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Home , Academy ratio, Anthony Mann, Anton Walbrook, Bad Day at Black Rock, Bigger Than Life, Farley Granger

CINEMASCOPE AESTHETICS: TECHNOLOGY, STYLE, AND MEANING

ANTHONY COMAN

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

2018

To Scott and Alan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation should properly be considered a community effort, as I could not have studied, researched, and written on this topic without the extraordinary support of my committee, my past mentors, the Department of English faculty, my family, and my friends. Every word of this document is a testament to their remarkable efforts on my behalf. Where this dissertation succeeds, the credit rightfully goes to this community.

I am especially thankful for the help and support of my chair, Maureen Turim, and for the time and energy my committee members—Robert B. Ray, Barbara Mennel, and

Craig Smith—have invested in this project. In addition to my committee, many other teachers and professors have been influential to my thinking about film. Among them, I am especially thankful for having had the opportunity to study with Marc Vanasse, Scott

Balcerzack, and Scott Nygren, each of whom have played an essential role in helping me to cultivate my passion for cinema studies.

I am thankful, too, for the support of Leah Rosenberg, the Graduate Coordinator in the Department of English, and Melissa Davis and Carla Blount, the department’s

Administrative Specialists. I have counted on each of them at different stages of my study at UF, and each has played an essential role in my degree progress.

And for the most meaningful individuals in my life, my friends and my family, words alone cannot express my gratitude. I am indebted to these special people, and I am better for knowing them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 9

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: A HISTORY OF CINEMASCOPE TECHNOLOGY AND ITS CRITICAL RECEPTION ...... 11

Chapter Summary ...... 12 Of Economics and Aesthetics ...... 14 An Industry in Trouble ...... 15 Theater Divestment as Obstacle to Change ...... 17 Fox’s Big Bet ...... 20 Pictures that Move ...... 23 Fade Out ...... 25 Critical Responses to CinemaScope ...... 26 The First Phase: Contemporaneous Critical Approaches ...... 29 The Second Phase: Film Studies’ Rediscovery of Scope in the 1980s ...... 34 The Third Phase: Contemporary Approaches to CinemaScope ...... 40 A Modified Mise-en-Scène Criticism Approach ...... 45 Outline of Chapters ...... 50 Ray and Rebel Without a Cause ...... 50 Ophuls and Lola Montès...... 51 Sturges and Bad Day at Black Rock ...... 51 A Model for Researching Technology and Technique ...... 52

2 “WHAT’S THE MATTER, TORREADOR?”: EMOTIVE MISE-EN-SCÈNE IN REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE ...... 53

Expressive Use of the Academy-Ratio Frame in They Live by Night (1948)...... 56 Organic Continuity as Organizing Principle in Ray, Wright, and Perkins ...... 61 Expressive Organic Compositions in Rebel Without a Cause ...... 64 From the “Average” Teen to the Myth of the American Teenager ...... 69 Aiming for the Teen Market ...... 71 Mythologizing the American Teenager ...... 74 An Aesthetic Sympathetic to the Teen Experience ...... 77 “Out of the Inner Moment Comes the Whole” ...... 86

3 “A WONDERFULLY PRODUCTIVE NEW DIRECTION”: THE AVANT-GARDE SPECTACLE OF LOLA MONTÈS (1955) ...... 93

“It’s Beautiful, but I’m Afraid it will have a Sad Ending” ...... 99 “A More Authentic Truth” ...... 105 Bird, Beast, Menagerie ...... 108 Lola, Liszt, and Life as Movement ...... 111 From Marginal to Captivating to Captive ...... 120 “A Wonderfully Productive New Direction” ...... 126

4 “MY MEMORIES AREN’T SO PLEASANT AS IT IS”: ALLEGORIES OF NATIONAL TRAUMA IN BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK ...... 137

Black Rock as Postwar Studio Western ...... 138 Popular and Critical Reception ...... 140 Sturges as metteur-en-scène ...... 142 Shifting Approaches to the Western Genre ...... 144 Competing Myths of the Frontier ...... 148 Black Rock’s Incomplete Critique of the Western ...... 150 The Cowboy Villain and the Modern Man ...... 150 Trains and the Desert Terrain ...... 152 CinemaScope Staging and Character Development ...... 157 “Doc Looks Out Window”: Passive Onlooking as Moral Weakness ...... 159 Crossroads and Catharsis ...... 163 Conclusion: The Intractable American Mythology ...... 167

5 CONCLUSION ...... 182

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 189

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 195

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 Jim observes his father and worries he is looking into his own future. Note the vertical lines in the molding...... 89

2-2 Jim’s father, in the reverse shot, wearing his wife’s apron, kneeling to clean up the food he has spilled...... 89

2-3 Expressive lines emphasize Jim’s appearance...... 90

2-4 The wall of the planetarium slashes through the frame...... 90

2-5 A mise-en-scène of danger...... 91

2-6 Clothesline blocking expresses the antagonistic nature of Jim’s home life...... 91

2-7 The breakfast table as graphic fulcrum...... 92

3-1 Paola Debevoise, reclines along the length of the screen in How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953)...... 132

3-2 Lola Montes, similarly reclining in Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955), but without inviting the viewer to possess her...... 132

3-3 Lola at the end of the circus, imprisoned in her dressing room cage...... 133

3-4 Young Lola on board the ship, imprisoned by the mise-en-scène...... 133

3-5 Lola in Nice, her world unsettled by the arrival of the Ringmaster...... 134

3-6 The Ringmaster confronting Lola in Nice...... 134

3-7 Edge-framing as Lola sits in the opera box with Lieutenant James...... 135

3-8 Lola escapes while Lieutenant James is distracted...... 135

3-9 Lieutenant James realizes Lola has escaped...... 136

4-1 Spencer Tracy as James Curtayne in The People Against O’Hara (John Sturges, 1951). Curtayne goes where he is not wanted and asks tough, pointed questions as he tries to solve a crime...... 173

4-2 Spencer Tracy as John J. Macreedy in Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955). In his suit and fedora, he is an odd-man-out amongst the cowboys...... 173

4-3 Tableau staging in Bad Day at Black Rock...... 174

4-4 Tableau staging in Mystery Street...... 174

4-5 The cowboy as villain: Hector bullies Macreedy...... 175

4-6 The establishing shot of Bad Day at Black Rock...... 175

4-7 The film’s second shot...... 176

4-8 A later shot from the film’s title sequence...... 176

4-9 Macreedy’s presence is aligned with the power of the train...... 177

4-10 Pete Wirth appears in the window, separated by the glass pane from Coley and Hector...... 177

4-11 Creative staging in depth: onlooking, landscape, and characterization...... 178

4-12 Doc is associated with the landscape as he looks on...... 178

4-13 In High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), the vanishing point perspective emphasizes the plot’s deadline structure...... 179

4-14 In Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955), a graphically similar shot suggests the inevitability of conflict between Smith (left), Coley (right), and Macreedy (not pictured)...... 179

4-15 Tragedian blocking at the crossroads; the town waits for Smith’s decision on how to handle Macreedy...... 180

4-16 Low-angle framing emphasizes Smith’s power, but also frees his figure from a ground, encouraging an allegorical reading...... 180

4-17. Rather than emphasize vulnerability and retain perspective with a high-angle shot, Sturges films Liz in a low-angle framing, casting her figure against a blank black sky...... 181

4-18 Reno Smith and his iconic red hat. Note how he muscles Pete out of the center of the composition...... 181

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

CINEMASCOPE AESTHETICS: TECHNOLOGY, STYLE, AND MEANING

Anthony Coman

August 2018

Chair: Maureen Turim Major: English

This dissertation aims to define specific ways in which CinemaScope has influenced the creative decisions of filmmakers who were assigned to use that technology. To do so, I look at three specific films, each produced in 1955: Rebel

Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray, Lola Montès, directed by Max Ophuls, and

Bad Day at Black Rock, directed by John Sturges.

In looking at these films, I argue that technological changes in filmmaking, like the widespread adoption of anamorphic lenses, offer filmmakers a new range of creative choices. By articulating the decisions they have made, we can correspondingly articulate the effects of technological change on filmmaking. Using a mise-en-scène criticism approach, I base my analysis on detailed descriptions of the films in question and offer close interpretive readings of the films in their own contexts: social, historical, and personal. By articulating background contexts of genre demands, production history, and director style, I aim to focus my criticism on the role CinemaScope technology plays in each of these films.

In pursuing this argument, I am cautious to avoid the drawbacks of prior approaches. Too often, the desire to produce a totalizing argument results in only

glancing looks at particular films. The films themselves come second to the theorist’s claims. Scenes, snatched from their original context, lose their character, their defining features having been flattened so as to provide more stable support for larger claims.

A significant feature of my approach, then, is that my conclusions are neither prescriptive nor comprehensive. I take this to be a virtue of the methodology. Instead of pursuing a totalizing, and therefore reductive, theory of the technology’s relationship to film aesthetics, and rather than bringing to the study a rigid, and therefore restricted, theoretical lens, I model a portable methodology, one that is responsive to contexts and qualities particular to each film. In doing so, I claim that the wider frame of

CinemaScope fundamentally altered the possibilities for realizing narrative on film, and that, to fully appreciate the contours of the change, one must look closely at specific films.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: A HISTORY OF CINEMASCOPE TECHNOLOGY AND ITS CRITICAL RECEPTION

In Film as Film, V.F. Perkins begins his discussion of the relationship between technology and technique thusly:

As the movie cannot exist apart from its apparatus, a satisfactory definition of the medium’s artistic nature depends on a full recognition of its technological base. ([1972] 1993: 40)

Building from this claim, he notes that much of existing film theory had repeatedly made the same error. Because cinema is first a technology, and because early theorists were largely motivated by a desire to earn cinema’s recognition as an art, the early theories of film tended to canonize film styles that developed under particular technological constraints (early film stock that was insensitive to light, black and white photography, lack of sound, etc.) and resent new technological developments that relieved those constraints ([1972] 1993: 53). In response to this observation, Perkins argues that, if our aim is to articulate how a director’s choices manifest a written script cinematically, then we must “relate our criteria to inherent possibilities rather than imposed restrictions”

([1972] 1993: 57). When discussing the relationship between technology, style, and meaning, therefore, we must focus on the ranges of possibilities, opened up by technological innovation, from which the director has to choose.

This dissertation takes up Perkins’ call to consider advances in technology as altering the possibilities available to filmmakers for cinematic expression. As I discuss below, I approach these changes optimistically, assuming every technological change brings with it new expressive possibilities. I follow in Perkins’ assessment, shared by the mise-en-scène tradition, and developed primarily in the British magazine Movie and reviewed in further detail below, that these modes of cinematic expression—collectively,

the film’s style—are fundamentally constitutive of the film’s meaning. I therefore argue that, in order to understand how CinemaScope influenced film style, we must attend closely to the ways in which specific films made the new stylistic opportunities offered by CinemaScope technology (in terms of blocking, performance, framing, etc.) meaningfully expressive.

In pursuing this approach, my work in the chapters that follow add to current scholarship on CinemaScope a more granular understanding of the relationship between this wide-frame anamorphic technology and film style. Whereas the predominant approaches to CinemaScope have argued for a relatively muted influence,

I argue that, within a few years of its widespread adoption, CinemaScope had a strong impact on the style of certain filmmakers, particularly those filmmaker’s who have become known for their CinemaScope films. To this end, I analyze films from three directors who have worked in both Academy Ratio and CinemaScope widescreen formats. In looking closely at the various ways in which they made the wide frame expressive, I aim to model a methodology—based on historical research, comparative analysis, and mise-en-scène criticism—for investigating the impact of any technological change on filmmaking. In taking this approach, I argue that we can best understand the relationship between technology and film style by considering the specific results of filmmaker’s decisions in the context of the films in which they appear.

Chapter Summary

In this introduction, I will establish the grounds for the pertinence of this dissertation, my methodology, and the case studies that follow. First, I will attempt to answer the question, “why CinemaScope?” In doing so, I draw heavily upon John

Belton’s research into the history of the technology. Belton maintains, and I agree, that

we must understand CinemaScope as a technology that was deeply tied to the film industry’s economic history, and therefore to American history more broadly.

Understanding this history will help us to understand why, by 1955, the format had so thoroughly saturated film production, thereby influencing the style of a wide range of films, including Westerns, teen pictures, and even international productions.

Second, this introduction reviews how critics and theorists responded to

CinemaScope technology and worked to understand its impact on film aesthetics. I identify three phases of critical response: contemporaneous responses from the 1950s, renewed attention to the technology in the 1980s, and a return to questions of

CinemaScope and film aesthetics today. As I will show, the first phase was marked by differing opinions regarding the essential qualities of film, with Charles Barr, drawing on the Movie tradition, making the most concerted effort to theorize the impact of the technology. The second phase arrived in the early 1980s, and it included the critical rediscovery of CinemaScope announced by a special issue of The Velvet Light Trap.

David Bordwell, who has since written prolifically on CinemaScope aesthetics, first discussed the topic in this special issue, establishing what I define as a pessimistic attitude towards the influence of the technology, which he further develops in Classical

Hollywood Cinema and Poetics of Cinema. Concurrently, Barry Salt was taking a radically different approach to the topic in his Film Style and Technology: History and

Analysis, and below I present my critique of that approach.

The third phase, current scholarship, has tended towards blending approaches from the previous phases, extending or modifying prior conclusions. These blended approaches include Harper Cossar’s Letterboxed, a study of widescreen films which

both extends Bordwell’s project on cinema poetics and critiques his earlier findings, and

Ariel Roger’s Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies, which combines an ideological approach outlined in the 1980s with more contemporary theories of bodily address and detailed research into the public discourses that accompanied major changes in film technology. Sam Roggen, at the University of

Antwerp, has developed a stylistic analysis approach that merges the projects of Salt and Bordwell. Last, I conclude with a statement on the relationship between my work and current scholarship, a definition of my methodology, and an argument for its pertinence when studying the relationship between film technologies and film style.

Of Economics and Aesthetics

Any discussion of the aesthetics of widescreen cinema should begin with a discussion of the economic circumstances that led to the industry-wide adoption of that format. The foremost writer in this regard is Academy Historian John Belton. His book,

Widescreen Cinema, documents the relationship between CinemaScope technology, indeed the whole history of cinema’s evolving aspect ratio, and the economic imperatives of the film industry. He and other film historians, notably Peter Lev, Winston

Wheeler Dixon, Aubrey Solomon, and Richard Hincha, have observed the various financial pressures facing the film industry in the postwar era. In their work, they have shown how converging economic pressures drove Twentieth Century-Fox to acquire a passed-over technology, anamorphic camera and projection lenses, in an effort to revitalize ticket sales. Their research into industry history also helps us understand why

CinemaScope achieved the market saturation it did. Crucially, I argue that this saturation encouraged experimentation with the technology that is generally

unaccounted for in current scholarship, resulting in an underappreciation for

CinemaScope’s influence on film style.

An Industry in Trouble

As John Belton argued extensively in Widescreen Cinema, changes in film technology are precipitated by the economic needs of production companies.

CinemaScope was no exception (Belton 1992:52). Between 1948 and 1953, average weekly attendance had dropped in half, from 90 million to 45 million (Lev 2003: 8). At the same time as attendance rates were plummeting, the studios were significantly wounded by a series of challenges to the studio system production model that forced major changes to their economic model. These twin crises resulted in a burst of technological innovation, and the specific characteristics of these crises led to

CinemaScope’s brief saturation of the industry and the subsequent permanent change to the shape of Hollywood filmmaking.

In the postwar era, American society experienced many changes that altered the habits of would-be moviegoers. These changes, and the subsequent loss of revenue from ticket sales, led studios to experiment with technologies that could match the evolving interests of their audiences. As Belton has documented, wages and incomes rose during the Second World War, in part because the national work week was extended. At the same time, wartime rationing kept spending down, and Americans on the whole therefore saved much of their income. After the war, workweeks returned to normal, and households, flush with money saved, began spending in ways that literally altered the landscape. Americans purchased cars (the number of registrations doubling between 1945 and 1953), they moved out of the city and into suburbs (where 11 million new homes were built between 1948 and 1958), and, once there, they took on a host of

new recreational activities, spending more than ever on power tools, gardening, and grilling supplies for their new homes (Belton 1992: 72-73).

Further, with money saved and new homes readily available, young couples became young families in staggering numbers. According to Belton, this postwar baby boom, in which the number of births in the 1950s nearly doubled that of the previous decade, substantially altered the ways in which young American families spent their leisure time (Belton 1992: 74). Perhaps most devastatingly for the film industry, these young families turned to recreation at home and, for entertainment, to their television sets.

In Transforming the Screen, Peter Lev has emphasized the rapidity with which the television took over the postwar home. In the 1940s, the nascent television industry had little effect on movie-going, with only an estimated 10 percent of the population having seen a television program (Lev 2003:9). By the mid-1950s, however, television alone accounted for an overall 3-4 percent drop in film attendance. According to the studio’s own surveys, families with televisions in their home were 20-30 percent less likely to go to the movies (Lev 2003: 9).

Given the evident encroachment of television on Hollywood’s bottom line, most studios were hedging their bets. One way to insulate against possible damages from industry competition was to produce content for television. Twentieth Century-Fox was an early adopter of this approach, and had opened a Television Department as early as

1945 (Solomon 1988: 81). In 1952, Columbia began its Screen Gems television series, investing $50,000 in a deal that was co-sponsored by Ford Motor Company, and, given that Columbia retained full rights over the programs, was ultimately valued at over $1

million (Dixon 2012: 57). Warner Brothers, too, was making money on the small screen.

By 1959, television grossed Warner Brothers $30 million, almost half of their earnings for the year (Dixon 2012: 211).

In attempting to profit off of the rival technology, however, some studios accidentally empowered the young medium’s ability to compete with movie theaters.

Hoping for a quick injection of cash, Warner Brothers, RKO, and Paramount each decided to sell off the rights to their back catalogue to television programmers. Warner

Brothers, for example, sold its entire back catalog of features, silent films, short subjects, and Looney Tunes cartoons for $21 million (Dixon 2012: 205).This move proved to be a costly mistake. Rather than lease the rights or distribute the pictures themselves, these studios gave television programmers a deep well of content from which to draw for the home audience. As Twentieth Century-Fox President Spyros

Skouras put it, “never before in the history of commerce has an industry been subjected to such competition, competition which supplies the same thing for free that we are trying to sell” (Solomon 1988: 105).

Theater Divestment as Obstacle to Change

The postwar audience had more disposable income, had moved away from city centers in large numbers, had developed a taste for participatory recreation, and possessed a new technology that brought films from the theaters into their suburban living rooms. The industry, therefore, was forced to respond. In an effort to solve two problems simultaneously, both audiences’ desire for active engagement and competition from television, studios literally sought new dimensions of entertainment.

70mm production, 3-D, color, stereo-phonic sound, and wide-screen1 were each auditioned as potential resolutions to the problem of changing audience tastes. That

CinemaScope won out among these other technologies was largely due to recent legal decisions that had weakened the studios and enforced changes to their business model.

Among the legal challenges to the old studio system were a series of court decisions that broke up the studios’ hold over their actors and control over their distribution. In the first case, the California Superior Court sided in 1944 with Olivia De

Havilland in her case against Jack Warner’s efforts to extend her contract to account for time not worked due to the actresses passing on assigned projects. This decision was a watershed moment in a shifting power balance between the studios and their talent, effectively encouraging more freelance work, greater negotiating power for actors, and contract innovations like profit-sharing (Carman & Drake 2015: 215-16).

Subsequently, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the major studios control over both production and distribution were in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust

Act. After an appeals process, the major studios agreed to what came to be known as the Paramount Decrees. These Decrees stipulated that the studios would have to divest their theater chains and end their process of block booking, in which studios pressed theaters to accept groups of films as a package, forcing them to accept product regardless of exhibition value (Dixon 2012: 22-24). The enforced divestment of theater

1 We should note, however, that none of these technologies were new. Each has a long history of false starts, which Belton reviews thoroughly in Widescreen Cinema. See, for example, his discussion of the Cinèorama, an interlocked series of ten 70mm projections, demonstrated in 1895 at the Paris Exhibition (Belton 1992: 85).

chains meant, in part, that a technological change could not come about by sheer force from the studios. Unlike with sound, where studio commitment meant studio-owned theaters were upgraded, pressing independent theater-owners to evolve or perish, studios in the 1950s had to negotiate technological changes with exhibitors.

In the course of the studio’s technological attempts to lure audiences back to theaters, many fads came and went. During this period of experimentation, theaters tended to fare worse than the studios, as each new technological wonder required theaters to invest in new projection technology. For example, Richard Hincha has noted that 3-D films seemed like a promising response to diminishing audiences, offering an immersive experience completely unlike what was available to television audiences.

The cost, however, was particularly burdensome for theater owners, requiring an investment in new equipment plus added salary costs for a second projectionist per film, as the technology required two specialized projectors2 and special glasses (Hincha

1985: 47). Worse, the production value of 3-D films was low, and technical challenges made the image quality poor despite the theaters’ upgrades.

While studios were struggling to find a hit that could prove 3-D’s marketability and persuade theater companies to invest in the technology en masse, an industry outsider brought in a fresh idea. Inventor Fred Waller had devised a multiple-camera, multi-projection system, Cinerama, which would offer filmgoers a then-extraordinarily wide image on a deeply curved screen. As Belton documents, however, studios were

2 In fact, single strip systems were in development at the time. Theater owners and viewers had begun to sour on the technology, however, and had an able substitute in the various forms of widescreen that were being heavily marketed (Limbacher 1968: 166-167). 3-D would have to wait for more than 50 more years for its watershed moment, the release of Avatar (James Cameron, 2009).

reticent to invest in the technology because they expected stiff resistance from theater owners, for whom the cost of conversion would be massive (Belton 1992: 103-106).

Cinerama did find producers to back a roadshow demonstrating the effects of the process, and the resulting film, This is Cinerama! (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B.

Schoedsack, Mike Todd Jr., 1952), was extraordinarily popular. Featuring a broad aspect ratio of 2.59:1, the program was non-narrative, focusing instead on immersive, participatory events like its famous point-of-view roller-coaster sequence. The film ran for years in specialty theaters, grossing over $32 million dollars on its $1 million budget

(Belton 1992: 99). Despite its popularity, however, widespread conversion remained cost-prohibitive. Cinerama did, however, have a lasting impact on filmmaking, as it lead

Twentieth Century-Fox to re-think its earlier pass on an old technology, anamorphic lenses, that achieved a similarly broad aspect ratio.

Fox’s Big Bet

With the industry model substantially changed, and with audiences opting for new ways of enjoying their leisure time, the industry was scrambling to reinvigorate an interest in theater-going. The national migration from city centers to the suburbs had more than simply relocated the audiences; it also changed their preferences for enjoying their leisure time. In the suburbs, American’s demonstrated an interest in participatory activities. As Forbes magazine declared in 1955, “the sharpest fact about the postwar leisure market is the growing preference for active fun rather than mere onlooking” (quoted in Belton 1992:77). When they did opt for filmed entertainment, many now had the option to view old films and new televised programs on a black-and- white screen in their living rooms. In addition to the multi-faceted problem of dwindling ticket sales, the studios also faced a unique industry landscape that complicated their

efforts to respond. With recent court rulings breaking up their distribution channels, the studios now had to negotiate with theater owners when proposing any technological solution to lure Americans back to the cinemas.

In order to navigate this terrain, Twentieth Century-Fox took an approach that it hoped would both draw upon the lure of Cinerama and meet the needs of exhibitors. In the process, Fox developed a plan to corner the market on future production using their patented technology. Their efforts ensured that CinemaScope was widely adopted, that it briefly saturated the market, including production outside of Hollywood, and that it would ultimately be replaced by processes which more effectively negotiated between the Academy ratio and the Cinerama spectacle by establishing a wider frame using traditional lens and 35mm film.

The technology undergirding the CinemaScope process was not new, but it was relatively simple, and therefore an attractive option for pitching to theaters. The invention, patented in 1927 by Henri Chrètien, was an anamorphic process for squeezing a large image onto a standard 35mm film strip and then unsqueezing that image during projection. Whereas shooting with standard lenses on 35mm film produced an image with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, using Chrètien’s lenses would produce a startlingly wider image. With a squeeze ratio of 2:1, the lenses produced an aspect ratio of 2.66:1. With magnetic stereo sound, the available image was 2.55:1.

As Richard Hincha notes, however, Fox initially insisted that theaters purchase not just the anamorphic lenses, but also special “mirror” screens and stereo sound systems. The initial estimates for these purchases were $25,000 for a large theater,

$15-17,000 for medium sized theaters with up to 2,000 seats, and $10-12,000 for

smaller theaters (Hincha 1985:46). To ensure that theaters would invest, studio president Spyros Skouras made a bold declaration: in 1953, he issued a promise that all future Fox productions would use CinemaScope technology. Most theater companies rejected the demands for installing new screens and sound systems, and in nearly every case Fox relented, eventually agreeing that medium-sized and smaller theaters needed only to purchase the projection lenses and a larger screen of standard construction. As part of the accommodations, Fox began to include optical sound alongside the magnetic sound track, limiting the aspect ratio to what became the standard for CinemaScope, 2.35:1, only slightly less than double the previous standard

Academy Ratio of 1.37:1.

Twentieth Century-Fox more or less willed CinemaScope into market saturation.

Their aim was to revive flagging ticket sales, but also to alter exhibition standards in their favor. On the one hand, they committed to making all future films in the

CinemaScope process. On the other, they secured patents on the lenses, then made sure that they had enough lenses to both shoot their own films and to lease others to competing studios. They marketed the process heavily, first in trade publications and then to consumers. They held demonstrations for the technology in Hollywood and on a country-wide tour, allowing the studio to target both national theater chains and smaller companies. Before their first production was released, they secured commitments from

M-G-M, Allied Artists Pictures Corporation (formerly Monogram), Columbia, Disney,

United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers (Hincha 1985: 46). Each of these companies would be forced to pay for Fox’s proprietary lenses, $25,000 per picture or

$100,000 lump sum for as many pictures as they would like (Solomon 1988:88). Fox

knew that by securing these commitments, they could convince more theaters to adapt to CinemaScope projection. And, if they could convince theaters to adopt the process, they could establish a monopoly of sorts over the industry, requiring other studios to lease their lenses and allowing Fox to cut in on their competitor’s biggest pictures.

These developments all took place in a short span of time. Fox had contacted and signed a deal with Chrètien in December of 1952, actual filming of the first productions began in February of 1953, and Skouras announced the studio’s commitment to the technology in the same month (Belton 1992 120-22). Within six months, Fox released their first feature, The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), followed two months later by How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953). In total, five

CinemaScope films would appear in 1953, including MGM’s Knights of the Round Table

(Richard Thorpe, 1953). The following year, 36 features would be released from eight different studios. Although Fox was initially careful about the types of pictures it would make, and although it had prescriptive guides for how to film them, this market saturation meant that very quickly the technology was finding new and more creative applications.

Pictures that Move

A brief survey of Twentieth Century-Fox promotional materials and internal memos describes exactly the sort of entertainment that the studio was hoping to deliver.

While the industry advertisements focused on promising “CinemaScoprosperity” and emphasized the number of theaters that had already converted, Fox’s advertisements to filmgoers focused on claims of immersion in the film (Hincha 1985: 51). They sought to capitalize on Cinerama’s success and the noted change in audience interests from

entertainment to recreation. As Zanuck wrote, “the public is now more participation minded than ever” (quoted in Belton 1992: 77).

Zanuck’s internal memos explain a bit about what sort of participation he believed audiences were looking for. For one thing, sex was a big seller for the company. “This report does not necessarily prove that a picture must have sex to survive or become a big hit,” read one Zanuck memo, “it indicates, however, that more pictures with this content are successful than any other type of picture” (Solomon 1988:

79). Further, given the all-in strategy Fox was pursuing, Zanuck wanted to be sure that the first releases were big successes. He was looking for “safe entertainment” to lead the roster of CinemaScope films, commenting to the film’s story editor, “I do not want stories that will be helped by CinemaScope. I want stories that will help CinemaScope”

(quoted in Custen 1997: 324). In a 1953 memo sent prior to The Robe’s release,

Zanuck made his position on how to best use CinemaScope even more clear:

Effective now we will abandon further work on any treatment or screenplay that does not take full advantage of the new dimension of CinemaScope. It is our conviction that almost any story can be told more effectively in CinemaScope than any other medium but it is also our conviction that every picture that goes into production in CinemaScope should contain subject matter which utilizes to the fullest extent the full possibilities of the medium.

This does not mean that every picture should have so-called epic proportions but it does mean that at least for the first 18 months of CinemaScope production that we select subjects that contain elements which enable us to take full advantage of scope, size, and physical action. . . .

For the time being intimate comedies or small-scale, domestic stories should be put aside and no further monies expanded on their development . . . We have a new entertainment medium and we want to exploit it for all it’s worth . . .

If CinemaScope does nothing else it will force us back into the moving picture business—I mean pictures that move. (Quoted in Solomon 1988: 86)

Zanuck’s emphasis on “size, scope, and physical action” was an effort to ensure the company’s investment in the technology would pay off. His strategy was to play it “safe,” with sex appeal, action, and known properties, in part to convince audiences that, with a

CinemaScope production, movies were no longer merely for passive spectatorship. In putting aside small-scale dramas and comedies, at least for the time being, Zanuck had hoped to sell the public, the theaters, and competing studios on ‘Scope.

His strategy was in some ways successful, but by other measures not so. As

Belton documents, the film business experienced a small bump during the second half of the decade, but the confluence of forces that were driving ticket sales down were too much for a single technology to overcome. All measures of cinema-going were dismal, as ticket sales, weekly attendance, and studio revenues continued to decline through the mid-1980s (Belton 1992: 212). Twentieth Century-Fox’s shrewd strategy to corner the market on CinemaScope lenses backfired on them, too, as the high costs of leasing the lenses drove other studios to engineer their own wide-screen formats. Fox themselves were in the position to lease their competitor’s lenses when, briefly, the

70mm Todd A-O systems proved successful in roadshows, leading Fox in 1958 to invest $600,000 for the right to produce 3 films in the format (Lev 2003: 124).

Fade Out

Although still revived occasionally today, as in the 2016s ode to 1950s

Hollywood, La La Land (Damien Chazelle), CinemaScope production dwindled sharply from a high of 78 pictures shot in the format in 1954 to an almost dead end in the

1960s, with only 6 pictures produced in 1967, 4 in 1968, 2 in 1969, and 1 in 1970, one

of only two that decade (Carr 1988: 92-99). Although anamorphic filmmaking had a productive afterlife in Japan as TohoScope, CinemaScope did not prove to be the future of cinema, nor did it single-handedly revive the industry. It did, however, demonstrate that movies were still a popular form of American entertainment at a time when executives feared television would make theater-going a thing of the past. Further, although ultimately displaced by other innovations, especially Panavision’s improvements on spherical lenses for production and exhibition, CinemaScope forever changed the shape of Hollywood movies. No longer was the nearly-square Academy ratio frame a standard for filmmaking. Wide-frame film would indeed be the future.

