THE UNKNOWN (Tod Browning, 1927)
Texto escrito por mim, na ocasião das Giornate del Cinema Muto de 2022.
Em Outubro de 2022, participei do Collegium das Giornate del Cinema Muto, em Pordenone. Esse foi o texto que escrevi para o festival, comentando vários dos diferentes programas, e mais detidamente o filme de Tod Browning. Tá bastante longo e meio repetitivo, mas acho que há uma ou outra passagem digna pelo meio.
THE UNKNOWN
We thus see how great the harmfulness of film language is: the viewer has to make no effort to understand the film. The signs of language make him understand everything without effort. He becomes passive, lets himself be put to sleep by the fiction of the film. Cinema loses its role as a school of life, before which man retains the same passivity.
– Luc Moullet, On the Harmfulness of Film Language, on Its Uselessness, and on the Means to Combat It1
I don't remember which film was it – maybe one of the lesser Norma Talmadge or Ruritania works – but there was this scene at the end where one of the main characters, after surviving an accident, finally removes the bandages on his face after days of recovering and finds himself blind.
We're in a room in a house, one of those interchangeable and uncharacteristic upper class, bourgeois rooms we find in some early melodramas of silent cinema, with its traditional heavy curtains, big armchairs, fancy wallpaper, lamps... The découpage went something like this: wide shot of the room, the man is surrounded by a doctor, a lover and family members. He removes the bandages, but doesn't act like he can see. He asks for the bandages to be removed – but they already have! –, gesticulates and walks around as if expecting to see something. It's immediately clear, more than obvious, by what the spectator can merely see and infer, that he is blind.
Yet, what ensues is a series of close-ups, first of the blinded man himself, crying, waving his hands in front of his static iris, and a title card where he states he's gone blind. Than, back to the wide shot, as the other people react to him being blind, followed by a close-up of some other person in the room realizing he is blind, and crying, and another title card of people stating in horror he is blind, and this cycle repeats a few times for each of the different characters in the room, as they all cry and gesticulate, in wide shots and individual close-ups, and say that, the man -- he's gone blind!
So, in this scene of a man who loses his sight, what do we see? An extremely redundant cinema, demonstrating enormous lack of faith in itself and in its own possibilities. A single unit of information – character X has gone blind – is repeated ad nauseam, shown in a succession of repetitive close ups of people crying, of a repetitive analytical edit to and fro a wide shot where all the information is already located, on a repetition of nearly identical title cards, of nearly identical gestures and tears, to which the poor pianist has no escape but to sustain a monotonously "sad" accompaniment, and the film expects that the mere continuous exposition to the same thing, through some mysterious alchemy, may transform itself into a cathartical emotion in the spectator. Image, text, actor; close-ups, wide shots, cuts: all elements of the picture seem absolutely indistinct, all mere vehicles for saying the same information, and thus the infinite possibilities of editing and the infinitesimal amount of detail present in the silver emulsion are completely suffocated by the overwhelming, univocal message – an emotional message, which presupposes the utmost identification of the spectator with that which is shown to him: "these people are sad, you should feel sad too, like them".
The fact that the Giornate is not dedicated to the supreme canonical silent masterpieces might just be its biggest positive asset, precisely by giving us dull moments in justly forgotten movies like this one: far from the glories of Griffith or Chaplin, most movies – then as now – are mediocre. The possibility of finally watching these mediocrities which cinephiles and historians and critics didn't bother remembering for the ensuing decades (how many people nowadays have watched the tradition de qualité films of 50's France that Truffaut fiercely mocked in his On a Certain Tendency of French Cinema? But we've all seen The 400 blows) is a precious occasion, for allowing us to get a more complete picture of the history of cinema, to put things into perspective.
Even if many movies I saw at the Giornate I found rather dull, the ones that flew high, they flew high. One could really see it how good a really good movie was, how far ahead it was of its contemporaries, and what set it apart from them. The Giornate gives us a more fair idea of the silent era, comprised not only of its masterpieces, while simultaneously allowing for us to appreciate those even more, to experience them fresh, as they were experienced decades ago.
