GREATNESS AND DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM1
What do we look for, today, in American cinema?
1) in Hollywood: Jerry Lewis.
2) off Hollywood: Goldman (Echoes of Silence).
And the others? They either splendidly update themselves only to later shut themselves in the lucid awareness of their own old age (of the fact that they belong – culturally, ideologically – to another age): Hawks, Red Line 7000; or they repete, conclude, give final form to their usual discussions: Ford, Seven Women (and, to a lesser extent, less neatly so, with cracks maybe, Hitchcock: Torn Curtain).
Why these choices, and why these distinctions? In the first two, there is a questioning of the established structures on all levels, a dissent in the fundamental form through which one's own subjectivity, one's own questioning and self-questioning, problematic consciousness intrudes into a world that, precisely because of this, is no longer accepted as it is; a world to be demonstrated, so to speak, in a reinvented way, categorically rejected, and all of that – for it is cinema what they do – on a cinematic level: that is, to reject the world as a filmic fact, as an image fixated by the cinema once and for all in its univocal clarity that is to be inherited and repeated, and not to be questioned.
In the others – Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock – we have the reiteration and the final destination of a cinema which the previous ones (Lewis, Goldman) reject: but we have it in its less ambiguous, more clearly self-confessed, declared and therefore non-mystified form, to the point of assuming the contours of a partial negation of itself (Red Line 7000).
All of this, this surpassing and this repetition, what does it concern? The American cinema; and here I'm removing its adjective "classical" in order to add that it concerns its general underflowing stylistic direction – which since Griffith (its inventor) up until today hasn't really been substantially contradicted (this is, simultaneously, its strength and its limit).
Here I allude to its realistic tendency (in its photographical, cine-photographical, cine-photo-phonographical sense, that is, its technical sense), to the "cinema of reality" (in opposition to the "cinema of the image"), to the cinema that (ideally) comes after the soviet "linguistic" experiments – whose brilliant results are, among others, Strike and Man with a movie camera – and after the pictorial-architectonical German cinema – and works such as Die Nibelungen and Faust are on that same level –, proclaiming cinema's demand to be itself, beyond literature, beyond figurative arts, to remain as cinema, to remain it permanently, without hesitations, doubts, regrets, that is, to industrially and stylistically install an essence of cinema in the screens of all the world; to install its particular specificity (that of analogical-photographical realism) as cinema's only specificity.
This industrial-aesthetical dictatorship is the product of a very precise ideology: faith in realistic-analogical cinema is faith in America; it's America as certainty, as contradictionless Eden, a tangible miracle; it's the myth-America that Americans demand and that other Americans – dreamers, more or less – provide to them, their "incurable need for idealization", as Pasolini says. This certainty is also tangible to the eyes: the screens, or the roads that are starting to reflect these screens.
In fact, American cinema's realism (which is analogical, not critical) is only good for dreaming better. And this because the final goal of analogical linguistic research isn't knowledge of the reality of the world, but its evasion in a spectacle of this reality that posits itself as much as possible as an other reality. The reality of the screen is, in sum, a projection of the reality of the world, and the realism of the former isn't there to make this link evident but to eliminate it, to value the "miracle" of re-creation, or of the simple creation of a new, more beautiful, more perfect world, more accessible to the spectator, who, precisely, projects himself onto it, alienates, loses himself in it. We are before the oneiric realism well-known by filmology and equally so by Hollywood, who has known how, when and why to profit from this characteristic of cinema as its only characteristic.
Therefore, it inevitably, logically follows that the work that accepts this stylistic status, the coherent work, the American film par excellence, must posit itself more and more as a self-sufficient object, as a reality of the screen, unassailable by the reality of the world, with its own structural laws (the genres), its own creatures (the divas, the stars): universes ruled by new divine creators (the directors).
It also follows, equally logically, that this cinema of "undeclared", "shameful" signs, of signs that hide their own signic nature behind the mask of analogical realism, must be a cinema that accepts and reflects existing structures (often with such power and depth as if one who questioned them), but certainly not a "political" cinema, a cinema of "arbitrary", unalienated signs2.
It also follows that the best works within the framework of this underlying choice are those where the screen is more prominent, therefore which are more "unreal": directly true in regard to themselves; indirectly true in regard to that reality of the world of which they're an increasingly fleeting reflex (whence the need for a second-degree reading). True, that is, not because they offer the immediate facts of the world, but because they offer, in the best cases, its lines of force, its idea. The dream (with its symbolisms) ends up being the best witness to a world (the American world) that lives in dream.
All of this lasts until the alternative, initially latent, not yet emerged, finally imposes itself. Now the dream is no longer enough, because America no longer lives only in dream. Dissent is underway, and in cinema dissent's name is Jerry Lewis or Peter Emanuel Goldman. We are, for the first time so clearly, before the anachronism of the myth, of the American dream.
And in fact, as evidence for that, the genres critique themselves, Hollywood is in decline, John Wayne ages, Gary Cooper dies, Marilyn commits suicide.
* * *
These considerations, these remarks, are born out of seeing this year's Venice retrospective dedicated to 1920s American films about 1920s America (the only thing that could be called "cultural" in that festival), and of the confusions that, as I see it, its organization and its success among critics demonstrate.
Well, what happened? Firstly, they looked for in these films things they could only offer in extraordinary cases (social critique, "political" commitment); secondly, they weren't able see what they actually offered, precisely in regard to the proposed "theme" (1920s America), there where it could be found; thirdly, they weren't able to distinguish the exception from the rule.
