As Bazin describes it, “far away in the background of this private desert is the

door, rendered even more distant by the lens’ false perspective” (Orson Welles 77–78).

We hear knocking first, and then Welles bursts into the room. The entire scene takes

place in deep focus, revealing all three planes at the same time. Combined with the use of

the long take, this sequence demonstrates Welles’s distinctive use of deep cinematic

space. But depth of focus here is not merely a stylistic device imposed on an otherwise

regular mise-en-scène. As Bazin has suggested, “the decoupage in depth becomes a

technique which constitutes the meaning of the story. It isn’t merely a way of placing the camera, sets and actors; it places the very nature of the story in question” (Orson Welles

81).25 Therefore, we might say that depth becomes the fundamental distinction between

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Welles and any other filmmaker, and that distinction becomes the key to the auteur’s signature. But, as mentioned earlier, I am referring here to more than just depth of cinematic space. The notion of depth was used over and over again by the Romantics as a true test of genius. “Therefore dive deep into thy bosom,” Edward Young urged the poet,

“contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee . . . let thy genius rise (if a genius thou hast) as the sun from chaos” (qtd. in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp 200). From a traditional auteurist perspective, then, Welles’s signature conforms to his association with a depth, of focus and of vision, which translates into a profound sense of him as a

Romantic artist.

But this particular signature is missing in the case of The Stranger. In this film,

Charles Rankin enters his wife Mary’s bedroom while she is lying in bed, apparently dreaming. The camera follows Rankin as he slowly walks into the room and stands next to Mary’s bed. He casts a large shadow, which towers over her as she begins to stir. In fact, through most of the scene, all we see of Charles is his shadow on the wall. Unlike

Citizen Kane, where deep focus cinematography enables Welles to explore different spatial and temporal planes in a single shot, here it is neatly incorporated into the linear narrative. Mary begins to tell Charles about her dream, in which she sees Meinike,

Charles’s most recent victim, “walking all by himself across a deserted city block, where every move he threw a shadow.” “But when he moved away,” she says, “the shadow stayed there behind him, just like a carpet.” The shadow in her dream is of course a manifestation of the shadow her husband casts on her and on the narrative, thus connecting her nightmares to him. While there is spatial depth, all the action takes place on a single plane. Other than that, the shot is literally empty. Bazin had argued that the

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development of deep focus cinematography represented “a dialectical step forward in the

evolution of film language.” But in this shot, deep focus is used not for dialectical but for

dramatic effect.

In his essay showing how the use of deep focus cinematography evolved in Classic

Hollywood from the innovative early 1940s to its full-blown use after the war, David

Bordwell has argued that while Welles’s cinematographic advances in Citizen Kane were

flamboyant and controversial, the studio system quickly found a way to appropriate those

innovations in the service of storytelling.26 After 1942, Bordwell notes, “Hollywood

adopted a less picturesque deep-focus style better suited to the demands of classical

narrative and decoupage” (120).27 In other words, the seemingly radical shifts in mise-en-

scène are standardized by the studio system, such that a shot that is “so rare in 1937 . . .

[becomes] quite ordinary a decade later” (93). The Stranger clearly belongs to the later

tradition in its “ordinary” use of deep focus. Interestingly, in place of cinematographer

Gregg Toland, who saw himself as an artist, in The Stranger, Welles uses Russell Metty,

whose name itself alludes to that standard craftsman of the studio system, the metteur-en-

scène.

So, if the Wellesian signature is missing here, let us turn to the other signatory on

the credits, S. P. Eagle. S. P. Eagle was in fact the name briefly assumed by the

independent producer Sam Spiegel until 1954. Like so many other Jewish European

émigrés, Spiegel came to Hollywood as a stranger. As a fugitive from Germany in 1933

where All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) had been banned, Spiegel stopped over in

Mexico before coming to America, a journey that ironically echoes Kindler’s move from

Germany to America. Once in Hollywood, biographer Andrew Sinclair explains, “he

168 lived under an assumed name on the charity of other refugee filmmakers from central

Europe” (69). Then, Spiegel reinvented himself in the American tradition, telling varied stories about his past to different people. He even renamed himself S. P. Eagle, apparently “struck by a burst of patriotism” (Sinclair 1).

But the name change was not as innocuous as that. As a producer, Spiegel himself operated like an eagle, much like other authoritarian producers, such as Irving Thalberg,

Darryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick. In fact, he later went on to produce Elia Kazan’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1976). Under his watchful eye,

Welles, like every other director, had to surrender artistic control, having been forced to sign a very restrictive contract. In other words, under Spiegel’s supervision, Wellesian vision had to be suppressed.28 What Spiegel preferred was a lean and uncomplicated tale, as Sinclair suggests, “with none of the ambiguities that usually made Welles’s films so rich and rare” (44). In opposition to Welles’s deep desire for innovation, Spiegel insisted on following the convention. Even when he later produced such blockbusters as The

Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), his films reflected what

RKO had printed on their stationery after Welles’s spectacular financial failures there in the 1940s: “Showmanship instead of Genius.” Whereas the genius came from an individual director’s personal expression, showmanship was the industry standard.

In that sense, Spiegel seems to stay true to his original signature: in German,

“spiegel” is a common noun meaning looking-glass, mirror, or reflecting surface.

Spiegel’s authority, we might say, derives from a pre-Romantic conception of authorship.

Recall M. H. Abrams’s basic distinction between the two types of authorship, the mirror and the lamp. According to the mirror conception of aesthetics, literary critics valued

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imitation over innovation. What was praised was an author’s ability to mirror already

established standards. As Abrams argues, in this model, the poet was regarded primarily

as “the maker of a work of art according to universal standards of excellence” (The

Mirror and the Lamp 26). The task of a critic was to uncover how well those established

standards had been followed. Spiegel similarly advocated a close adherence to, or

mirroring of, the established rules of the studio system. A director was to be like an

auctor, a craftsman who could successfully reflect the conventions of the system. By that

standard, things had gone well with The Stranger. It was a standard genre film that cashed in over three million, almost three times its cost, upon initial release. Perhaps things had gone too well.

