Wood, Michael. "Modernism and Film."

9 MICHAEL WOOD Modernism and film I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it. Roland Bardies, Camera Lucida1 It is tempting to argue that all films are modernist, that the cinema itself is an accelerated image of modernity, like the railway and the telephone. But to do this is to miss the nostalgia inseparable from the way the medium has worked out historically, its (amply rewarded) yearning to become our century's version of last century's novel. There are modernist films, even outside the period we associate with Modernism; but the largest fact about the cinema over the hundred years since its birth is its comfortable embrace of ancient conventions of realism and narrative coherence. When the German critic Walter Benjamin describes the strange mingling of artifice and illusion in the cinema - we know all about the tricky construction of the pictured world, which we nevertheless take as far more intimately actual than anything we could find in the live theatre - he says "the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."2 "In the theatre one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting." Benjamin's inference is that the absence of illusion in the studio or on location is canceled by the sheer power and invisibility of the editing process. The result is (most often) more illusion, a modernist, distancing gesture swallowed up in denial; an orchid pretending to be a daisy or even a weed. Still, technology is not always disavowed in the movies, and illusions are questioned as well as fostered, so we can ask what Modernism looks like when it does appear in the cinema; where it appears; and what this Modernism has to tell us about other modernisms. I have concentrated on particular films and ideas about films rather than attempt a survey, but I hope the reach of the questions will suggest something of the richness of the ground. My examples are chiefly German, Russian, French, and American films of the 1920s and early 1930s. A trawl which went on a little longer would pick up the work of Jean Renoir in France, and one which reached 217 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WOOD beyond the Second World War would find Modernism going strong in Italy, notably in the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. But the range of modernist possibilities in the cinema was clearly outlined by the end of the 1920s; and the disavowal of modernist preoccupations was already proceeding apace. In Christopher Isherwood's novel Prater Violet (1945), a brilliant and tormented Austrian film director defines his medium for us: The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion, it revolves with an enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot retract anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice . .3 We can scarcely miss this man's intricate pleasure in his contact with Hell, but the narrator also records a gesture for us: "Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower." A little later, the narrator explains to his mother and brother that Bergmann was talking about the fixed speed of film, the fact that it does not allow us to pause or go back, as a painting or a novel does, but this seems trite, a deliberate backing off from Bergmann's metaphor. The novel is set in 1933 and 1934, Austria is yielding to the National Socialists, we can think of other persons and inventions, apart from anarchists and movies, eminently incapable of pausing, apologizing, retracting, waiting or explaining. Bergmann is saying that film is not only an art of time but the art of his time, a modern, even a modernist art which cannot disentangle itself from the world it opposes, and which must describe its hopes in terms entirely appropriate also to its fears. His infernal machine recalls and looks forward to the factory worlds of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Germany, 1926) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (USA, 1936), as well as the ticking bombs of European politics. The irony is further complicated by the film Bergmann is making, a frothy operetta set in a Vienna which is all charm and unreality, impervious to the very notion of politics. Bergmann's infernal machine begins to look like a fancy cake. Bergmann is working in an England where modernity is pictured as uncertainty, a kind of technological and commercial bewilderment. The "panic" is not the Wall Street Crash or the Depression, but the arrival of sound at Imperial Bulldog Pictures: At the time of the panic, when Sound first came to England and nobody's job was safe, Bulldog had carried through a hasty and rather hysterical recon- struction program. The whole place was torn down and rebuilt at top speed, most of it as cheaply as possible. No one knew what was coming next: Taste, 218 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modernism and film perhaps, or Smell, or Stereoscopy, or some device that climbed right down out of the screen and ran around in the audience. Nothing seemed impossible.4 I am sure this is an accurate enough picture of the British movie business in the 1930s - Isherwood would be the first to say he is writing from memory rather than invention - but as an image constructed in 1945 it means something rather different, just as the name of the movie company shifts in this light from broad comedy to rather subtler historical satire. This England is no more prepared for Hitler and war than the company was for sound. It is noticeably edgy, has lost all its old biting arrogance, but has found nothing to replace it. It is like an art form in transition; like a 1930s movie, or a movie studio. Later Isherwood describes a ghostly sound stage, with its multiple, partial sets: "a kind of Pompeii, but more desolate, more uncanny, because this is, literally, a half-world, a limbo of mirror-images, a town which has lost its third dimension. Only the tangle of heavy power cables is solid, apt to trip you as you cross the floor."5 The unreality of the movie world is a trope as old as the movies themselves, so we must ask what produces its peculiar force in this context. The answer, I think, is history, and a form of double-take. We register the forlorn unreality of this half-world, because it is not like ours, then or now. Then we look at our world again, and are astonished at the resemblance. Emptied of what we thought was its reality, our world is the studio, frantically guessing at what it can not know. The Modernists kept frightening themselves with such thoughts, as if they were not quite ready for the implications of their insights. Virginia Woolf's essay "The Cinema" (1926) does not seem to tell us a lot about the movies. She mentions only one film by name, glances at the contents or conceptions of a few others. Yet with characteristic shrewdness and indirection Woolf manages to evoke an essential feature of the cinema, an abstract, nonmimetic expressive possibility that the film industry, both before and after 1926, has devoted considerable amounts of time and money to refusing. For instance, at a performance of Dr. Caligari the other day a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic's brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement "I am afraid."6 Woolf goes on to explain that the shadow was not part of the film but the effect of some sort of fault of projection or flaw in the print; but then 219 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 MICHAEL WOOD implies that the unintentional quality of the image was also part of its magic - and a rebuke to the rather meager intentions of the cinema as Woolf understood it. Yet if the shadow was an accident, an abstract shape rather than a scripted and performed human action, Woolf's interpretation of it as "fear itself" belongs very much to the world of this particular film. In another film the same shape would have meant something different, and Woolf through sheer mischievous intelligence appears to have stumbled on one of the fundamentals of film theory: the principle of montage. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (directed by Robert Wiene, Germany, 1919) announces itself as old and new, in a way which is familiar to us from literary Modernism: "A tale of the modern re-appearance of an nth century myth ..." Later we are told that a monk called Caligari was practicing the dark arts of hypnotism in 1093; and that a modern psychiatrist has taken his name and turned showman, because his scientific interest in somnambulism has modulated into something more sinister: into the desire, as the doctor says, to get Cesare, his haunted, sleeping subject, to "perform deeds he would shrink from in his normal waking state." Cesare in his sleep kills the doctor's enemies, terrorizes the town, abducts a young woman.

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