If it is the development of a thing called "cinematic language" which allows such a banal scene to exist – it is a perfect example of an orderly découpage of its time, just following the rules, basic competence and no invention – then let's take a step back and not take this language for granted; it is neither an imposition on all films, and neither a limiting factor as one such exponent of it might suggest. Firstly, it is unnecessary; films were doing very well without it; then, it is only one possibility, decurrent of a specific tradition, that of the narrative comercial film, among many; and thirdly, it is not, as one could be led to conclude, a prison which strangles the filmmakers' creativity. In many instances, it is within certain frameworks, even against the very frameworks someone is operating within, that greatest invention arises, out of necessity. Let's look at some examples for these statements.
Starting with Lumière: one cannot watch the films of Lumière and think of them as less complete, less complex, less sublime than the works of Griffith simply because they don't have cuts, just as one can't find the works of Griffith lesser than those of Bresson just because of a lack of sound. Cinema changes, yes, but let us not associate evolution necessarily with improvement. From the very beginning, in what might seem a primordial form, films already exist as fully realized aesthetic objects.
The development of this competent "cinematic language" is often less an improvement and more a taming of the art. Take the Lumière-Swiss films by Lavanchy-Clarke, the best program of this year's Giornate. As some structural filmmakers of the 70s taught us to see2: in these films of early cinema, the incredible complexity of reality is rendered into a net of abstract relations between concrete forms. What counts is not language, for these shorts do not contain any language; they do not aim at conveying anything; they satisfy themselves merely showing, giving total freedom to the spectator. Thus, by this removal of all language, every single thing, the most minute detail of it, all that remains that is not codified, verbal, is brought forth in the surface of the screen, and the film becomes a never-ending whole. Representation of reality, yes, but elevated to a level of concreteness where we no longer see "building", "person", "tree"; the gestalt is rebooted; vision is returned to its primordial, pre-linguistic form. The evolution from a baby to a child consists in the brain organizing the infinitely complex and continuous reality it experiences into discrete categories, much alike words. The films of Lumière, the infants of cinema, rejuvenate us to the condition of a baby. We don't see things, but a continuum of shapes, light and shadow interplays, movements small and large, blurs, lines. It is this centrifugal quality, where any point of the image could become the center of our attention, which allows for Méliès' (who'd work within a completely different tradition than that of the Lumière's realism) observation, in wonder, that "the tree leaves move". The people in it look at the camera like they look at a child, and vice-versa. Random faces pass by, appearing and reappearing. A total reality, in which there are no symbols, no signs, no meaning: a mysterious concreteness, things and shapes representing nothing but themselves, which teaches us that, indeed, "the abstract is the symbol of the concrete”: Then because there are so many green trees, so many men, so many elephants, so many butterflies, so many daisies, so many animalculae, we coin a general term “Life.” And then the mystic comes and says that a green tree symbolises Life. It is not so. Life symbolises a green tree.3
(Something should be said on why the Lavanchy-Clarke films are much more interesting than some of the similar Segundo de Chomón documentaries also shown at the Giornate. We know the Lumière films, even when shot by different operators, followed a common approach, a certain set of instructions relating to the study of the location, its light, its movements, to the positioning of the camera, etc, a method. I won't go into details on this due to lack of information on the exact approach, and lack of prints to adequately rewatch and compare the films seen at the Giornate, but as Henri Langlois makes it clear in Rohmer's Louis Lumière (1968), however simple and devoid of staging these films might appear, c'est simplement une illusion. Perceived simplicity and nonchalance is always the result of complex work. Chomón's work involving animation and trickery, more in the tradition of Méliès, do seem more well-succeeded than those where he takes a shot at Lumière-style realism. And anyway, this difference is probably too elusive for me to write anything clear about it, other than that the experience of watching the Lumière and the realist Segundo de Chomón films were qualitatively different. Perhaps Chomón is too much of a showman to allow reality to breath for itself, not having the same rigor of composition, the eye for lines and creating depth, and choice of setting that allows for all the criss-crossing movements in the different planes of action we see in the Lumière films)
This same interest in showing things permeates the Pathé-Baby films, but usually on a minor scale, with a single subject: a flower, a butterfly, a single person dancing, a baby. Usually in close-up, with a black background. Instead of giving us our complete reality and rendering it through the camera, it's often about going closer, in more detail than what the eye can see (the smaller film stock and short length maybe wouldn't be adequate to scenes with too much going on?), with the added benefit of painted-on colors.