By all accounts, Welles had signed up for The Stranger in order to make a conventional film. After struggling with trying to make ambitious projects like War and

Peace and Crime and Punishment, Otto Friedrich tells us, he wanted to convince “a suspicious Hollywood that he could make a perfectly orthodox film” (266). This new project would be completed on time and under budget, thus disproving accusations that

he was undependable. To a certain extent, these were false accusations, since, as

Naremore points out, “he was never ‘inclined to joke with other people’s money’”

(Magic World 83). Citizen Kane was actually made on a relatively low budget of

$749,000. Yet, during the 1940s, he had developed the reputation of being an unaffordable director. Therefore, The Stranger would be different. The film would still carry his name, but the name would not mean the same thing it had before. So, rather than the “Director’s Cut,” what we end up with is a highly efficient narrative, proving that

Welles could indeed “say ‘action’ and ‘cut’ just like all the other fellas.” To put it another

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way, it is Welles the auteur who becomes the ultimate stranger in this picture. Like a

dutiful auctor, Welles estranges himself from his signature in order to make a film that

would be all too familiar. Let us assume that is in fact the point and therefore look not for depth but perhaps its inverse, the surface. In so doing, we would be following that other

O.W., Oscar Wilde, who once said: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible” (qtd. in Sontag,

Against Interpretation 3).

To judge by appearances is to point out that The Stranger, first and foremost, was an imitation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which is a story about the

strange familiarity of evil. Interestingly, Welles has claimed that this was the only

American film directed by Hitchcock that he admired. In the Hitchcock version, Charles

Oackley, a strangler of wealthy East coast widows, hides in an idyllic Northern California

town of Santa Rosa. There, his sister Emma and her daughter (and his namesake) Charlie

are thrilled to welcome him into their home and community, because they believe he can,

as R. Barton Palmer argues, “save them from their suffocating ordinariness” (5). But

what Uncle Charlie introduces to the small town is an outside world not only of exciting

entertainment but also of crime and deception. Shadow of a Doubt presents an ironic

portrait of wartime America. As Palmer notes, “the Capracorniness of the film’s Santa

Rosa makes room not only for a full gallery of oddball grotesques, but implies (as Emma

and young Charlie both testify) sexual immaturity and failure” (6). That is, the film

exposes the illusion that crime exists out there, disrupting the porous boundaries between

the underworld of crime and the moral world of upstanding small town America. To put

it differently, Hitchcock, whose fascination for Poe has been well documented, ruptures

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the binary opposition between interiority and exteriority, turning the world of small town

America upside down—or we might say, inside out. Hitchcock’s Charles, then, becomes

the kind of criminal Poe’s Dupin would find intriguing.

Welles’s Charles, on the other hand, seems not to be such a character. Truffaut

once said that Wellesian characters were always “exceptional beings.” They were, he

believed, “geniuses or monsters, monstrous geniuses.” Charles Rankin seems to exhibit no such depth. Welles plays him fairly unambiguously. That Rankin is in fact the Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler is never in much doubt. One of his first acts in the film is the murder of old comrade Meinike, who claims he has been sent by the All Highest. This scene with Meinike becomes the key, albeit a very obvious one, to figuring out Rankin’s identity. While the boys at his prep school are out trailing a paper-chase, Rankin drags

Meinike into the woods and murders him with his bare hands. In a rare long take, Welles shows Rankin quickly burying the dead body in a shallow grave. That is all it takes. The mystery is simple, and it is simply revealed.

Indeed, the film is not about our detection of Rankin’s guilt but of his wife Mary’s eventual discovery of his (to us, obvious) genocidal crimes. First, he is not a conflicted figure. Unlike the Charles in Shadow of a Doubt, Palmer argues, Charles Rankin is unmistakably guilty and Mary is truly innocent (10). Nor is he a very complex character.

Unlike other “monstrous geniuses” in the Welles oeuvre, such as Charles Foster Kane or

Hank Quinlan, “the ‘otherness’ of the unheimlich Kindler is not identified with either relentless power or hypnotic sexuality” (10). Nor still is he the ambivalent noir hero.

Borde and Chaumeton have argued that one of the central features of postwar noir is its moral ambivalence: “In it, ‘vice’ is seductive; it is nevertheless experienced as ‘vicious,’

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and the lawbreaker seems obsessed by a sense of anguish and a feeling of guilt” (147).

Charles Rankin, however, is simply vicious. There are no signs of an inner struggle.

Although the names Kindler and Rankin certainly echo the monstrous geniuses, Kane,

Arkadin, and Kindler, in this film, nothing comes of those alliterative associations.

In part, that is because the viewer knows too much. Although he plays the role of

Rankin, Franz Kindler never remains buried. While Wilson later tells Mary that it is difficult to detect a Nazi because “they look like other people and act other people,”

Kindler/Rankin does not fit that mold. During a dinner at Judge Longstreet’s, where he comes face to face with Wilson for the first time, Rankin does not try too hard to keep

Kindler hidden. When the conversation turns to the German “problem,” Rankin becomes an authority on Nazi philosophy, claiming up front that he has “a way of making enemies when [he’s] on that subject.” He says he believes that equality or democracy could never take root in Germany. “Mankind is waiting for the messiah,” he asserts, “but for the

German, the messiah is not the prince of peace—he’s another Barbarossa, another

Hitler.” When Noah cites Marx as a possibility that perhaps Germans might embrace equality, Rankin immediately rebuffs the notion: “Marx wasn’t a German, he was a Jew.”

The others remain skeptical. Eventually, the judge wonders, “If we concede your argument, there is no solution,” to which Rankin responds: “annihilation.” Yet, even these overt references to the Final Solution that are right there on the surface do not raise any suspicions around the table. With the exception of Wilson, everyone else has “a kind of blind faith in the appearance of things” (Palmer 10). In fact, Rankin’s words are dismissed as the odd notions, even ramblings, of a delightful pedagogue.