Critical Responses to CinemaScope

CinemaScope technology has had an interesting reception history, one that parallels developments in popular and academic film criticism. In the first phase of responses, contemporaneous with the release of the first CinemaScope pictures, critical appraisal of the format was largely related to either a priori beliefs about what makes good cinema or concerns about the realities of filming and exhibiting in this quickly- adapted format. A late entry in this era, Charles Barr’s “CinemaScope Before and After” was emblematic of the former debate. Inspired by a tradition of criticism that extends from André Bazin, through Cahiers du cinéma, to the British critics in Movie, Barr argues that CinemaScope opened up possibilities for “gradation of emphasis” which encouraged active viewing and relieved filmmaking of didactic editing and compositional impulses. Barr’s essay closed this phase of critical response but became a touchstone for nearly all of the discussions that followed.

The second phase of critical responses came from American universities, both metaphorically, in that this phase was indicative of the research boom that resulted from

the enormous growth film studies as an academic discipline, and literally, in that the key text from this phase is a special issue of The Velvet Light Trap, published by University of Texas, dedicated to discussions of “American Widescreen.” As the editors of that issue note, in the more than 20 years since Barr’s publication, CinemaScope (and

Barr’s claims regarding the technology) had received little discussion. Their special issue meant to remedy that dearth of attention with a diverse array of approaches to the topic, beginning with a letter from Charles Barr and concluding with an index of widescreen films, a summary of box office performance, and a bibliography for further research.

Important contributions to the issue include an essay from John Belton that would eventually evolve into Widescreen Cinema, cited extensively above, and research from

Richard Hincha into Twentieth Century-Fox’s efforts to sell CinemaScope, also cited above. In addition to these industry studies, the issue included a research program for an ideological reading of CinemaScope technology. In it, James Spellerberg argues for the need to pair Althusserian materialism with historical research into how the technology was represented to the public. Lastly, this issue includes an essay from

David Bordwell which foreshadows his subsequent publication with Janet Staiger and

Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema. Bordwell’s essay rejects Barr’s claims, putting forward a call for a theory of narration, in his terms “a historical poetics of cinema.” A separate but concurrent approach from outside the American academy, published only two years prior to this special issue, came from Barry Salt, whose ambitious Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis put forward an empirical, data-driven approach to understanding how technologies like CinemaScope.

A third phase of attention to CinemaScope is currently being developed, one which in many ways seeks to resolve the tensions and heal the wounds of the belletristic debate that marked the preceding eras. Each of these approaches to

CinemaScope is marked to a greater or lesser degree by those debates and works to weave strands of competing arguments together into a more comprehensive understanding of the technology and its relationship to film style. Harper Cossar’s

Letterboxed, carries out Bordwell’s call for research into narrative and stylistic protocals, but arrives a contrary conclusions regarding the impact of ‘Scope and outlines the formal and stylistic “ruptures” the technology encouraged. Leah Jacob’s work in

Cinematic Appeals takes up Spellerberg’s call for a modified approach to understanding the spectator, using historical research into discourses around the technology to negotiate contradictions between apparatus theories and theories of bodily address.

Also profiting from a blended approach, Sam Roggen has forthcoming publications using Salt’s statistical analysis to more sharply define a poetics of cinema, extending

Bordwell’s project but utilizing Salt’s methodology to modify both researcher’s prior claims.

What is missing from this current phase, however, and which this dissertation hopes to contribute, is sustained attention to specific films. In an effort to synthesize various theoretical approaches, most of the recent work on CinemaScope has worked towards all-encompassing claims that may be informed by, but which necessarily omit, close analysis of CinemaScope in relation to the film in which it appears. As such, I similarly follow a blended approach, working in the Movie tradition of mise-en-scène analysis as it has grown and evolved since the earliest phase of responses to

CinemaScope. Debates between Movie critics and Pauline Kale and David Bordwell have helped to refine the aims and practices of style-based criticism without, I believe, rendering the approach insignificant. In contributing a modified mise-en-scène approach, this dissertation helps to broaden the contemporary discussion, extending and modifying some first phase methodologies for assessing the relationship between style and technology that modern approaches have thus far neglected.

The First Phase: Contemporaneous Critical Approaches

The first phase of approaches to CinemaScope was marked primarily by a disagreement about film aesthetics. For example, contributors to Sight and Sound were profoundly dismissive of the technology, particularly as pertained to its initial use. This position is outlined plainly by Richard Kohler in an editorial on “The BIG Screens” in the

Spring 1955 edition. His argument extends from his assumptions regarding what

CinemaScope offers and what he believed film ought to do. Regarding the former, he argues that CinemaScope can only present stationary views on the action, letting the drama unfold before the camera in such a way that “the camera becomes only a photographic adjunct to a stage director’s creation” (Kohler 1955: 121). For Kohler, this feature of technology contrasts sharply with filmmaking in the Academy ratio. There, “a director is allowed to use his medium properly,” which Kohler takes to mean that he

“selects concise images, juxtaposes them in meaningful combinations, and brings them to his audiences as representations of reality—not the thing itself” (Kohler 1955: 121).

In the critics at Cahiers du cinéma, however, CinemaScope had passionate champions. That these critics were to become filmmakers is perhaps evident in the manner in which they focus on CinemaScope’s potential for filmmaking rather than on the faults of any one production. For François Truffaut, for example, the CinemaScope

process was an “aesthetic EVOLUTION” (his emphasis), a major step forward in cinema’s purported teleological progression towards increased realism ([1953] 1985:

274). “Certainly,” he argues, “the first films made in CinemaScope will be mediocre,” but, he goes on, once filmmaking in CinemaScope is as natural as filmmaking in the

Academy ratio, directors will enjoy a new freedom ([1953] 1985: 274). For Jacques

Rivette, too, CinemaScope was “the crowning moment and the consecration in this long process” of cinema’s evolution from silent to sound, black and white to color, and now narrow to widescreen (1954). He asserts that, in retrospect, it was the narrowness of the Academy ratio frame that led to plastic compositions and expressionism (the

“proper” use of the medium, per Kohler). As did Truffaut, Rivette argued that

CinemaScope brought a new freedom to filmmaking: “Freed from framing, freed from editing,…this at last is our cinema, now forced to look for its real problems” (Rivette

[1953] 1985). Erich Rhomer, too, was poetically optimistic about the technology, proclaiming that CinemaScope would bring to the cinema “the only palpable element it lacked: air, the divine ether of poets” (1954 [1985]: 280). In their shared enthusiasm, these critics placed equal emphasis on the visual pleasure of the wider screen, with

Truffaut praising the “full view,” and Rhomer declaring “I like to be enveloped in the spectacle” ([1954] 1986: 280).

The Cahiers critics’ intellectual mentor, André Bazin, wrote extensively on the topic of CinemaScope. In André Bazin’s New Media, Dudley Andrew notes that Bazin’s response to the technology was markedly more ambivalent than that of his young iconoclastic protégés. One the one hand, Bazin’s yearning for revelatory powers of cinema’s photographic process made the wide format a potential cause for celebration,

but, on the other, “he never wanted all films to be shot in what he understood was a trendy shape” (Andrew 2014: 29). Bazin was frustrated that, rather than offering a choice to filmmakers, the studios were imposing the format on directors and projects that might have been more at home in Academy ratio, and he was similarly frustrated that theaters, which weren’t equipped to project the wide image, would do so anyway, resulting in crudely cropped presentations (Andrew 2014: 29).

Bazin was savvy to the role economics played in these developments.

“Everything in cinema begins with exhibition,” he wrote, “‘people’ didn’t create

CinemaScope because ‘people’ felt some…need for a larger screen; instead it was cinema’s need to win out in a competition against television” (Bazin [1955] 2014: 215).

Although he praised the format for expanding the camera’s view, imagining what such additional space would have meant for a Flaherty documentary or a neorealist picture, he also argued that “we must understand that as far as their material destiny goes—and this controls their aesthetic destiny—cinema and television are not really arts of storytelling or drama at all…within the capitalist world, anyway, they are industries of spectacle” (Bazin [1953] 2014: 279).

Whereas some denounced the format, however, Bazin was optimistic about its potential. While some contemporary filmmakers saw the horizontal image as being merely cropped, Bazin praised the wider view offered by CinemaScope. He imagined a wealth of new compositional possibilities, and he thought the new shape revitalized the close-up rather than inhibiting it, arguing that the empty space of the frame is not properly empty or useless, but rather a gift of the wide image. “This is something which

CinemaScope gives us,” he wrote, “the air around faces” (Bazin [1954] 2014: 296).3

Bazin also readily embraced the marketing language of being “engulfed” by the film:

“CinemaScope does indeed make us enter the image!” (Bazin [1954] 2014: 296).

The participatory implications of this last statement anticipates Charles Barr’s

“CinemaScope Before and After.” Published in 1963, Barr followed Bazin in readily admitting both the commerciality of CinemaScope and the fact that it had often been used “for a circus effect,” but against these observations he posited an increased opportunity for subtlety. Again echoing Bazin, Barr argued that “the natural subject for the film is man-in-a-situation. But the [Academy ratio] frame was too narrow for this to be shown” (Barr 1963: 20). In the narrow frame, meaning had to be artificially constructed through framing, close-up, camera angles, and montage. With the increased breadth of the CinemaScope image, however, Barr believed filmmakers could develop a “gradation of emphasis” by letting scenes play out in front of a camera, capturing multiple figures and their relationship to the environment whereas a narrow frame would have to either reframe or cut (Barr 1963: 18).

Barr both imagined what past masterworks by directors like Renoir would have gained from CinemaScope and offered commentary on those films he saw as using the technology well. Quoting at length V.F. Perkins’ analysis of River of No Return (Otto

Preminger, 1954) from Movie, Barr argued that, with CinemaScope, the meaning of a shot could develop within the frame rather than having to be imposed artificially in the

3 Bazin expresses this position in “New Screen Technologies,” “CinemaScope and NeoRealism,” and “The Trial of CinemaScope: It Didn’t Kill the Close-up,” all in Andrew, Bazin’s New Media. For the opposing arguments, see Sight and Sound 24:4, 209-212, “The Big Screens,” in which directors sound off on their view of the technology. See also Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, citing Delmer Daves (page 290), George Cukor (page 300), Howard Hawks (page 302), and Vincente Minelli (page 311). These latter points are referenced again on pages 36-7, below.

editing process, and, as a result, viewers would be encouraged to actively participate in the drama rather than passively receive an announced meaning. For Barr, this development brought cinema more in line with the qualities that, in his view, are quintessentially filmic.

Importantly, Barr’s publication in Film Quarterly was flanked on either side by debates surrounding the methodology he employs. In the preceding issue, Pauline Kael published a lengthy refutation of auteurist approaches to criticism, citing specifically

Andrew Sarris and the British critics from Movie. In “Circles and Squares,” she argues for a more socially conscious criticism. She puts forward that, for Cahiers du cinéma critics to focus on American films made sense as a corrective to the films they saw being made in France, allowing them to admire “the energies and crude strength and good humor” of Hollywood films (Kael, Spring 1963: 23). For British and New York critics, however, focusing on American Hollywood directors as film authors made no sense to Kael given that the system of production so rigidly enforced studio demands.

Worse, in her view such a focus risked establishing a cult of personality at the expense of genuine critical engagement (Kael, Spring 1963: 17). In focusing on mise-en-scène and authorship, the Movie critics were, for Kael, hobbyists busily “reducing movies to trivia” (Kael, Spring 1963: 22).

In the subsequent issue, the Film Quarterly editors published a response from the Movie editorial staff and a rejoinder from Kael. In their response, the Movie critics most successfully defended their position regarding her claim that mise-en-scène criticism collects trivia at the expense of plot and story. “[S]tyle or technique,” they wrote, “is not just an optional extra, but the means by which the content of the film is

expressed…Of course one talks about content, if only to get to grips with content”

(Cameron, et. al. 1963: 59). Elsewhere, however, their ostensible defense is spiteful, at times embarrassing, and the whole exchange so negative on both sides that the editors had to follow the entries with a call for more level-headed exchange.

The Second Phase: Film Studies’ Rediscovery of Scope in the 1980s

For many years after Barr’s publication, little critical attention was paid to

CinemaScope. The mid-1980s, however, saw CinemaScope return to center stage in many debates about film criticism. In 1982, Barry Salt published his history of film technology and an outline of his empiricist, data-gathering approach to understanding the relationship between style and technology. In 1985, The Velvet Light Trap published a special issue on widescreen cinema that would include preambles to two important works on the topic, John Belton’s Widescreen Cinema and David Bordwell, Janet

Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema. This was also the year that Jim Hillier published his edited collection of translated essays from Cahiers du cinéma, including dossiers on CinemaScope and on American directors, including

Nicholas Ray, a director whose most famous works were filmed in the anamorphic format. Clearly this was an important decade for film studies as a whole, but also specifically for studies of CinemaScope. As Bordwell here positions himself contra Barr, subsequent approaches to the topic would have to grapple with the major contributions made in this period.

As mentioned above, David Bordwell first articulated his views on CinemaScope in the 1985 special issue of Velvet Light Trap. His article there, “Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise-en-Scène Criticism,” set out to refute the critical tradition Barr was drawing on, including the past contributions from Movie critics. In his argument, Bordwell positions

mise-en-scène criticism as descendent from, or at least theoretical partners with, the auteurist impulse of the Cahiers group. He asserts, however, that these writers had abandoned Bazin. Rather than pursue Bazin’s key question, “What is cinema?”,

Bordwell argues that “they sought guideposts for good filmmaking in a tradition that they admired.” (Bordwell 1985: 19). Thus, Bordwell asserts, echoing Kael’s earlier arguments, they slipped into an auteurist tendency that curates fine styles of filmmaking rather than truly analyzing films.4

The body of Bordwell’s essay focuses on a refutation of Barr’s analysis. He sustains that criticism of Barr in his book length project of the same year, Classical

Hollywood Cinema. Ultimately, however, he abandoned the antagonistic stance while retaining his basic premises in a lengthy discussion of CinemaScope in his later book,

Poetics of Cinema. The argument Bordwell puts forward across all of these texts is that

CinemaScope did not have any noteworthy impact on what he and his co-authors define as the classical range of choices available to filmmakers. In “Widescreen Aesthetics,” for example, he argues that “for one thing, the filmmaker will often struggle to adapt the new technology to for formal functions already canonized within the norms” (1985: 34).

The strength of Bordwell’s work lies in its global view of filmmaking. There has not been a more comprehensive or detailed historical account of the Hollywood industry, including its technology, its marketing, and its average output, than his collaborative work with Staiger and Thompson. His analysis of CinemaScope, however,

4 In carrying out this argument, Bordwell claims of mise-en-scène criticism that ‘critical interpretation had the job to treat the stylistic overlay as thematic commentary’ and ‘style as an abstract gloss on story.’ (Bordwell 1985:20, emphases mine). Significantly, however, the mise-en-scène tradition holds that style is story. For a powerful rejoinder to Bordwell’s critique of the Movie group, see Andrew Britton, ‘The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and the Classical Style,’ in Britton on Film, pg 435- 467.

offers little sense of how, at the level of the individual film, the technology offers filmmakers meaningful choices. Instead, Bordwell begins from the premise that

CinemaScope was a problem for filmmakers, a “struggle” that was ultimately resolved by recourse to standard practices. This is the pessimistic approach to the stylistic possibilities of new filmmaking technology, par excellence.

For example, in Poetics of Cinema, Bordwell lays out the industry history that resulted in a turn to widescreen. In doing so, he documents in a labored fashion the complaints of directors, like Delmer Daves and Vincente Minelli, who voiced opposition to using the technology. Bordwell emphasizes their resistance in order to position

CinemaScope alongside other technological changes as a problem for filmmakers.

Drawing upon an impressive assemblage of stills from various eras in filmmaking, his methodology forces him to generalize and draw sweeping conclusions. The standard conclusion is foregone: with a change in filmmaking technology, everything old is new again. Finding that, for example, tableau staging is common to films before, during, and after CinemaScope, he concludes that little more can be said about the influence of the technology.5 “For the student of film poetics,” he concludes, “the Scope era can be seen as giving a cluster of classical staging options one final run-through” (Bordwell 2008:

325).

While a problem-solving mindset was surely the stance of many directors, particularly those working on the first CinemaScope productions, the rapid adoption of the technology led to a variety of approaches to filming. Considering that Bazin, the

Cahiers critics, and Barr all thought imaginatively about the technology, envisioning

5 I return to these arguments in Chapters 2 and especially Chapter 4, pages 140-142

what the wide frame could have added to previous films and how it might equip directors to approach new ones, I find it hard to believe that every director approached

CinemaScope with the degree of pessimism that Bordwell underscores in both his history and his analysis of the technology.

In the process of drawing remarkable connections between eras of filmmaking,

Bordwell ends up flattening the distinctions that make individual films meaningful and memorable. Such a flattening seems almost inevitable given the ambitious aim of his coverage. Consider the remarkable use of edge framing in Lola Montès (Max Ophuls,

1955) (see pages 127-130). Bordwell’s approach alone does not seem able to speak to such an innovative use. “Now and then,” he writes, “key elements would be thrust to the very side of the frame” (Bordwell 2008: 302). Because his emphasis is on such a large scale study, and because he is concerned predominantly with the consistencies that delineate what he defines as the classical mode of address, he has little more to say about such techniques. While his caution against ahistorical readings of film style are certainly useful, his own discussions of CinemaScope suggest that, zoomed too far out, a critic risks flattening the distinctions that make certain films stand out amongst the ordinary.

Barry Salt’s approach to CinemaScope is both like and unlike Bordwell’s. Their approaches are alike in that they both strive for a global view of cinema’s modes of address and its relationship to technology over time. They are alike, too, in that, perhaps owing to this approach, they reach similar conclusions about the technology’s impact on moviemaking. They each argue that the influence of CinemaScope is negligible. Salt’s approach is different, however, in that he abhors what he considers to

be armchair theorizing. In its place, Salt seeks a data-driven approach to understanding the relationship between technology and film style. Lest there be any doubt about the antagonism between the two, they have left behind a public record of their sharply- worded altercations over the relative quality of their work, bitterly traded bitter blows that were landed in the pages of Film Quarterly in 1985 and 1986.

Like Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s Classical Hollywood Cinema, Barry

Salt’s impressive Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis contributes considerable historical research on the use of various film technologies from early cinema through the 1980s. The exemplary historical research, however, is motivated towards a larger project, which is to suggest that film theory has suffered from various logical errors, all of which, for Salt, stem from the fact that theory has not been scientific enough. At the end of his book’s opening review of prior contributions to film theory, he summarizes his point of view:

Eventually we will discover how the actual mental mechanisms involved in perception of the real world work, and then we will know how the perception of the representational part of the film medium works as well. But this will be done by scientists, and not by “theorists” sitting in armchairs in the humanities department of universities. As for how the small part of purely filmic perception works, this will likewise have to be found out with active experimental research. It truly embarrasses me to have to state something which should be so obvious, but the conceit and self-deception involved in most recent theorizing about film forces me to do it. (Salt [1983] 1992: 30)

The tone of Salt’s denunciations extends throughout the book. No approaches to cinema studies are deemed valuable save his own statistical style analysis of films, with which he punctuates chapters of his historical research.

If the aim of film analysis is an accumulation of data, then Salt’s approach is without equal. If, however, the aim of film analysis is to understand how a particular film

works, Salt’s statistical approach is, taken on its own, insufficient. That the statistical analysis is to my mind dubious is in part because he so thoroughly abstracts films into blocks of data and then purports to understand the films thereby measured. His process is impressively labor-intensive, but not for that reason any more compelling. For one thing, he readily acknowledges that “since we are considering films with over 200 shots in them, there is a tendency for occasional errors in the assignments of shots to their correct category” (Salt [1983] 1992: 142). The errors in question could be of scale or shot number, but in either case he “corrects” for these errors by a process of standardization: “it is preferable to multiply the number of shots in each category by 500 divided by the total number of shots in the film, so that one then has the number of each type of shot per 500 shots” (Salt [1983] 1992: 142). This same corrective measure, he contends, accounts for reframing, too, including the rather dramatic reframing strategies of directors working in long takes with a mobile camera. The results of his study, thus corrected, can be graphed out by director, by years of production, or by specific film, and it is these graphs upon which his style analyses are based.

By studying film in this way, Salt concludes of CinemaScope “that the effect was quite small” (Salt [1983] 1992: 246). He begins with a random grouping of 21 films, and shows that the Average Shot Length (ASL) had lengthened about 2 seconds, but that some films, such as Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), with an ASL of 5 seconds, could cut quite rapidly. His conclusion, then, is that directors simply went along with whatever their prior tendencies were for cutting. He then summarily makes the same conclusions about shot composition, along the way making some truly puzzling claims, such as

“composition in the ordinary sense was inevitably not so important for directors…who used long takes with a mobile camera” (Salt [1983] 1992: 247).

However one feels about the relative value of quantifying editing patterns in films,

I can only firmly disagree with claims like the one above. Salt’s method cannot possibly tell us whether or not “composition is important” in any film, as its conclusions are drawn strictly from aggregated and plotted data rather than any sense of what actually appears in the frame, let alone the context in which it appears. I only belabor this point because

Salt is one of the few authors who has given sustained attention to both CinemaScope and to one of the directors under discussion here, Max Ophuls. What Salt’s approach lacks is clear when, at the end of the book, he presents his stylistic analysis of Ophuls’ films, including such spurious claims as “Ophuls was continuing on his commercially dangerous course of using very long takes (ASL=18) shot from far back, with just a little emphasis on the Medium Shot as a small gesture to his supposed ‘star’” (Salt [1983]

1992:312). Not only does the gathered data insufficiently support the sarcasm inherent in his use of “supposed”, it also fails in its assertion that long takes are commercially dangerous. For example, La Ronde (1950) also had an ASL of 18 seconds, according to Salt’s own research, and was both commercially and critically successful. In practice,

Salt uses the illusion of scientific certainty to make semi-educated guesses about the purpose of the shots he knows primarily as figures in a statistical average. Were

Ophuls’ medium shots small gestures to his leads? We cannot possible discern the answer from a bar chart.

The Third Phase: Contemporary Approaches to CinemaScope

Recently, critical attention has returned to CinemaScope, often taking a blended approach to previous practices, working to extend and modify previous theoretical or

critical dialogues by weaving them together or holding them together in productive tension. In the latter category, Ariel Rogers Cinematic Appeals extends James

Spellerberg’s approach, outlined in the The Velvet Light Trap, for theorizing the spectator of a CinemaScope film. Looking at a number of moments in which new filmmaking technologies were introduced, Rogers’ aims in each case to assess “the ways in which public discourses…and modes of presentation…conspire to formulate cinema’s draws for viewers” (2013, 3). To approach an understanding of how filmgoers experienced new filmmaking technologies, she analyzes thoroughly-researched publicity and popular press descriptions of the technology, including advertisements, trade press descriptions, newspaper reviews, and essays from periodicals, connecting her findings to further research on the physical environments in which the films were encountered. Rogers extends Spellerberg’s call in Velvet Light Trap for combining

Althusser’s observation with historical research, drawing upon and weaving together multiple strains of academic discourse, including theories of bodily address (referencing

Steve Shaviro, Linda Williams, and Jonathan Crary), and apparatus theory (referencing

Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli). From these various strands of historical and theoretical research, she attempts to approximate the viewing experiences of spectators across various shifts in movie-making technology, including CinemaScope, digital cinema, and 3-D.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her theoretical referents, Rogers focuses her

CinemaScope discussion predominantly on images of the body, looking closely at how the body is framed in How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953) and East of

Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955). She notes that the industry dialogue surrounding the

technology by turns demanded submission to the image, promised tactile interaction with the image and encouraged audience identification. The films, she argues, maintain these contradictions. Of How to Marry a Millionaire, Rodgers argues that Monroe’s image in CinemaScope “emphasized the act of display…[while] her figure simultaneously, and rather vigorously, reinforced dominant conceptions of race, class and gender” (Rogers 2013, 58). In Kazan’s direction, too, she finds embedded contradictions, particularly in the striking close-ups and canted-angle shots of James

Dean, ultimately concluding that the images of Monroe and Dean “although certainly not subversive…nevertheless activated contemporary concerns about humanness, particularly relating to ideas about gender and sexuality” (Rogers 2013, 90). Roger’s blend of theoretical approaches and historical research bring to CinemaScope a renewed emphasis on the spectator’s experience of the image. Framing that experience in terms of bodily response, she finds an alternative to previous work on CinemaScope which focused primarily on the distinction between active and passive viewing.

In another example of extending and modifying previous work on CinemaScope,

Harper Cossar’s 2011 study, Letterboxed, leans heavily on Bordwell’s work while at the same time sharply critiquing Bordwell’s conclusions on similar terms to those I’ve outlined above. Cossar pushes back against what he describes as Bordwell’s

“underwhelmed assessment” of CinemaScope (Cossar 2011, 12). Not limiting himself to

CinemaScope, he argues that wide-frame films in general have effected two “ruptures,” physical and stylistic, that offer filmmakers new opportunities to heighten the pitch of narratives at key moments. For Cossar, the physical ruptures involve fragmentations of the frame and plastic compositions, whereas the stylistic ruptures “occur when

filmmakers take existing stylistic tropes and reinvent them in new ways” (Cossar 2011,

5-6).

Cossar develops a rubric for assessing films for such ruptures, restricting himself to looking at close-ups, landscapes, angles and camera movements, and limiting those observations to moments that occur in opening sequences, in indoor conversations, in outdoor vistas, and in moments covered with complex camera movements (Cossar

2011, 99). The rubric feels artificial, but Cossar makes two interesting and related observations. First, that, because directorial decisions entail corollary decisions regarding set design, lighting, and blocking, many of the ruptures he observes likely occured in the pre-production phase. Secondly, “because of these changes in the preproduction phase, the shooting of these films requires stylistic ruptures as well,” primarily a lower camera height (Cossar 2011, 180). Cossar tends to follow Bordwell in making his claims broadly and at a remove from the film. What, for example, of a filmmaker like John Sturges, who shot in CinemaScope but did not storyboard, preferring instead to figure out his shots on location (Lovell, 2008: 107)? What of the expressive effect of those shots, shot from a lower camera, on a given moment of the film? Though he ultimately concludes that Bordwell underappreciated the stylistic changes brought about by widescreen filmmaking, Cossar follows Bordwell in maintaining a purposeful distance, facilitated by his self-imposed rubric, from detailed analysis of a specific film (Cossar 2012: 21).

Most recently, in 2016 I co-chaired a panel on CinemaScope at the annual

Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference with another doctoral student, Sam

Roggen. As I do, Roggen focused his study on CinemaScope aesthetics. Working out of

the University of Antwerp, Roggen has aimed to blend the approaches of Salt and

Bordwell, applying rigorous statistical analysis, supported by archival research into production memos and on-set correspondence, in an effort to more sharply define a formalist poetics of CinemaScope. He conceptualizes his work as following Bordwell’s problem/solution model, looking particularly at the elements of filmmaking that statistical analysis can best measure: shot scale and editing rates. In a forthcoming article on early CinemaScope productions from Fox, he argues that his empirical research supports the common claim for the elimination of close-ups and fast cutting, but that research into memos from the studio suggest that this was not a directorial decision, but rather a top-down directive designed to ease concerns about the format change and standardize production practices. In “Gradation of Emphasis in the CinemaScope

Westerns of Anthony Mann: A Style Analysis,” Roggen argues that empirical data supports Barr’s notion of gradation of emphasis in Mann’s Westerns. Taken together, these arguments sustain my assertion that, whereas early filmmaking in CinemaScope was reserved, its widespread adoption by the industry led to innovative approaches to the technology.

My own efforts, culminating in this dissertation, have taken a different approach, one that I hope addresses what is currently a blind spot in contemporary work on

CinemaScope. I focus not on the early output of Twentieth Century-Fox studios, but on productions in 1955, at which point the technology was widely adopted. In doing so, I take an optimistic stance regarding the technology, one which follows from V.F. Perkins’ observation that “the cinema’s faculties are chiefly important for the opportunities they create, not for their ‘demands’” (Perkins [1972] 1993: 98). I therefore begin from the

assumption that a change in filmmaking technology necessarily restructures the creative options available to filmmakers. Whereas, as Bordwell has argued, technological change may both add and subtract from choices available to filmmakers, I argue that the change need not therefore be addressed only as a problem to be solved by way of assimilation, but may equally be taken up as offering a series of new opportunities for constructing visual narratives(Bordwell 1985: 24).

From this beginning, I follow in the tradition of the British mise-en-scène critics, emphasizing the importance of close attention to the details of a given film, read in the context of the film as a whole. In heeding Bordwell’s advice that a critic must be able to situate a filmmaker’s decisions within the broader context of narrative and stylistic traditions, I hope to avoid pitfalls of ahistorical readings and, ultimately, I hope to contribute to contemporary dialogues a modified extension of some critical insights from the first phase that have subsequently been left unaccounted for. Specifically, I hope to contribute to the current dialogue sustained analysis of CinemaScope aesthetics in particular films.

A Modified Mise-en-Scène Criticism Approach

The fundamental premise of mise-en-scène criticism is that style and meaning are inseparable. Following this premise, if we wish to discuss the content of a film or how the film addresses that content to its audience, then we must closely attend to the specific details of that film. As Perkins asserted, “Theory exists in the wake of experience, and must remain adjustable to new experience” (Perkins [1973] 1992: 160).

Although mise-en-scène, a phrase borrowed from the theater (literally, “setting the stage”), has at times been defined with greater specificity, for the purposes of this critical approach, the term refers to everything one beholds when viewing a film and

how that content is arranged in space (within the frame and within the diegetic world) and time (narrative time, via editing, and duration as regards, for example, a long take).

In V.F. Perkins’ formulation, the elements of the mise-en-scène are how the film communicates—its style—and how the film communicates is what the film communicates. By attending to both sides of this equivalency, we achieve what Perkins calls a “synthetic approach.” Such an approach, he argues:

Corrects the critic’s literary bias towards portentous narrative and his purist bias towards visual bombast. In the process it centers our attention on the normal function of the director not to devise stories and not to construct painterly patterns but to realize given material and organize it into significant form. In order to comprehend whole meanings, rather than those parts of meaning which are present in verbal synopsis or visual code, attention must be paid to the whole content of shot, sequence and film. (Perkins [1972] 1993: 79)

The mise-en-scène approach, then, begins with the film itself. When analyzing a tracking shot, an editing pattern, or a framing device, we must first consider must the context of the film in which it appears.

In an interview with Academy of Fine Arts Saar, Perkins notes that he developed his ideas in Film as Film, indeed the very title of the book, as a contrast to other books, like The Art of Film, which Perkins saw as aiming to justify a study of film by arguing in part for its similarity to more established arts (HBKSaar 2012). In response, he sought to advocate an approach that valued film on its own premises, creating a relationship between critic and spectator “where the critic’s job is less to judge it and categorize it than to define its achievements” (Perkins 2012). Importantly, for Perkins the aim is not to bring suppositions to the film, but to begin with moments of the film and to establish the relationship between those significant moments and the film as a whole.