Let's give some examples (and, at the same time, let's add some nuance to the rigidity of the scheme presented in the beginning of this essay). There were four "aberrant" films in relation to the stylistical lines of force traced by me (I must add and specify: the analogical, metonymic, syntagmatic, narrative, potentially with sound, prosaic lineage), and they're: on the one hand, Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928); and on the other, Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928), It (Clarence Badger, 1927), and The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928) (to limit my discussion to the films worth remembering).
The first one is an aberrant film even more in regard to grammar and semiology than to style or content. In fact, it does not present any of the linguistic aspects which characterize the American cinema3: it is the only film I saw that had an authentic silent cinema aesthetic (despite having some sequences with added sound, unfortunately missing from the Venetian print) and, at the same time, that anticipated future discoveries, such as the uncodified movement of the camera, with a free-moving dolly, not guided by tracks in any direction but submitted to the movements of the actor, who's "followed" in his everyday gestures, in his existencial freedom – making us think of Renoir and neorealism. This aberration is easily explainable: Fejos' cinematographic education is not American, his découpage isn't "classical", his stylistics is of German origin; his realism isn't oneiric but, if anything, like Murnau's, his is a realistic oneirism.
The other three films are, on the opposite, and with varying results, American exceptions. They're attempts – in regard to theme, to the actors, and to the style, respectively – to confront reality without mediations. In the first case, that of Our Dancing Daughters, we have the refusal of "genre" – not a problematical refusal, of course: it's always about rejecting a convention in favor of another, much less refined one –, with the ensuing possibility on behalf of the short-sighted critic to recognize reality reflected on the screen: "fitzgeraldian reality", some might say; "a foreshadowing of the crash of 1929", others might, quoting some lines of dialogue... In the second case, It, there is the rejection of the diva and the invention of an affected but "modern" creature: Clara Bow, an anticipation, on the level of the actor, of a cinema of identification, and no longer of projection (as that of Garbo): a cinema where one says "I'm like..." and no longer "I want to be like..." (not yet a cinema where the spectator overcomes the screen – that is the case of Jerry Lewis the actor, if we wish to remain among stars). Lastly, The Crowd – the only of these three films that is a real film – places itself as a successful, more advanced attempt at a diverse cinema, contrasting at all levels with the established norm. On the ideological level, by standing as a film whose social critique isn't tempered by any alternative, mainly not that of a screen-world which to escape into; on the thematic level, by promoting the banality and randomness of its protagonists (while, usually, what is desired from the reality of the world isn't its truth, but its pro-filmic-ness, its photogeny); on the stylistic level, in the abnormal dilation of scenes up the exhaustion of the narrative premises that had determined them in the first place, so much so that a simple argument between man and wife or a trip to the beach become more important, or at least as important as a wedding or a death: the unique and the commonplace are one and the same, that is, they're the product of the same alienation: without Man, everything is uniform.
The Crowd is a film that destroys myths (from its first up to its last shot) without creating others to replace them. That's why it's an excepcional film, not only within the American cinema but also within Vidor's work. To see it as an "exemplary" film is to isolate it from the historical context where it was born: the rule is elsewhere.
For Vidor, it's in the microcosm of Show People (1928), where cinema shows itself only to better conceal itself. Analogously, for the other true authors, for those who consciously accepted to lose their own subjectivity in the increasingly perfect and more deceptive creation of an apparently objective but substantially personal microcosm – that is, for Sternberg, Hawks, Dwan, Lubitsch, Walsh and DeMille, from their masterpieces to their merely beautiful films, their screen-works at Venice are, respectively, The Docks of New York (1928), Fig Leaves (1926), Manhandled (1924), So this is Paris (1926), Sadie Thompson (1928) and Why change your wife? (1920). And we should add, in regard to the first three authors, Underworld (1927), A girl in every port (1928) and Stage Struck (1925); and to Vidor, The Patsy (1928) and, from other minor but interesting filmmakers, Chicago (Frank Urson, 1927) and Are parents people? (Malcolm St. Clair, 1925).
Sternberg's representation of desperate and self-ironic characters, Hawk's self-sufficient universe of appearances and inversions, Dwan's comical intrusions into proletarian environments, Lubitsch's nihilistic stylization, the rootless bragging of Walsh's adventurers, DeMille's moralistic and simultaneously ironical bourgeois comedy, Vidor's contemporary fables: it should be clear by now, according to our general lines, why the oneirism these worlds without an immediate relation to the historical and social reality of their time inhabit has as much truth (even if a different one) as the polemical realism of The Crowd.
To get into the details of this would require a different discussion, analytical and not synthetical: it would require examples of filmic reading, questioning the pertinence of applying current "sociological" readings to films that structurally reject them, precisely at the level these are applied; it would require us to state that the American cinema, the real one, the "regular" one, still is the hardest to understand and that, conversely, to understand The Crowd is, after all, very simple. But I refrain myself, for now: for us, there will always be occasions for such discussions.
– ADRIANO APRÀ
Originally published in Cinema & Film #1. Winter 1966-67.
Translated from the Italian by Gabriel Carvalho.
Grandezza e decadenza del sogno americano: maybe a reference to historian Guglielmo Ferrero's Grandezza e decadenza di Roma. [Translator's note]
Here I make use of Roland Barthes' cues in "Principi e scopi della analisi strutturale", Nuovi Argomenti #2, page 116.
It is to the American cinema as Unser Tägliches Brot (Phil Jutzi, 1929) is to German cinema, as I could verify during the laudable German retrospective that took place in Rome at the Planetario, organized by the Cineteca Nazionale.