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The dinner scene is not the only one where Rankin’s obvious guilt goes undetected

by the local community. As they say, from the start, there are too many clues.29 During

their wedding reception, Rankin disappears to bury the body of Meinike a little more

deeply. But the body refuses to stay buried. And after it is dug up by the dog, Red,

Rankin kicks him and later kills him. He is even prepared to kill Mary. “Murder can be a chain,” he says, with “one link leading to another until it circles your neck.” These circles end up with Rankin/Kindler waiting in the phone booth literally doodling a swastika on

the wall. Critics agree that Rankin/Kindler’s basic function in the film is to embody the

threat of renascent fascism. In his daily editorial column for the New York Post, Welles

often agued, “The phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of

renascent Fascism” (qtd. in Freidrich 266). Made right after the war, this film, yet another

generic thriller, is supposed to be a warning about the coming dangers of the McCarthy

era. If that is the case, in The Stranger one need not worry about any smokescreens. Lest

anybody miss it, that message is repeated over and over throughout the film. At this

point, the film has already begun to become excessive. Kristin Thompson argues that one

of the ways in which the cinematic material signifies excess is through redundancy of

narrative information. “After a point,” she points out, “the repeated use of multiple

devices to serve similar functions tends to minimize the importance of their narrative implications” (492). Rather than advancing the narrative, this redundancy “tends to expand the narrative ‘vertically’” (492).

There are other kinds of excesses too—other links in the associative chain, to use

Rankin’s metaphor. While Kindler’s name readily transforms itself into Rankin’s,

Kindler does not stay buried as Rankin. Indeed, the one clue that Wilson intuitively

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notices while striking off the names of other strangers in Harper is the kin-ship between

Rankin and Kindler. But there is more than just a few letters in common between them.

While the townspeople of Harper do not notice it, the overlapping identities of Kindler and Rankin are really obvious. Their names themselves are clues to their roles in the plot.

David Thomson hints at these in passing when he comments that “[t]he unruly bundle of

Kindler and Rankin (containing the name Kane as well as the dreamy threat of a Kain for

kinder—the puzzle fiend cannot quite not notice these things) is played by Orson Welles

in mustache and wavy hair” (Rosebud 266). Although Thomson himself does not, let us try to unravel this unruly bundle, for that will lead to the key to unlocking this film.

Rankin, which is an old English name meaning little shield, provides only a nominal shield. When Wilson finally confronts Mary about Rankin’s past, he actually accuses her of “shielding a murderer.” But Kindler has not remained buried at all, for the

viewer is reminded repeatedly about his being a Nazi fugitive. Kindler is the one whose

name obviously signifies the most authority, since to kindle means to excite or arouse or

set going. As the presumed architect of the Final Solution, the name fits. And Kindler has

a partner in crime. Rankin, with its German roots in “ranke,” means plotter or schemer,

one who is full of deceit and duplicity. If we follow these nominal associations, we

discover a slow piling up of too many redundant details. With all these free-floating

associations, I would say that the linear narrative implodes from within. Michael

Anderegg claims that the

key to understanding what Welles achieves in The Stranger lies in seeing that the actor and the character are locked in an irresoluble conflict: Welles’s desire to expose Franz Kindler as a mad Nazi is in direct opposition to Kindler’s desire to keep that fact well hidden. Welles wants to play Kindler, while Kindler wants to play Rankin. In this contest, Welles wins throughout. (Orson Welles 148)

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That is certainly true at the narrative level. But the inverse is equally true. As we have seen, Kindler does not stay buried as Rankin. So, if Welles wins, he does so in spite of the narrative as well as his own stated intent about wanting to make a film about the hidden dangers of fascism. That is to say, the evidence that lies right on the surface of the text disrupts the linear narrative by violating its own manufactured reality. The fact that the townspeople do not see it lends a touch of the absurd to the text. And, as Truffaut suggests of another auteurist “failure,” Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, “Absurdity

is above all destruction: as the film goes forward, it destroys itself, each scene being a

challenge both to logic in general and to the logic of the preceding scene” (Dixon, Early

Film Criticism 98).30 That is obviously the case with The Stranger. Influenced by his

mentor Jean Renoir, Truffaut may have regarded Welles’s film as a B picture, but there is another “letter” we can use to describe the effect of The Stranger and the role of the auteur in it.

In 1969, only one year after the author had officially been declared dead, Cahiers du Cinéma published an influential piece aiming to redefine the object and purpose of film criticism. In this manifesto, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Jean-Louis Comolli and

Jean Narboni called for a reclassification of cinema. In place of a naïve intentionality that characterized so much of early Cahiers criticism, Comolli and Narboni proposed seven categories, from (a) to (g), for rethinking individual films and their relationship to ideology. The most intriguing of these alphabetized categories is (e), which describes those films that dismantle themselves from within, in spite of the intentions of its director. In these films, they argue, “[a]n internal criticism is taking place” (27). These are distinct from auteurist films, where the intention for disturbing the dominant

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ideology, be it of the studio system or some other dominant entity, is clearly or implicitly

stated. Instead, films belonging to category (e) are very conventional. “This is the case in

many Hollywood films for example,” Comolli and Narboni suggest, “which while being

completely integrated in the system and the ideology end up by partially dismantling

them from within” (27). What can we do with these films? In their initial manifesto, they

suggest: “All we want to do is to show the process in action” (27). A year later, the

editors at Cahiers produced a collective text showing that process, which has significant

implications for our understanding of The Stranger. Drawing on John Ford’s Young Mr.

Lincoln, they argued for a film criticism that takes into account those overdetermined sites that are neither “faults in the work” nor “a deception on the part of the author”

(496). This form of criticism acknowledged those spaces where an otherwise conventional film begins to crack at the seams. But they cautioned: “we refuse to look for

‘depth,’ to go from the ‘literal meaning’ to some ‘secret meaning’” (496). To put it differently, category (e) is a form of film analysis that lies beyond strict interpretation, an idea particularly relevant to my use of the detective’s methodology for scanning the surface of The Stranger. In other words, category (e) helps to turn the generic thriller inside out. But there is yet another way that the category (e) connects with what I am doing here.