Whereas Perkins’ book is perhaps the cornerstone of the mise-en-scène approach, John Gibbs has been the strongest proponent of the approach today. He is currently the editor of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, the modern incarnation of

Movie. Gibbs has also written a history of the mise-en-scène tradition, sometimes referred to as the Movie tradition in reference to the style of criticism the journal had become famous for. In his The Life of Mise-en-Scène: Visual Style and British Film

Criticism 1946-78, Gibbs outlines the history of thought that led to the formation of

Movie and the subsequent approaches those critics took to their work. In this history,

Gibbs argues that interest in style and authorship have a deeper history than usually documented, finding origins for the Movie approach in the earlier journal British Journal

Sequence. Published from 1946-1951, Sequence critics focused on the work of “film artists” (directors) and praised those artists who were able to achieve “poetry” in their films (Gibbs 2013: 21-25). Gibbs notes similarities and differences in approach, but on the whole he finds that, in their discussions of film artists and poetry, the Sequence critics were working towards the same ends as later critics who would use auteur and style to describe the same phenomena.

This connection to the older tradition, however, illuminates two points of criticism of the mise-en-scène approach. These points refer to the problem of an auteurist approach and the problem of focusing on extraordinary films rather than seeking to understand the ordinary, and each of these critiques is sustained by both the evolving mise-en-scène approach and my own work here. Whereas Kael critiqued what she saw as a naïve focus on directors as authors of films, David Bordwell extended her critique to include the Movie tradition’s concepts of style. He argues that the premises of mise-

en-scène criticism led critics to read too much into elements of style, forcing those elements to cohere with the rest of the film (which he describes as “premature thematization” of style) or ascribing this style to an auteur director when in fact, for

Bordwell, the elements in question were functions of classical norms.6 To read particular moments as meaningful, he argues, requires first an ability to articulate the standard practices from which those techniques draw. “What ordinary practices make Ophuls’ camera movements or Sirk’s objects privileged expressive devices,” he asks, rhetorically (Bordwell 1985: 22). Bordwell ends his critique with calls for study into the background traditions of films, including the traditional narrative and stylistic protocols implied by their specific genre and production history.

Bordwell and Kael each make good arguments regarding traps to avoid when pursuing a mise-en-scène approach. In Style and Meaning, John Gibbs and Doug Pye both maintain the importance of recognizing the interrelated nature of style and meaning while also supporting an effort to situate the film contextually:

It may be that historical and/or contextual knowledge can provide a basis for initial placing of the work in relation to generic or other kinds of categories and that further research can refine these broad recognitions. But…understanding…cannot rest at these levels, and can never be simply factual: grasping the work…necessarily involves interpretation. Classification, however subtle and historically well informed, can only take us so far. (Gibbs and Pye 2005: 8)

I take these comments as positive adjustments to a mise-en-scène approach to film style. While each of my analyses began with close attention to the films themselves, I aim to anchor those analyses in research into genre, production history, and filmmaker

6 Noel Carroll makes a similar argument about circular reasoning in Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, arguing that Perkins’ premises tautologically lead him to privileging certain films over others (See Carroll 1988: 189).

style. Mindful of the critiques from Bordwell and Kael, and of the subsequent refinements of Gibbs and Pye, I have aimed to both interpret the style of the films and to situate the films fully in their production contexts.

For example, where the films explicitly engage genre, as do Bad Day at Black

Rock (John Sturges, 1955) and Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955), I have tried to firmly establish that genre’s history and to thoroughly define the nature of that engagement.

Where the film has a strong relationship with the director’s signature style, as do Lola

Montès and Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), I have made an effort to investigate that style and its evolution across genre (as with Ray) and changes in technology (as with both Ray and Ophuls). Where the production history is well documented, I have researched the relevant studio’s decision making process: Who initiated the project? Who was on the creative team? What were the target audiences, and how was the film received? Where the films engage with contemporary politics, I have followed those leads, and where the films intersects with other cultural artifacts, I have attempted to make those connections clear. In other words, I have tried to narrow the focus of my analysis to the role that CinemaScope has played in these films by way of triangulation, controlling in these ways for the industrial and historical context, genre demands, and stylistic tendencies of the director.

This dissertation aims, therefore, to contribute to existing criticism a sustained analysis of exactly how CinemaScope was used in particular films. Whereas a global view of cinema might not register any change (as CinemaScope’s debut brought a real, but only temporary, bump in ticket sales), I argue that the wider frame fundamentally altered the possibilities for realizing a narrative on film (as CinemaScope fundamentally

changed the standard shape of Cinema). Rather than look at this shift in technology as a problem for directors to solve, I look at the technological change as opening up creative opportunities for the filmmakers. Of course, I do not presume any secret knowledge of filmmaker’s attitudes, but I do believe that the critical posture of attending to what is possible prevents the pessimistic conclusion that filmmaking is simply a process of applying stock solutions to unique creative situations. In place of abstractions like Salt’s Average Shot Length or long-view summaries like Bordwell’s persistent group styles, I look at specific films, emphasizing not what is a new or startling break from the past, but rather what is made meaningful by way of the creative decisions of filmmakers working in CinemaScope. The chapters that follow are therefore perhaps best read as a model of the methodology defined above, evidence of the contributions mise-en-scène criticism can bring to film studies’ understanding of how this change in technology influenced film style.

Outline of Chapters

Ray and Rebel Without a Cause

This chapter argues that Nicholas Ray uses CinemaScope to elicit sympathy for his teen protagonists by viscerally conveying their emotions. To support my argument, I draw especially on Geoff Andrew’s monograph on the director, which works to emphasize his predilection to closely align style, content, and theme, as well the essays in David Slocum’s edited collection, which situate Ray’s films in the context of American cultural history. I further draw upon Bernard Eisenschitz’s biography of Ray, to which I contribute my own research into Ray’s relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright in order to argue that Ray approached the film’s frame as an organic unit of composition. In doing so, I claim that Ray made his films expressive in part by drawing upon the aspect-ratio

in which he was filming. In Academy ratio films, I argue, Ray tended towards images of entrapment, whereas in Rebel Without a Cause, Ray uses the CinemaScope frame to develop framing strategies, especially clothesline framing, graphic linear compositions, and imbalanced compositions, to convey the subjective emotions and interior dramas of his characters.

Ophuls and Lola Montès

This chapter argues that Ophuls uses the CinemaScope frame in a Brechtian manner. In making this argument, I work to extend observations by Laura Mulvey and

Daniel Morgan, particularly Mulvey’s observations that Ophuls frequently adapted his source texts in such a way as to comment on them critically, and that his work in Lola

Montès seems to go against the grain of CinemaScope’s potential, and Morgan’s observation that Ophuls’ camerawork allows access to his character’s inner thoughts, while at the same time commenting on them by offering a larger perspective. I outline some of the director’s primary concerns, including his longstanding interests in the abuses of the film industry and in drawing viewers’ attention to their own act of viewing.

I argue that, pressed to work in CinemaScope by producers looking for an international hit, he instead used the draw of ‘Scope, which in itself called attention to the act of looking at the screen, to create a critique of those spectatorial pleasures most often associated with the format. In support of that argument, I look especially at examples of

Ophuls’ graphic compositions, his use of edge framing, and his use of a variably constricted frame.

Sturges and Bad Day at Black Rock

This chapter argues that Sturges uses the CinemaScope process to both engage the Western tradition and critique its underlying philosophy. In it, I further argue that the

film aims for a cathartic allegory of overcoming America’s treatment of Japanese during

World War II, but that it ultimately fails to resolve the tensions between ruthless outlaw and democratic society that mark the Western genre more broadly. In making this argument, I draw upon Richard Slotkin’s trilogy on the American West, particularly as adapted to the study of Westerns by Scott Simmon and Matthew Carter, and the parallel observations of Robert Ray regarding the Western genre and its relationship to developments in Hollywood cinema. In support of my argument, I present analyses of how Sturges uses the widescreen format to engage the Western tradition via his depictions of landscapes, trains, and the cowboy figure, how his framing also helps to establish the stakes of the drama and to elicit a rising tension, and, finally, how Sturges uses the frame to define his characters and establish character relations while firmly and critically aligning those characters with their environment.

A Model for Researching Technology and Technique

In sum, the dissertation is both an argument for and a model of a particular methodology. As an argument, it presents stylistic analyses of three CinemaScope films, closely attending to their use of the technology while also situating them in their historical and film-historical contexts. I argue that this methodology and the resultant analyses provide an essential contribution to fully understanding the impact of a technological change, beginning from the assumption that technological change can fundamentally alter the range of choices available to filmmakers.

CHAPTER 2 “WHAT’S THE MATTER, TORREADOR?”: EMOTIVE MISE-EN-SCÈNE IN REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

Nicholas Ray’s CinemaScope drama, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), opens with two shots. The first is an extreme long shot of Los Angeles at night, offering a brief glimpse of the anonymous lights of the city and the darkness which envelops them. The

Warner Brother’s shield appears over the image before a cut brings us to an extreme low angle shot of troubled teen Jim Stark (James Dean), who stumbles into focus and falls to the street, filling the frame. He plays with the debris there, covering a toy monkey with a scrap of paper before laying down his head as the credits play over the image.

Already evident in these first seconds of the film is Nicholas Ray’s pessimistic exaltation of the individual – the drama of a boy and the indifference of his environment.

The emotions and the lived experience of the individual are the preeminent foci of Ray’s projects, and he almost always treats them in the form of tragedy, the story of man versus society. In Rebel, this tragedy plays out as a Romeo and Juliet story of star- crossed lovers Jim and Judy, whose desire to be true to themselves and their emotions will inevitably end in loss and an implied acquiescence to the given rules and proper roles of their society. Although the drama therefore necessarily implicates post-war

America as a foil to their young love, Ray’s focus is resolutely on the experience of his ill-fated teen protagonists, for whom the turbulent and sometimes explosive emotions of adolescence are always felt to be matters of life and death.

This chapter explores how Ray’s predilection for pessimistic romanticism manifests aesthetically in Rebel Without a Cause as a function of the widescreen

CinemaScope format with which Warner Brothers assigned him to film. Although the story is familiar territory for Ray, who had already fine-tuned his compassionate interest

in outsiders while working with the Federal Theater and on his equally personal debut film, They Live by Night (1946), the full-color CinemaScope format of Rebel presented

Ray with new aesthetic possibilities. The prior film’s aesthetics were also emotive, but differently so. Whereas They Live by Night’s expressive patterns emphasize a suffocating mise-en-scène of entrapment, Rebel makes broad use of the horizontality of the CinemaScope frame to emphasize the potential and kinetic energies of the plot and characters.

As a transitional technology between the industry standards of academy-ratio and widescreen, CinemaScope has received much attention from critics and film theorists. Thus far, the dominant approach to CinemaScope aesthetics has focused on understanding the macro evolution of film techniques over time1. These studies approach a change of technology, such as the introduction of widescreen anamorphic filmmaking, as a problem of assimilation, and they focus their efforts on understanding how, on average, films coped with these problems. David Bordwell, for example, has described CinemaScope as forcing upon filmmakers one of three compensatory measures: treating CinemaScope as added horizontal space, as restricted vertical space, or as a tool for establishing distant depth. In developing this theory, his primary concern is to understand CinemaScope’s role in the history of film aesthetics. Perhaps as a result of this concern with the broad arc of developments in cinematic expression, he posits the filmmaker’s process as that of a problem solver, working to compensate for the added width of CinemaScope by filling in the extra space, making use of the vertically-severed frame, or staging action at a great distance from the camera

1 See, for example, Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology and David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema.

(Bordwell 2013). Similarly, Marshall Deutelbaum’s thorough analysis of set design in

CinemaScope films proceeds from the premise that CinemaScope was a problem for directors and editors alike. His work documents the recurring use of strong vertical lines in CinemaScope films, and he argues that these lines function to guide spectator attention and to facilitate match cuts (Deutelbaum 2003). In each case, the tendency is to look at trends, and to presume that those trends were the result of compensatory measures.

Compared to the “average” CinemaScope production favored in studies like those of Bordwell and Deutelbaum, Rebel might fairly be considered an outlier. For one thing, Nicholas Ray was no studio workhorse. His films are intensely personal, and they earned him the status of auteur in the eyes of Cahiers du cinéma critics. For François

Truffaut, the hallmark of Ray’s filmmaking was the emotional quality with which he imbued his films. Of Ray’s emotional portrayal of his characters, Truffaut writes “Ray’s very great talent resides in his absolute sincerity, his acute sensitivity” ([1955] 1985:

108). In Rebel, this sensitivity is conveyed visually as the film explores themes of balance and imbalance, presenting a world precariously on edge and marked by struggle and discontent.

In his concerted effort to present this world from the point of view of the youth who feel lost in it, Ray uses a variety of compositional strategies to convey their feelings of angst, frustration, and longing for love. In doing so, he develops a coherence between mise-en-scène and character experience that calls to mind the ideals of

“organic” in art that his former mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, propounded, and which organicist film critics like Victor Perkins have come to praise. As a result, Nicholas Ray

takes what is made available by the greater width of the frame and makes it meaningful, resulting in a film that prioritizes the emotional lives of teenagers in America, even while recognizing the ultimate futility of the rebellions which they take upon themselves in an earnest, if confused, manner. The boy in gutter, the city at night: Rebel uses the

CinemaScope frame to mythologize the passions which take hold of youth, and, in doing so, presents an enduring and iconic image of the “average” American teenager.

Expressive Use of the Academy-Ratio Frame in They Live by Night (1948)

They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray's first film, was filmed from a treatment written by Ray himself, who also worked on the final shooting script, and it was therefore very much a product of Ray's artistic predilections. Like Rebel, They Live by Night focuses on young protagonists who feel out of place in their society. Also like Rebel, Night uses its format expressively, and, by looking closely at the mise-en-scène of this earlier film, we can get a sense of how the broader CinemaScope frame influenced Ray's aesthetic decisions on Rebel.

They Live By Night is a film about two lovers on the run, but you wouldn’t mistake it for a road picture. The film offers very few looks at the open road, with none at all in the second half of the picture when the couple is actually on the lam. Instead, this film, again like Rebel, focuses its drama on the experience of two young protagonists who struggle to make an ordinary life for themselves in a Depression-era world that seems intent on impeding their pursuit of the American dream. Convicts and tenacious lawmen populate the film, and their persistent antagonism leaves no room for the romantic notions of young Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell). In their youthful innocence, they seem to think that lawyers will help them, that the sincerity of their actions will guarantee their future, and that weddings are a meaningful rite of true

love. Although the film treats their notions of love as naïve, it sympathizes with their idealism, and the suffocation of their ideals by the gritty world around them is the main subject of the drama. Formally, Ray underscores this drama through a play of wanted and unwanted presence, in either case taking advantage of the academy aspect ratio to box in his protagonists, whether they are sheltered together, trapped, or bullied by outside forces.

Consider, for example, the opening shot of the film, which introduces us to “this boy and this girl” who “were never properly introduced to this world.” Ray fills the frame with a soft-lit extreme close-up on our young lover-protagonists, Bowie and Keechie.

They are lying down and looking into one another’s eyes, Keechie playfully rolling over from her back to her stomach before the two share an intimate kiss. Lit from above and from the sides, the lovers’ faces shine lustrously against a blank black background.

Here, the frame contributes to the intimacy of the scene, blocking out the world to which their young love is blind and emphatically placing the viewer’s attention on the sparkle in their eyes and the dampness of their lips. This iconic image will be repeated later in the film when Bowie and Keechie share a brief happy moment beneath a Christmas tree. In each instance, Ray’s framing formally underscores the bond between these characters by sheltering them together in a private space.

An aspect ratio is never equivalent to a single expression, however, and with a cue from the theme music, the framing of this establishing shot modulates from a sense of sheltered escapism to a sense of dangerous vulnerability. As Leigh Harline’s score shifts from romantic to threatening, Bowie and Keetchie suddenly clutch one another and look up and off frame. No longer an idyllic space, their private moment becomes a

trap with no exit, and the soft lighting takes on the feeling of a police spotlight’s penetrating brightness, foreshadowing the lights that eventually catch up with Bowie at the end of the film, before fading out on the bereaved Keechie’s sorrowful face. No longer intimately sheltered within the academy-ratio frame, the lovers are cornered, and thus the tension of the film – the ongoing intrusion of outside forces into their love affair

– is already defined before the cutaway to a helicopter shot of the Bowie escaping prison with fellow convicts T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) and Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva).

The cutaway to a mobile overhead camera energizes the opening sequence, but the versatility of the frame is already clear, as is Ray’s expressive use for it in this picture.

Similarly, Ray frequently divides the narrow frame with bars, lattice work, edifices, or any other element of the set design that can heighten the sense that his character’s decisions are restricted and their room for action narrow. Early in the film,

Keechie is sent to pick Bowie up from his hiding place beneath a roadside billboard, where T-Dub and Chickamaw have left him due to his injured ankle. Watching these first few character-building shots of Bowie alone, we do not yet know his back-story -- that he escaped from prison to find a lawyer who will defend him on the grounds that he was convicted without due process -- but we do sense his bind. Ray uses a shot- reverse-shot pattern, alternating between shots of Bowie peering out from the shadows behind a lattice and shots over his shoulder and through the lattice as a vehicle approaches. Ray belabors this visual sense of confinement with a panning shot of

Bowie as he paces along the length of the latticework, cautiously making his way out of hiding to approach the driver. In this sequence, we don’t need the narrative specifics to

understand that Bowie is caged in, an escaped prisoner whose fugitive status is itself another kind of prison.

Framing and composition work to convey Bowie’s predicament, and the same is true in our introduction to Keechie. Although we don’t yet know that Keechie is the lackey of her alcoholic father (and perhaps, the film suggests, the victim of sexual abuses from her uncle, Chickamaw), Ray gives us visual cues to her entrapment. At this point in the sequence, we can’t quite see her behind the wheel of the car. As she pulls up to the billboard where Bowie is hiding, she sits back into deep shadows pooling beneath its light. A metal grate lines the back of the vehicle, and the sequence is lit so that it casts a net of shadow over her figure. When Bowie joins her in the vehicle, Ray shoots them from behind and through the grate, establishing a visual rhyme with the lattice work that alerts us to their shared fate. These are our protagonists, and this is their drama: two young characters with little control over their destinies who try to make a life together in spite of the odds against them.

Ray frames even the most intimate moments between Bowie and Keechie with a sense of their being caught up in mechanisms out of their control. For example, when they decide to hop off their bus and get married at the all-night $20 wedding chapel, their movements are trance-like. The pair faces the bus, motionless, as it pulls away to reveal their destination. Filmed from behind, their languid stroll across the street seems emotionless, and when, at the curb, they pause a moment to look into one another’s eyes, a cut shows them in profile, constrained within the frame by two tall and garish stone cupids. Here again, Ray divides the frame expressively, using the set design to

express the narrow possibilities open to his protagonists. The pessimism is palpable, as

Ray uses the given aspect ratio to convey the ineluctability of his character’s fate.

In filming Bowie and Keechie’s endless run from the law, Ray uses expressive framing to suggest how little agency they have. Ray uses expressive framing, too, to suggest the power Bowie’s fellow escapees, T-Dub and Chickamaw, exert over both protagonists. Hardened criminals, the pair helped Bowie escape on the condition that he would help them rob a bank, but one heist proves not enough to satisfy them. Although

Bowie had made efforts to pursue a lawyer, the two convicts catch up with him before he can make good on his plan. Desperate to back out of another robbery, Bowie agrees to meet with T-Dub and Chickamaw so he can tell them to count him out. Ray films the conversation by crowding the frame with Bowie trapped between the older convicts, visually suggesting the threat of force before Chickamaw grabs his shoulders to square him up for T-Dub’s hit.

Such expressive framing in unsurprising in a noir film, and it is illustrative of the heritage of German Expressionism that both characterizes noir films and Ray’s career more broadly. Shadows of jail-cell bars fall ominously over attorney Andrew Morton

(Humphrey Bogart) and accused cop-killer Nick Romano (John Derek) as the former attempts to free the latter in Knock on Any Door (1949); the innocence of saloon-keeper

Vienna (Joan Crawford) is underscored by the beautiful white dress she wears when accosted by an unruly mob, her back against a ruddy wall in Johnny Guitar (1954); and the severity in the parenting of prescription drug-addled father Ed Avery (James Mason) is expressed in the huge and monstrous shadow he casts while overseeing his son’s arithmetic in Bigger than Life (1956). Clearly, Ray films in such a way as to make the

world itself expressive and meaningful. Although such expressive mise-en-scène has a long heritage in film history, the significance of Ray’s directorial decisions are best understood in the context of sequences themselves. The close relationship between technology, style, and meaning in these sequences suggests another precedent for his decisions: the modernist concept of the “organic” in art.

Organic Continuity as Organizing Principle in Ray, Wright, and Perkins

In Nicholas Ray’s films, his penchant for sympathetic treatment of outsiders is as constant as his preference for eliciting the same sympathy from the audience through expressive use of cinematic conventions. As Geoff Andrew writes in his monographic on

Ray, “[t]he close inter-relationship between form and content, style and theme…is immediately evident” in his films (2004: 10). To help understand the role of the

CinemaScope aspect ratio in determining that interrelationship, we should consider the precedent set by one of Ray’s early mentors, Frank Lloyd Wright.

When praising Nicholas Ray’s CinemaScope films, critics often mention, in passing, a connection between the horizontality of the frame and Ray’s connection to

Wright, for whom Ray worked first as a student at Taliesin and then as an organizer of public speaking events. As Andrew argues, “With the interest in horizontal lines he inherited from Frank Lloyd Wright,” the CinemaScope widescreen process “came to hold a special affection” for him (2004: 91). Ray himself notes the connection in a 1958 interview with Charles Bitsch. There, Ray asserts a fondness for horizontal lines, but he goes further, connecting that fondness to Wright’s architectural philosophy and admitting that artistic influence is difficult to measure:

I’d say the most obvious influence Wright had on me, apart from a kind of philosophic leaning…no, not a philosophic leaning, rather a certain way of looking at things, is my liking for CinemaScope; I like the horizontal line

and the horizontal line was essential for Wright […] but I think you can rarely determine the exact influence you’ve undergone, where your taste for something comes from, or what that taste was subjected to as it evolved. (Bitsch 1958: 121)

The way of looking at things that Ray alludes to is all but absent from most accounts of Wright’s influence on Ray, but that way of looking is a rich source of inspiration for critically approaching Ray’s films, and it’s proposed “organic” ideal rhymes significantly with the filmic coherence V.F. Perkins values in Ray’s filmmaking and the synthetic approach to criticism that he advocates powerfully in Film as Film.

To describe Wright as being fond of horizontal lines is to dramatically reduce his architectural philosophy and to take a notable visual pattern as the soul of his work.

Wright’s prairie homes, especially, are known for their horizontality, but they were not built to accommodate an abstract interest in lines. Rather, the prairie houses were exemplars of a modernist approach to architecture, spearheaded by Wright, that believed not in imposing design elements, but rather in discovering within a given site the design which extends organically from it.

In his essay, “In the Realm of Ideas,” Wright lays out the concepts of organic and plasticity as related to his architectural vision. For Wright, architecture should aim to develop a structure that evolves naturally from its surrounding and from the needs of its inhabitants. He sought, therefore, to begin by imagining his structures as organic wholes:

Suppose something you always took for granted as made up of various things, “composed” as artists say, suddenly appeared to you as organic growth. Suppose you caught a glimpse of that “something” as a living entity and saw it as no creature of fallible expediency at all but really a creation living with integrity of its own in the realm of the mind. Suppose too you saw this something only awaiting necessary means to be born as living creation instead of existing as you saw it all about as miserable makeshift or sentimental, false appliance. (Wright 1931: 11)

In asking his students to consider structures as “organic growth,” Wright dissuades them from beginning with a base form and adding ornament and embellishment merely for the sake of developing the structure’s character. “Simplicity is not in itself an end,” he writes, but “it is a means to an end” that counters the fashionable tendency to “crave ornament for the sake of ornament [and] cover up our faults of design with ornamental sensualities” (Wright [1908] 1975: 6).

To further articulate his preference for organic construction, Wright introduces the concept of plasticity. “Plasticity,” he writes, “may be seen in the expressive lines and surfaces of your hand as contrasted with the articulation of the skeleton itself” (Wright

[1908] 1975: 17). Such plasticity develops not as ornamentation added for decorative effect, but as natural extension of the building’s structural ground. These concepts, organic architecture and plasticity, are what led to the recognizable appearance of

Wright’s prairie homes, marked as they are by broad horizontal lines. For Wright, these homes belonged to the prairie on which they were constructed, and their design sprung

“organically” from the natural horizontality of their environment. Considering other contemporary architecture, Wright rhetorically asked, “What was the matter with this house? Well, for beginning, it lied about everything” ([1908] 1975: 12). For Wright, buildings should belong to their environment; whatever decorative qualities the architecture possesses should be developed organically from the demands of the place in which the structure will be erected.

Such a distaste of strictly decorative effects shows, too, in Victor Perkins’ attitude towards filmmaking and film criticism. For Perkins, movies succeed as movies when

“what is presented becomes a part of the manner of presentation” ([1973] 1992: 25).

Citing various examples of fiction filmmaking, Perkins makes the case that a director’s job is not to impose significance on a given scene, nor to draw attention to the bravado moves of the director as artist, but rather to “realize given material and organize it into significant form” ([1973] 1992: 79). As in the manner of a magic trick, the best direction does not call attention to the structuring of the film, but rather creates a sense that the images seen are natural to its plot, setting, and action. “To make the desirable look unavoidable,” he writes, “to take what is available and make it meaningful, that is a large part of the director’s secret” (Perkins [1973] 1992: 84). Importantly for both Perkins and

Wright, this meaning should not develop in an additive way. In the case of filmmaking, significance should be developed through the careful use of the camera to select, arrange, heighten, and comment upon the scenes it records.

Expressive Organic Compositions in Rebel Without a Cause

In proposing that Ray aimed to elicit meaning organically from the physical and temporal site of filming, we should be wary of arguments that suggest his compositions are stylistic compromises between established shooting practices, evolved to fit an academy-ratio frame, and CinemaScope’s novel width. Indeed, the Cahiers du cinéma critics quickly recognized Ray’s tendency to imbue the worlds of his films with a meaningful expressivity. As Jacque Rivette remarked, Ray’s auteur signature was his tendency to, in the manner of a sculptor, chisel away at the pro-filmic so as “to reveal…the one and only hidden statue” ([1953] 1985: 105). What for Rivette was “a certain dilation of expressive detail,” was for Truffaut an extravagant realism, one in which “poetic accidents” manifest themselves meaningfully and spontaneously in the details of the world ([1955] 1985: 108). Indeed, we can see many examples of such meaningful “accidents” in Rebel, each composed organically in the widescreen format.

In one telling example, Ray makes expressive use of the sort of graphic matches, predicated on strong vertical lines in the frame, remarked upon by Deutelbaum. The sequence begins when Jim arrives home after the knife fight, shortly before he leaves again to meet Buzz (Corey Allen) and members of Buzz’s gang, the Wheels, for the chicken run. As Jim climbs the stairs to his room, an off screen clatter instigates a cut to his perspective, from which we see his father (Jim Backus) in an apron cleaning up a spilled tray of food. In his essay, “Stark Performance”, Murray Pomerance gives an excellent analysis of the stakes of this encounter, emphasizing the role of hidden labor in personal relationships and connecting such domestic labor to the showy masculinity of Buzz and the gang. As Pomerance notes, reviewers place much emphasis on the costuming – the yellow and red polka-dotted apron – at the expense of addressing the action: Mr. Stark quietly covering up a spill so as to make the accident, and the labor of cleaning it, invisible (2005: 47). To Pomerance’s reading we can add attention to the graphic matches that bridge the shot-reverse shot of the father-son dialogue in which

Jim is once again let down by his father’s cowed behavior.

Jim stands at the left of the frame, and the wood moldings behind and around him create strong vertical lines that match with the bars of the railing in the reverse shot

(Figure 2-1). In that shot, Mr. Stark is seen through the bars on his hands and knees, and the visual suggestion of imprisonment adds a sense of ineluctability to his situation

(Figure 2-2). From Jim’s perspective, his father is trapped in a domestic relationship that robs him of his will and prevents him from maintaining his own convictions and acting of his own volition. Jim fears that this model of domesticity will ruin him, too, and he yearns for something else to which he can aspire. The graphic match helps to express his inner

fear, as the very walls of home itself threaten to imprison him, too. In his rebellion, Jim is outside the restraint of these vertical lines, but as the scene cuts back and forth between Jim and his father, we can grasp visually the threat of entrapment he feels at the thought of pursuing the life his father has led. Thus the principle of a graphic match, itself never unique to the CinemaScope frame, is here more than just a compensatory measure to accommodate an excess of space. Instead, Ray elicits from the mise-en- scène and editing pattern an expression of the scene’s underlying drama.

At other points in the film, Ray’s organic linear compositions extend beyond the use of strong vertical lines to include sharp angles that underscore the drama of the scene. One example occurs during Jim and Judy’s first conversation. When Jim first sees Judy (Natalie Wood) outside of his family’s kitchen window, we already know he is smitten. Critics have pointed out that Judy, all in green, is visually coded as vibrant.

Later, when they talk in the alley between their houses, this sense is strengthened in a shot-reverse-shot that frames Judy against a flowering spring garden. We have a similar visual cue of Jim’s potency and Judy’s attraction to him, when, in a two-shot from the same sequence, Jim is framed against the wall of his family’s garage (Figure 2-3). The framing is an example of the double close-up the wide Cinemascope frame can offer, with both faces framed closely in the same shot as the teens share their first hesitant conversation. During this exchange, the blocking is such that the woodwork of the garage wall creates angles of emphases directing toward, or emanating from, Jim, who is making a very strong impression on Judy, despite her best efforts to stay cool.

Later that day, when Buzz and his gang, the Wheels, confront Jim after the planetarium lecture, Ray again uses a horizontal line to give graphic emphasis to the

drama of the scene. As it is one of the most iconic scenes of the film, the knife fight has received sustain attention from critics. John Francis Kreidl, in particular, offers a detailed analysis of how Ray’s sequencing places equal emphasis on the competitive tension between Jim and the gang members, Buzz in particular, and on the romantic tension between Jim and Judy. Further, Kreidl’s analysis shows how Ray uses rapid cutting and

“bad” matches to create a sense of chaos in the fight, alternating between low angles and straight-ahead shots and sacrificing a sense of coherent space to the momentum of the sequence by letting characters, Jim for example, appear first on the left of frame and then, in the next shot, on the right (Kreidl 1977: 130-134).

Our own concern with CinemaScope can offer some additional insights to

Kreidl’s analysis. We can note, for example, how Ray has used the location shot to create a graphic line through the frame that expresses the tension of the moment. After

Buzz deflates Jim’s tire, successfully coaxing him down from the planetarium entrance, he presses harder against Jim, calling him chicken. Thus far, Jim has taken pains to remain stoic in the face of these taunts. The reaction shots that captured his response to the Wheels swarming his car place him against the backdrop of the firm vertical lines of the planetariums walls. His face registers pain, and we can sense, graphically, that the pain stems from Jim’s strain to remain above the torments both physically, in his position above the scene, and emotionally, in his resolve to not stoop to level of Buzz’s childish attempts to lure Jim into an altercation (Figure 2-4)]. Frustrated, Jim descends the stairs to his car, verbally sparring with Buzz as he retrieves his jack and sets about changing the tire. When Buzz calls him “chicken,” Jim spins around suddenly to face

him, and shouts into the crowd “Is that meaning me!?” Buzz, knowing now that he can get a rise from Jim, switches his blade, and Jim lifts his fists, ready for confrontation.