Then, language comes into play. As the medium becomes narrative, this reality must be structured into something coherent with discrete elements – wide shots, close-ups, characters, actions, a plot. In the early short fiction films before the Griffith revolution, as we see in some of the narrative films from the early nineteen-teens present at the Giornate, the synthetic style birthed by Lumière still persists. Shots are mostly static, uncut tableaus, but what used to be a total reality often becomes no more than filmed theatre. In these cases, it's still more interesting to see all of the actors faces at once, letting the eye wander around the screen as they gesticulate and cry, but it's also not much different than the series of close-ups of the blind man scene.
Griffith's work may be the biggest influence on the shift from a synthetic construction of space to the analytical one, thus organizing what would become classical cinematic language. One of the major characteristics of Griffith's genius is his endless eye for observing and creating oppositions, contrasts, contradiction – which motivated his pursuit of new forms of découpage and editing. Perhaps his best film, Intolerance (1915), is labeled in one of its title cards as "a drama of comparisons", and is entirely structured around that idea. Not only in its macroscopic scale, that is, comparing and cross-cutting its four different stories set in different epochs, but also in the microscopic scale, in the contradictions of human emotions, of gestures, sometimes in the same shot. A man cries for his dead father-in-law while simultaneously smiling at his fiancée; a girl waves her arms desperately while kissing the love of her life; a woman is horrified by having killed a man, while relieved for saving another woman's life; unforgettable images.
Viktor Shklovsky already argued in his famous essay Art as Device that "this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the “enstrangement” of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art."4
There are, of course, numerous ways of achieving this process of prolonging perception, be it the pure untamed perception of the Lumière films, or the surrealism of Europa (1931), whose cryptic images demand more from our eyes, or Griffith's comparisons which amplify the emotions shown, the contrast making them more acute.
Now, I'd like to analyze the structure and the effects produced by perhaps the best film shown in Giornate, made by a co-writer of Intolerance: Tod Browning's The Unknown. In it, we see that, as in Griffith, emotional contradiction and counterpoints abound, but to different results: if in Griffith the counterpoint punctuates simultaneously the opposite emotions characters undergo, in The Unknown Browning, within the mould of classical narrative cinema, uses contradiction to separate the spectator's emotions from the drama. Not that we watch things from a cold distance; we fear, we despair, but the emotions we feel are always distinct, separate from those the characters themselves experience; often, they're opposite. Our perspective is not aligned neither with Chaney or Crawford, nor is Browning's camera, who pleases himself in making us flinch. A very sophisticated technique in the dramatic articulation of the plot is thus laid out. Also, from its most basic to its most minute levels, it is a film interested in transformations, and in making us see and feel the undergoing of these transformations. Compared to the numerous conventional silent films shown in the Giornate, we can't think of a better work to show us to what limits a filmmaker can push the classical grammar of cinema towards perverted effects.
In, say, La Dixième Symphonie (another great film in the program, for completely different reasons), the parallels in the editing and the characters' ignorance of some facts which we know may indicate an omniscient narrative point-of-view which is not the point-of-view of any particular character, but our emotions are still aligned with the protagonists, and posed against a very determined, machiavellian antagonist: in Gance's film, the conflict arises from the villain's mischiefs, of which the heroin is desperately trying to escape. Meanwhile, in the story of Alonzo, The Armless, there is no real villain; it's his own actions, his deepest desires, which will lead to his own destruction. He's the protagonist, and the film seems, initially, to push our identification towards him, just to consistently make him a more disturbing character, his actions more and more terrifying; he has secrets which we are unaware of. But, in a sensational dramatic turn, eventually it's Alonzo who's unaware of the facts, and we are left to watch in horror as he confidently fulfills his own demise.