Finally, a hint of what Welles accomplishes here may be found in the German meaning of his name, with the letter e carefully reinserted. In German, a welle

(interestingly, it is a feminine noun, the only one in this entire discussion) is a wave or a ripple. If we think about this undulating ripple as a small agitation or disturbance to the surface, we can see how paradoxical the Wellesian signature can be. Rather than the

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deep, brooding auteur, we can see Welles here as a kind of prankster or trickster causing

small waves. This would not be the first time that Welles has been seen in this light.

There is a long history of this other side of Orson Welles, as a person who plays tricks.

There is his early interest in magic. Writing about his childhood, Thomson notes that

Welles had very large hands that mesmerized people. His hands were, he argues, “his

first gesture of conjuring before he had thought of tricks, black velvet rabbits in his deep

pockets. The hands seem to know more even than George Orson’s naughty mind”

(Rosebud 17). And this interest in trickery is not abandoned even when Welles decides to

make movies. His first venture as a filmmaker was in fact not Citizen Kane but a short

silent film called The Hearts of Ages, which Welles himself regarded as a spoof of an

avant-garde film like Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou or Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un

Poète. What this first film also evinces, besides his preference for trickery, is Welles’s

complicated relationship with the notion of an auteur. As McBride points out, “The credit

cards list only the title and the actors, but they are in Welles’s handwriting” (Orson

Welles 25). It shows, right from the beginning, the simultaneous appearance and

disappearance of the auteur.

And then of course, there is Welles’s most comprehensive meditation on trickery, F

for Fake. Ostensibly about the notorious art forger Elmer de Hory, the film is filled with

hoaxes: not only de Hory’s, but Clifford Irving’s and Orson Welles’s too. It shows, as

Leaming has noted, Welles “turning up on both sides of the frame by oscillating between

the roles of narrator and character, thereby calling into question the line between fact and

fiction” (474). But there are other divisions that are being called into question in F for

Fake as well. The central question, one that Welles returns to at the end of the film, is the

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relation between the self-promoting auteur and the self-effacing auctor. In terms of authorship, McBride argues, “The man who often boasted ‘My name is Orson Welles’ is the least anonymous of filmmakers. Not for him the self-effacing craftsmanship of the builders of Chartres” (Actor and Director 143). McBride is correct in that Welles’s name

preceded him even before he went to Hollywood, and his name/fame would never allow

him to be the anonymous craftsman of the Chartres. But F for Fake is clearly not an

unambiguous celebration of authorship either. Indeed, what Welles accomplishes in that

film turns the whole notion of auteurism inside out. By playing with the boundaries

between depth and surface, fiction and reality, high art and kitsch, Welles makes fakery

another way of thinking about the role of an auteur.

And what does all this have to do with The Stranger? I believe that by following

the conventions of the studio system too closely, the film turns those conventions inside

out. I am not arguing that that is what Welles intended to do. Indeed, the point of the

signature experiment is to step outside the bounds of artistic intentionality. But it also

allows us to avoid the opposite trap, which most critics of the film have followed by

calling The Stranger an un-auteurist film. As Derrida suggests, in the signature

experiment, “[t]he category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from

this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of

utterances” (“Signature Event Context” 326). That is to say, if the auteur theory was the

authoritative account of analyzing a director, then the signateur theory becomes the

unauthorized version.

Let me finally propose two ways to think about The Stranger in the signateurist

context. First, using what Ray has called a “readymade research technique,” we might

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conclude that this un-Wellesian film is like a readymade, a la Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp’s readymades are also deeply engaged with the notion of the signature, in that a readymade is a nominal piece of art. It is nominated by Duchamp, following what he called pictorial nominalism, to become what the proper noun designates as art, even though the actual object is merely a product otherwise called by a common noun.

Comparing Duchamp’s work to Allen Smithee’s, Jonathan Eburne suggests, “[w]ith the readymade, Duchamp, like Smithee, did not ‘invent’ or ‘create’ so much as devised ways of exhibiting or reproducing other objects, even other works of art, under aliases designed to complicate the all-too-automatic process of using art ‘as a proper name’” (232–33).

We might add that, like the category (e) films, the readymades present a way out of assigning authority to the author. In a 1961 lecture on the readymades, Duchamp said that

“the choice of these ‘readymades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation,” emphasizing an indifference and a “total absence of good or bad taste” (141). While disowning The Stranger in an interview with Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, Welles ironically echoed Duchamp, saying “I don’t know if it is good or bad” (74). So, if this film is seen as a readymade, we might then be able to answer the question Bazin posed at the end of his critique of auteurism—Auteur, yes, but what of?—by saying that in the case of The Stranger, Welles is the “auteur” of what can in fact be seen as a readymade.

As it turns out, Bazin’s initial assessment of the film as a Wellesian parody is correct. As a readymade, however, The Stranger can be regarded as a productive parody than one that can be easily dismissed.

Michael North has argued that readymades posed a serious challenge to the regime of authorship because they effectively eliminated the human intermediary. In so doing,

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the readymades could accomplish a “snapshot effect” (Duchamp 32), thus anticipating

the Surrealist interest in the automatism of photography as well as automatic writing. As

North puts it, “For dada as later for surrealism, what Man Ray called the ‘automatism’ of

the photograph was its most appealing characteristic, since it helped to disperse the worn

out subjectivity of the arts of the past” (1383). North’s argument demonstrates that

Duchamp was among the first in a long line of thinkers who used the snapshot effect to

establish a counterregime to authorship, thereby anticipating Roland Barthes’s claim

about the death of the author. Therefore, we have Duchamp talking about the readymade

as a picture that is made “without the / intervention of the ‘hand’” (32). Then, we have

Barthes, in “The Death of the Author,” arguing for seeing the author as “the hand, cut off

from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression)” (146).