In this shot, the wall of the planetarium parking area slashes through the frame from the lower left corner to the upper right, carving a lightning-bolt shape diagonally through the image (Figure 2-5). No longer stoic, now lowered to the level of the taunts he can’t resist, Jim’s temper flares, and Ray takes advantage of the location and the

CinemaScope frame to create a mise-en-scène of danger and action. This graphic composition stays throughout a brief shot-reverse-shot sequence, and the jagged line subsequently reappears during the fight itself, when Ray shoots from overhead to show

Buzz and Jim scuffling around a spinning telescope. Neither part of the city which stretches out below them, nor quite on the level of the gods suggested by the solid blue sky above them, the teens are on their own plane of action, fighting for no other cause than to assert themselves as meaningfully present in the world.

The extreme low angles that cast the teens against a solid blue sky does more, however, than give, in Kreidl’s words, “the feeling that the fight is off in space” and connect to Buzz’s taunt at the start of the scene (“He’s real abstract”) (1977: 131). The framing puts their conflict in the realm of the mythic while the script makes multiple references to bulls and bullfighting, these stemming from Jim’s failed attempt at humoring the Wheels by mooing at the sign of Taurus in the planetarium lecture. When

Buzz lifts his knife above his head in equal parts mockery and threat, he shouts “Toro!

Toro!” When he calls Jim out for shying away from the conflict, he does so with a similar jab: “What’s the matter, toreador?” In elevating the horseplay to a mythic level, and in

extending a casual remark into an emphasis on the performed masculinity of a bullfight, the film calls to mind another artistic precedent: Eduard Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864).

From the “Average” Teen to the Myth of the American Teenager

Plato: He doesn’t say much, but, when he does, you know he means it. He’s sincere.

Judy: Well, that’s the main thing.

In his biography of Nicholas Ray, Bernard Eisenschitz suggests that the opening shot of Jim Stark, drunk and lying in the gutter, was improvised by James Dean, who modeled his pose on a painting by Eduard Manet, Dead Toreador (1864) (1993: 247).

The formal similarities between Ray's framing of Dean and Manet's framing of the toreador are clear, and the visual similarities suggest also a shared thematic interest. To understand the connection, it is helpful to know that Ray envisioned this project as more than just a social problem picture. In remarking on the departure of one of Rebel’s many writers, Ray states that Irving Shulman thought ending the film at the planetarium made no sense from the point of view of Plato’s character. Ray, however, wouldn’t budge on this point: he wanted to “try to follow the classical form of tragedy,” but Shulman could not appreciate the “more sweepingly developed conflict [he] was searching for” ([1956]

2005: 33). To insert an underrepresented voice into a mythic setting was, in fact, one of

Manet’s animating impulses.

Working a hundred years before Ray, Manet was regularly criticized for the scandalous nature of his compositions. Into works that quoted liberally from the masters who came before him, Manet would insert common figures. The most often-cited example of this technique is his Olympia (1865). The portrait, an odalisque, calls into

question the erotic exoticism of the Romantic tradition by replacing an idealized nude with a modern-day prostitute. As Georges Bataille noted of Manet’s modernism:

In the past art was the expression of “supreme” forms, divine and royal…Though adulterated and practically meaningless by Manet’s time, they yet lingered on…The upshot was an anarchy of forms, fraught with possibilities, but saddled still with the last remnants of majestic forms. (Bataille 1955: 56)

Manet capitalized on this anarchy of forms by presenting his Olympia as a nude who was neither a mythic figure nor a romanticized ideal. His critics understood the woman’s orchid, her black string necklace, and the black cat at her feet as signifiers of a

Parisian prostitute, and her gaze at the viewer struck contemporary audiences as confrontational. “[A]fter all,” Bataille writes, “Olympia is a woman and not a goddess; she and the men in frock-coats live in the same world – a world that art obstinately sought to ignore” (1955: 71). Salon judges did, in fact, seek to ignore such contributions from Manet, either by rejecting him from the Salon entirely or by publicly criticizing his work in the press.

In defense of his friend Manet, Emile Zola offered the following account of the

Salon’s response to Olympia:

[E]veryone exclaimed that this nude body was indecent. That's as it should be since here in the flesh is a girl whom the artist has put on canvas in her youthful, slightly tarnished nakedness. When other artists correct nature by painting Venus, they lie. Manet asks himself why he should lie. Why not tell the truth? He has introduced us to Olympia, a girl of our own times, whom we have met in the streets pulling a thin shawl of faded wool over her narrow shoulders. (Hamilton 1954: 99)

As Manet sought to introduce figures of his own times to canvases then standardly reserved for idealized figures, with Rebel, Ray sought to bring the teenage experience to the CinemaScope format, which heretofore was used primarily for spectacles on the grand scale: musicals, fantasies, and period pieces.

Ray explained of his research efforts, “I was trying to dramatize the position of

‘normal’ delinquents. Of one thing I was convinced: for all those adolescents from

‘ordinary’ families, delinquency was a way of drawing attention to themselves”

(Eisenschitz 1993: 232). For Ray, whose work had always been sympathetic to the outsider, depicting the experience of ordinary teenagers was a sufficient and worthy aim for a Hollywood picture, especially if he could succeed in telling the story from his teenage protagonist's point of view. For Warner Brothers, hungry for their share of the teenage market’s disposable income, Ray’s aim sounded like a winning proposition.

Aiming for the Teen Market

Nicholas Ray’s interest in the life experiences of outsiders did not begin with his

Hollywood productions. While working for the Federal Theater project, he was preoccupied with preserving and amplifying marginal voices. His recordings of regional folk music are registered with the Library of Congress, and he worked throughout

Appalachia to develop local theater programs and help script and stage those programs’ first productions. By the time he began filming Rebel, he had carried this preoccupation through to Hollywood, having established himself as sympathetic to the outsiders in society. Such a sympathetic approach was just what Warner Brothers was looking for as they sought a director for their adaptation of Robert Lindner’s non-fiction sociological study, Rebel Without a Cause. Like other major studios in the 1950s, Warner Brothers was aiming to produce films that would bring audiences back to the theaters at a time when the post-war economic boom gave US citizens necessary capital for pursuing other recreational interests. “[P]ersonal expenditures for recreation by … the new middle class more than tripled in the postwar era,” John Belton explains, but “most of this money was being spent on outdoor recreation” (1992: 83). As audiences moved

from the city to the suburbs, their new automobiles carried them off to picnics and away from the cinema.

Faced with competition for leisure spending, the studios hoped that

CinemaScope technology would lure audiences, including the new and burgeoning teen market, back to the cinema. In his essay, “Rebel Without a Cause, Fifty Years Later,” J.

David Slocum sets the production context explicitly:

During the 1950s, the emergence of teenage audience or market segments, and of teenage subculture, was both symptomatic of, and contributed to, sweeping changes taking place in Hollywood and U.S. society...Hollywood was not only to produce stories about teenagers, but to shift their operations so that their productions were more explicitly created for teenage markets increasingly understood as active and profitable. (2005: 2)

In response to increasing competition for leisure time, and in a quest for a profitable share of the money to be made off of leisure pursuits, studios began producing genre pictures specially designed to cater to the demands of individual demographics, including especially the teenage market.

Like other teen problem pictures, Rebel Without a Cause takes juvenile delinquency as its subject. Although the film’s publicity claimed that it “Daringly meets the challenge of today’s most vital controversy,” however, Rebel’s evident focus on the experiences of its teenage protagonists sets it apart from other films taking on the same issues. For example, Blackboard Jungle (1955) opens with a text announcing:

Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency – its causes – and its effects…We believe that public awareness is a first step toward remedy for any problem.

This spirit of providing a public service announcement is a familiar advertising ploy in

American cinema, but here it also suggests the controlling perspective of the film. As these opening lines indicate, although the film is about teenagers, it is aimed explicitly at

an adult audience. Fittingly, the drama of the film unfolds from the point of view of the new school teacher, Mr. Richard Dadier, who acts as the audience’s surrogate in observing and responding to troublesome high school students. We discover alongside

Dadier the poverty of the school’s neighborhood, and we are with him when he is whistled at and harangued by the students on his first visit to the school. We learn early on that Dadier is a war veteran, and that the battles he fought overseas did not fully prepare him for the classroom battles he would encounter. We soon come to know that his wife has some secret reason to be ashamed or angry with him, and that these reasons stem from his time in the war. The narrative’s central arc, therefore, is his quest to resolve the problem of “those kids” while maintaining a happy home life. As spectators, we suffer alongside him through insult after insult: a baseball thrown at the chalkboard, symbolically chipping away the letters of his name, the beating he endures when cornered in an alley, the accusations of racism, the student’s scheme to convince his wife that he is cheating on her. His journey is the heart of the story, and so the teenager exists as a dangerous problem which lies in wait for the virtuous, if troubled, adult male to solve.

Rebel, on the other hand, is resolutely on the side of its teenage protagonists.

Whereas Blackboard Jungle plainly articulates several possible causes for teenage rebelliousness (their parents don’t care, the school system has failed them, racial tensions divide them and prescribe their destiny), Rebel’s script is less explicit about the family dynamics underlying the teenager’s dissatisfaction, choosing instead to emphasize how the young protagonists experience these dynamics on an emotional level. We will never gain explicit knowledge of Jim’s past, but we will share his

passionate search for belonging and for honor, and we will rebel with him against a society which demands instead that he follow the easiest path in life, even if that path is one of cowed avoidance and self-denial. Such a focus on the teenage experience may have originated with Ray’s artistic sensibility, but it was also good business for Warner

Brothers at a time when studios were looking to capitalize on the niche teenage audience.

Mythologizing the American Teenager

Beginning with his very first treatment for the film, Ray emphasized that his goal was to convey the point of view of the American teenager, and that the challenge of the film was to orchestrate and cover events that accurately captured this viewpoint. Given the film’s depictions of Jim and his home life, however, and given, too, the post-war period in which the film was written and shot, many critics have found the film to be an intriguing cultural document of 1950s masculinity and domesticity. Jon Mitchell, for example, writes compellingly of the film’s narrative as a project of re-establishing masculinity at a time when men returning from the second World War were forced to abandon the homosocial brotherhood of platoons and return to a domestic life whose dynamics were irrevocably changed in their absence. “In Rebel,” Mitchell writes, “the influences of homosexuality and delinquency are overcome, the female is contained in her subservient place…and the film solidifies the importance of the role of father in the suburban home” (2005: 143). Taking a similar approach to historicizing the text, Mick

Broderick argues that the film draws upon “strategic doctrines of deterrence as evinced in the game of ‘chicken,’ the psychology of ‘nuclearism’, and narratives of finitude,” and he concludes that the film’s juvenile anxieties stem from Eisenhower-era “apocalyptic anxieties” (2005: 150). As intriguing as these readings of the film are, such approaches

risk grounding the film too firmly on its narrative, reducing the action of the film to the verbal equivalents of argument or statement.

Rather than describe the causes of or argue for solutions to the problem of rebellious teenagers, however, Rebel aims at conveying the emotions of the average teenager. In its approach, Rebel places its emphasis on action and experience, and, in doing so, it calls to mind V.F. Perkins’ thoughts on critical attitudes towards films:

Too great a concentration on what a film “has to say” implies that the significance of a movie can be reduced to the verbal concepts which its action suggest. But films are unlikely to replace speech or writing as the medium for examining and conveying ideas. … The movie’s claim to significance lies in its embodiment of tensions, complexities and ambiguities. It has the built-in tendency to favor the communication of vision and experience as against programme. ([1973] 1992: 155)

In attending too strictly to the Rebel’s narrative, critics risk losing a sense of the film as seen. In Perkins’ words, “[t]he real, that is effective, meaning of a film is contained in the total experience which it provides, not in its declaration of intent” ([1973] 1992: 149).

Alongside the rich insights of such cultural studies, therefore, we should take an interest in the film on its own terms, as an exercise in point of view and an example of

CinemaScope aesthetics motivated towards meaningfully conveying character experience.

Here, too, the precedent set by Manet is instructive. Like his Olympia, Manet's

Dead Toreador was poorly received when initially exhibited. What for Dean at the time of shooting Rebel, and for us today, exists as Toreador was originally submitted to the

1864 Salon as part of a larger and squarer canvas depicting a full scene, Incident at a

Bullfight. The reception was unkind. Critics and salon judges ridiculed Bullfight for its unrealistic use of perspective, which, in the words of one reviewer, gave the impression of a “wooden toreador killed by a horned rat” (Hamilton 1954: 53). Frustrated with this

reception, Manet cut his canvas into two rectangular images, Bullfight and Dead

Toreador, with the latter being an altogether more arresting image.

Deprived of its original context, Toreador presents an ambiguous death. Art historians believe Manet modeled his figure on a 17th century Italian vanitas depicting a dead soldier in still life near a skull and a hanging lamp, freshly extinguished. The blank background, once clearly identified as the floor of the bull ring, now offers no sense of context. Against it, the prostrate corpse seems to float out from the canvas and into a variety of dialogues. Although the image makes no explicit reference to the French invasion of Mexico in 1861, contemporary readings place Toreador firmly within that context, asserting that the dead bullfighter alludes to the Mexican deaths in a battle over interest and trade, prefiguring Manet’s later and more explicitly political works, such as

The Execution of Maximilian (1867) (Rubin 2012: 120). In wrenching an ordinary figure from its total context, Manet makes the corpse’s appearance strange, leaving spectators with the responsibility of justifying its presence.

But whereas some critics see in Manet's Toreador a political critique, others follow Zola's contemporaneous reaction, placing emphasis on a common experience raised to mythic proportions. Addressing the epic aspect Dead Toreador takes on in the absence of its bull ring context, Marcello Venturi writes:

[L]et's be clear: this epic aspect is one of flesh and blood, one that each of us unconsciously carries within, and is part of the human condition in which we live. In other words, it is our greatness as mere mortals struggling with the infinite difficulties of life, our weaknesses and hardships, in this struggle to survive...there is something a lot like heroism. (2016: 11).

Like Dead Toreador, Rebel Without a Cause explores a social problem through the experience of individuals implicated in it, and, like Olympia, Rebel is sympathetic to an otherwise underrepresented demographic.

An Aesthetic Sympathetic to the Teen Experience

In his discussion of CinemaScope aesthetics, David Bordwell notes that one conservative solution to the problem of extra width is to block actors horizontally across the frame in “clothesline” formation. Although such framing is a common strategy in

CinemaScope films, Ray’s use for it is not simply to fill in space. Instead, Ray uses this blocking, as well as several other formal strategies, to present the film from a perspective sympathetic to the plight of its teenage protagonists.

One particularly noteworthy example of clothesline framing in Rebel comes at the end of a complex camera movement early in the film when Jim’s parents are picking him up from the police station. Detective Ray Fremick (Edward Platt), noticing that Jim is overwhelmed by his parent’s disapproval and their own bitter in-fighting, invites him into a back room. There, Jim’s aggressive stance slowly breaks down and he forms a tenuous bond with Fremick. Jim opens up to him, confessing that the bickering in the adjacent room is a constant problem at home, and that, in light of his father’s own submissiveness (“they make mush out of him!”), he has no role model to turn to for support. Fremick offers to fill this role, advising Jim to come by any time, day or night, to talk with him before any more trouble starts. Of course, the offer is made in earnest, but impossible to honor, and it will eventually lead only to Jim’s further disillusionment. The pep talk works for the moment, however, and Fremick leads Jim back to the main office to rejoin his family and head home.

As they reach for the door, a cut brings us to the main office, where the family continues to squabble. The shot begins facing the door to record Jim and Det. Fremick as they enter, and the camera, still focused on the pair so as to register their discomfort with the family drama, pulls away and out of the room, dollying back far enough to capture the family as they file out and into the waiting room. There, it stops and the family members pause in a perfect example of clothesline blocking (Figure 2-6).

Farthest to the left is Detective Fremick, who is forthrightly refusing cigars from Jim’s father, who stands in center frame. Standing in the threshold, between and slightly behind the two men, we see Jim as he first eyes the cigars his father proffers and then regards his father with a look of embarrassed distain. Jim had already settled the situation with Det. Fremick, and had done so by opening up to him emotionally about his chaotic home life. In place of such an honest conversation, Mr. Stark attempts a subtle bribe in a practiced performance asserting his wealth and generosity.

The framing does not direct our attention to Jim’s reaction, however, but rather offers it alongside a broader view of the antagonism that wracks Jim’s family. That Mr.

Stark’s offer of a conciliatory cigar is a common gesture can be seen on the face of his exasperated wife (Ann Doran), who stands to the right of him in the frame. Mrs. Stark is constantly critical of her husband, and her impatience here suggests that she is much more comfortable openly criticizing her husband than addressing directly her son’s delinquency. Standing farther to the right of frame is Mr. Stark’s mother (Virginia

Brissac), herself critical of Mr. and Mrs. Stark both, and her frown implies that, had this been her son, the trip to the police station would never have been necessary. This framing rewards roaming eyes with small glimpses into fine performances of each Stark,

providing alert viewers with a survey of their dysfunctionality. Although one could simply focus on the central figures of Det. Ray and Mr. Stark, noting the familiarity with which the latter makes his offer and the strength with which the former politely refuses it, registering the details of the family dynamic is an illuminating bonus. The blocking, which culminates from complex movements of camera and character, is meaningfully expressive and sympathetic to Jim’s predicament, and as such it strikes one as more significant construction than perfunctory arrangement.

Ray similarly makes expressive use of another recurring CinemaScope set-up, that of demarking areas of the frame so as to arrange shots in planar depth. In his lecture on CinemaScope, Bordwell connects this kind of staging to a tableau style that was popular in the 1910s. He posits that this staging was, in both eras, the result of compromise in the face of similar formal restrictions, which he lists as to “keep the camera back, don’t have a lot of fancy camera moves, [and to] minimize cutting”

(Bordwell 2013). Marshall Deutelbaum similarly posits such staging as a way of compensating for the new width of the image, arguing that “placing action within the central quarters offered a practical way of coping with the wider frame based upon using the old Academy ratio within the new format” (2003: 74). In Rebel, however, Ray makes expressive use of this framing to reinforce the film’s sympathy for its teenage characters.

The first example of this framing occurs early in the film, as Jim’s parents arrive at the police station, and the set-up is one of the many formal indications that the film remains sympathetic to the teenager’s point of view. The shot begins from an alcove behind the main waiting room. From the alcove, we look out onto the three primary

protagonists. In the left of the frame we see Jim’s right shoulder as he sits, his back to us, slouching over the arm of a shoeshine chair. In the center frame we see Judy being led by a social worker towards the camera and away from her meeting with Det.

Fremick. She clutches her coat closed as if embarrassed, but the shocking intensity of its red color attracts both our attention and Jim’s, whose head turns to follow her as she walks out of frame. We also see Plato (Sal Mineo), lost in his own thoughts as he sits to the right of frame, staring down at the floor. Another social worker calls his name, and he, too walks out of frame. His exit prompts a rack in focus, turning our attention away from the waiting room and towards the distant background, where Jim’s family pours through the front doors of the police station. Of course, their line of sight is as unobstructed as ours, and when Mrs. Stark sees her son she shouts to him, “Jim!,” and the family rushes around the desk to confront him with their acidic mix of theatrical concern and misdirected hostility.

The width of the frame allows Ray to direct our sympathy towards the teenagers in two ways. In the first half of the shot, he is able to continue a pattern, established earlier in the sequence, of holding all of his young leads in the frame, hinting that “they are all somewhat mysteriously linked together,” as George M. Wilson observes in his chapter on the film’s narrative (1986: 170). This first half of the shot establishes our focus on the teens, allowing us to survey their common feelings of isolation and consider the fleeting impressions they make upon one another. The second half of the shot takes advantage of the depth of the frame, giving room for the actors to convey

Jim’s family’s show of concern as being theatrical, beginning with an exasperated yell from across the room and continuing with a race to be the first to arrive at Jim’s side.

This, of course, is the in-fighting that Jim finds so suffocating in his home life, and which presents at least one possible cause for his rebellion.

A similarly expressive deep framing occurs later in the film, when Judy arrives home after the disastrous chicken run. Here again, the division of the frame is used to allow staging in depth, and once again a rack focus divides our attention between the youth and the adults. Judy attempts to sneak in the house, but as she arrives at the top of the stairs, her younger brother rushes out of his room to meet her, embracing her and showering her with the affectionate pet names that, when spoken by her father, have turned cold and numb with routine. The focus rests on this embrace, allowing us to survey the pain in Judy’s face and recall the various causes that feed into it: a father who pushes her away, a boyfriend killed in a tragic accident, the impossible feeling of new love, the frustration of being caught once again breaking the rules. After registering these complex emotions, the focus shifts, and we can see into her parent’s room as her father exchanges a look with her mother before approaching Judy, stopping at the frame of his bedroom door. As with the staging in the police station, the division of the frame serves to demark areas of emphasis, but like the other shot it is also expressive.

Here the depth underscores the distance between the generations that provides one of the unspoken sources of tension in the film. Judy’s father articulates concern, but he refuses to cross the threshold and close the distance between himself and his daughter.

By first establishing Judy’s grief and then her father’s insufficient response, the shot is demonstrably sympathetic with Judy, extending the film’s interest in speaking to and for the teenage audience.

In addition to these examples of staging in depth, two other formal strategies make use of the broad CinemaScope frame to express sympathy with the teen protagonists. The first, blocking in a wide a V formation, uses the proportion of the screen to convey the shifting imbalance in character power-relationships that destabilizes the teenager’s home lives. The second, a broad reach across the screen, creates a rhyme between two key scenes that, when viewed together, demonstrate

Jim’s desire for meaningful human connection, as well as Judy’s ability, and his parent’s inability, to provide such a connection.

The first of these recurring framing strategies, blocking characters in a wide V formation across the breadth of the screen, gives a graphic sense of the power struggle between them. We see this formation in the police station early in the film, when Jim is cornered by his father, who is criticized by his wife, who in turn is corrected and admonished by her mother-in-law. We see it, too, in the shots leading up to the knife- fight sequence, when Buzz and the Wheels gather around a stairwell corner that sticks up and into the frame as they decide on what to do about the new guy, Jim, whom they sneeringly refer to as “moo.” In the same sequence, two rhyming shots of Jim looking down on the gang as they vandalize his car also employ this framing strategy, placing

Jim in the center background between Judy and her friend, first, and then between Buzz and his fellow Wheel.

One of the most dynamic uses of this blocking strategy, however, occurs in the family kitchen as Jim prepares for his first day of school. Jim enters the room to pick up his lunch before heading out, and, at first glance, the scene is one of placid domesticity:

Mom, in her apron, calls Jim for breakfast as she walks out from the kitchen and

towards the breakfast table where dad is reading his newspaper and, across from him, grandma sits enjoying her meal. Ray is quick to undermine the tranquility of this scene, however. As Jim enters, he is immediately distracted by Judy who, outside of his window, is calling for her younger brother, Bo. After cutting away to his point of view and reaction shots as he watches her, the camera returns to its initial placement facing the breakfast table head on.

At the window, Jim completes a deep and broad V in the blocking, making the object of domesticity, the breakfast table, a graphic fulcrum in the adult’s struggle to outperform one another as Jim’s caregiver (Figure 2-7). On one side of the table, Jim’s parents each speak to him, his mother asking his sandwich preferences and his father attempting to bond by remembering his mother had pampered him on his first day of high school. In this remembrance, Mr. Stark draws sharp looks from his wife, whom we sense must be tired of trying to live up to her mother-in-law. Exacerbating the conflict, on the other side of the table Jim and his grandmother look back at them, Jim trying nervously to make a quick exit, and his grandmother quick to point out that she knew best what sandwich he would like and that she made the cake that ultimately whet his appetite. Jim’s father, sensing, perhaps, the tense glares back and forth between his wife and mother, gets up from the table and crosses the frame to stand behind Jim, forming a new triad of Jim, his father and his grandmother, before his mother crosses, too, and, front of frame, blocks our view of her husband and his mother as she kisses her son goodbye.

Ray’s framing here takes advantage of the width of the CinemaScope frame to convey the power struggles and resultant animosity that lurk behind the façade of a

happy home life. The sequence includes three primary set-ups, not including the shots of Jim at the window and the object of his gaze outside. The first is the scene’s establishing shot, which also establishes the V blocking and sets up the second and third shot, each shot from a low angle about 30-degrees to the left or right of center. The strategy gives the composition an angularity with the same qualities of tension and disequilibrium as the other graphic diagonal lines in the film. These angular compositions, combined with the low angle shots, support the actors and the script in conveying the petty competitiveness of the adults, each of whom is committed intensely to playing a role they have tired of long before. Their dissatisfaction has made them bitter, and, as a result, Jim’s home life is unbearable.

The second recurring framing strategy similarly works to convey a perspective sympathetic to the teenage protagonists. The first example of this meaningful gesture occurs just after the chicken run, after Buzz’s tragic death and the speedy departure of the rest of the Wheels. The first shot of the sequence is roughly from Jim’s perspective, looking at Judy as she peers over the edge of the cliff. Judy appears in an almost empty frame, one which recalls again the mythic status of Manet’s defamiliarized toreador and imbues her look with a similar sense of tragedy. The reverse shot returns Judy to her context, and in it we can see Jim, looking down as he processes the gravity of the situation, and, between them, Plato as he shivers in the night. We then see Jim look up to Judy, and, wordlessly understanding her thoughts of suicide, he reaches out to her.

As he reaches, his gesture instigates a cut to the reverse angle, where we see Judy, still transfixed by the rocky sea below, reach back towards him. A cut returns us to the previous perspective, and we see their hands meet slowly, cautiously, before Jim pulls

Judy closer to him in a sympathetic embrace. Although the film offers us only negative images of mature relationships, we, like Plato, cannot help but believe in the strength of their feelings for one another. As he did with Bowie and Keechie in They Live By Night,

Ray treats the love between Jim and Judy without scorn or derisive irony, and yet the worlds of his films will never allow such a love to last.

As if to underscore the pessimism, a complementary gesture occurs shortly after

Jim arrives home from the fatal run, and it demonstrates the disunity between Jim, his mother, and his father. Jim arrives home to find his father asleep with the television on, having made an effort to wait up for his boy. The scene was famously rehearsed in

Ray’s own home, a model of which was constructed for this living room and stairwell scene. Ray’s direction in the scene is telling; he states that he gave Dean “two contradictory actions: one, to get upstairs without being detected; and the contradictory action, that he had to talk to somebody” (Eisenschitz 1993: 244). In performing Jim’s simultaneous desire for connection and fatigue with family arguments, Dean quietly brings his bottle of milk into the living room and lies across the couch, filling the frame.

He sets himself upside-down, and, in a psychological point of view, the camera rotates one hundred and eighty degrees as his mom, in yet another theatrical display of concern mingled with scorn, quickly descends the stairs to sit beside him. The script betrays her compassion as thinly put-on, as she quickly suggests the difficulty he has caused her: “I was going to take a sleeping pill, but I wouldn’t till I knew you were home.”

In the ensuing conversation, Jim tells his parents about the tragedy at the cliffs and asks for their support in his decision to turn himself in. Rather than support him,

they begin to argue with one another. His father suggests that knowing he has done wrong is enough, and that bringing the police into the matter is unnecessary. His mother berates her husband, accusing him of lecturing, before herself suggesting that the solution is to move once again to another town where they can start over. The argument is shot primarily on the stairway, with the mother halfway up the flight, the father at the bottom by a bay window, and Jim between them. The railing of the stairs cuts through the frame in a manner that recalls the jagged lines of the knife-fight sequence, aided in part by a canted angle that further underscores the volatility of the moment. Desperate,

Jim extends one hand towards his mother and reaches out towards his father with the other. “You better give me something,” he warns, desperately. But neither parent can provide the support he needs, the support that he provided Judy and which the spectator, cued by Plato’s expression, is led to find so admirable. Whereas the teens could form a meaningful connection with each other, they remain isolated from their parents, perhaps even doomed to grow into the same bitter roles. Ray uses the wide frame to convey the desperation of Jim’s reach, visually representing emotional distance by means of a spatial one. Significantly, the teens can close this gap to meet one another, but their parents helplessly cannot.

“Out of the Inner Moment Comes the Whole”

“Out of the inner moment,” Ray wrote of his early treatments of Rebel, “comes the whole accent of what is said or done” ([1956] 2005: 28). In Rebel, he develops expressive mise-en-scene by adapting his approach to the dynamics of place (the graphic appearance of the environment on film) to the constraints of the CinemaScope frame. Such organic composition recalls Wright’s architectural ideal of “the sense of reality as [coming from] ‘within’ and with no exterior pretensions” (1931: 27). Further,

Ray’s aesthetic compositions fit well with Perkins’ argument that “we can value most the moments [in movies] when narrative, concept, and emotion are most completely fused,” adding that “such moments compose a unity between record, statement, and experience” ([1973] 1992: 133). Rather than being merely influenced by a preference for horizontal lines, then, Ray’s method reflects a contemporary interest in aesthetics derived “organically” from the specificity of place, material, and the moment of creation.

Each of the framing strategies discussed in this chapter (the clothesline framing, the expressive use of vertical and diagonal lines, the staging in depth, the wide-V composition, the broad reach of outstretched arms) takes on a specific meaning located organically within the film itself. Although the expressive use of mise-en-scene is not a new development in film style, and although many of these framing strategies may be found elsewhere, their significance is unique to the scenes in which they appear. Rather than compensating for an embarrassing richness of space, as some critics have noted in the work of other CinemaScope directors, Ray elicits from the wide frame an expression of the film’s narrative concerns. Neither aiming to reduce the frame nor merely to fill it up, Ray finds expressive potential in the wide format. He uses the broad image to convey his noted sympathy for outsiders, here teenagers who feel out of place in a world that offers them no promise of lasting emotional connection. Further, he uses the frame to create an emotive mise-en-scène that conveys to viewers the visceral feelings of tension his young protagonist’s experience, as well as the perpetual conflicts that characterize the relationships around them. As he made use of the confines of the frame in They Live by Night to convey a sense of entrapment, here Ray paints the teenagers as precariously placed in a world of hostile and antagonistic relationships. In

doing so, he finds expressive potential in the CinemaScope format. Further, he uses that expressivity to elevate the emotional lives of teenagers to mythic proportions while also undermining traditional images of 1950s family life, stamping these domestic scenes with his uniquely pessimistic romanticism.

Figure 2-1. Jim (James Dean) observes his father and worries he is looking into his own future. Note the vertical lines in the molding (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

Figure 2-2. Jim’s father (Jim Backus), in the reverse shot, wearing his wife’s apron, kneeling to clean up the food he has spilled (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

Figure 2-3. Expressive lines emphasize Jim’s appearance (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

Figure 2-4. The wall of the planetarium slashes through the frame (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

Figure 2-5: A mise-en-scène of danger (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

Figure 2-6. Clothesline blocking expresses the antagonistic nature of Jim’s home life (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

Figure 2-7. The breakfast table as graphic fulcrum (Rebel Without a Cause [Nicholas Ray, 1955]).