The film is, on one hand, extremely condensed, with only 66 minutes. The facts and the characters, fantastic and bizarre, are presented without greater justification: the circus owner is a cruel gypsy, who punishes and assaults his young pretty daughter, who has a pathological fear of men's arms (why does he treat her like that? is it due to her father's beatings that she's afraid of arms? we may speculate, but the film in not interested in psychological explanations). There's also the circus' strongman, who besides his strength has a great deal of naive kindness. The protagonist, however, is the most absurd: a murderer (who, why did he kill? Unknown.) with six fingers on one hand, who disguises as a circus freak in order to mislead the police, pretending not to have arms by hiding them under a corset – he's developed amazing feet skills. The only one who knows about his crimes (and arms) is his midget friend Cojo, who's also a member of the troupe. These are all the characters, and their defining characteristics, which will determine the events of the picture.
Both the strongman ("Malabar, the Mighty") and the "armless" ("Alonzo", Lon Chaney) are in love with the girl ("Nanon", such a young Joan Crawford!). Nanon rejects Malabar due to his big arms, while treating Alonzo kindly – but not without some patronizing demeanor. Malabar also seems to treat Alonzo as if he was a kid, and neither him nor the girl suspect he might be interested in Nanon. For them, the Armless Alonzo is a sexless being (an obvious metaphor), despite Chaney's secret lust and malice.
Issues of sex and body are posed from the very opening, which surprises us by its boldness (sometimes we forget how prude our time is compared to pre-code Hollywood!): a show in which Alonzo handles a rifle with his feet and, shot by shot, tears the straps of Nanon's clothes, leaving her semi-nude for the audience (and for us, spectators). Then he throws knives at her, also with his feet, delineating her provoking silhouette on the wall. Then it's Malabar's turn, shirtless, to carry enormous weights. Alonzo is the only one fully dressed – he must hide his arms, after all.
During Malabar's performance, Nanon, who seemed to enjoy being undressed by Alonzo, looks at the strongman in disgust as he bends an iron bar. Her reaction is posed against that of a woman in the audience, who admires his arms. These associations, which challenge our expectations – armless man/ sensuality, strongman/disgust – foreshadow the twisted, perversely fascinating paths the film will take. We see Malabar through Nanon's point of view, as before we had seen her through Alonzo's eyes; Browning's camera operates as a mosaic of the characters gazes, their desires and repulsions; he places us in their perspective only so this perspective can later be opposed by another. There are also some alarming details: in the shot of Alonzo staring at Nanon, Cojo is by his side in a devil costume, signaling the diabolical aspect of the character's desire. Instead of inviting identification, the film alerts us not to trust these people.
The decoupage and editing of this first scene, with its different point of views, inserts, the organization of multiple characters in a space and in relation to each other, already exhibits a level of sophistication that would be unthinkable for a movie 15 years earlier. On the other hand, classical language doesn't seem to have changed that much since The Unknown.
Something should be said about the convenience of how the different parts of the drama seem to fit each other. Singular, idiosyncratic characters here find themselves together, complementing and opposing each other perfectly, and the film doesn't bother justifying it. Browning says: "The story writes itself after I have conceived the characters. The Unknown came to me after I had the idea of a man without arms. I then asked myself what are the most amazing situations and actions that a man thus reduced could be involved..."5. The self-contained world of fiction arises from the need of exploring the potential of its basic elements, the characters, to their limits. The dramatic construction, so straight and to the point (and yet so sophisticated), seems to derive logically from these initial conditions which, due to their unbelievability, are presented as quickly and directly as possible: as axioms. They may surprise us in the early scenes (a love triangle between an armless man, a strongman, and an arm-phobic girl!), but after the first act, everything happens according to relations of cause and effect so tight that are almost suffocating. An almost deterministic quality roams over the film: even if we may not be able to predict exactly how, we sense doom approaching; and every step towards it must necessarily, tragically be taken. Alonzo's story is indeed a tragedy derived from his error, which only he doesn't see. Therefore, the conflict between the film's absurdity and the necessity of its dramatic developments is one of its greatest sources of tension.