Finally, we have Orson Welles playing Franz Kindler playing Charles Rankin, standing in a phone booth, sketching a swastika. The camera zooms in during the revelatory moment, and what we see is his hand, virtually cut off from any voice—the signature a gesture of inscription, not expression. If we look at the swastika closely, we see yet another inversion. The swastika that the Nazi mastermind and supposed author of the Final Solution sketches turns in the wrong direction. The swastika was adopted as a symbol of the Nazi party and Aryan supremacy in 1920. When it first appeared, Hitler took credit for its design, almost like an artist claiming authority over his art. In Mein

Kampf he apparently speaks at length about the laborious but inspired process of creating the swastika, even though it is believed that he only copied it from Dr. Friedrich Krohn, a dentist from Starnberg (Heller 64). “[S]ince Hitler was a wannabe architect, painter, and dabbler in commercial art,” Steven Heller argues, “as leader of his movement he chose to

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be its art director and image manipulator” (61). The swastika was originally meant as a

symbol of good luck, especially in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Its name itself was

a Sanskrit word meaning the thing associated with auspiciousness. In appropriating this

image as the “artist” of Nazism, Hitler also manipulated the long tradition of regarding

the swastika as a signifier of well-being.

Malcolm Quinn, on the other hand, argues that the swastika should be included

within another tradition, drawing on its associations with the discourse of awakening or

coming to consciousness. “In the writings of Goethe and Schelling, of Coleridge and

Novalis,” he points out, “the symbol is defined not so much as a representation as an event, a sudden revelation which restores the alienated subject to a richer, fuller existence” (3). In other words, Quinn argues that the swastika might also be seen as a sign of Romantic vision and perhaps as the signature for genius.

But in the revelatory moment in The Stranger, this Romantic revelation is undone.

Here, the swastika rotates in the counter-clockwise direction, its arms leaning leftward,

thus reversing the original symbol. Ironically, it resembles a satirical Saul Steinberg

cartoon (Figure 4-2), showing a frustrated Hitler drawing swastikas on the wall. Most of the swastikas have been sketched inaccurately, and then there are strikes across them to cancel them out. The cartoon is Untitled, but it is usually called “Hitler Drawing Faulty

Swastikas.” It was created in 1946, the year The Stranger was released. In the cartoon as well as in the film, the swastika, which is the signature of Nazism itself, ultimately turns out to be a fake. In the end, we see it right there on the surface—the swastika has been virtually turned inside out.

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Figure 4-2: Hitler drawing faulty swastikas

“This is Orson Welles”

Here is a story told by a man who only knows his name. In the winter of 1927, he finds himself walking down a deserted street in Zurich with nothing but the suit he is wearing and two hundred thousand Swiss francs in his pocket. He uses the money to build an empire. He is now a ruthless billionaire, a powerful financier, with no memory of how he started off that winter night in Zurich in 1927. This is the story of Gregory

Arkadin, who offers a small-time American smuggler, Guy van Stratten, a peculiar deal: to investigate his own past before 1927. Van Stratten’s only clue will be his subject’s name itself, Gregory Arkadin.

This deal is offered in Mr. Arkadin (1955), which was another troubled film made by Orson Welles. Like most other ventures after Citizen Kane, this film was left virtually unfinished due to disagreements with Welles’s chief financial backer, Louis Dolivet. We do not know exactly what the final version, the “Director’s Cut,” would have looked like, because the now-familiar pattern of Welles’s inability to finish the film under budget and

183 on time led Dolivet to remove it from the director’s hands. Garis reports that although

Welles had planned a nonlinear structure for the film, it was edited under Dolivet’s supervision “as a straightforward linear structure, supposedly to make it more easily understood” (28). There are in fact multiple versions of the film,31 including the British version originally released under the title Confidential Report. Before asking the

American crook to act as a private detective and investigate his life, Arkadin has already compiled a “confidential report” on van Stratten. That report has uncovered van

Stratten’s secret: that his aristocratic name “Guy van Stratten” is in fact a cover for his original, more ethnic name, “Guy Straitheimer.” Arkadin’s own secret, if van Stratten is to complete his mission and write up a confidential report on him, is likely to turn on names too. Guy diagnoses Arkadin’s problem of having no memory before 1927 as amnesia, asking: “So what makes you so sure your name is Arkadin?” He adds, “Well, maybe it’s Arkadine, or Arkadini, or Arkapopoulos—or Smithee.” He is quickly chided by Arkadin: “Don’t be a fool. I know my own name.”

Like Arkadin, auteurist film critics have put too much faith in the stability of names. But, as Guy van Stratten’s seemingly random question suggests—random because the associative versions of Arkadin make sense in terms of the different ethnic possibilities, but why Smithee?—names themselves are slippery and can form associations that go beyond the intentions of this or that director.32 Specifically, it demonstrates that there is less than six degrees of separation between Orson Welles, whose name invokes auteurism itself, and Allen Smithee, whose name was invented to stand in place of those directorial names that had to be willfully erased. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Bazin’s primary example in his critique of the politique des auteurs was

184 in fact Mr. Arkadin. But if we want to be “foolish,” in Arkadin’s terms, and start from the premise that names are unreliable, how would we proceed in van Stratten’s investigation?

The Benjaminian detective’s response would be via improvisation, and the signateurist method is that improvisation—an improvised auteurism, if you will. The signature no longer lies safely outside the text, governing its interpretation, but its nominal effects are also scattered within it. Rather than exploring the auteur’s stylistic competence or personal vision, the signateurist detective improvises, by investigating the name itself.

“These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence,’” Benjamin has argued, “Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed”

(“One-Way Street (Selection)” 65).

Notes

1 Most commentators briefly mention that, like most of Welles’s films after Citizen Kane, The Stranger was not released as it was originally conceived by its director. Based on the shooting script, schedules, and other documents housed in the Welles archive at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, James Naremore and, more recently, Clinton Heylin provide comprehensive accounts of the scenes apparently cut from the film. My discussion of the deleted scenes relies on their studies.

2 Meinike, however, is clearly delusional by this point and believes the message he is carrying is from God. This idea is later echoed when he finally tracks Kindler down in Harper, Connecticut and urges him to accept Christ.