CHAPTER 3 “A WONDERFULLY PRODUCTIVE NEW DIRECTION”: THE AVANT-GARDE SPECTACLE OF LOLA MONTÈS (1955)1

It’s hard to imagine Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955), at least as it came to be made, without How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953). Although the latter film’s profits were more modest than its precursor, The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953),

Millionaire set a number of precedents for ways in which to fill the large horizontal frame. Whereas The Robe is satisfied with proscenium staging, using a large number of extras in extravagant costumes to fill out the shot, Millionaire provides an inventory of other ways to fill the wide CinemaScope frame. Trains in nearly full length, the bulbous glistening steel of commercial airplanes, giant ships in the harbor, the broad skyline of

New York City, snowy mountain ranges extending deep into the visible distance, and, of course, most famously, the bodies of women. Millionaire finds any number of ways in which to shoot its three female leads: modeling on a stage, lounging on their patio, admiring their reflections in mirrors that multiply their images across the width of the frame, and reclining on chairs, chaise lounges, and sofas. It is a film that salaciously fulfills the promise of CinemaScope’s advertised claims to “put you right in the picture,” primarily by overwhelming the frame with the image of woman and offering the spectator the opportunity to behold her in long looks across the screen.

We can infer, based on the pre-production decision making, that Gamma Films was hoping for a spectacle along the same lines as Millionaire when they first announced Lola Montes. As Martina Müller notes, “Lola was a producers’ idea . . . in

1 Portions of this chapter were published in my essay, “Similar Means to Different Ends: Lola Montès as a Punch in the Gut,” which appeared as part of the “Opening Choices” dossier in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, issue 7, online.

1954 Gamma developed the idea of a triumphal march of the European film and the prelude and brilliant highlight would be Lola Montès as a French-German co-production”

(2004, 27). To that end, they planned to make a period-piece biography of a scandalous woman. They promoted the film as being based upon a book by Cécil Saint-Laurent, an effort to capitalize on the popularity of his past risqué work on Caroline chérie (Richard

Pottier, 1951)2. Further, they ultimately contracted the star of that film, Martine Carol, an actress known primarily for her willingness to appear nude in her films, to star as the infamous Lola. And, once Carol was on board, the producers upped the ante by deciding to shoot in color and CinemaScope. From these details we can imagine a film that never was, one which offered many of the same spectatorial pleasures as

Millionaire, but perhaps more lurid in its display of the title character’s many affairs.

By comparing similar shots in Millionaire and Lola, however, we can clearly see how far Ophuls’ film deviated from its producer’s wishes. In Figure 3-1, we see Paola

Debevoise (Marilyn Monroe) reclining on a chair with her legs up on an ottoman. She is on the phone with her suitor, J. Stewart Merrill (Alexander D’Arcy), whom we will shortly discover to be a fraud masquerading as a wealthy speculator. Paola’s figure spans nearly the whole width of the CinemaScope frame. Her hips and shoulders are turned toward the camera, and she gazes off screen, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Excepting a few brief cuts to the scoundrel Merrill on the other end of the line, Paola/Marilyn is on display for the viewer. Her posture, carefully designed to appear both relaxed and open to view, causes her green dress to bare her legs. As she listens intently to Merrill, she

2 Although Saint-Laurent would eventually write a book based on the life of Lola Montes, he did not do so until several years after the release of Lola Montes.

rhythmically slides her right leg over her left. This motion—the only motion in the frame—further implies a sexual gaze, fixing attention on her body.3

In contrast, Figure 3-2 presents a graphically similar shot from Lola Montes. Here again, we see a woman in a green dress reclining across the width of the frame, but the contrasts are telling. Lola is reclining in her lover’s carriage. She is flat on her back, rather than turned towards us, and she is nearly motionless throughout the shot. Only her lips and eyes move, almost imperceptibly, as she speaks. The only other movement in the frame is the smoke from her cigarette. Further, she is almost fully covered, baring only her face, hands, and feet. Although the mood is decidedly boudoir, given the red walls and satin pillows, Lola is not on offer to the viewer in the same way as Pola.

Although she may be looked at, there is no implicit invitation to posess her; she is present on screen, but at a remove.

In fact, these differences in presentation complement important differences in agency between the characters. In her scene, Pola is being duped by a criminal. Lola, on the other hand, is willfully ending her relationship with her lover. Whereas Pola hangs on Merrill’s every word, eyes wide in obeyance, Lola is in control of her conversation, leading her partner to an understanding that their affair must end. Pola will, after the call, rush off on Merrill’s insistance that she take a flight to meet him. Lola, on the other hand, will dictate how her evening is spent. She has her own carriage

3 The striking features of this image did not escape the critics. Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times: “The giant panel screen is without equal as a surface on which to display the casually recumbent figure of the temptatious Marilyn Monroe. Thirty-odd feet of the blond charmer stretched out on a forty- foot chaise longue, purring stereophonic sweet nothings into a three-foot telephone, is an eye-filling sight which suits completely the modern-day taste for size, and, to that extent, anyhow, warrants this gigantic way of showing films” (quoted in Rogers 2012: 84).

travelling just behind her lover’s so as to make a clean break whenever she deems it appropriate.

These contrasts are exemplary of the differences between the two films, and they remind us that Lola, as it exists for us today, is a film that was never meant to be, at least not if the producers had had their way. In the course of their pre-production decision-making, contracting Max Ophuls for director was a relatively late decision. In the early announcements, first Jacques Tourneur, a successful genre filmmaker, and then Michael Powell, a proven director of Technicolor melodramas (Black Narcissus,

1947) and spectacles (The Red Shoes, 1948), were listed as director. Once Ophuls was on board, however, the course of the film’s development quickly changed. Ophuls brought with him to the project several crewmembers, each of whom were his frequent and recent collaborators: Jacques Natanson and Annette Wademant to work on the script, Christian Matras as cinematographer, and Jean d’Eaubonne as production designer (Berthomé, 2001). Given that this team had worked together on Ophuls’ recent

French films, the producers may have been expecting something like the profitable (and bawdy) La Ronde (Ophuls, 1950), if on a grander scale.

In fact, Lola Montès was a flop. Indeed, upon its initial release, audiences responded so poorly to the film that exhibitors played announcements in the auditorium before the show, “The public is warned that it’s going to see a film that’s out of the ordinary and that there is still time to get a refund before the first scenes” (Müller 2004:

34). There are several accounts of protesting spectators, theater managers calling for the police, and fences set up to keep those leaving the theater from convincing those in line to avoid seeing it. On this last point, the director’s son, Marcel, recalls that

“dissatisfied spectators . . . jumped over the barricades . . . to tell their fellow citizens not to go see this terrible turkey” (Ophuls 2004: 21). The producers soon ordered Ophuls to recut the film, and he obliged by redubbing the multi-lingual film and reducing its length.

Unsatisfied, his producers cut the film further without his knowledge4, converting the flashback structure into a more linear narrative for wider distribution. All of these efforts were for naught, however, as the film performed poorly in every iteration.

Lola has been critically divisive, too. Famously, upon its initial release, several filmmakers wrote in Figaro to defend the film, including Jean Cocteau, Roberto

Rossellini, and Jacques Tati (Gallagher, 2002). Audiences expecting a salacious performance were understandably upset by the film, however, and even fans of Ophuls’ previous work found the film lacking. The published comments in The New York Times are particularly telling. Following their publication of Andrew Sarris’ lavish praise for the

US release of Pierre Braunberger’s restored version of the film, the paper published two response letters. “Very Un-Ophulsian,” reads one, “he seems to have lost all sense of proportion and piles on bauble after bauble until it becomes camouflage for the paperweight goings-on underneath” (Campbell 1969). The other, equally disparaging, laments that “the picture cannot be said to be moving in any way, save slow moving”

(Kovner 1969).

These viewers are not alone in their opinions, as later critics, too, saw Ophuls’ direction as a disappointment, especially in terms of his use of CinemaScope. Barry

4 On this point, Ophuls recalls: “Yesterday, I saw the English version of Lola, which they tried to make behind my back while I was on holiday in Germany. The attitude of the director-general of Gamma Films was most suspicious, even then; he kept phoning me to say: ‘Have a good rest, please, do take a rest!’ I’ve seen the cuts—it’s incredible to think that people who do that not only have no respect for your work, but they can’t even read. . . The production company that was responsible for Lola didn’t want the film, they never understood it.”[quoted in Rivette and Truffaut [1957] 1978: 24)

Salt, for example, writes that “a curious feature of Lola Montès . . . is how little [Ophuls] used the ‘Scope frame in composition. . . in fact for an appreciable part of the film

Ophuls has the frame physically masked in to Academy proportions, which is a defeatist attitude to composition.” ([1983] 1992: 312). Similarly, French film historian Jean-Pierre

Berthomé, in his history of the film’s preproduction, notes that Ophuls did not himself elect to use CinemaScope (the technology was pressed upon him by the film’s producers), and he argues that Ophuls simply responded with a “refusal . . . to accommodate this format so poorly adapted to his needs” (2001). And so this complicated film has had an equally complicated reception history. Detractors suggested that Ophuls had gotten too carried away with the technology at his disposal; supporters argued the film has an avant-garde appeal.

More recently, the film has attracted sustained critical attention for its commentary on the price of stardom, a price inequitably paid by actresses. But even when singled out for praise, little attention is given directly to the influence of the

CinemaScope process on Ophuls’ decision-making. Take, for example, Laura Mulvey’s recent work on the film. In an insightful essay on “the relation between female stardom, spectacle and commercial entertainment” in the film, Mulvey addresses, briefly, the role of CinemaScope. Early in the essay, she notes that:

Over the course of his long career, Ophuls had mastered a particular cinematic style that might have seemed at odds with the constraints of the wide-screen CinemaScope format. . . . In his black-and-white cinema, Ophuls’ camera, with its forward tracking movements and gravity-defying crane shots, had been constantly mobile. While he manages in Lola Montès, almost magically, to sustain a mobile camera, he uses CinemaScope against its own grain with extraordinary inventiveness and imagination. The wide screen rarely stretches out into a coherent space, but is instead filled by a mise en scène in which the frame is organized into multiple planes and layers. Ophuls consistently creates depth and

distance, countering the natural tendency of CinemaScope to emphasize width. (2016)

Mulvey goes on in her essay to mention a single instance of a constricted frame, concentrating the majority of her reading instead on the film’s narrative structure. At this level of analysis, her reading of Ophuls’ use of CinemaScope seems little more than a positive variation on Salt’s claims that “the edges of the full ‘Scope image are just filled with bits of decoration that are compositionally connected very weakly, if at all, with the central area” ([1983] 1992: 313).

While I agree with Mulvey’s assessment that Ophuls works against the grain of

CinemaScope, I believe that how the process is used in this particular film, and to what end, deserves more detailed and sustained analysis. As this chapter will argue, Ophuls found many expressive uses for the CinemaScope frame. The lineage of the films motifs and stylistic devices can be traced backwards through Ophuls’ career, but here the techniques are assisted by the width of frame offered by CinemaScope. Here, too,

Ophuls uses the CinemaScope frame, and in fact the lure of the technology itself, to create his most powerful critique of the film industry, the producers and directors responsible for its correlative commodification of desire, and the audiences—the viewers of Lola Montès included—who are complicit in the process of exploitation known as “stardom”.

“It’s Beautiful, but I’m Afraid it will have a Sad Ending”

The CinemaScope process aimed to increase ticket sales by emphasizing the movie-going pleasure of looking. Advertisements encouraged viewers to be self-aware; had you chosen to see a CinemaScope picture rather than a film in the traditional aspect-ratio, you were paying in part for the pleasure of looking at the large screen.

Given that Ophuls’ most recent films were lush with baroque décor, we can understand why the producers at Gamma might have thought the anamorphic process would be a good fit for the director. Indeed, many of the ways in which Ophuls takes advantage of the CinemaScope frame are consistent with his past work, yet adapted in significant ways to the larger screen image.

Ophuls adapted the technology to his own techniques (in his words, “I did everything just as it presented itself to me” (quoted in Rivette and Truffaut [1957] 1978:

24), and then motivated those techniques to tell the story of a woman whose aim in life was self-definition, but whose efforts to achieve that goal were ultimately captured, commodified, and put on display for the enjoyment of others. The drama of Lola’s life was already set in Ophuls’ early treatments, but with CinemaScope came an added twist: by using the technology’s emphasis on the look, Ophuls was able to draw a dark analogy between the film-going public and the crowd of the circus for whom Lola is put on display.

In sum, Ophuls achieved a verfremdungseffekt by capitalizing on the novelty of

CinemaScope technology. CinemaScope advertisements routinely emphasized “the feeling that you are actually there in the picture, taking part in the action,” but whereas audiences may have expected to enjoy a privileged view of Lola engaging in tawdry affairs, Ophuls instead assigns his audience a rather different position. Whereas

Ophuls’ previous films about the perils of stardom, La signora di tutti (1934) and Divine

(1935), emphasized the loneliness of stardom and the scurrilous characters in show business, respectively, in Lola Montès he extends the critique to include the audience, including especially the viewers of his film. As Ophuls remarked in his notebooks, “The

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audience is expecting a cream cake but instead it gets a punch in the stomach!” (qtd in

Müller 2004:34).

In retrospect, that the film came together in this way is not entirely surprising, as

Ophuls had long been interested in meaningful use of form, beginning in his days in the theater. As Helmut G. Asper has convincingly shown, Ophuls’ early career in theater was shaped by both German Epic Theater and Russian Synthetic Theater. Ophuls had studied and worked with directors who had championed important figures in each movement, including Erwin Piscator and Paul Legband (Asper 2004:193). For Ophuls, the concept of “total theater” was especially influential. Beginning with his earliest plays, he stressed the importance of all aspects of the production (music, lighting, costume, performance, staging, etc.) working together in a spectacle, and he drew upon a wide variety of modern techniques, including “slide projections, films, trapdoors, flying machines, conveyor belts, and . . . electric lights” (Asper 2004: 184). To this history,

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith adds the observation that Ophuls was particularly interested in the work of theater director Alexander Tairov, arguing that Tairov’s concept of “the theatricalization of theater” became for Ophuls the ideal of “the cinematization of cinema” (2011: 24). Motivating a new film technology, CinemaScope, towards conveying the major premise of his film, the culpability of spectatorship in the exploitation of actresses, is a perfect illustration of such “cinematization.”

Similarly, critics have located a tendency in Ophuls’ work to engage, directly or indirectly, with politics. Of his work as a stage director, Asper notes that “Ophuls was very much engaged in social and political drama, especially in plays concerning minorities,” and that he staged plays about anti-Semitism, homosexuality, and poor

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conditions in prisons and reform schools (Asper 2004: 189). These interests carried over into Ophuls’ cinema, too. For example, Laura Mulvey has catalogued several of the ways in which Ophuls has revised his source texts so as to comment on both national and sexual politics. She points out that Ophuls routinely made women the central characters of his films, even when they were minor characters in the source material, and she argues that he does so in order to dramatize the rigidity of the patriarchal systems in which his heroines are trapped. In the course of that argument, she unpacks a number of ways Ophuls has engaged similarly engaged national politics in his work, noting his service as a broadcaster of anti-Nazi radio programs for the French army and remarking of Liebelei (1933) that “it is not unlikely that Ophuls introduced the Austro-

Hungarian military to inject into the original play an allegorical warning about the rise of fascism in contemporary Germany” (Mulvey 2013: 19).

In addition to national and sexual politics, critics have also found in Ophuls an ethics based around sympathy for characters whose choices are delimited by a rigid class system. For example, Daniel Morgan’s striking analysis of camera movements in

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948) lead him to his concept of “dual attunement,” in which Ophuls’ camera movements invite his viewers to “take into account the subjective states of the characters while at the same time revealing their place within a social world” (Morgan 2011: 131). He argues that the women in Ophuls’ films “repeatedly desire to break out of the structures that enclose them yet prove unable to do so,” and that one function of Ophuls’ camera movements is to help us understand why they fail by showing us their own actions in a larger context (Morgan

2011: 137).

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Although his producers had likely been banking on his reputation for directing baroque melodramas, we can readily see that Ophuls’ work had always demonstrated an interest in both meaningful form and political expression. Indeed, we have Ophuls’ word regarding what was on his mind as he wrote the treatment for Lola. He stated in an interview with Truffaut exactly what was on his mind while writing the treatment for the film:

When it was proposed that I do Lola it seemed to me that the subject was completely foreign to me. I don’t like lives in which a great many things happen. At the same time, I was struck by a series of news items which, directly or indirectly, took me back to Lola. Judy Garland’s nervous breakdown, the sentimental adventures of Zsa Zsa Gabor. I meditated on the tragic brevity of careers today. The questions asked by the audience in Lola were inspired by certain radio programs. (quoted in Williams 1980: 140)

In fact, Judy Garland’s biography bears striking resemblances to the story of Lola

Montes as told by Ophuls. Like Ophuls’ Lola, Judy suffered an overbearing mother, she chose promiscuity as a mode of rebellion against her mother’s authority, she became obsessed with how she was portrayed in her films and in coverage of them, and in the years before her breakdown she had become increasingly dependent on her doctor’s prescriptions.5

What Ophuls achieves is something rather different from Morgan’s aforementioned concept of dual attunement, however, as it extends beyond the diegesis to implicate the film’s own audience. Lola Montes does provide us with both character psychology and an understanding, which the characters cannot grasp, of the ways in

5 Judy Garland’s own biographies, including Christopher Finch’s Rainbow: The Stormy Life of Judy Garland and Joe Morella & Edward Epstein’s Judy: The Films and Career of Judy Garland, tend to similarly indulge in the temptation to treat her life like a series of accolades and scandals. This thought, of course, bringing to mind other parallels between the lives of Frances Ethel Gumm (1922-1969) and Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert (1821-1861)

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which their actions and passions are circumscribed by societal constraints, but it goes further by using form to constantly remind us that our own viewing pleasure is complicit in the systems that make Lola’s exploitation a foregone conclusion. Susan White identifies this dynamic when she writes that, in Lola, “one can feel ‘Ophuls’ being torn between the laying bare of cinema’s ability to show, to exhibit, and the more occulted, fetishizing powers of the camera unmediated by a ‘director-figure’” (1995: 300). To extend her observation, I argue that Ophuls in fact pits one against the other. The frame narrative of the circus foregrounds the insatiability of its spectators desire to see and to know its subject, Lola, and Ophuls works in various ways to parallel the audience of the circus and that of the film. This frame narrative and identification with the spectators clash with and comments upon the flashback structure that offers us varying degrees of access to and immersion in Lola’s life. In the conflict between the two, the film encourages its viewers to both indulge in the “fetishizing powers of the camera” and notice the unkind metaphor for that indulgence in a circus where an ignoble Ringmaster parades a woman before an indecorous audience.

But Ophuls uses more than the narrative structure to achieve this tension between absorption and awareness. His use of the CinemaScope frame is both evocative and conspicuous. Through obstructed views, constricting frames, and distraction, Ophuls uses the CinemaScope process to convey the power dynamics of his characters, ultimately painting a sympathetic portrait of his main character. At the same time, these devices are ostentatious, always foregrounding their constructedness and thereby calling attention to our position as spectators. In so doing, Ophuls does not

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so much substitute a stomach-punch for cream cake as rapidly deliver both in alteration.

That the result caused a certain displeasure amongst some viewers is not surprising.

“A More Authentic Truth”

From the very first moments of the film, Ophuls draws his viewers’ attention to both their assumptions about the film and their own role as spectators. In its opening moments, Lola encourages the false sense of cream-cake comfort to which Ophuls referred. An orchestra plays the overture, and, as the stringed instruments swell, the details of cast and crew appear in ornate gold script across the wide, royal-blue frame.

At this point the film is interchangeable with any number of other period dramas, and an audience unfamiliar with Ophuls’ work could be forgiven for expecting a routine romance to follow. Such expectations are quickly dashed, however, by a sharp whistle from the Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov). His whistle cues the first shot of the film, two chandeliers hanging symmetrically to the left and right of center frame. The chandeliers are lowered, and, as the camera follows their descent with a tilt down, the complementary movements split our focus, causing the initial objects of our gaze to escape from us as they move further and further to the extreme edges of the shot. Even when viewing at home, on a screen immensely scaled down from CinemaScope theatrical projections, tracking the chandeliers requires glancing back and forth across the frame. Ophuls’ use of the wide frame here is reflexive; it first directs our attention towards objects moving within the shot and then frustrates our ability to follow them. In this opening shot, therefore, Ophuls derives from the ostensibly immersive

CinemaScope format an alienating effect that underscores both the garish qualities of the circus and the inaccessibility of its ostensible subject.

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We are encouraged to scan between the chandeliers, and between them we see the infrastructure of the circus: rafters, ropes, and pulleys, a make-shift proscenium arch. When the Ringmaster emerges from behind a curtain, we glimpse backstage, with various individuals moving about in front of a bare wall and scaffolding. His entrance is captured in a remarkably fluid long take, which, as the shot progresses, reveals the elements of the film’s construction, too. In a television interview on the making of the film, Cameraman Alain Douarino recalls having warned Ophuls about the plan for the shot, noting that it could not be done without revealing the cameras tracks. “Ophuls simply said, ‘I don’t care.’’’6 Indeed, the shot plainly reveals the tracks, covered in red rugs. We begin the shot in rafters; we see the ropes from which the props of circus dangle; we see the camera’s tracks. If the CinemaScope framing allows us the freedom to hunt for significance, Ophuls’ mise-en-scène makes significant both the circus’ and the film’s construction, drawing an explicit parallel between the two.

For Truffaut, these peeks at the seams of the spectacles’ construction—both the rafters of the circus and the tracks of the camera—point towards “a more authentic truth” ([1955] 1994: 228). He provocatively refers to this as “neo-realist,” referring to the post-war tendency in Italian cinema to shoot in the street rather than in the studio.

Rather than reveal truths of daily life, however, Ophuls’ willingness to repeatedly call to mind the film’s own construction points to the “truth” of the film as artifice. The film, like the circus, is a production designed to dazzle. And, of course, by extension, the audience expects to be entertained. By allowing the cameras tracks to be visible in the

6 Douarino’s recollection can be seen in context in the special features of the Criterion DVD of Lola Montes. His comments originally aired on French television in 1965 as part of ‘Max Ophuls ou le plaisir de tourner,’ a televised documentary on the making of the flm.

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shot, by filling the frame with the infrastructure of the circus, Ophuls doubles down on the self-conscious nature of CinemaScope productions, inviting viewers to be aware of their own position, sitting in theater seats and anticipating a few hours of pleasurable looking.

Furthering the tension between display and immersion, Ophuls constructs the film’s mise-en-scène to constantly remind us of the frame narrative, and by extension our own film-going, even as he works to absorb us in the details of Lola’s story. For example, the same details of the circus that fill the opening shot of the film reappear in various ways throughout the film, causing the diegetic present to bleed into Lola’s memories of the past. For example, in the flashback to Lola’s adolescence, we see her wandering the deck of a ship, walking in and out of dangling ropes and pulleys that call to mind the same elements of backstage at the circus. We see this same reminder even more emphatically in the longest flashback sequence, Lola’s memory of life with the

King of Bavaria, which itself includes a lengthy discussion between the two backstage at an opera, surrounded by swinging ropes, costumes, and random portions of stage sets.

Beginning with the first shot of the film, we frequently see chandeliers in the circus, often raised out of or lowered into the frame. At several moments, the chandeliers straddle a dissolve between past and present, appearing in the circus, the flashback, or both. In fact, on two occasions the presence of a chandelier is part of a play on our attention to such details. On both occasions, a flashback sequence involves the theater, once with Lola in attendance, and once with her as the star. In the latter case, we dissolve from a night sky to a curtain decorated with stars, in front of which hangs a chandelier. We hear the Ringmaster announce a transition between scenes,

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and, before the camera pans to find young Lola with her mother, we believe for a moment that we have returned to the circus. Similarly, when, in a later flashback, Lola receives a standing ovation for her dancing, the camera cranes and pans up to survey all of her admirers before stopping on a chandelier. The applause fades as the image dissolves to a backroom, blurring the lines between one backstage and the other.

By calling our attention to the film’s own construction, Ophuls furthers his parallel between circus and film, a parallel that implicates the producer (circus owner), director

(Ringmaster), and audiences of each. Lola’s is a sad story, in part because it ends with the circus retelling, which exploits both her and her history. In its spectacle, the circus offers Lola up to the audience for its own lurid enjoyment. Audiences may have expected the same from the film. Rather than merely present Lola as spectacle, however, the film invites audiences to sympathize with the plight of the woman branded as scandalous, and to recognize in her exploitation their own seats at the circus.

Bird, Beast, Menagerie

In his use of CinemaScope, Ophuls manages to both draw conscious attention to the films form and to use that form to invite viewer’s sympathy with Lola. In doing so,

Ophuls uses the film’s form itself to make points that further the film’s critique of show business in general, and the film industry in particular. For example, Ophuls uses formal elements of mise-en-scène to both develop our sense of Lola’s powerful attraction and to insinuate how the adoration of her many suitors ultimately entraps her. Throughout the film, for example, Ophuls develop a motif of Lola as songbird. In the flashbacks where Lola is at the height of her powers, she carries a songbird with her. In the first flashback sequence, when we see her carriage arrive at the inn, her maid is carrying a bird in a cage. The same bird is prominently displayed in her room the next morning.

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Similarly, in a later flashback, one which ostensibly takes place around the time of the first7, Lola is in Nice entertaining a suite of suitors. The walls of the suite, interior and exterior, are largely glass, and her bird is plainly visible in several of the shots, uncaged and standing on an ornate perch. We see Lola in possession of the bird when she is at her most self-possessed, but Ophuls also uses the mise-en-scène to demonstrate that her willingness to put herself on display will eventually cage her in.

In the opening sequence of the circus, the Ringmaster draws a rather different analogy for Lola, promising his audience “a creature a hundred times more murderous than any beast in our menagerie.” His description of Lola as captive animal is literalized by the cage in which she is kept, a large circus cage in which you might expect to see a bear or a tiger. Backstage at the circus, we see that her cage serves as her dressing room, and when not in center ring she is often depicted behind its bars. At the end of the film, we see her in this cage, arms outstretched, receiving the throngs of men who have come to the circus for a chance to see her, to interrogate her about her sexual exploits and now to kiss her hand. Here, having willfully relinquished her agency to the circus, she has gone from song bird to dangerous beast, an ending which is foreshadowed throughout the film in shots that depict Lola “caged” by the mise-en- scène.

For example, in the flashback to Lola’s adolescence with her mother, we get a brief premonition of her future. Lola’s father has recently passed away, and her mother

7 The flashbacks are all in chronological order, except for Lola’s first flashback. While the subsequent flashbacks track Lola’s life from adolescence, through a series of lovers, to her affair with the King of Bavaria and ultimate expulsion from that country, the first flashback is to Lola’s relationship with Franz Liszt. This flashback must take place after her failed marriage to the Lieutenant and before her affair with the King, but exactly when it takes place is unclear.

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has taken up with his adjutant, Lieutenant James. Together, Lola and her mother are set to sail from India, where her father had died, to France, where her mother plans to introduce her to an elderly baron. We do not know for certain if her mother’s plan to marry her off is already in place, or if Lola knows about any such plan, but her mother’s actions are clearly off-putting for Lola. When Lola learns that her mother has arranged to have only a single bed, in a cabin directly across from the Lieutenant, and that Lola is to sleep with the children in the ship’s dormitory, Lola becomes despondent. The pain of being marginalized by her mother will eventually lead to Lola’s rebellion against her, but the mise-en-scène hints at where her rebellion will take her (Figure 3-3).

While Lola is being escorted to the lower levels of the ship, a cut takes us to a dreary hall in a shot with a partially obstructed frame (Figure 3-4). The left half of the image is open, and the right half is divided by a series of closely-spaced vertical lines, an element of the set design arranged closely enough to the camera as to appear only as black bars across the right of the frame. Lola descends into center frame, at the pivot point between the open half of the frame and the half that is thus barred-off. She takes a step back, momentarily in the open. Her escort, a cabin boy who is hopelessly enamored with her, directs her towards her future: “Straight ahead, mademoiselle.”

Tentatively, Lola moves right in the frame, placing herself in the cage of the mise-en- scène.

Whereas Lola was once in control of her own appeal, in possession of her own desirable qualities and able to use them to her own ends (Lola as songbird), those same qualities made her the perfect spectacle for the Ringmaster’s circus (Lola as beast). In the circus, her agency is refigured as scandal, and crowds have gathered to

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watch the scandalous fall. As with observing a dangerous animal act, the circus goers pay be titillated by Lola’s daring and comforted by her taming and capture. The

Ringmaster predicts as much when he visits her in Nice. “You know how to trigger a scandal . . . in the entire world, scandal means money. Come with me. I’ll get you top fees. . . The world’s most scandalous woman, the most scandalous act.” Indeed, the circus comes to possess her body, which it exchanges nightly for profit, but the rights to her story. As the Ringmaster barks during a tight-rope sequence portraying a series of her affairs, “Mammoth Circus owns the exclusive rights of this story. Copyright is strictly reserved!”

Lola, Liszt, and Life as Movement

The circus captures Lola’s agency by rebranding her self-determination as

“scandal.” As Laura Mulvey has argued, Lola is “essentialized and generalized” by the circus, her character flattened from a unique individual to a scandal machine, defined by sex and an imposed narrative arc of ambition and downfall (Mulvey 2016). That the circus which thus captures and commodifies Lola’s control over desire is aligned with the film industry is in part made clear by Ophuls’ foregrounding of formal devices that incessantly call our attention to our own position as spectators, and in part by Ophuls’ ability to arouse and frustrate our visual interests, capitalizing on the technological appeal of CinemaScope as an attraction in and of itself.

Another device Ophuls uses to these ends is a constricted frame. At several moments in the film, the wide CinemaScope frame is cropped—sometimes naturally by elements of set design that obscure parts of the frame, sometimes artificially by masking the sides of the frame from above or below—creating a variety of possible screen sizes. Critics of the film often refer to these moments in the film as Ophuls’

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exhibiting a lack of imagination for dealing with the ‘Scope frame. Far from a “defeatist attitude towards composition,” as Barry Salt claims, however, Ophuls uses these variable frame sizes expressively and motivates them towards a variety of ends. The technique again works on two fronts, allowing us access to a character’s motivations while also keeping the story at arm’s length through conspicuous formal devices. For example, Ophuls’ establishes the tragedy of Lola’s end by connecting the exploitive desire of the circus audience, manipulated by the Ringmaster, to the intimate desires of her suitors, manipulated by Lola. Ophuls achieves this parallel in part by using the constricted frame to develop a motif of love as entrapment. Retrospectively, the parallel clarifies Lola’s stated reason for ending what to all indications was a mutually pleasurably affair with Franz Liszt. When Lola declares that “Life for me is movement,” she is really describing her own agency as an ongoing effort to avoid entrapment.

The first instance of a constricted frame occurs during Lola’s first flashback, her reminiscence of the end of her affair with Franz Liszt. This flashback occurs very early in the film, after the spectacle of the Ringmaster’s introduction to our story, and we can assume that the memory is important for Lola, as it is prompted by an audience- member’s question, “Does she remember the past?” A dissolve takes us to the Italian countryside, where Liszt and Lola are riding in his carriage (the same carriage ride sequence from which the still in Figure 3-1 is taken). In ending the affair, she tells him that, in a relationship with an attractive man, it is easy to “yield, to hang on, to go too far,” and, despite his adoration for her, he knows she has made up her mind when he notices that her carriage is following his, facilitating an easy parting of ways.