The crux of the film has to be the sequence in which the surgery takes place, splitting the story in half. In it, this absurdity and this logical necessity reach their peaks, and we may observe the most relevant aspects of the work.
After Cojo's warning as to the risk of Nanon finding out about his arms, Alonzo's frustrated for the girl seems to be beyond his reach. Without realizing his arms are actually free this time, he lights up a cigarette with his feet. Cojo points out, jokingly, how he seems to forget he has arms; Alonzo, seriously, decides to have them amputated. This is not informed directly to the spectator; rather, we are led to deduce it ourselves by following a syllogistic reasoning which is also that of the character: Alonzo desires Nanon, but his arms are an obstacle; he doesn't need his arms; therefore, the arms must be amputated. All of this shown in a single close-up of Chaney in which his face goes from bummed for not having Nanon, to surprised at his own feet, and finally to a wild smile as he seems to resolve the contradiction; his expressions are extremely precise and demonstrate perfectly the steps of his reasoning, without a single word. Even more than Chaney's ability in creating these faces, it's the way he's able to transform from one to the other in a single shot what makes this scene work.
When, in the end, Alonzo's eyes glimmer, we shiver. Even if we were just put inside the character's head, understanding his reasoning, Alonzo's anticipation and enthusiasm gives rise to fear in us. The film then deliberately withholds information, as we see Alonzo speak but no title card informs us of his words (an effect that would be impossible to achieve in a talkie). They are not necessary, but the impression one gets is of being separated by a sound proof wall to the characters; we can't hear him, and we know he couldn't hear us if we were to warn about the horrible mistake he's making!
Alonzo goes to a doctor with a dark past, and blackmails him into performing the operation. The character of the surgeon is completely irrelevant to the plot, and is only there so Alonzo can go on with his intentions. Yes, there's some implied past relationship between them, but just as Alonzo's killings, Nanon's fears and Malabar's passion, no explanation is necessary. It's just so the story can get quicker to its destination; what really matters is the articulation of the character's drama. Everything else is pretext.
The scene is stretched as to prolongate our perception of anguish. If we could, we'd scream, we'd try to stop him somehow! Alonzo and Cojo walk calmly through the hospital. Alonzo reveals his identity to the doctor (his sixth finger! another plot convenience) and demands the surgery. Chaney's face is in ecstasy. Fade out. The surgery is about to begin.
The next time we see Alonzo he'll be waking up, armless. The surgery itself is suppressed by the editing. Instead, in the meantime, we get to see something way more horrifying than an amputation: the blossoming of Nanon and Malabar's love. In fact, we may say that Browning is not omitting the amputation from us, but rather showing that this is Alonzo's real amputation: not the loss of his arms, but of Nanon. Simultaneously it's a cutaway from and a symbolic representation of the surgery itself.
As Nanon and Malabar walk in the park, there's some nervousness: she's not yet fully over her arm- phobia. But it is precisely these instants of transformation that Browning is interested in showing. She trips, and Malabar catches her just before she hits the ground. They look at each other, both anxious; shot, reverse shot. Malabar's strong arms hold her, her legs raised, over his body. Joan Crawford slowly eases herself, and proclaims her fears are gone. So ours begin.
Cut back to Chaney as he wakes up. The doctor informs him the surgery was a success; he smiles. Cut back to Nanon and Malabar, both smiling.