3 For instance, after a brief prologue, The Stranger was to begin, like Citizen Kane, at the end. The opening credits, James Naremore tells us, would have led into a surrealist dream, in which Rankin’s wife Mary (Loretta Young) “rises from her bed at midnight, makes her way through a graveyard, and emerges into a New England town square” (269–70) for her “date with destiny” (the working title of the film). As she reaches the church and starts climbing the clock tower, a scream is heard, the camera pulls out to reveal the climactic struggle of the film, and then the narrative commences in flashback. But that introduction was abandoned. Instead, the film begins at the beginning and unfolds as a straightforward, linear thriller.

4 David A. Anderson argues that those are three documents “upon which assessments of [Lincoln’s] literary achievement must ultimately be based” (qtd. in Burlingame 59). See Michael Burlingame’s “New Light on the Bixby Letter” for an historical account of the

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reception of and controversies surrounding this letter. Incidentally, this letter makes a cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, where General George Marshall is shown reading precisely this letter in order to justify saving Private Ryan.

5 Here, I am drawing on Michael Burlingame’s essay, which cites thirteen different instances of the word “beguile” in John Hay’s various correspondences (65). Incidentally, while there has always been critical interest in this letter’s authenticity, the debate seems to have reached a fever pitch around the time of World War II, when several monographs were published on the subject, including Jacob Blanck’s The Lincoln Letter to Mrs. Bixby (1941), David Rankin Barbee’s The Plain Truth about the Bixby Letter (1945), and Sherman Day Wakefield’s Abraham Lincoln and the Bixby Letter (1948).

6 Woodmansee also points out that as late as the 1750s in Germany, it was not uncommon to see a writer as “just one of the numerous craftsmen involved in the production of a book” (15). The writer was “not superior to, but on a par with” the typesetter, the gilder, the book-binder, and so on (15–16).

7 Martha Woodmansee’s essay provides an excellent analysis of the collaborative nature of Johnson’s major works. Her central argument is that “[a]lthough official history presents Johnson as the very archetype of the modern author, the majority of his energies as a writer went into the kinds of activities Bonaventura identifies” (17). Johnson himself became the modern author due to efforts of biographer James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson conferred that romantic aura on him.

8 The Statute of Anne, which was passed by the British Parliament in 1709, is widely regarded as the first copyright act. The law replaced the monopoly of the Stationer’s Company and granted authority for reproduction to authors rather than printers. Following this statute, the U.S. copyright law was passed in 1790, followed by France in 1793.

9 Mark Rose suggests that this discourse of authorship as a proprietary right grew out of a Lockean discourse of possessive individualism. Since an individual’s “person” was his own property, his writing could be construed as his property as well (56).

10 I borrow this phrase from Andrew Sarris’s revised essay on the auteur theory, where he uses precisely this metaphor of discovery to talk about what the auteurist does. Cinema, he argues, “is a deep, dark mystery that we auteurists are attempting to solve” (“The Auteur Theory Revisited” 28).

11 Routt also rightly points out that the auteurs usually championed by the Cahiers critics were not major stylists. What this critical regard exalts is the seeming simplicity of their work: “These ‘old masters’ are great because of the direct, uncomplicated nature of their work” (59).

12 Interestingly, photography, for Holmes, represented a move away from depth and an engagement with surfaces. Everything that is worthy of consideration would be available

186 as a copy, for “[e]very conceivable object of Nature and Art [would] soon scale off its surface for us” (qtd. in Wells 28).

13 The notion that photography did not require much creative effort became quite commonly accepted. In 1888, George Eastman’s Kodak camera apparently advertised itself on this basis: their slogan was “You press the button, we do the rest.”

14 Indeed, Sontag goes so far as to suggest that since the primary demand on the photograph is “that it record, diagnose, inform,” photography seems almost counter- intuitive to authorship (133).

15 Bazin even accepted the value in investigating the role of directorial intent: “Jacques Rivette has said that an auteur is someone who speaks in the first person. It’s a good definition; let’s adopt it” (“On the politique des auteurs” 255).

16 Similarly, Bazin feared that the politique des auteurs was more likely to ignore “good” films from non-auteurs or metteurs, such as a director like John Huston. Therefore, he insisted that even “mediocre auteurs can, by accident, make admirable films, and how, conversely, a genius can fall victim to an equally accidental sterility” (“On the politique des auteurs” 258).

17 Bazin’s position here remarkably anticipates Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”; like Foucault, Bazin seems to want to treat the author as a function of discourse.

18 On the other hand, linearity apparently appealed to James Agee, who was not much of a Welles fan, but found much to praise in this “tidy, engaging thriller” (qtd. in Naremore, Magic World 123).

19 Writing about another troubled Welles film, Mr. Arkadin (1955), Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock suggest that “Welles’s later career was more prescient of the necessity for Smithee’s arrival than was that of anyone else who worked in Hollywood before Smithee’s appearance” (23).

20 “The Purloined Letter” was originally published in an American annual called The Gift in 1844. Apparently, unlike his other manuscripts, this one appears hastily composed with many erasures (Muller and Richardson 3)—perhaps not dissimilar to Welles’s shooting script of The Stranger.

21 Dupin also argues that while they are really tenacious, the Parisian police are unsuccessful in finding the letter because they are using a flawed method, one that cannot accommodate individual variations of the general rule. Although intelligent, their measures were inappropriate; “‘their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case and to the man’” (215). As he says of them in another story, “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” the “‘Parisian police, so much extolled for acumen, are cunning, but no more. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method of the moment’” (152).

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22 Drawing on the optical unconscious, which Benjamin elaborates in “The Work of Art” essay, Gunning even argues for “turning the methods of psychoanalysis inside out, so that we see Freud less as a psychologized Sherlock Holmes rifling through the archives of personal memory for clues to a primal crime than as a ruthless surveyor of the modern barriers between self and society” (127).