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His carriage takes them to an inn, where we see their final night together. Late in the night, we find Liszt alone at a table, composing a farewell waltz for Lola. A close-up shot of the sheet music cues romantic music on the soundtrack, and in voice-over he muses, “Thank you for allowing me to believe I am leaving, not you.” He reviews his notes, stands, and paces around the room looking to where she lays. He walks over to her bedside, where she is ostensibly sleeping, and tries to offer his music to her. “Here, darling. Do you hear me? Do you want to hear me?” Suddenly upset, as much at his suspicion that she is pretending to sleep as he is at her decision to end the relationship, he tears up the sheet music, causing the non-diegetic music to end abruptly. He begins packing his bags, looking back at her all the while.

We learn a lot about Lola from how Ophuls chooses to shoot this scene. For one,

Lola commands an intense power over Liszt despite how little time she spends on the screen. The attraction Liszt feels for Lola is emphasized through relationships between on- and off-screen space in a long take that tracks through the room they have let for the night. Frustrated with what he assumes to be Lola’s “performance” of sleep, he tears up his sheet music, causing an abrupt end to the extra-diegetic music playing over the scene. In its place, a chime marks the hour, reverberating in the relative silence of the room as Liszt moves to an armoire to pack his bag, to a table in the distant background to collect his valise, to the mantle across the room to pick up his hat. He turns once more, now headed toward the door and walking towards the camera, and he bumps his head on a low arch. He walks passed Lola in bed and, making every effort to be quiet, opens a glass-paned door and begins to exit. In the course of the shot he looks off screen towards Lola in her bed exactly twelve times, presumably in an effort to catch

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her at playacting, accentuating both her passive control over the events of the night and his frustration at being the one dismissed from the affair.

Just before he leaves, Lola speaks: “You might at least say goodbye,” she says,

“it would be polite.” Her lines stop Liszt mid-exit, half way out the door. His back is facing the camera, positioned behind a door in the far left frame. To the far right is Lola, laying nearly motionless in her bed, draped in red silks. In another example of ostentatious framing, we can only see her face, framed by an ornate gate around her bed that blocks much of the center frame with its flower pattern. A direct light on her face suggests it is the focal point of the shot, but she is small in the frame, much smaller even than Liszt, who stands in the foreground. In the breadth of the wide frame, Lola is emphasized, but almost hidden.

As a couple, they are divided by private interests unknown to us, and the mise- en-scène underscores their division by graphically separating them with strong vertical line. Liszt apologizes for his quiet attempt to leave, and walks back in, through the door and then through the gates of the frame around the bed. A cut takes us to a canted angle shot, and an unsteady one at that, with Lola and Liszt under the silk netting and behind the bed gate for their farewell kiss. After the first kiss, the camera reframes and steadies, with Lola and Liszt sharing the center frame, both partially obscured from our view. “Voila,” Lola says, “it is done.”

At this line, Liszt takes a half step back and away from Lola, distancing himself from her so that they are again at far edges of the frame. As he plays with his top hat, she proposes a fanciful future encounter, imagining each of them performing in the same city, cancelling their plans to steal away for a secret night together. As she

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seduces him with her own narrative of desire, Liszt sits down and the camera reframes again, settling on them sitting together as equals on the bed. As she speaks, Lola touches his top hat casually. She is in control. She first touches his hat, then strokes it gently, then moves it aside. She takes his cane from him in the same fashion. Having removed the barriers between them, the accoutrements of his departure, they kiss and the sides of the frame close in tightly. The camera reframes, pushing in slightly and tilting down, and the couples’ faces disappear above frame and off-screen. We see Lola undo his cravat, and the camera follows her hand as she lays it on a stool behind the bed. A dissolve elides the rest of their evening, bringing us instead to the morning after, where, smiling, Lola surveys the empty room, satisfied with her decisions.

In regards to Ophuls’ choices for framing this conversation, we might echo Salt’s critique that “very nearly all the action in the whole film falls within an Academy aspect ratio frame area, as when a ‘Scope print is scanned for T.V. transmission’” ([1983] 1992:

312). Certainly this particular scene ends in this way, and emphatically, as the shutters that close down the width of the frame do so at a moment of passion, embracing the characters as they embrace, just before looking away to the metonym of their passion, effecting a close-up on the cravat from what would otherwise had been a medium-close shot given the frames width. But to take up this line of criticism would be to ignore the way the shot creates meaning precisely through the frame’s constraints, both within this moment and in relation to the sequence it follows. We see, geographically, Liszt’s attraction to Lola. Like a moth to light, he is drawn in, even as he is frustrated by his lack of control. We see him pace the room as he prepares to present his song to her, and we see her silent rebuff of his farewell. We then see him, angered at his inability to leave on

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his own terms, moving about the room packing his things, yet fixated on her. And, just at the moment of his departure, when the frame is multiply divided by doors and furniture, we see him beckoned in to her bedside. Once again, the blocking is broad across the width of the frame, and Liszt moves in and out of what would be the academy ratio frame, here strongly demarked by the vertical line created by her bedframe. Yet he cannot leave, he is compelled to move closer, and the frame closes in at that moment, too, in a moment of capture and of passion.

The framing of the sequence takes advantage of the width of CinemaScope to emphasize both Lola’s power in the relationship and our own spectatorship, as we, like

Liszt, and like the circus audience, too, must seek her out in the frame. Like the circus audience, and unlike Liszt, we have only an obstructed view, and we are conscious of the fact that we can only know the moment at a remove. In constricting the frame,

Ophuls graphically matches their embrace; we might even say he conveys visually the sense of being “lost” in the embrace of another, the rest of the world shut out by their passion. In simultaneously tilting down, the film gives them their privacy, the first of many instances in which the film deprives the spectator of a chance to spy on Lola’s most intimate moments.

The feeling of a warm embrace imbued by the shuttering of the sides of the frame is soon complicated, however. The second instance of a constricted frame comes immediately afterwards, in the circus, when we first learn that Lola is sick. As she goes backstage to change, she is helped out of her costume and a blanket is wrapped over her shoulders. A doctor arrives with medicine, and, with a cut to Lola behind the bars of her changing room, the frame cropped-in significantly from both sides. Here, too, the

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remainder of the action takes place in the confines of the academy ratio, but here the suggestion is not embrace, but entrapment. Behind bars rather than an ornate gate, shot in dark hues rather than the rich tones of her boudoir, taking medicine to ensure that she can go on with the show, the dramatic significance of the constricted frame is altogether different here when taken in context.

We have already seen one cycle: a tight, embracing frame in the flashback to

Lola and Liszt, followed by the constricting frame of behind-the-scenes at the circus.

Next, the cycle is repeated with variation during the flashbacks to Lola’s adolescence.

Having escaped from her planned marriage, Lola convinces her mother’s lover—the

Lieutenant—to elope with her. The move is impetuous, a last-minute decision to form a clear break from her mother. Lola knows that she does not want to be married off to an older man, a baron, simply to enrich her mother, and she disapproves of her mother’s relationship with the Lieutenant. But Lola does not really know what she wants, other than to be elsewhere, to be in control of her own destiny, however ill-defined that destiny may be at the moment. “Well, do something,” she calls out to him as she continues her escape from the opera house. “Marry me!” she calls out, “Isn’t that what usually happens?”

The Lieutenant follows her as she exits through two large doors, the camera reframing to center on the doorway. Lola runs into the depth of the frame, and the

Lieutenant follows her. The frame closes in on both sides, reducing the image to approximately that of the academy ratio. In doing so, the shot effectively focuses our attention on the couple as they kiss. The elements of the mise-en-scène approximate that of a wedding chapel: the hallway pillars, the overhead lights, the vegetation here

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and there, and the strong lighting on Lola’s white dress. As with the scene with Liszt, the constricting frame seems to be evocative of their loving embrace, an assumption that will soon be overturned.

After a brief, less than two-minute return to the circus, in which Lola is to play, as the Ringmaster declares, her life “in Scotland, marital life, full of bliss. . .”, we return to her recollection of her life with the Lieutenant, and the dissonance is striking. We dissolve from Lola posed in a wedding gown on a spinning pedestal in the circus (a shot which very much calls to mind the topper and decorations of a wedding cake) to another example of the masked frame. All we can see in the frame is a door, being broken open by the butt of a gun. As the Lieutenant enters, the mask on frame right opens up, allowing him access to the room. He storms in angrily, and the mask on frame left opens. Here the constriction of the frame was self-protection. Lola was hiding from him, but his strength gives him mastery over the scene, including the frame. As the couple argues over his drunkenness and past indiscretions, he taunts her: “You forget, that ours is a love match,” he says, adding, menacingly, “You can’t escape a love match.” As he speaks these lines, we see a shot-reverse-shot, with the frames masked so as to put the adjutant and Lola at the distant extremes, underscoring their tensions: the adjutant frame right, Lola frame left.

Lola attempts to make an escape, paralleling her actions when escaping her mother’s control. As then, the Lieutenant once again pursues her, this time with violent intent. Lola struggles with a door to the foyer, unlike before, at the opera, when she was able to fling to doors open so masterfully that one opens without her even touching it, and, once she makes her way through, the camera cuts to a side view of the entryway.

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The Lieutenant is close behind her, overtakes her, and blocks her way out of the front door. The frame is constricted here, in part by the ironwork in the panes of glass through which we see them struggle, which creates a blurry screen across the visible portion of the frame, but also with masking and with the mise-en-scène itself, which is dark enough to be indiscernible, focusing the shot on struggle in the center frame. “I’ll never let you go. I’d sooner kill you,” he says, clutching her face. She bites his hand, they tumble, and the camera tries to track the violence but cannot. The scene is too dark, our view too obstructed.

We cut suddenly back to the circus, and the frame opens marvelously to reveal

Lola riding towards the camera on the front of a train, wearing a short, revealing dress.

The Ringmaster announces with painful irony, “That peaceful life couldn’t last forever.”

In the wide frame, Lola dances provocatively, but unsteadily, with a troupe of men in tuxedoes with 1000-dollar gold coins for heads and red wallets full of money that they throw at her as one would throw rice at a wedding.

The evident disjunction between the past and the present retelling of that past, between the truth of an abusive husband and the lie of a peaceful life, between the fight to escape an unhealthy relationship and the circus’s caricature of a lavish life of sex and money, is doubled by the disjunction between the constricted and wide frames. In the tightly focused shot, we see Lola’s recollection of the truth; in the wide CinemaScope frame, we see a patently sexualized version of that truth designed specifically to please a crowd.

But Ophuls’ use of the constricted frame does more than parody the desire implicit in CinemaScope productions. He uses it to demonstrate that an embrace can be

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either passionate or controlling, an ambivalence that he takes advantage of lager in the film. In Nice, at the height of her notoriety, the Ringmaster visits Lola and offers her a role in the circus. More specifically, he offers to make her a marketable scandal. He insults her dancing, but promises that her body will bring paying customers. That they are at odds with one another is heightened by Ophuls’s use of canted angles in the shot-reverse shot sequence of their introduction. The camera is angled so as to create the sense of the characters leaning away from each other, and they are shot from the same point, behind a vase, so as to create the sensation that they are much farther apart than they are.

For most of the scene, Lola is evasive, free to move around her large apartment.

Suddenly, however, the Ringmaster commands her to stop smoking. She does, and he gains control over the conversation. Before he leaves, he kisses her, and the framing closes in tight around them. Passion? A threat? We may be allowed to believe some mixture of each, as the frame narrative has already made clear that the circus will be her downfall, but also that the Ringmaster’s whispers to her during the show seem to suggest he has genuine concern for her health. In either case, he has abruptly taken control over the scene, and the screen remains masked until a few moments after he leaves. As it opens, Lola is free to walk around her apartment again, and she watches him as he goes, descending the stairwell to her apartment, rubbing shoulders with a long line of suitors bearing gifts and waiting to see her. For now, at least, Lola is still free to move as she wills, but we know her capture to be eminent.

From Marginal to Captivating to Captive

Another way in which Ophuls uses formal devices to convey how desire can both empower and entrap Lola is by manipulating our attention. Of the techniques discussed

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in this chapter, Ophuls’ control over our attention is perhaps the one that most thoroughly puts to use the compositional width of the frame, as they are also the techniques which most emphatically call attention to our own act of viewing the film. In his essay on CinemaScope, Charles Barr argues that the scope frame comes closer to our natural perception:

At any time we see “central” things and “marginal” things; of the latter we may be aware, or half-aware, or they may merely serve to orient us. The traditional [pre-‘Scope] aesthetic separates out the central things: the marginal ones it omits as inessential or distracting. . . So an alternative method . . .is to present a complex image organized in such a way that we are induced to interpret it for ourselves. (1963: 117)

In other words, one potential benefit of the CinemaScope frame is to encourage an active viewing that requires spectators to discern what is most significant in a shot.

For Ophuls in Lola Montès, this license to interpret takes on an ethical dimension. He uses this active look to emphasize both Lola’s marginalization and the way a viewer’s gaze can trap its object. In Lola’s life, lack of attention was cause for despair, but in an effort to seize that attention and empower herself, Lola enters into a power structure that she will ultimately lose control over.

When we first see young Lola in the film, a dissolve brings us from the circus to the scene of Lola and her Mother in a small boat of passengers rowing out to board a large ship. Lola is looking down and off frame to moonlight on the rippling water. Her mother is incessantly critical, and the only dialogue here, her mother’s critiques, set up our sense of their relationship. “Watch out! Don’t Fall! Don’t look at the water, come on!

You are always dreaming. Look at the ship.” Evidently, Lola does not want to be a party to this voyage, but she is dutifully accompanying her mother. When the smaller boat arrives at the ship, Lola’s mother is excited. She hurriedly climbs the stairs to the ship,

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at the top of which she meets the Lieutenant. The camera holds much of the ship’s length in the frame, though the scene is darkly lit to resemble a night voyage in a full moon. Portholes along the ship add a graphic pattern to the shot, echoing the moon’s shape and color. As Lola’s mother climbs the stairs, moving diagonally from center frame left to center frame right, the camera pans up slightly to see her being received by the Lieutenant. They exchange flirtatious pleasantries, and then he escorts her to present her tickets. They move to the left of frame across the deck, and the camera reframes to track them.

Suddenly, Lola’s mother doubles back. Where’s Lola? An afterthought for her mother, and for us, too, as the motion in the frame, and the camera’s reframing to follow that movement encourages us to forget about her, too. Her mother hurries back, and the camera pans to keep her in frame. She leans over the side of the boat and calls down to Lola, who remains out of frame. From here we cut to a shot of Lola and her mother entering the ticket office together. This time the camera tracks to follow Lola’s movement as she walks, head down, pouting, from frame left to frame right and out of frame. The frame, however, is full of action that distracts the viewer from her slow walk.

A young man is sitting on a table, throwing a brightly colored ball up and down (another one of many examples of the bleed-through between circus and flashback) while, center frame right, Lola’s mother and the Lieutenant talk about their tickets and which stateroom they will be in. Once again, in the space of the wide frame, Lola escapes our attention.

Ophuls uses the wide frame to distract us, dramatizing her mother’s inattention.

Even as we follow Lola on the deck, during a later sequence in which she has broken

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down at being sent to bed early, we are a distracted viewer. As she walks, crying, two gentlemen emerge from the background and cross paths with her. One looks back at her briefly, but they continue on their way to the party, moving to frame left as she walks off frame right. Rather than following her, we turn to follow the men. After a brief distraction, the camera glances back to see she has gone.

Ophuls has used this sort of embodied and distracted camera in the past. His early film, The Bartered Bride (1932), for one, uses a mobile camera to roam around the grounds of a circus, moving us quickly from sideshows to crowds to quieter behind the scenes moments. In that film, the tone of circus life is altogether different, as many of the scenes the camera stumbles upon emphasize the humble pleasures of circus life. In

Le Plasir, too, we have a distracted camera. During the first sequence, we are meant to be interested in the mysterious man who has collapsed after rigorous dancing. When we are following the doctor who is sent to aid him, however, we are instead distracted by the events at the party, eyeing the food, the décor, even joining a dance before the camera takes us away. As with other devices at work in Lola Montès, the technique of the distracted camera is both familiar in Ophuls’ oeuvre, but here used to a new effect, abetted by the large screen format. In directing our attention away from Lola, Ophuls helps us to understand how marginalized she feels at this point in her life. We sense, in the ease of our own distraction, that Lola feels unappreciated, and, further, in using this technique Ophuls sets up a key dramatic moment in the subsequent scene at the opera house.

In the second half of Lola’s flashback to her adolescence, we find her at the opera. We see the crowd leaving for intermission, and two prominent figures stand up:

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Lola’s mother and the Lieutenant. Lola remains seated, and her mother excoriates her as usual, this time telling her to hurry up, as they are on their way to meet the baron to whom Lola is betrothed. As the three make their way towards the theater’s rear exit, the camera tracks them through the bustling crowd. As before, we lose Lola without realizing she is gone. We only notice her absence when her mother does. Upon noticing she has fallen behind, her mother sends the Lieutenant ahead while she doubles back to find her daughter. As her mother turns, the camera, too, begins to retrace its steps.

Guided by her mother’s look, the camera begins a pan to the right, searching the crowd.

A track begins in the same direction but stops suddenly, as Lola is in fact right there, just a few paces behind her mother. As before, we are aware of how easily our interests are shifted away from the ostensible star of the film, the character whose very flashback we are witnessing.

Thus reunited, Lola’s mother escorts her to the opera box, which is ornately decorated with rich red velvet drapes and thin black lace drapes. Inside, older men bustle about. Lola is often obscured in these shots, but when she is not, she is brightly lit and stands out strongly against the red drapes. Her presence is as conspicuous as her awkwardness, and the staging certainly calls attention to itself. When, for example, the Baron’s footman fetches champagne for the party, he pauses to offer Lola a glass.

She refuses, and he offers a compliment, instead, addressing how beautiful she looks, even more beautiful than in the portrait he had seen. In the composition, Lola is to the far left of frame, and the footmen is to the far right. Between them and deeper into the space of the room, Lola’s mother and her Lieutenant lover stand side by side, but divided by a post and obscured by the black lace that hangs from it. The whole party is

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present, but the clear emphasis is on Lola’s discomfort with the older man’s evident attraction to her. She knows that this will be her future, and that her mother’s main concern is not Lola’s well-being, but the wealth—and freedom from the burdensome responsibilities of parenting—that exchanging her daughter may bring.

Lola’s mother moves to a back room in the box to discuss the matter of her daughter’s betrothal. There in the background, we can see her sitting and smiling solicitously as she receives the bad news that the baron is away to seek treatment for his gout. In the extreme foreground, and at the extreme edges of the frame, we see

Lola, frame left, and the Lieutenant, frame right. They look at each other, awkwardly listening as her fate is determined in the other room. Lola looks distraught, and the

Lieutenant looks sensitive to her position, perhaps feeling guilty for his role in the transaction. He offers her a beverage, stands and moves to a punch bowl. In the most extreme far left of frame, almost impossible to see, a brief movement. The Lieutenant turns around with a glass in hand, and voila: Lola is gone. He takes several strong steps into the room, he turns around, but there is no sight of her, she has escaped: escaped the control of her mother, escaped a future as a wealthy old man’s trophy wife, escaped into agency. She has no idea what she wants to do, but she knows that, in the absence of our attention she has the opportunity to take control over her own destiny.

We feel she has escaped us, too, as throughout the sequence she has been on the edges of the frame and of our interest. It is this disinterest, our disinterest, engineered by Ophuls’ direction in CinemaScope, that both motivates Lola to seek something else and which makes her escape possible. Again, the CinemaScope frame plays an important dual role: it both draws attention to itself as a device of looking, and it

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allows Ophuls to convey important facts about the inner life of Lola. Placed here, after a sequence in which Lola is in control of the narrative and her relationship, we see that

Lola’s animating impulse is primarily to be in control of her own life. Placed as a flashback, contained within the narrative frame of her future in the circus, we know that her desire will eventually be captured and commodified in a way that misrepresents her passions, creates of her life a scandal that can be sold, and manufactures desire that places great demands on her health and safety.

In captivating others and in captivating the camera, Lola unwittingly participates in the system which guarantees her entrapment. She earns the Lieutenant’s full attention, and that attention curdles into oppressive possession. She escapes again, and makes an effort to live her life in constant motion so as to never again be another’s captive. She succeeds for a while, until love again persuades her to allow herself to be captured, this time by the attentive doting of a king. That relationship, too, ends badly, and Lola resigns herself to an altogether different life, ceding control of her image and her story to the circus that will market her as a lovely, dangerous beast, the lusty object of the circus audience’s gaze.

“A Wonderfully Productive New Direction”

The question of whether or not Lola Montès should be considered an avant- garde film is often posed as a matter of intentionality. Certainly, Marcel Ophuls believes that, based upon private conversations with his father, making an avant-garde film was never his intention. Although praise for the film is often lavish, Barry Salt puts forth a powerful rejoinder in suggesting that describing Lola as an avant-garde film is a massive recuperation effort on the part of viewers who desperately want the film to be great. In an effort to answer the question without falling back upon arguments of

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intentionality, we might return to our knowledge of Lola’s pre-production, considering in greater detail our imaginary film, the film that perhaps the producers had meant Lola to be. For this film, we can cast the talented dancer and singer Ludmilla Tchérina in the lead, as the earliest announcements listed her in the title role. We can sign on Michael

Powell to direct, as Gamma had considered him for the job ahead of Ophuls. Of course, our spectacular would have to be in color and CinemaScope, and our aim would be for a film that sells well globally. How might this imaginary film differ from the Lola Montes we ended up with?

Fortunately for us, this comparison film existed. In 1955, the same year as Lola

Montès, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s production company, The Archers, released Oh… Rosalinda!! The film, shot in Technicolor and CinemaScope, starred and was directed by the same talent as our would-be Lola. An adaptation of Johan Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus, the film had an international cast (Michael Redgrave, Ludmilla

Tchèrina, Anton Walbrook) and setting (present-day Vienna, during a post-war occupational period co-supervised by the United States, France, and Russia). Like Lola

Montès, the film featured a prominent character who was also an on-screen narrator, a character who both introduces and narrates the events of the film as well as featuring in those events. To look at the films side-by-side is to instantly cast in relief all that is avant-garde about Ophuls’ Lola Montès.

As with so many of the musicals produced in this era, Rosalinda treats the widescreen frame as little more than a proscenium for its acts. Although the format lends some scale to a masquerade scene, the primary visual appeal is a privileged view of choreographed dance numbers, operatic solos and duets, and, of course, lingering

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looks at Tchèrina’s title character in various stages of undress, including whole scenes during which she is in the bath or in a negligee. The film is unquestioning about its presentation of its female lead, and the framing of shots has less to do with conveying or commenting on character psychology than it does with putting a show on display.

Rosalinda is comfortable with its role as commodity spectacle; it does not question the source material, the format, or the spectator. In the end, the film was mildly successful and, subsequently, almost entirely forgotten.

A perfect example of Powell’s use of the ‘Scope frame to replicate the width of a theater stage comes in the first third of the film. Our narrator-character, Dr. Falke (Anton

Walbrook) is laying elaborate plans for revenge on French Colonel Eisenstein (Michael

Redgrave), arranging for his detention by a British major (Dennis Price). At the same time, the American Captain Westerman (Mel Ferrer) has arrived in Vienna on leave. In the lobby of his hotel, he recognizes an old flame, Col. Eisenstein’s wife, Rosalinda

(Ludmilla Tchèrina). When he arranges to take the room next to hers, a cut takes us to an exterior view of the hotel.

In the wide frame, we see three windows with adjoining balconies in front of them, the posts of which divide the image into three ‘Scope-shaped frames. In the far left, Captain Westerman; in the middle, Rosalinda, in a bubble bath; in the right,

Rosalinda’s maid. The sequence that ensues is comprised of two musical numbers, in the course of which the Captain discovers that Rosalinda will be left alone and makes arrangements to surprise her. Powell uses five set-ups to capture the sequence: (1) a wide shot of the three balconies, (2) a closer shot of Rosalinda in the bath, raising and washing her legs, (3) a different shot of the balcony that includes only the windows of

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Rosalinda’s apartment, (4) a shot of a maid dancing while on the phone at a coat check, and (5) a final shot of balconies, but from a different perspective, shot from the side to include more of the building and the courtyard below. The shots are static, with few cuts between them, allowing the performers relatively long takes in which to sing and allowing the viewer relatively long looks at bathing Rosalinda and the dancing maid.

In its straight-forward framing, in its indulgence in the figures of women, in its proscenium staging, Rosalinda!! makes clear how surprising Lola Montès must have been to both its producers and much of its contemporary audience. Although much of what makes Lola stand apart from its contemporaries was in fact consistent with the previous work of Ophuls and his favorite collaborators, he chose with this film to motivate his signature techniques towards a critique of cinema, its producers, its directors, and its audiences.

Towards the middle of Lola Montès, Lola’s doctor goes to visit the circus owner, a clown in the show. He finds him backstage, dumping change out of a basket shaped to look like Lola’s head. He stands up to greet the doctor, still in full clown make up.

“Excuse me,” he says, touching his oversized bow tie, seeming to apologize for his appearance. He turns around and grabs his equally oversized jacket, complete with fake daisy flower pinned to the lapel. Putting it on, he asks “now what is this about?”

The joke is on him, and by extension on producers who make clowns of themselves by putting profit ahead of all other concerns. But Ophuls does not spare himself, either. His analog in the film is the Ringmaster, whose outfit is a pompous approximation of a general’s uniform, replete with phony medals. Unlike Ophuls’ previous on-screen narrators, the Ringmaster is completely unaware of his role in the film. He paces and

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barks and cracks his whip. And when, late in the film, after the final flashback and before Lola’s show-stopping leap, her doctor petitions the owner to leave a safety net in place, it is the Ringmaster who refuses, putting the spectacle of the show above his concern for its obviously infirm star.

Perhaps the most damaging critique, at least in terms of ticket sales, is that of the viewers. Drawn to a CinemaScope super-production that had been promoted with heavy emphasis on the actress and scriptwriter responsible for Caroline chérie, viewers saw instead a different kind of exposé. Rather than a body laid bare, they saw a film that laid bare the relationship between audience desire and the exploitation of the object of that desire. Ophuls said he had Judy Garland in mind when writing his treatment, but the critique is much broader than a single case. The same critique of desire has, sadly, continued to prove itself relevant. It could apply to the spectacle of How to Marry a

Millionaire and the price Marilyn Monroe would ultimately pay for her celebrity. It could equally apply today, as contemporary movie producers and directors—Harvey

Weinstein, James Franco, Quentin Tarantino, to name only a few—are increasingly outed for the various ways they have exploited actresses, extracting from them personal pleasures and profits.

The Oxford Bibliographies defines the avant-garde film thusly: “cinema made outside of the film industry on an artisanal basis, largely without regard to the structures and demands of traditional narrative film. . . It also frequently produced as a critique of dominant, classical Hollywood cinema and functions in relation to political movements and strategies, such as feminism” (Robin Blaetz 2012). Based on this definition, the answer to the lingering question of Lola Montès’ avant-garde status is a perhaps

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unsatisfying “yes and no.” Made within the dominant industry, produced by a major production company with the intent of global distribution, the film also interrogates its own position as spectacle, offering a critique of the spectatorial pleasures to which its unique CinemaScope format was designed to cater. Given the film’s mixed status, we might settle for a more conservative formulation. Of Ophuls’ use of CinemaScope in

Lola Montès, V.F. Perkins observed, “it seems to formulate a wonderfully productive new direction” (Britton et al. 1982: 109).

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Figure 3-1. Paola Debevoise (Marilyn Monroe), reclines along the length of the screen in How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953).

Figure 3-2. Lola Montes (Martine Carol), similarly reclining in Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955), but without inviting the viewer to possess her.

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Figure 3-3. Lola at the end of the circus, imprisoned in her dressing room cage. (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955])

Figure 3-4. Young Lola on board the ship, imprisoned by the mise-en-scène. (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955])

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Figure 3-5. Lola in Nice, her world unsettled by the arrival of the Ringmaster (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955]).

Figure 3-6. The Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) confronting Lola in Nice (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955]).

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Figure 3-7. Edge-framing as Lola sits in the opera box with Lieutenant James (Ivan Desny) (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955]).

Figure 3-8. Lola escapes while Lieutenant James is distracted (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955]).

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Figure 3-9: Lieutenant James realizes Lola has escaped (Lola Montès [Max Ophuls, 1955]).

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“MY MEMORIES AREN’T SO PLEASANT AS IT IS”: ALLEGORIES OF NATIONAL TRAUMA IN BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK

In her movie reference guide, 5001 Nights at the Movies, Pauline Kael has this to say about Bad Day at Black Rock (1955):

[I]t is a very superior example of motion picture craftsmanship. The director, John Sturges, is at his best—each movement and line is exact and economical; the cinematographer, William C. Mellor, uses CinemaScope and color with intelligent care—the compositions seem realistic, yet they have a stylized simplicity. In part because of this, when the violence erupts, it’s truly shocking. ([1982] 1984: 37)

As is her talent, Kael succinctly captures what we might find memorable and noteworthy in the film. Subsequently, this chapter will complement her review with a much more thorough analysis, explicating the following interrelated claims: that Sturges is here at his best (and that “best” here is in part owed to being “exact and economical” and to being shot in CinemaScope), and that CinemaScope is used here with intelligent care, being both realistic and stylized. As Kael mentions, these elements in part work to emphasize the film’s violence. That violence, I will argue, is a contradiction that is built into the film’s discursive argument about how to resolve past traumas.

As a Western film, Black Rock engages critically with the genre’s mythology, dramatizing modern man’s return to the mythic West and arguing that its moral code is unfit for the present day. Sturges uses the CinemaScope process to engage the genre on a stylistic level, accentuating its traditional elements: the setting, both in time and location, the cowboy figure, and the competing notions of the frontier that the Western genre contradictorily maintains. As with other Westerns, however, contrary premises that Black Rock seeks to sustain—in this case, the horror of violence and the necessity of regenerative violence—ultimately complicate the film’s explicit moral argument.

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Black Rock as Postwar Studio Western

Bad Day at Black Rock is primarily a Western, but it places the genre in conversation with elements of war pictures and social problem pictures. The film works through these genres to address allegorically the violent treatment of the Japanese, at home and abroad, during World War II. To do so, it tells the story of a disgruntled

American, Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who, angered first by the bombing of Pearl

Harbor and doubly by his rejection by the military, channels his anger into violence against his Japanese-American neighbor, Komoko, burning down his home and shooting him dead. The few townspeople who live with Smith in Black Rock are all aware of what he did—a few of them were there on the scene—but none of them spoke out against him and all are now keeping his secret.

The film seeks a cathartic intervention to absolve the townsfolk, and by extension, the viewer, of past sins. It codes the passive onlooking of the townsfolk as moral weakness, but it maintains an option for redemption by offering the townspeople the opportunity to speak up and act out. As I will show, CinemaScope helps to establish this argument, though, surprisingly, not by encouraging active participation in the sense that Charles Barr had described. Instead, the film uses the wide-angle image to engage the Western mythology, emphasizing the railroad, the desert landscape, and the figure of cowboy, as well as to galvanize the hero, Macreedy, to dramatize the passivity of the town, and to elevate the story of Macreedy’s intervention to dramatic allegory.

The film stages an argument between the vigilante craziness of Smith and the investigatory state justice represented by John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy). In 1955,

Sturgis was experienced in shooting city-based police procedurals and crime films, having directed Mystery Street (1950), which placed heavy emphasis on forensic

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investigations, and The People Against O’Hara (1951), a courtroom drama infused with noir aesthetics. In O’Hara, Spencer Tracy played a washed-up alcoholic lawyer making a return to court to defend a falsely-accused neighborhood boy. In that film, as in Black

Rock, much of the film featured him visiting places where he was unwanted and asking questions that perturbed the locals (Figure 4-1).