If the movie described in the beginning of this text is one where everything seems to repeat itself, where the emotion expressed by the characters is equal to the emotion expressed by the direction and equal to the emotion inflicted upon the spectator, here everything clashes: the smiles of the characters, their happiness, in an absurd arithmetical reversion, adds up to pure horror in the spectator. And the relationship the movie establishes with the spectator, instead of begging for him to empathize, is almost confrontational, daring us to stand these horrific mistakes which we can do nothing about. All of this mediated by the very deliberate technique of parallel editing, changing perspective as to show these opposing happinesses. It's pure cruelty: making us flinch at other people's happiness, the movie pretty much rubbing on Alonzo's face (and ours) his own recklessness! While filming Malabar and Nanon, Browning even uses a gauze on the lens, giving the image a soft, dream-like quality. There's nothing in the individual scenes that indicates tragedy. Seen out of context, we'd think this was a wonderful melodrama!
When Alonzo recovers, he goes to meet Nanon. She's not at the house; he sits down, alone in a table. Cut: Nanon sitting by Malabar's side at the theater. Cut back to Alonzo, an empty chair by his side. This insert has no narrative purposes, it is purely expressive, showing us the futility of the amputation. Cojo then tells him where she is, and they go after her.
She immediately hugs him, and senses that he's thinner, to which Alonzo replies, jokingly, he's "lost some flesh". All the previous sequence of the surgery and the parallel editing could have been cut out of the film and we wouldn't be missing any information. We could already tell what were Alonzo's intents and that Nanon was growing closer to Malabar. Its sole purpose was to show, to prolong "the process of perception" and to make us "live through the making of a thing", as Shklovsky puts it – of a cruel thing. A cruelness that so far only we've experienced, not the characters. Most horror movies try to scare us directly through horrific things; Browning constructs horrific sentiments from the happiness of his characters – the ultimate irony. The happier Alonzo gets from seeing Nanon, the more desperate we get, for we anticipate his greater demise.
There's some anticipation as to Alonzo's downfall here, but can we even call it suspense? We already know everything, the revelation is imminent; Browning delays it while we flinch. "I am happy you have returned Alonzo, now we can be married", says Nanon. The ambiguity of the sentence is even more cruel. Browning takes pleasure in the knotting of his ironies. Alonzo is being pushed high, and the fall will break him. Eventually, Malabar enters and everything is revealed. The centerpiece of this scene, and of the whole movie, and maybe of the whole festival, is the series of transformations Lon Chaney's face undergoes in the span of a couple of minutes. While Nanon takes her time introducing Malabar and happily talking about their relationship, Alonzo goes from sublime joy to apprehension to anger to a dissimulated smile and then, on top of the smile, horror, an aggressive hysterical laugher, to then laughing at himself in self-pity, to an indescribable confusion which culminates in a scream until ultimately he collapses, in complete emotional exhaustion. Chaney looks like he's about to explode. Each of these series of emotions is played to an astounding precision, to the point where one can really see the exact moments of the changes in states. We ourselves don't know what to feel. Maybe the most precise description we can give is catharsis: it's as Oedipus finding out he's killed his father and married his mother – fear and pity. He's in horror at his situation, we're in horror at himself.
Then Nanon says she now loves Malabar's hands, and he delivers the final blow: "I did what you told me, Alonzo. I took her in my arms...".
A complete dramatic reversal has taken place: the powerful, aggressive, lascivious Alonzo, full of secrets, is now armless, castrated, because of his own ignorance and recklessness. When we found out who he was, a murderer, we feared him; now we feel sorry for him, almost disgusted.
Then, there's the interest in transformations. Chaney's face is obviously the biggest example; when he plans his amputation and when he realizes his mistake. But also the wonderful shot of when his arms are first revealed to us earlier in the film, and he slowly stretches them; we don't his face, but his back – a transformation of the body. Nanon also undergoes transformations: a close-up of her as she looks to Malabar and we feel something is changing in her eyes; then, at the park, when she slightly looses herself under Malabar's arms. Finally there's Alonzo's redemption in the end, when he goes from murderous rampage to self-sacrifice. For a movie that's barely an hour long, it's impressive the amount of changes characters undergo.