23 According to Bernard Dick, here is how the complicated financial transactions worked for those who were forced to become nonpersons in the industry. Dalton Trumbo “opened one checking account under the name of James Bonham (his protagonist from Johnny Got His Gun), then endorsed his checks twice—as James Bonham and as the payee (John Abbott, Sam Jackson or another pseudonym). When a check had cleared, James Bonham would write out a check to Dalton Trumbo for deposit in an account under the name of Dalton Trumbo in another bank” (Radical Innocence 228).

24 The Director’s Guild of America requires that the director’s name be listed as the last one in the title sequence as a way of signaling authorial control over the film. The DGA came into existence in 1960, after taking over from its predecessor, The Screen Directors Guild, which was founded in 1936.

25 Ironically, Bazin famously argued for seeing this style of filmmaking as explicitly more realistic as well as a genuine evolution in the language of cinema. Ironically, what Bazin praises in this signature Wellesian moment is precisely the auteur’s ability to get out of the way. “More realistic and at the same time more intellectual,” he suggests, “for in a way it forces the spectator to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations, which the decoupage no longer displays on the screen like the pieces of a dismantled engine” (Orson Welles 80). That is to say, having defended the camera’s automatism, Bazin praises Welles’s style for being less stylized and more realistic, allowing the viewer to democratically pick the details he or she would like to emphasize. This style, Bazin argues elsewhere, approximates human vision. Of course, Naremore has rightly discredited this portion of Bazin’s argument related to deep focus, suggesting that “human vision is exactly the opposite of depth photography, because humans are incapable of keeping both the extreme foreground and the extreme distance in focus at the same time” (Magic World 37). In any case, there is no dispute about how much this style, where realistic or not, defines the Wellesian signature.

26 While this essay is originally from The Classical Hollywood Cinema, my citations here are from the reprint in Janet Staiger’s The Studio System.

27 Bordwell argues that the reason deep focus cinematography becomes standardized has a lot to do with the paradoxical role of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) in the studio system. As a technical agency, the ASC reflected the tension between standardization and innovation, and this tension directly influenced the development of cinematography. As Bordwell puts it, “On the one hand, the ASC asked the cinematographer to be a craftsman, cleanly obeying the rules. At the same time, he was expected to originate techniques” (99–100). In Citizen Kane, cinematographer Gregg Toland, encouraged by Welles, is clearly invested in the latter role. How does Hollywood

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respond? At first, with considerable criticism; but then, the style is appropriated by the studio system, such that by the mid 1940s, deep focus shooting itself becomes incorporated into the classical style. The Stranger clearly belongs to that later era.

28 Spiegel was also considered quite devious in the way he would persuade actors to join his films. An anecdote usually recounted about Spiegel is that he would tell Charles Boyer that Ginger Rogers and Charles Laughton had agreed to do the picture and then tell Rogers that Boyer and Laughton had already accepted the deal. By the time they all found out about the little trick, they would all have signed up for the picture. In fact, Sinclair notes that “his talent for persuading people to do what he wanted to do or invest in him became part of the Hollywood vocabulary. To be ‘spiegeled’ meant to be soothed, cajoled, or conned” (43).

29 Here, I am quoting the detective in Ellery Queen’s The Chinese Orange Mystery, who is being quoted by Ray (Andy Hardy 182).

30 Truffaut sees Hitchcock’s film as a kind of joke. But rather than deconstruct the Hitchcock canon, it only reinforces it. According to Dixon, what may be seen as an anomaly that could not fit the auteurist version of Hitchcock, Truffaut argues instead that the auteur must “in order not to get bored or repeat himself, invent extra difficulties, create new disciplines for himself, so that we find, in his most recent films, an accumulation of thrilling limitations that are always brilliantly overcome” (Early Criticism 97). It should be noted that this is precisely the kind of assimilating tendency of auteurism that Bazin disputed.

31 At least three of these versions were recently released on a Criterion DVD, which includes three half-hour episodes of the radio program, The Lives of Harry Lime (itself a spin off show of the movie The Third Man), upon which Mr. Arkadin was based.

32 I am assuming that the association is entirely coincidental, since Allen Smithee was not “born” until 1969, when the name was first used as a stand-in directorial credit for Robert Totten and Don Siegel’s Death of a Gufighter (1969), fourteen years after the initial release of Mr. Arkadin.

CHAPTER 5 “THERE ARE MANY SUCH STORIES”: AN AFTERWORD

Metaphor sustains any discourse which asks: “What is it? What does it mean?”—the real question of any essay. Metonymy, on the contrary, asks another question: “What can follow what I say? What can be engendered by the episode I am telling?” this is the Novel’s question. . . . [Each] incident in life can give rise either to a commentary (an interpretation) or to an affabulation which imagines the narrative before and after: to interpret is to take the Critical path, to argue theory . . . to think incidents and impressions, to describe their development, is on the contrary to weave a narrative, however loosely, however gradually. —Roland Barthes, “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure . . . ”

A Hollywood Ending

On a cold, lonesome winter night, a passenger waves goodbye from a train window. There is a chilly wind blowing, visible in the snow flakes it kicks up. Steam rises, and the train begins to move. We cannot even see the passenger’s face. Is it her lover she is leaving behind? Is the film about a separation caused by war? Will there be a reunion at the end? These questions are not answered here, making the moment even more poignant. All we see is a lonely white handkerchief, trembling in the wind, waving goodbye. In a different movie, this may have been a cinephiliac moment.

In George Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954), however, it does not offer such pleasures.

For the shot is about the systematically choreographed production of a lonely farewell. It is the scene of Esther Blodgett’s debut in Hollywood. Having been discovered by

Norman Maine, she is offered a small role in what appears to be a big-budget production.

Esther’s opening shot in Hollywood is in fact about saying goodbye, which, appearing at a moment when the collapse of the studio system is already underway, is doubly ironic.

On the set of her debut film, we see the unglamorous inner workings of the studio system.

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As numerous technicians prepare for the shoot, Esther is brought on set and quickly wrapped into a burly fur coat. Before the shooting begins, the director of the film cautions: “It’s farewell, Esther, so give it everything you’ve got.” After the technicians hit the lights, snow, wind, and steam, the cameras begin to roll. Then, there is a problem.