In Black Rock, Tracy, as Macreedy, confronts the Western with the ethos of the city lawyer and police investigator, a contradiction made evident by the awkwardness of his suit and fedora in the Western milieu (Figure 4-2). Macreedy’s incessant pursuit of answers to his questions about Komoko’s whereabouts are inconvenient for the local cowboys. Though the townspeople begin as guilty by association, Macreedy’s questioning forces many of them to confront their past and work with him to bring Smith to justice. In the process, they slowly, often reluctantly, evolve from passive onlookers to active participants in the drama. In the end, however, the film contradicts its presumptive intervention on the side of rule of law and collective intervention. The only solution the film can offer to resolve the problematic violence of the past is the generic one: Macreedy does succeed in bringing the police to town, but only after he has already killed Smith, burning him alive. Of postwar Hollywood films, Robert Ray has observed that the period’s “emerging preference for the values of the official hero could be felt in even those films whose story seemed to criticize them” (Ray 1985, 173). In

Black Rock, we see a complementary, if inverse, gesture: an example of a postwar film that explicitly endorses the official hero, excusing his own vigilantism on the grounds that it provides a necessary corrective to the outlaw’s unhinged violence.

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Popular and Critical Reception

Though the film has largely eluded critical commentary in the years since its release, it was initially a success for the studio, MGM, the cast and their director.

Spencer Tracy and John Sturges were nominated for academy awards, and John

Sturges was nominated for the Palm d’Or.1 The film was a commercial success, too, grossing more than three times its budget in domestic and worldwide receipts, and it was named by The National Board of Review as one of the top ten pictures of 1955

(Lovell 2008: 112). Subsequently, however, it has received only passing attention as a

CinemaScope film, a social commentary picture, or a Western. If referenced at all, the title is mentioned in footnotes or grouped with other films to substantiate a critic’s argument about movies of the era.

Among the few notable critical mentions is David Bordwell’s description, in his

CinemaScope lecture, of the character blocking in a diner fight scene (as part of the genre’s update, this Western has a brawl at a “Bar and Grill”, but the interior is much more of a 1950s diner than a saloon, complete with pinball machine by the door).

Bordwell brings the scene up, however, only to discuss how the characters are framed, offering it as an example of tableau framing (Figure 4-3)., with characters in distant depth in a style he associates with films from the 1910s (Bordwell 2013)

This analysis is incomplete on two accounts. First, because of Bordwell’s studious lack of interest in surveying a director’s past works for evidence of a personal style, Bordwell misses the fact that, rather than reaching back to old solutions to a new staging problem, Sturges had in fact repeatedly demonstrated an interest in tableau

1 In every case, the film was beaten out by Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955).

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framing. Mystery Street (1950), The Capture (1950), The People Against O’Hara (1951), and even Sturges’ contribution to the omnibus It’s a Big Country (1951) all feature multiple instances of tableau framing. In each case, Sturges uses the framing to film an ensemble on multiple plans of action, developing arrays of responses to, and guiding our attention toward, the main action, which he usually stages in the middle ground

(Figure 4-4). If we want to restrain from crediting Sturges with maintaining a preference, we might argue that tableau staging was a popular way to arrange the frame in 1950s studio productions, but, in doing so, we make less tenable Bordwell’s cause and effect claim that CinemaScope, as a problem to be solved in 1953, caused directors to return to a staging practice that had fallen from fashion.

More significantly, however, in keeping the film at arm’s length, Bordwell misses much of what makes this sequence so richly significant. What the CinemaScope frame helps to convey, firstly, is Macreedy’s desperate attempts at passivity in the face of increasingly aggressive taunts from Reno Smith’s thug, Coley Trimble (Ernest

Borgnine). As the sequence opens, Macreedy takes a seat at the center of the counter, near the center frame. Coley, however, approaches him and claims that Macreedy is in his seat. Macreedy, hoping to avoid a conflict, moves down the counter and towards the corner of the frame, increasingly penned in by Coley and, in the upper left quadrant of the frame, Smith. This blocking, which evolves in a single take, is part of a slow build-up to a fist-fight between the two, a build-up which underscores both Macreedy’s passivity and his threat to the local status-quo (a contradiction that the image sustains).

Secondly, the staging helps to emphasize the passivity of onlookers, another of the film’s central motifs. In a cut to a slightly different framing of the lunch counter, we

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see a row of local townspeople behind Macreedy, all looking on passively as he is bullied by Coley. Lastly, the staging helps to emphasize the film’s relocation of the West from frontier days to near-present day via the inclusion, in the same shot, of a pinball machine at the door. Hardly a simple solution to a problem of how to fill space, then,

Sturges’ blocking across the frame has both narrative and thematic import.

Other than Bordwell’s brief reference, the only other significant mention of Black

Rock can be found in the comprehensive BFI Companion to the Western. There, Julian

Petley describes the film as “a contemporary Western…very much a product of the

Dore Schary “socially conscious” period at MGM,” adding that “the film is distinguished…by Sturges’ extremely taught direction” (Petley 1988: 248). In the list of directors, Petley praises Sturges for his “lively yet precise direction of actors, his judicious and imaginative use of space and colour and his ability to handle large-scale action sequences” while noting bluntly that “in truth, Sturges is no auteur” (Petley 1988:

387).

Sturges as Metteur-en-Scène

Indeed, Sturges was, in many respects, a company man, or, in Petley’s words,

“an efficient and impressive metteur-en-scène” (1988: 387). He came to film directing through persistence rather than an artistic vocation, beginning his studio career as a blueprint inker in the art department at RKO, a job he landed thanks to his brother, who was working for them as an architect at the time. Over time he advanced at the company, eventually working as an editor alongside future directors Robert Wise (The

Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951; The Sound of Music, 1965) and Mark Robson (Peyton

Place, 1957). Looking back on this time, he recalled that they all had ambitions to direct:

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“‘I knew I didn’t have literary merit…but I understood cutting. And if you know how to cut pictures, you know how to make ‘em’” (Lovell 2008: 24).

As implied in the BFI Guide’s entry, Black Rock was, more than other films addressed in this dissertation, a collaborative studio production, as were all of his films at MGM, according to his biographer (Lovell 2008: 53). Sturges himself credited Black

Rock’s success to the film’s screenwriter, Millard Kauffman, calling it “the best script I ever had” (quoted in Lovell 2008: 107). Dore Schary gives himself primary credit for the film in his autobiography; besides selecting the script, dictating its revisions, and selecting the production team and talent, Schary claims to have made several creative decisions, including cutting the first version of the film himself. He had also made crucial decisions about the soundtrack, first to have no film music and then to have André

Previn compose the score (Schary 1979: 277-280). In his leather-bound copy of the script, Schary wrote: “This picture will always be one of my favorites. The concept was largely mine but Millard Kaufman wrote a terse and powerful script and John Sturges directed it with enormous skill” (Lovell 2008: 115).

These collaborative efforts were by all accounts a success. Black Rock remains an intriguing and powerful film, and its CinemaScope compositions are a testament to the virtues of the technology. Fundamentally, it is Sturges’ use of CinemaScope that first secures the film’s status as a western, engaging the genre via the rocky landscape

(shot on location east of Lone Pine California, between Death Valley and Mount

Whitney) and the railroad. Further, Sturges’ use of CinemaScope underscores the moral stakes of the narrative, dramatizing the idea of a community at a crossroads, forced by a mysterious stranger to confront its past. Lastly, the film’s ostensible critique of apathy

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is delivered in part through CinemaScope compositions that emphasize the film’s engagement with the Western genre’s moral code.

Shifting Approaches to the Western Genre

Black Rock engages with and holds in productive tension some foundational myths of the Western, drawing upon the visual codes of the genre to build an argument about collective and individual action that engages the politics of its day. In this sense, the film is what André Bazin derogatorily referred to as a “superwestern,” “a western that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence—an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest…extrinsic to the genre and which is supposed to enrich it” ([1955] 1998, 51).

My argument about the role CinemaScope plays in the film’s style, and how that style relates to the film’s engagement with the Western, must be understood in the context of shifting dialogues about the Western genre. Before a style analysis of Black

Rock as Western, then, we must first outline some of the major contributions to our understanding of the genre. We can begin by briefly qualifying Bazin’s conception of superwestern, as the genre has received a lot of detailed attention from film critics and historians since Bazin made his observation. One of the first sustained and detailed accounts of the genre, subsequently updated and still very influential, is Jim Kitses’

Horizons West. Originally published in 1969, both the original and expanded editions of the text extend Bazin’s evolutionary concept of the genre. Drawing upon a combination of auteurist and semiotic traditions, Kitses developed a structuralist grid “focused around the frontier’s dialectical play of forces embodied in the master binary opposition

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of the wilderness and civilization” (Kitses 2004: 13).2 “At its core,” he argues, “the

Western marries historical and archetypal elements in a fruitful mix that allows different film-makers a wide latitude of creative play” (Kitses, 2004: 14). In analyzing that play,

Kitses suggests we can distinguish a “Classical Western” from neo- and post-modern

Westerns, appreciating the ways in which the classical formula is adapted by auteurs to fit their own interests and production contexts.

Kitses’ structuralist approach has proven itself to be both enduring and a fruitful starting place for others working to better understand the Western. John Cawelti’s The

Six Gun Mystique, published in 1970, and Will Wright’s Six Guns and Society, published in 1975, both furthered the structuralist approach to Westerns, subtly shifting the defining myth of the Western towards sexual politics and masculinity (Cawelti) and national economics (Wright). Writing in 1980, John Lenihan furthered these efforts to connect the evolving myths of the Western to contemporary American politics. In his book, Showdown, he argues that “filmed interpretations of the Indian wars, Jesse

James, or Wyatt Earp tend to vary according to the concerns and perspectives prevalent at the time when a film is released” and, accordingly, he worked to demonstrate how emblematic Western films manifested Cold War anxieties, racial attitudes, and post-war alienation (Lenihan 1980: 20). Furthering the theretofore dominant political/allegorical approach, Michael Coyne’s 1998 study The Crowded

Prairie combined interpretive analysis of given film’s variations on foundational myths

2 Notable, given his auteurist approach, is that neither the original nor revised and expanded edition of Horizons West includes a single mention of Bad Day at Black Rock. Sturges is only mentioned in the introduction to the revised edition, where he is dismissed summarily: “other, more prolific film-makers of often more prominent Westerns, such as John Sturges…are not included here. Such a decision reflects the belief that not all the work of those directors who favored the genre is equally distinctive and distinguished” (Kitses 2004: 16).

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with those films’ reception history in order to establish “the crucial relationship between era and artifact” and in so doing reveal “the social or political message underlying selected prestigious Westerns” (Coyne [1998] 2008: 13).

Taking a slightly different tact, in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema,

Robert Ray reframes the conversation, arguing that Kitses’ structuralist grid is in fact applicable to all Classical Hollywood Films. Or, more precisely, that all of Hollywood’s films during the classical period are in fact Westerns, either evidently so or only thinly disguised. Of Kitses’ grid, he writes, “the striking point about these oppositions was their general applicability. Certainly, the transposable nature of the western mythology makes it likely that such a chart…would in fact account for the dichotomies basic to all the genres of Classic Hollywood” (Ray 1985: 74). The tendency of the book’s title regards the ways in which the Hollywood film, especially the Western, worked to contain the contradictions inherent in Kitses’s binaries in an attempt to validate both sides of the equation: the individual and the community, the outlaw hero and the democratic rule of law (Ray 1985: 74-5). Where Kitses sees an evolution into a postmodern Western and

Bazin sees a superwestern, Ray sees the central tenants of the genre as rather being

“inflated” in style and theme. Stylistically, he writes, “Hollywood filmmakers amplified stock western stories into epics,” drawing upon resources of color and widescreen.

Thematically speaking, the genre’s “standard plots were overlaid with pseudopsychology, pat lessons about racial prejudice, critiques of moral passivity, pride, and selfishness,” all issues which “seemed extraneous to the principal appeal of the story, grafted on and in no way essential” (Ray 1985: 150-151).

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Ray’s argument draws upon a sophisticated understanding of the mythology of the frontier as essentially a device for ensuring American exceptionalism. More recently, scholars have elaborated on that position by drawing upon the monumental historical research of Richard Slotkin, whose trilogy on the history of the frontier, Regeneration

Through Violence, Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation thoroughly document the heritage of the cinematic Western. Echoing Ray’s observations, though without specific mention, Matthew Carter argues in his aptly titled Myth of the Western that the genre’s mythology precedes cinema. He quotes Slotkin’s summation of the point, “The West was already a mythologized space when the first moviemakers found it” (quoted in

Carter 2014: 234). In Carter’s words, “the Frontier Thesis… presented an ideologically desirable (for Anglo-Americans at least) idea of America, rather than a “real” history of

America; yet, having successfully integrated itself into a significant proportion of the cultural mindset, it effectively became that history” (Carter 2014: 13). Scott Simmon, in his The Invention of the Western Film, takes up a similar line of thought. He observes,

“It’s revealing that the Western, of the type that would win Hollywood, found its origin more completely than any other film genre in something taken for public history. It may be for this reason that the Western…has found it easier than any other film genre to speak socially” (Simmon 2003, 49).

Both Simmon and Carter draw upon Slotkin’s research, and each ultimately arrives at the same conclusion as Ray: that these pre-Western myths served the primary purpose of providing turn of the century Americans a way to conceptualize their past, present and future. Like Ray, Carter then makes the connection between the mythology of the American West and moments of national anxiety, suggesting that the

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myths, rooted in the colonial Puritan efforts to comprehend their life in a “savage” land, were extended and modified though the industrial revolution, and regained national significance in the atomic age. For Carter, then, as for Ray, the “classical” Western mythology is part of a larger historical project aimed at defining the exceptionalism of

American national identity. These are the same elements we find at work in Black Rock, embedded especially in the essential inversion of the genre whereby the cowboy figure is the villain and the modern city man our hero. In executing this reversal, Black Rock attempts to contain competing myths of the frontier.

Competing Myths of the Frontier

In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin firmly connects the myth of the frontier to twin urges: to define an American character independent of the nation’s European roots, and to rationalize the process of capitalist development of America (1985: 34). To achieve these ends, this inaugural myth of the West conceptualized the unsettled areas of North America as an abundant source of unclaimed raw materials. These resources were understood as open to the claim of individuals who were brave enough to settle the land and thereby expand the country further westward. From this belief emerged one myth of the West, a pastoral image exemplified by the paintings of the Hudson

River School. In this conception, the American identity was a divine gift in the form of a boundless frontier. In settling that landscape, Americans developed their quintessential character. As expounded by Thomas Jefferson, whose massive land acquisitions were inspired in part by his belief that “political democracy required a material basis in economic equity,” in settling that land, the American farmer would forge a “natural democracy” (Slotkin 1985: 78).

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As Slotkin notes, however, even in Jefferson’s time, the ideas of both an inexhaustible resource and individual prosperity were already proving untenable, as the arable land “was well on its way to being completely taken up” and the wealth derived from that land concentrating in the hands of eastern and European speculators more than individual farmers (1985: 79). By the turn of the century, when Frederick Jackson

Turner presented his Frontier Thesis (“The Significance of the Frontier in American

History”), oligarchies like railroad land companies, mining companies, farm and livestock organizations were proving that frontier conditions were no longer capable of guaranteeing economic parity and natural democracy, if indeed they were ever capable of doing so (Slotkin 1985: 44). Turner, therefore, proclaimed an end to the frontier in which Americans had found their defining essence—the end to a defining myth of the

West. He predicted tough times ahead for a country that lacked further raw material from which to forge its character.

During the same historical moment, a new conception of the West was emerging to take the place of the pastoral image of inexhaustible abundance. The defining feature of this competing myth was conflict, and its major proponents were William Frederick

“Wild Bill” Cody and Theodore Roosevelt.3 Of Cody’s Wild West shows, Carter argues that they “fueled the public’s imagination for a violent frontier filled with merciless savages and brutal outlaws, and then fed its desire for a hero to tame it” (2014: 8).

Carter further argues that Roosevelt’s writing, based in part on his own experience as a

3 Carter notes an interesting interrelation between Roosevelt’s history and Cody’s rowdy fictions, citing moments of overlap like Roosevelt’s borrowing of the term “Rough Riders” for his cavalry troop and Cody subsequently replacing his ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ finale with a depiction of Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill (2014: 14).

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cattle rancher, drew upon Cody’s graphic performances to extend Turner’s hypothesis,

“expand[ing] the concept of Manifest Destiny to embrace international conquest” (2014:

13). In doing so, Roosevelt offered a symbolic answer to Turner’s lament regarding the closing of the frontier in the form of a national symbol: the cowboy.

Black Rock’s Incomplete Critique of the Western

These competing myths of the West, character as defined through either divine gift of pastoral abundance or brutal conflict for territory, animate Kitses’ binary code of the Western genre. As Ray has argued, these myths pertain to Hollywood cinema more broadly as they are a part of America’s efforts to define its character, explain its past, and provide some guide for right action going forward. In Black Rock, that project is explicitly motivated towards reconciling America’s recent violent past in World War II.

Taking place at the end of the War, the film inverts and thereby calls into question aspects of the mythology. While on the surface it seems to critique the cowboy code of outlaw justice, displacing authority onto Macreedy, who advocates community justice and rule of law, the critique is ultimately undermined from within.

The Cowboy Villain and the Modern Man

Significantly, Bad Day at Black Rock is a Western with few cowboys. Chief among them, Hector David (Lee Marvin) is a villain. Hector, one of Reno Smith’s primary henchmen, is the only character who wears a cowboy hat in every scene, he is the character who speaks with the most pronounced Western drawl, and he is the only character to carry a pistol in a gun belt around his waist. Visually, he is a sharp contrast to Macreedy, who is coded in the film as urban (he is travelling to Los Angeles), genteel

(upon arriving at the hotel he says he wants to take a bath), and weak (he is disabled, unable to use his arm due to a war injury). Whereas Macreedy, the hero of this

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Western, is always seen in a suit and fedora, Hector is our quintessential cowboy, calling to mind Alan Ladd in Shane (1953) in his trim build, his facial features, and in his preference for tan clothing.

Hector is the first of Reno’s henchmen to antagonize Macreedy. He is present in the hotel when Macreedy tries to get a room, and, knowing that Macreedy will be bathing, he sits in the room Macreedy has chosen and waits for him to arrive. Taking advantage of the breadth of the frame, Sturges arranges the room in such a way that the entrance is in the background, in front of which the bed takes up nearly the entirety of the foreground. Hector is sitting on the bed, his hat casting a menacing shadow over his eyes, smoking a cigarette. He looks both relaxed and immovable, with his obviously dirty boots on top of the sheets. Although his figure takes up only half the frame, the bed extends almost the full width, offering Macreedy very little room to maneuver in the shot.

When he enters, he does so tentatively, his face appearing in just a crack of the door.

He enters, wearing a robe and a bright white towel over his neck—a noticeable contrast to Hector’s dirty boots—and stands at the foot of the bed. Hector refers to himself as a cowboy in the ensuing dialogue, and tries to press Macreedy into fighting over the space. “If you really wanted this room, we could maybe settle your claim without all this talk. I believe a man is nothing unless he stands up for what is rightfully his.”

Our primary cowboy figure in this Western is combative and antagonistic. As in the Roosevelt/Cody tradition, his character is defined through conflict. Macreedy,

Hector’s opposite in age, stature, dress, and demeanor, seeks to avoid conflict. He defuses the situation, asking politely if he may have a moment to gather his things and move to another room. Our hero, then, is not interested in staking claims or battling over

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territory. As such, the film calls into question the heroic stature usually ascribed to the cowboy figure.

On the one hand, the cowboy’s antagonism is critiqued as the result of the community’s failure to intercede and end his bad behavior. On the other hand, the film effects a kind of displacement. Whereas in Shane the title character is a gun-slinging stranger who rides into town to put down the oppressive forces of a local cattle gang, here, Macreedy is passive and urbane. Like Shane, Black Rock’s narrative surrounds a stranger’s arrival into town, but here the townsfolk are not tormented by a gang but by their own consciences. The townspeople, this Western’s cowboys, are hiding a secret guilt, and Macreedy works to uncover their crime. His process is predominantly interrogative rather than combative, and as an opposite to Hector he seems to embody a rejection of the vigilante identity that Shane wore openly, if begrudgingly. (“There’s no living with a killing,” Shane says before riding off into the night, “right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks.”) While Black Rock aims to endorse pacifism and rule of law, the film offers an exception for Macreedy’s own vigilantism by drawing upon the very logic the film ostensibly critiques, that which says acting above the law is essential when the community fails to act.

Trains and the Desert Terrain

In addition to the presence of cowboy figures, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) substantially engages with other elements of the Western genre. The film takes place in a landscape that is evidently Western, in a small and remote town anchored by a railroad station. The opening sequence firmly establishes this location, and therefore the genre. Composed of 13 shots, the sequence feels briskly edited, though it actually extends for nearly two minutes. The first shot of the film is an unsteady aerial shot of a

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vast expanse of open, empty land, across which we can see a locomotive roaring. From this perspective, we can see the whole train, which is just a thin strip of red and black in the center of the frame. André Previn’s score launches immediately into a dramatic sautillé punctuated by brass counterpoints that add urgency to the sequence. The sense of pacing is conveyed in part by the constant movement of the camera, which shakes with the speed of the helicopter and often captures the scene in canted angles.

The first cut further dramatizes the moment, shifting to a view of the train head on as it careens towards the camera, passing just below it as the credits begin to roll. Adding to the energy of the sequence is the constantly shifting camera position, from extreme long shots that provide a view of whole the train, to closer shots filmed from almost directly above the train, to very close low angle shots that depict the train huge in the frame.

Further, each new shot reframes the train so that it is constantly entering the frame, driving hard from the left to the right of the screen or, on occasion, directly at the camera (Figures 4-6, 4-7, and 4-8).

In her essay “Landscapes of Gendered Violence: Male Love and the Railroad,”

Lindsay Collins offers some context for understanding both the environment of these shots and the urgent quality they convey. Although her argument centers on other

Western films, her observations are relevant to Black Rock. She begins by arguing that wide, panoramic landscape shots in Western films, like several of the shots that open the film, are linked to a white masculine exceptionalism, a male gaze that is empowered by technology and which claims mastery over an empty land (2010: 93). She supports her claim with a review of late 19th- and early 20th century literature, noting that appearances of the railroad were often negative and linked to forces that sought to

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exploit the landscape. Here she cites both Nathaniel Hawthorne (“But, hark! There is the whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness…”) and

Frank Norris, whose 1901 novel Octopus refers to the railroad as “the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam…the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power” (quoted in Collins 2010: 94).

Black Rock’s opening sequence injects the film with a similar energy, using both sharply juxtaposed points of view—extreme long shots from above cut to medium-close shots from below and very near the train—and a driving score to imbue the sequence with powerful sense of immanent drama. This energy maps onto Macreedy’s presence in the town, imbuing him with the force of modernity, a force that feels ironic as the opening scenes progress, given his quiet temperament, his inquisitive rather than aggressive nature, and his tendency, in Hector’s words, to push “too easy.”4

That the train is associated with Macreedy becomes clear on the character’s first appearance. He emerges from the train and briefly speaks to the conductor, who then signals the train to depart. Macreedy stands squarely and firmly in place, surveying the dilapidated buildings of the town. Sturges holds on Macreedy, shooting him from slightly to the left while keeping his figure in center frame. As the train departs, its red, corrugated body fills the top half of the frame, a thin white stripe of paint separating the body from the massive black steel wheels. Framed in this way, the screen pulses with energy. Although the still image can convey the idea of the moment in the contrast

4 Interestingly, this memorable and effective opening credit sequence was an afterthought, added on after test audiences responded poorly to the opening ten minutes of the film. Associate producer Herman Hoffman came up with the idea and directed the opening sequence. “You ought to start on that train going like a bat out of hell,” he reportedly told Sturges, “The train is a character” (quoted in Lovell 2008: 109).

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between Macreedy’s dark suit and the brilliant red of the train, and in the graphic elements of the shot, only seeing the film in motion can demonstrate how the train imbues Macreedy with its energy (Figure 4-9). This shot, building from the dynamic opening sequence, indicates the transformative power he will have over the town.

In the course of her argument, Collins builds upon historical observations that the railroad destroyed pastoral images of the West through tourism, commerce, and settlement. In her survey of literature, she finds that “though the highly rationalized, panoramic consciousness [offered by railroad travel] produces a colonizing subjectivity,” and which therefore produces anxiety as the train’s passage through the landscape both brings about the end the pastoral ideal of the frontier and substitutes for it a rigid, mechanized society (2010: 97). She argues, therefore, that the presence of railroads in the context of Westerns “reflects the instabilities inherent to the projects of colonialism and masculinity” (2010: 97). Echoing Slotkin (whom she does not cite), she finds in the presence of a railroad both the desire for and destruction of an ideal past, a conflict that is sustained by the genre’s competing notions of the frontier as either placid abundance or site of perpetual conflict, and which ultimately undermines the film’s ostensible critique of cowboy morality.

The contradictions that Collins finds inherent in the landscapes of Western films that are crossed by railroads are certainly present in Black Rock, and another of the film’s interesting deviations from genre expectations accentuates them. Rather than taking place in the late 19th century, Black Rock is situated in the recent past, 1945. As such, the isolation of the town is not indicative of a pioneering community, but rather of a community left behind or forgotten by the advancement of modernity. Indeed, we

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come to find out the Black Rock is a failed landscape: the ground is arid, water and other resources are scarce, the population is small, with no families or children. When the train arrives, the telegraph operator notes that no train has stopped in Black Rock for four years, and when the conductor helps Macreedy off the train, he surveys the town and says, solemnly, “They look woebegone and far away.” Rather than discovering a new frontier, then, Black Rock inverts the structure in that here modernity is desirable over the past, and the modernization of the West is complete, with the exception of a town like Black Rock that has been left behind. Macreedy is associated with the train, and therefore with modernity, and his stopping here is part of an effort to correct an error in the past, indeed to correct an error in the mythic past of the West, so as to allow Black Rock to catch up with the rest of society.

That the film is shot in CinemaScope complements this sense of overconfidence in modernity, as CinemaScope, a technology acquired by Fox to save the Hollywood production industry, here encounters one of the medium’s oldest genres. In its

“corrective” intervention in the genre, the film seems to claim a superiority, both technological and moral, over the Western tradition. That modernity is conceived of as an ideal, of course, is problematic. Black Rock, while claiming a moral high ground based in part by asserting the superiority of a forward-looking modernity, ultimately undermines its own values, resorting to restorative violence to recuperate a past that it decries as having been dangerously violent. In a different register, CinemaScope suggests a similar hubris. CinemaScope was to be the future of cinema, but, despite all of Fox’s marketing efforts, the technology would hardly survive the decade, largely replaced by competing technologies or relocated overseas in foreign production.

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CinemaScope Staging and Character Development

On the arrival of the train, we see a brief montage of reaction shots that alert us to both the strange behavior of the locals and the degree to which a stranger’s visit to

Black Rock is unusual. In town, nothing much is happening, as we find most of the townspeople reclining on chairs in front of buildings. Macreedy’s arrival literally sets the town into motion, as we see Doc Veile (Walter Brennan) sit up and take notice, Liz Wirth

(Anne Francis) step outside of her gas station, Hector David and Coley Trimble let their reclining chairs fall back onto four legs as they look on in surprise at the stopping train.

Even a row of extras outside of the diner all turn to look, and the cook steps out, drying a dish and squinting towards the mysterious stranger’s arrival.

Most of these shots are filmed from a slight angle, adding some depth to the image that emphasizes the relative emptiness surrounding the town. But the shots also dramatize what the film takes to be the town’s major guilt: inaction. In these opening shots we see the townspeople as bystanders and gawkers, porch-locked, observing but also refusing to engage. Macreedy’s arrival has already piqued their interest; his task from here will be to motivate them to act on the known misdeeds of the towns past.

As yet, however, we do not know how to read their reactions to the arrival. Their faces convey shock, and their stances appear defiant or defensive. Their posture raises questions that the narrative will work to solve. In the manner of a mystery, all of the characters possess knowledge that we do not. We will have to observe their actions and interactions, judge them, and slowly discern the truth of both Macreedy’s purpose and their standoffishness.

This sequence of shots also gives us a concrete example of what Pauline Kael referred to as Sturges’ “exact and economical” direction, as the shots that make up the

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montage establish both the film’s central claim regarding the townspeople’s culpability and the character differences that foreshadow the film’s conclusion. All of our major players, each of whom has a secret to hide, reacts differently, each with a bodily response: Liz stands and exits her office, Mr. Hastings (Russell Collins) stands up and paces, Doc moves from leaning over to sitting erect. The shot that introduces Reno

Smith’s two most violent henchmen, Coley and Hector, follows the pattern. It begins a moment after the train has caught their attention, framing the two of them in front of one of the film’s primary locations, the town hotel. Seated in front of a large window pane, they are each turned to look, their gaze focused over the camera and in the distance, but they are still leaning back on their chairs in a relaxed posture. Like the others, they react to the train physically, dropping their chairs down, uncrossing their arms, and leaning forward. Coley, the brawny fighter, grabs onto the arm of his chair while Hector, the cowboy, coolly unfolds his hands, as if to be at the ready.

Suddenly, a third figure enters the frame from behind them. Pete (John Ericson),

Liz’s brother and another of Smith’s accomplices, steps forward to the window, coming into focus over Hector’s shoulder (Figure 4-10). Graphically, the shot both aligns Pete with the henchmen but also draws a distinction between them. He is more reserved than the others in the sequence; unlike his sister, Liz, or the cook, he does not exit the building for a better look, opting instead to stay relatively out of sight. The glass pane puts him on a separate plane from the henchmen, too, physically separating them. The gesture is emphasized in a second shot, two minutes later. Upon Macreedy’s exit from the train, we see another round of reaction shots with more emphatic action. Coley and

Hector stand up and step forward, looming large in the frame, while Pete moves from

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looking out the window to looking out the screen door. Once again, the shot emphasizes both Pete’s reserved character (later in the film, Smith will chastise him for lacking the

“guts” his sister has) and his separation from Coley and Hector. In doing so, the shots establish an important distinction between these characters and foreshadow later events. As the film progresses, both Hector and Coley will threaten Macreedy. Cooley will try to injure him on two occasions, first in a car chase and later in a fistfight. Later, believing that Macreedy will try to escape in the night, Cooley stands guard, spinning his revolver, threatening to shoot Macreedy down on sight. It will be Pete, however, who provides the most complete confession to Smith’s killing of Komoko, and Pete will work together with Doc to plan Macreedy’s escape. That he will be the one member of

Smith’s gang to stand up against him is suggested visually here in Sturges’ dynamic use of CinemaScope.