What is meant to be a memorable shot of a handkerchief trembling in the wind as the train leaves the station reveals a face. During the shoot, Judy Garland’s bewildered face inadvertently peaks through the train window, a pleasure that cannot be afforded at this point in the narrative. That moment is cut, and in a second take, we see what is necessary to keep the plot rolling: just a solitary hand, waving goodbye. Except that Cukor also shows the entire mechanism required to create that second, memorable shot, complete with artificial lights, wind, snow, and steam.

Figure 5-1: Lights, wind, snow, steam: action!

The two shots of this scene illustrate the difference between a cinephiliac moment and a memorable moment. The latter, which most likely makes it into the narrative film, follows the rules of the studio system. That choreographed shot carries the narrative along. But the former, which does not make it, presents the possibility of disruption, of

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contingency, of a lightning flash. As the opening shots of each chapter in this study illustrate, sometimes those flashes do make it on screen, providing a way to expand upon their visual pleasure differently.

The Experimental Turn

This project has proposed that moments of intense visual pleasure can be used as prompts for cinematic research. The proposal was based on the premises that cinephiliac moments signify in excess of their narrative contexts, and that the something extra in those pleasurable moments can be activated for academic film studies. This itself might

be a controversial move, since cinephilia is usually regarded as an uncritical buffism in

film studies. But cinephilia, I have argued, also provides uncanny points of entry into the

studio system of filmmaking. By drawing an analogy between cinephiliac moments and

Walter Benjamin’s lightning flashes, I have suggested that these cinephiliac visual details

can be deployed to uncover alternative histories of Classic Hollywood that would not be

accessible by our traditional research methods.

Writing about something as seemingly trivial as George Washington’s false teeth,

Robert Darnton argues, “[Washington’s] contemporaries probably worried more about

the pain in their gums than about the new constitution in 1787” (ix). Lest the reader think

that Darnton is not serious, he emphasizes the point by adding, “they were an odd lot, if

seen up close” (ix). “In fact,” he concludes, “everything about the eighteenth century is

strange, once you examine it in detail” (ix). The same is true, I believe, of Classic

Hollywood. So much scholarly work has been done on the studio system that one might

assume we know what it was like: a standard system with a uniform style of filmmaking.

It is not this project’s aim to debunk that argument. However, taking my cue from

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Darnton, I would argue that everything in Classic Hollywood appears similarly strange, once you examine it in detail. It is a little like rewriting the birth of the nation by focusing on the problem of toothache—that is what a cinephiliac history has enabled us to do.

In the process, I have also sought to inject some of that cinephiliac pleasure into the writing of these essays. For this project is not a history of cinephilia. It is a cinephiliac history, and as such, it follows a different methodology than traditional histories of cinema. Although I do not think we should return to the kind of passionate, but more or less uncritical, writing practiced at the Cahiers du Cinéma, I do believe that we can recover some of that experience and combine it with our traditional modes of analysis.

Sylvia Harvey has similarly argued that “one of the challenges of current secular criticism [is] to reconstruct or re-invent a sense of the sacred and the immortal, and perhaps to find other words than these to refer to the constant presence of the extraordinary within the ordinary, to foreground significance which is present without words” (28). One of those other words to be used for this experience could be cinephilia.

It captures the feeling of something exciting and pleasurable, but it also lends itself to a critical practice. Of course, that practice will be different too. In the introduction, I suggested that what I was offering was an experimental history, and I would like to end by reflecting on that idea.

My primary source of influence for experimentation with film studies has been

Robert B. Ray’s The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Published in the same year as

Susan Sontag’s essay that proclaimed the death of cinephilia, Ray’s book offers this proposal: “the appropriation of avant-garde experimentation for the purposes of humanities research” (199). Ray himself draws on the Surrealist tradition, arguing that

193

the Surrealists’ interest in games, chance, fragments, anecdotes, and collage provides a

good model for rethinking research methodologies in film studies. At the end, Ray notes

that he has “investigated only a fraction of the avant-garde’s possibilities,” urging other

researchers to find other models and methods for experimenting with film criticism. As

Pop Liebel might put it, “there are many such stories.” Lightning Flashes has tried to find one such way of telling the story, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s method of historical materialism to investigate startling fashions, enigmatic objects, and a missing auteur in

Classic Hollywood.

Recently I came across Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast, which theorizes the impulse toward experimentation in humanities research. Friedlander’s book offers what he calls four experiments in criticism. Each of the four experiments adopts the methodology of essays written by earlier writers, such as Jean Wahl’s A Short History of

Existentialism and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Literati of San Francisco.” He calls this method of working “applied poetry,” since it amounts to “the creation of criticism through the strict recreation of an earlier critic’s text” (2). The essays explore issues of style versus substance, artifice versus rigor, plausibility versus truth. But Friedlander adds, “The results were emphatically not what I could have written if left to my own devices” (2; original emphasis). That is to say, by forcing himself to copy the styles of the source texts, the results were not predetermined. For in experimental criticism, one “in effect cede[s] control of [one’s] writing to writing” (2). But that surrender of writing to writing is also enormously liberating. And it seeks to transform criticism as we know it.

Experimental criticism offers new modes of thinking and writing about the movies. At the beginning of his experimental project, Ray asks a question that is fundamental to

194 rethinking film studies: “What if we still want the hermeneutic effect but feel we have exhausted hermeneutics as a tool?” (Andy Hardy 9; original emphasis). By suggesting multiple possibilities in terms of subject and method, experimental criticism opens up the potential for reimagining cinematic discourse.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Rashna Wadia Richards grew up in Bombay (Mumbai), India. From 1992–1997, she attended Narsee Monjee College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in business with a minor in English. Then, at the University of Mumbai, she earned a Master of Arts in English in 1999. She received another master’s degree in English at West Virginia

University before attending the University of Florida for doctoral work. In August 2006, she earned her doctorate in English, with an emphasis on film and media studies. Her work on film history and theory has appeared in Criticism and Arizona Quarterly. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at SUNY

Brockport.

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