“Doc Looks Out Window”: Passive Onlooking as Moral Weakness

The shot of Pete in the window is part of a motif of looking through and out windows, a series of shots that are some of the most memorable in the film. Sturges repeats set-ups like the one with Pete, shot from outside the building as a character looks out from within, five times in the first 20 minutes of the film:

 Liz noticing the arrival of the train  Pete doing the same, moments later  Doc watching Macreedy walk to the gas station  Doc again, in a second set-up, watching Macreedy walk towards the train station  Smith, Hector, and Colely looking out as Macreedy walks towards the jailhouse  Smith, alone, looking out as Macreedy leaves the jailhouse

Sturges’ biographer notes that the impressive visual quality of the shots were found on location. In the script, Sturges had only to go on simple directions like “Doc looks out window” (“Stage according to what you see,” Sturges said of these shots, “It’s not in the

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script, it’s just there…that’s why I never used storyboards”) (Lovell 2008:107).

Nevertheless, these shots achieve at least three distinct goals: to demonstrate the effects capable with the CinemaScope process (technical), to establish character traits and motivation (narrative), and to suggest the apathy of the townspeople who watch but do not act (thematic).

First, the shots are a unique demonstration of qualities of CinemaScope’s anamorphic process. At the time that Twentieth Century-Fox was pushing

CinemaScope, other technologies were competing for ticket sales, each marketing themselves as providing an enriched, participatory movie going experience that could not be replicated at home with televisions. As John Belton has documented, it was industry competition that ultimately decided the victors in the technology race, a competition that led Fox to replace their original lenses, manufactured by Henri Chrétien in 1937, with Bausch & Lomb lenses built using the Chrétien patent. As a result, the lenses focused better, had increased depth of field, let in more light, and reduced distortion at the edges of the frame (Belton 1992: 146). Yet, even with the improved lenses, the anamorphic process accentuated the center frame. In staging the layered reflections in the center of the frame, Sturges’ cinematographer, William C. Mellor, was able to capitalize on the best of both the anamorphic process and the higher quality

Bausch & Lomb lenses to produce an almost 3-dimensional view.

Secondly, the window reflections allowed Sturges to communicate contrasts between his characters. The windowpane allowed characters to be seen together while also dividing them according to their motives and inclinations, as above where Pete is distinct from Coley and Hector. In the remarkable composition of Smith, Coley, Hector,

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and Doc, a similar division is created (Figure 4-11). Like Pete, however, Doc will eventually be convinced by Macreedy to stand up against Smith and his gang, and as with Pete, the blocking in this shot separates Doc from the rest of the gang. His image overlays theirs as he announces “Hey, what do you know, Mr. Macreedy seems to be heading for the jail,” then asking, knowingly, “now what do you suppose he would want to talk to the sheriff about?”

Thirdly, the motif of looking out through windows registers a moral critique of the inhabitants of the town, while also locating that critique in part in the myth of the West.

Although Doc acts as if he does not know what happened to Komoko, he confesses to

Macreedy that really he is willfully ignorant. When Macreedy seeks his help in leaving town, Doc is reluctant. “I feel for you,” he says, continuing:

but I’m consumed with apathy. Why should I mix in? … Look, I try to live right. I drink my milk every day, but mostly I try to mind my own business, which is something I advise you to do.

Doc, like the rest of the community, has been witness to Smith’s violent crime, but he has chosen to remain ambivalent to the killing. The townspeople’s inaction, their apathy, is what makes them culpable for Smith’s crimes.

Further, in this shot and others drawing upon the motif of onlooking, the characters are associated with the surrounding landscape. These shots feature what would be an anachronism in the Old West, picture windows, connecting the tropes of

Western genre to the present day (Figure 4-12). They also engage the paradox inherent in the phrase “picture window”. As a window, they emphasize the act of looking out from within, a position that underscores the complicit passivity of the characters. The window also provides a picture of the Western landscape, however, a view onto the environment that metonymically suggests a view of the Western mythology. Shot from

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an exterior set-up, this picture is projected onto the faces of the townspeople, visually confronting them with the mythology that engendered the violence which has figuratively left their land untillable and which they refuse to face. Each of these shots takes place in the beginning of the film, and, associated with Macreedy’s arrival, they visualize in

CinemaScope compositions the confrontation his presence will force between the townspeople and their past.

These characters and their inaction, accentuated by their positioning as spectators behind glass, are thereby associated with the land and the politics entailed in its representation. Regarding those politics, Scott Simmon has argued that the emptiness of the landscape stems in part from the idea derived from Turner’s thesis, which, in asserting that the land of the West was free and open for claim, conveniently omits the land dispossession of Native Americans. “This is the politics of space,” he writes, “empty land is there for the taking” (Simmon 2003: 53). That omission had political ramifications for the 1950s. In The Genius of American Politics, conservative political philosopher Daniel Boorstin argued that the American national identity is a product of the “givenness” of our environment during the early 19th century. Quoting

Turner’s thesis that “to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics,” Boorstin defines those characteristics as “coarseness and strength,”

“acuteness and inquisitiveness,” “dominant individualism” and the “exuberance of freedom” (1953: 26). That these characteristics come specifically from an American settling of a free and open land is essential to Boorstin, for whom “the values and form of institutions are shaped and ought to be shaped by the landscape in which they grow”

(1953: 175).

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Black Rock gives the lie to Boorstin’s concept of nature as having been given unto Americans as if by a higher power, and, in doing so, challenges the characteristics that are said to have grown from this environment. With the landscape projected over their anxious expressions, the film seems to suggest that what has resulted from this mythological landscape is a willingness to follow a bullying leader, a fearfulness of speaking out against what they know is wrong, and a belief that the virtue of “minding one’s own business” is a moral defense. This virtue, too, is intimately tied to the

Western genre, as Simmon notes:

There is a final apparent paradox about the ways that the Western represents the past. On the one hand the West is the region where we can go to find all that is deemed essential in American history, where the past is most treasured. On the other, the West is the place where men are allowed to have no past and to start life anew. Indeed, the very worst of social errors in a Western, fatally punishable, is to ask about a man’s past or try to investigate it. (2003: 189)

Black Rock presents this paradox in the inverse: what we find in the past is not what is most treasured, but most regressive and inhibiting, and what must be done is to interrogate this past, to confront it and refuse to let it go unsaid. These shots gather the landscape and overlay the faces of the townspeople with its reflection. In doing so, it confronts them with the paradoxes of the mythology of the West. Their looks of concern are justified, as Macreedy’s presence will force them to confront their past, and the film will judge their character on their willingness to do so.

Crossroads and Catharsis

The sense of an impending confrontation, dramatized in the opening credit sequence and visualized in the picture window reflections of the landscape, is also contained within the figure of the railroad, replete as it is with the attendant concepts of timetables, arrivals, and departures. In Parallel Tracks, Lynne Kirby isolates a tradition

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in silent films to incorporate the railroad as “a handmaiden of Fate,” a machine imbued

“with a divine status, as if truly descended from a greater power” (Kirby 1997: 228-9).

The arrival of Macreedy and his incessant questions have put the townspeople at a crossroads, and Sturges, borrowing imagery from High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952), shoots their discussion about how to respond to Macreedy at the crossing of the railroad tracks and the town’s dusty road (Figures 4-13 and 4-14) .

The framing of the shot calls to mind both the BFI Guide’s praise for Sturges’

“judicious and imaginative use of space,” as well as Kael’s praise for the film’s compositions as both realistic and stylized. In the composition, Komoko’s murderer,

Reno Smith, is the largest figure in the frame. He is unquestionably the leader of the men gathered, all of whom participated in the burning of Adobe Flat and witnessed

Smith’s crime. His power is further accentuated by the fact that, wearing a red hat and standing in the middle of the tracks, he, like Macreedy, is aligned with the power of the railroad (Figure 4-15). Here, Smith has just received a telegram from his contacts in Los

Angeles, and they could find no information on the mysterious Macreedy. Now his gang looks to him to make a decision on how to proceed, calling to mind Scott Simmon’s connection between the cowboy hero of the Western and the Jacksonian mantra that

“one man with courage makes a majority” (quoted in Simmon 2004: 135). Here, Smith will decide that the only thing to be done is to kill Macreedy. Pete objects, meekly, but

Smith castigates him for being weak, adding the assertion that his decision is ultimately a way of protecting Pete. Pete acquiesces, and the only question remaining is how they will go about the task.

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Sturges himself describes the sequence as “the most unrealistic staging ever…like a Greek tragedy: theatrically true but realistically false” (Lovell 2008: 101).

Set at a crossroads and invoking cowboy mythology, the evocation of tragedy is not without its merit. The film is cathartic in the formal sense, as the situations that play out in Black Rock dramatize the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

These actions are stains on the American conscience. Here and elsewhere in the film,

Black Rock stigmatizes inaction and apathy as enabling of cruelty, and therefore finds the townspeople culpable. On the other hand, in its resolution and the death of Smith,

Black Rock equally suggests that, if we can isolate and remove bad actors, we can overcome the sins of the past.

Such an allegorical reading is present in this very dialogue. On the train tracks,

Smith refers to Macreedy in language that calls to mind the cruelty of American westward expansion: “This guy’s like a carrier of smallpox,” he says, “since he’s arrived, this town has a fever. An infection. And it’s spreading.” Invoking smallpox brings to mind another curious feature of this Western. This is a Western without Native Americans. In their place, Black Rock substitutes another racialized Other. But unlike the Turnerian pastoral view of the frontier, the Other is not merely elided from history, and unlike the conflict-based view of the frontier advanced by Cody and Roosevelt, the conflict at the heart of the film is suppressed. The townspeople seem to inhabit the contradictions of

Western mythology, wishing to have it both ways: to get away with the violence of their past and imagine themselves free of guilt in an ethnically pure West of their own creation. On the surface, Black Rock contends that this pure West is untenable. The town, in living out this ethos, has stagnated, finding itself backwards, arid, and empty.

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Macreedy, as an agent of modernity, aligned with formal law, is positioned as the necessary corrective.

When Smith alludes to killing Macreedy, he argues, “the point is, who would miss a nobody like Macreedy if he just, say, disappeared?” The ensuing efforts at effecting

Macreedy’s disappearance offer the only brief breaks from the film’s relatively slow pacing. Structured as it is around conversations, inaction, and increasing threats, the moments of violence are—as Kael notes—particularly bracing. Here again, though, violence plays a central role, but not in a manner typical to a Western. The arrival of the train in Black Rock is anxiety inducing. But this galloping monster, this terror of steel and steam has arrived with a rejuvenating force. Macreedy’s primary mission is not to bring violence to the town, but to force the town to reconcile with its own violent past, to heal its wounds, and, we might presume, revive the land itself.

The allegorical reading of these events is further supported by Sturges’ creative use of low-angle framing. In such shots, he omits the ground, casting his figures against a blue sky or the black of night. In the crossroad sequence, for example, shots of the ensemble staging are intercut with low-angle shots of Smith. Despite Smith’s height, these shots are from no character perspective. Instead, Sturges shoots from well below

Smith’s shoulders, resulting in an image that elides the location at the crossroads, but which, in casting Smith against the empty sky, sustains the tenor of the “tragedian” staging and encourages reading beyond the narrative to a larger mythic/allegorical commentary (Figure 4-16).

Sturges returns to the low-angle shot at the end of the film to emphasize the drama of the moment when Liz realizes, despite her continued willingness to abet him in

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his crimes, Smith is going to kill her so as to leave no witnesses. In the shot-reverse shot structure, a low angle shot of Smith makes sense, as he has the high ground relative to Liz, who runs towards him from below. The reverse shot, however, if sustaining the relative perspective of the characters, should be a high-angle shot looking down on her as she pauses, helpless. Instead, Sturges films Liz from a low angle, casting her against a pure-black backdrop that seems to mythologize her death by virtue of freeing it from a ground (Figure 4-17).

Conclusion: The Intractable American Mythology

In his analysis of Classical Hollywood cinema, Ray observes in the postwar period a fissure between a film’s ostensible intent and its resultant effect. He notes that

Westerns of the era commonly asserted one half of the mythological binary, for example, the need for an outlaw hero, while also implicitly supporting its opposite. “As such,” he writes, “they suggested the period’s emerging anxiety that if before, both had been possible, now neither was” (Ray 1985: 174). This fissure is present in Bad Day at

Black Rock, which outwardly condemns the outlaw hero’s predilection for violence and the racism implicit in the mythology of the West. Produced in 1955, but set ten years prior at the end of World War II, the film seeks to clear the American conscious of guilt for the violence of Japanese internment and the brutal destruction of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. In the process, however, it undercuts its own stance against violence, reinforcing the cowboy code of vigilante justice by embracing Macreedy’s own violent acts as necessarily restorative.

Drawing together the work of Ray, Matthew Carter, and Scott Simmon, I am convinced that Western films have always held in productive tension the various myths the genre was founded on, of the “givenness” of the frontier and the conflict through

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which heroism is defined. Regardless of how one chooses to categorize the film—a superwestern, a post-Western, an inflated Western—Black Rock certainly motivates the contradictions inherent in the Western genre towards a political end. By setting its west in the near present day, Black Rock inverts the traditional meaning of the landscape.

Rather than a mythic past frontier outpost where a democratic society is coming into being, Black Rock is a barren and forgotten town in the present day. Our hero is transient, but he is not a hyper-masculine gunslinger. Anticipating future unlikely heroes, like Senator Stoddard (James Stewart) in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962),

Macreedy is not only urban and pacifistic, but also crippled and coded as modern and genteel. The film’s cowboys are hostile and confrontational, and their demeanor is panicky and anxious.

We come to find out that their anxiety stems from guilt they acknowledge internally but suppress for one another and hide from the rest of the world. In a twisting of Boorstin’s hypothesis that Americans discover their values in the frontier, Macreedy discovers in the town of Black Rock the lie of “givenness.” Namely, we discover that the land was not merely there, but taken from a dispossessed people. In our updated

Western, the absence is not of Native Americans, but of Komoko, A Japanese-

American farmer, whose son had died heroically saving Macreedy’s life in battle.

Komoko, singled out because of his race, was set on fire, his farm burned by cowboy nationalists, and murdered while the townspeople watched.

Although Macreedy’s role in the film is more therapist uncovering repressed secrets than gun-slinging avenger, the film cannot seem to escape the Western genre’s predilection for restorative violence. It is hard to escape, therefore, an allegorical

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reading of the film in the style of Michael Coyne’s The Crowded Prairie. Although Black

Rock is not a focus of his writing, Coyne does mention the film in passing, and his observation emphasizes the contradiction at the heart of the film. In a close reading of

Shane (1953), Coyne argues that Shane’s departure at the end of the film reinforces the character as a reference to an idealized conception of atomic-age America. Here, the

United States is a predominantly peaceful but formidable foe, one who would prefer peace, but who will willingly release the potential of its terribly destructive power if necessary. In making his argument, Coyne aligns Shane with Macreedy and several other lead characters from 1950s Westerns, arguing that “Spencer Tracy in John

Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock…stood with Ladd’s Shane as personification of the sleeping giant in the age of atomic weaponry…naturally inclined to negotiation and coexistence, but best not provoked too far.” (Coyne [1997 2008: 76).

Ascribing Macreedy the character of national vengeance seems at odds with the film’s narrative thrust. Macreedy is an army veteran, true, but he is no gunslinger like

Shane, who, within minutes of his first appearance on screen is brandishing his pistol as a threat. In fact, the only gunslinger in Black Rock is the evil Hector David, who is made up to look like Alan Ladd’s Shane. It is Hector, not Macreedy, who represents the strong-arm cowboy ethos of the earlier film, an ethos that Macreedy’s quiet strength overcomes. In finally eliciting the townsfolk’s confession for these crimes, Macreedy seems to be bringing the audience to terms with its own history of violence. Pauline

Kael reads the film as addressing Japanese-American internment, but given the fiery death Smith brings to Komoko, we might as well associate the murder with the

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destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this reading, aligning Macreedy with the

“sleeping giant” of America’s atomic military might seems odd at best.

Yet Black Rock’s ending does seem to suggest that the only way to fix the town’s problems is through violence. In doing so, the film enacts the discrepancy between intent and effect identified by Ray, effectively displacing the cowboy ethos onto the ethos of a new and more modern masculinity. Set-up, trapped, and fired upon by Smith,

Macreedy engineers a Molotov cocktail. He tosses it with deadly accuracy, and the homemade weapon engulfs Smith in flames. As Smith calls out for help, Macreedy stands over him and watches him burn to death.

The following day, state police arrive and take Smith’s co-conspirators into custody. Doc Velie approaches him as he is preparing to board his train and asks him for the Silver Star he had intended to bring to Komoko. “This town’s wrecked, may as well have been bombed out,” laments Velie, suggesting that, with the Silver Star, the town may have an inspiration to build itself up again, nobly. In this reading, the film seems to suggest that Smith was the primary obstacle to that recovery, the proverbial bad apple that had spoiled the bunch. With his death, the racism, violence, and apathy seem to be fully and completely behind the townspeople. The catharsis extends to the audience, who are encouraged to believe that they can’t really be morally responsible for a national disgrace like internment. As long as they recognize and admit the error, they will have absolved themselves of responsibility. With this gesture, they can truly put the past behind them.

The contradictions at the heart of the genre, then, seem to be equally alive in

Black Rock. So, too, is the concept of white male exceptionalism. Although the film

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seeks to redress racial injustices, specifically the disappearing of an Other, the film itself performs a kind of disappearance. Sturges’ biographer notes that, ten years after the film’s release, screenwriter Millard Kauffman was honored in Japan with an award for treating the Japanese with uncommon dignity. As he recalls, “‘the whole thing was absurd because there were no Japanese in the movie. But I knew what they meant’”

(Kaufman, quoted in Lovell 2008: 113). In this sense, Black Rock fits Coyne’s description of the Western as depicting white centrality. “Various Westerns had a Civil

Rights agenda,” he writes, “but above all we must bear in mind that the genre customarily posited such narratives as problems for white America to solve” (Coyne

[1997 2008: 5). For Black Rock, then, the resolution is doubly problematized, as it argues that removing a single bad actor, through an act of white male valor, will resolve the issues of race that plagued the community. The Other is not only disappeared, but voiceless and, ultimately, irrelevant except as a lesson to be learned.

Viewed today, it is difficult to avoid extending this observation to contemporary politics. Reno Smith, a racist whose prejudices stem from deep insecurities, is also a nationalist who more than anything wants to be left alone to his own way of life. When explaining his crime to Macreedy, he laughs at the concept of a patriotic Japanese-

American, saying “they’re all mad dogs…there’s a law in this country against shooting dogs, but when I see a mad dog I don’t wait for him to bite me.” When Macreedy presses him on this point, Smith suddenly slips into a different, protectionist argument.

“So we’re all poor and backward, and I guess we are,” he says, “but to us, this place is

OUR west, and I wish they’d leave us alone” (“they” here being a substitute for moneyed interests trying to co-opt or modernize “his” west).

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For most of the film, Smith dons a signature red ball cap, an icon which in the present day has become synonymous with the United States’ nationalist turn (Figure 4-

18). Embraced by President Donald Trump, this nationalism marks a return to American exceptionalism and attendant mythologies of the West. The slogan for that movement,

Make America Great Again, colloquially expressed in the acronym “MAGA”, eulogizes a past America in the same way as Turner’s frontier thesis eulogized the end of westward expansion. The slogan calls back to the prosperity of the 1950s in a mythic way that implicates the myths of the Western. Like the frontier thesis, MAGA presumes a past

“givenness” of plentitude while conveniently omitting whole histories of struggle and inequality upon which that wealth was built. As Roosevelt had converted that backward- looking thesis to justify extending the frontier outside of our national boarders, MAGA has been used to justify racially-motived Executive Orders that bar entry to the country and that expel immigrants in the name of protectionism. Further, Black Rock’s internal conflicts lament racism while also sustaining a white centrality that seems to suggest that the attitudes inherent in a MAGA philosophy can be overcome by simply removing a single proponent of the philosophy, a token bad actor.

To a contemporary viewer, then, the film’s final lines contain a very significant weight. Doc, in asking for the Silver Star, opines, hopefully, “Maybe it [the town] can come back.” Macreedy responds, solemnly: “Some towns do, some towns don’t. It depends on the people.”

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Figure 4-1. Spencer Tracy as James Curtayne in The People Against O’Hara (John Sturges, 1951). Curtayne goes where he is not wanted and asks tough, pointed questions as he tries to solve a crime.

Figure 4-2. Spencer Tracy as John J. Macreedy in Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955). In his suit and fedora, he is an odd-man-out amongst the cowboys.

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Figure 4-3. Tableau staging in Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955).

Figure 4-4. Tableau staging in Mystery Street (John Sturges. 1950).

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Figure 4-5. The cowboy as villain: Hector (Lee Marvin) bullies Macreedy (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

Figure 4-6. The establishing shot of Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955).

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Figure 4-7. The film’s second shot (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

Figure 4-8. A later shot from the film’s title sequence (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

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Figure 4-9. Macreedy’s presence is aligned with the power of the train (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

Figure 4-10. Pete Wirth (John Ericson) appears in the window, separated by the glass pane from Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955])..

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Figure 4-11. Creative staging in depth: onlooking, landscape, and characterization (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

Figure 4-12. Doc (Walter Brennan) is associated with the landscape as he looks on (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

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Figure 4-13. In High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), the vanishing point perspective emphasizes the plot’s deadline structure.

Figure 4-14. In Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955), a graphically similar shot suggests the inevitability of conflict between Smith (Robert Ryan, left), Coley (right), and Macreedy (not pictured).

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Figure 4-15. Tragedian blocking at the crossroads; the town waits for Smith’s decision on how to handle Macreedy (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

Figure 4-16. Low-angle framing emphasizes Smith’s power, but also frees his figure from a ground, encouraging an allegorical reading (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

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Figure 4-17. Rather than emphasize vulnerability and retain perspective with a high- angle shot, Sturges films Liz (Anne Francis) in a low-angle framing, casting her figure against a blank black sky (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

Figure 4-18. Reno Smith and his iconic red hat. Note how he muscles Pete out of the center of the composition (Bad Day at Black Rock [John Sturges, 1955]).

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CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

Between September 10th and November 22nd 1953, Twentieth Century-Fox ran a series of ads in the New York Times to drive interest in their first CinemaScope releases. In the copy, a phrase recurs which has also played a recurring role in this dissertation, but which points to an important criticism of this project:

 “You will be engulfed in the everlasting wonder of The Robe” – Sept. 6

 “The new Anamorphic Lens creates infinite depth and life-like reality to

engulf you in the action” – Sept. 10

 “Soon you will be engulfed” – Sept.16

 “The curved Miracle Mirror screen…the new Stereophonic Sound

System…magically engulf you in a breath-taking panorama” – Oct. 15

 “The amazing Anamorphic Lens process…engulfs you in a new triumph of

life-like realism” – Nov. 2

 “The Miracle Mirror screen engulfs you…” Nov. 10

In researching this dissertation, I never saw the CinemaScope film as it was designed to be seen; I was never engulfed by the images of these films. The test screens used by

Fox were 61 feet wide and 21 feet high, larger than most multiplexes today (Belton

1992: 185). Then as now, however, screen sizes have varied immensely. The theater companies, having recently gained independence from the studios, had some room to dictate how the films were screened, and occasionally projected CinemaScope pictures on standard screens, much to the consternation of both Darryl Zanuck and Andre Bazin.

Nevertheless, Twentieth Century-Fox did what it could to ensure that screens were wide and curved, and filmmakers worked with the knowledge that the films would be shown

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in enormous scale. Any approach to such a technology without an analogous experience will miss something.

In, Style and Meaning, John Gibbs and Doug Pye note the change in scholarly approaches to film that came about when young scholars first began to have access to a wide variety of film texts via home video (Gibbs & Pye 2005: 4). Whereas critics once had to wait for a film to be screened publicly, and, if they were to write about the film, they would have to rely largely on memory, the introduction of home video was its own modern miracle. Today, our access to films feels nearly unlimited, with streaming resources like FilmStruck, Mubi, Netflix, Amazon and Kanopy each available for a reasonable subscription fee. That richness of resources, however, conceals an absence which particularly pertains to a study of films utilizing new technology. Technologies like

CinemaScope, CinemaScope 55, Todd-AO, Cinerama, and 3D are all difficult to study by viewing at home. The feeling is something akin to the loss one feels when, having

Criterion Collection BluRay discs on reserve for his students, a teacher finds out the class has been streaming videos on YouTube.

In “CinemaScope Before and After,” Charles Barr describes moments in

Academy Ratio films that he thinks yearned for shooting in ‘Scope. One of them is the long take at the end of Renoir’s Partie de campagne (1946). As Henri is rowing the boat toward home, the low-set camera captures the ripples left by the boat’s wake as rain dapples the water’s surface. CinemaScope, Barr argues, would give the shot more

“weight” (Barr 1960: 10). In this dissertation, I’ve tried to refrain from comments like these, though the films call out for such a discussion. The “weight” Barr describes seems at once obviously true and hopelessly subjective, and so I’ve put it aside,

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reluctantly. Yet, consider when, in Rebel Without a Cause, after Buzz’s tragic death in the chickie run, Jim and Judy, each desperate for affection and suddenly confronted with the reality of death, reach out for one another, and the gap between them narrows as their outstretched hands begin to shake with the effort to connect. It is hard to escape the sense that a certain “weight” inherent in this composition is somehow diminished on a small screen.

Even when speaking of more purely compositional effects, like the clothesline staging when Jim’s family comes to claim him from the police station (pg. 92, figure 2-

6), the way Ophuls orchestrates Lola’s disappearance from the frame when, refusing to be married off, she escapes her mother’s control and our attention (pg. 136-7, figures 3-

7, 3-8, and 3-9), or the dynamic depth of John Stuges’ play with reflections in Bad Day at Black Rock (pg. 179, Figure 4-11). Although we can describe and conceptualize these moments of the film, contextualize them and discuss their relative importance, the incredible difference in scale between the “Modern Miracle” of the supersized

CinemaScope screen and that of the home theater, or, worse, desktop computer, seems to suggest an inaccessibility of the object under discussion.

As part of her larger project investigating the experience of new film technologies, Ariel Rodgers has made an effort to refine concepts of spectatorship specifically related to the experience of CinemaScope. She, too, is seeking to understand a similarly inaccessibly object of study. Combining theories of spectatorship with historical research into discourses around the technology, she contends that

“although every viewer’s encounter with cinema is unique to the personal, cultural, and physical context in which that encounter occurs—and thus cannot be circumscribed

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completely by the epistemological or experiential frameworks proffered by the dominant culture—these frameworks can deepen our understanding of film experience by allowing us to discern shared beliefs and attitudes” regarding the film-going experience

(Rogers 2012: 75).

Rogers’ conclusions here align in interesting ways with Robert Ray’s understanding of the fissures in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Rogers suggests a parallel anxiety to the one which Ray describes in the tension between style and theme in the postwar period. For Rogers, the tension exists between discourses of participatory immersion and enforced submission, tensions that, I would argue, are contained in the repeated claims above that the process will “engulf” the spectator (for immersion, see Rogers 2012: 80-81; for submission, see 82-83). This sustained contradiction, she finds, renders rigid application of specific approaches to theorizing spectatorship—a psychological model, for example, which for Rogers implies that the viewer is a passive recipient, versus an Althusserian emphasis on the apparatus—on their own necessarily limiting and incomplete (Rogers 2012: 95).1 She concludes that the tensions she finds in the contemporaneous discourses surrounding spectatorship

“can be eclipsed by eager application of one model or another” (Rogers 2012: 96). She therefore concludes that we therefore must be flexible in our approach. As Pauline Kale has argued:

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic. But this does not mean a scrambling and

1 Here, too, Ray’s Certain Tendency is relevant. He poses a related question about spectatorship, though more overtly political in its thrust: “…how can we possibly say whether Casablanca’s fist audiences saw it innocently?” Ray, too, invokes Althusser, in his formulation as opposite to Adorno. He concludes, “I would settle here for a middle position that defines the industry-audience relationship as a reciprocal one.” (Ray 1985: 363-364).

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confusion of systems. Eclecticism is not the same as lack of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the best standards and principles from various systems of ideas. It requires more care, more orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory (Kael, Spring 1963: 21)

Like Kael, Rogers argues that the best approach begins not with a totalizing theory, but rather with giving nuanced attention to how spectatorship is constructed in historically contingent ways.

In a related call for specificity, this dissertation has aimed to show that, in order to understand the aesthetic impact of technological change in cinema, one needs to pay close attention to specific films on their own terms and in their own contexts. Whereas, thus far, the tendency in academic criticism has been to look at changes in technology as part of wide-ranging historical studies, the vantage point of these studies precludes a nuanced approach to the individual films. While broad historical approaches can help us to understand the macroevolution of the art of cinema, they are often insufficient for appreciating the value of stylistic decisions at the level of an individual film.

In the course of my look at particular films, I have aimed to show that

CinemaScope opened up a wide variety of new expressive possibilities to directors.

Among any number of other possibilities, the wide frame could be used for expressive, plastic compositions, for Brechtian distanciation effects, or for encouraging a viewer’s immersive gaze. To understand the value of these effects, however, one must attend to the specificity of the films. In Rebel Without a Cause (1955), for example, Nicholas Ray develops a mise-en-scène “organic” to his horizontal frame, eliciting from the wide image an aesthetic sympathetic to the experience of his teen protagonists. This resultant aesthetic was both in line with Ray’s own style as an auteur director and

Warner Brothers’ interest in targeting the teen market. In Lola Montès (1955), Max

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Ophuls used the lure of CinemaScope’s induced self-awareness, its call for viewers to be cognizant of their acts of looking, to critique the pleasures normally associated with the cinematic spectacle. Like Ray, Ophuls’ work was a natural extension of his style

(albeit, in Ophuls’ case, part of a trajectory towards the increasingly baroque). Unlike

Ray, however, Ophuls’ film completely contradicted his producer’s aims for a titillating costume drama. And in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), John Sturges worked, like

Ophuls, to develop a critique, though his was much more a product of a Studio collaboration, spearheaded by Dore Schary. Black Rock’s critique is situated within the mythology of the Western film and focused on contemporary politics and racism. In this final case, the film was a commercial success, showcasing some of the CinemaScope format’s incredible potential, but the critique it put forward failed on its own premises.

Although the techniques used by each of these directors were in no sense invented for CinemaScope, and while they may not register as noteworthy in terms of

Average Shot Length or as a novel turn away from “classical” stylistics, we could nevertheless agree that these films would simply not be the films they are had they not been filmed in CinemaScope. The technology, contingently assigned and overdetermined by industry economics, nevertheless offered an extended range of options from which the filmmakers could choose. These directors took what was available in the new format, and they made it meaningful.

These arguments are by no means laws of use or prescriptions for right use. Nor are they meant to be any sort of taxonomy of the uses to which CinemaScope was put by its directors. Indeed, in pursing such aims, as I have argued, one is liable to miss much of what makes the technology meaningful within specific films. What these

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arguments do offer is detailed observations about the actual use of CinemaScope in the context of a director’s style, the demands of genre, and the production demands specific to each. Together, these observations contribute nuance to the wider-ranging histories already published. The case studies here offer important close-ups on significant films which have, until now, only been treated academically in extreme long shots as part of the wider horizon of filmmaking during the technological shift from Academy ratio to widescreen cinema.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Although a life-long lover of film, Anthony Coman’s academic interest in the topic began at Canterbury School, where he graduated in 1998. He subsequently received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Northern Illinois University in 2007 and 2010, respectively. He graduated from the Department of English at the University of Florida with a doctoral degree in Film and Media Studies in the summer of 2018.

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