The most distinctive aspect must be the movie's cruelty, it's lack of hesitance in making its characters suffer, to show Alonzo as a fool, and to prolong our feeling of his suffering – we start suffering for him pre-emptively, way before himself does. We wouldn't suffer if we didn't care for him – this wouldn't be possible if not by the emotional frankness of Chaney and Crawford, by their beauty and the beauty of their gestures, their honest tears, their honest, ignorant smiles, but this sympathy does not mean we identify with them.
There's the contrapuntal construction, which messes up our point of view and the subject of our identification as spectators: first we have Alonzo's excitement and Cojo's dread. Then, Alonzo happy with the surgery and Malabar and Nanon's happiness. Then Alonzo's happiness becoming his nightmares. These oppositions take place since the beginning: there's a scene where Nanon talks to Alonzo; friendly, she places her arms over him, just as she says she hates man's arms. The very next scene is Malabar going after Nanon, placing his arms on her; this time, she runs away. There's also a beautiful moment in which Malabar looks at Nanon, we see it trough his point of view; then we cut back to Malabar, but now seen through Alonzo's hateful point of view. The gazes of the two men – one in love, the other hateful, are thus opposed. Their point of view is offered to the spectator not so we blindly identify with each of them, but so their opposition can be felt viscerally.
And let us insist again on the film's tragic construction, Alonzo's error, him sealing his own demise, his own insensate actions leading him to his own destruction; the feeling that we can't do anything but watch, that everything's been decided, that to each character a Fate has been assigned. A purging of evil emotions, which takes us to the bliss of the final shot – Nanon and Malabar embracing each other, like before, but peacefully, this time without any counterpoint: the contradiction has resolved itself with Alonzo's death. It is only on the last shot of the film where the happiness and relief we are shown are really pure, where we can finally give ourselves to the world of the film to contemplate the trees, the grass, the wind which waves Nanon's dress and Malabar's shirt as their splendid bodies hug and kiss.
Anyway, I've become somewhat obsessed with this film, rewatched it a bunch of times at home (unfortunately, not on the restored print!) and could go on and on about each of its scenes in detail. I feel these pages have barely scraped the surface of it. The more I think I have it clear in my head the more possibilities it seems to offer, the more twisted and perverted and mysterious it seems; the more unique, ahead of its time and subversive. Suffice to say, it's a masterpiece.
On a more contemporary note, it's interesting to think what sort of challenges a film like this brings to a composer today. If in a drama as the one described in the beginning of this text the choice for reinforcing what's onscreen is simultaneously unavoidable and dull, here it is a much more complex matter. Should the music be horror-like even in the scenes which seem happy, but that when opposed by another scene become terrifying? Or, in the impossibility of consulting the authors of the picture, should the composer restrict himself only to accentuating what's on screen, avoiding the (perhaps unwanted) possibility of a music whose tone and emotion is different form that which is shown? I believe the more conservative approach in this case was indeed the best: when the movie cuts from Alonzo in the hospital bed to Nanon and Malabar in the park the music becomes joyful. And thus, also intensifies the irony of the film, and the fear we feel for Alonzo. The music gains a significant expressive quality which is missing from the accompaniment of some other films in the festival, less because of the compositions than of the movies themselves.
I must say that in most cases, particularly when the music was on the piano and therefore more improvised, it did not add much to the film, merely repeating what was already being said onscreen. And worse: the music's continuity – literally its temporal continuity, but also its emotional one – sometimes ended up limiting the image's expressive potential to the composer's interpretation, and also softening it, dampening it: we no longer feel the cuts, the discontinuity – the music gives everything an artificial unity which often does not exist, and is propitious to, let's say, invoke the god Hypnos into the auditorium. The worst case has to be for the documentary shorts, which honestly don't need music at all: in the Lumière- Swiss films, which offers us a crystal-clear window to reality, to everyday life, to impose any sort of tone or melody on top of it, guiding how the spectator should feel, is akin to a betrayal.
Maybe this resonates with a common tendency, even among some of the Giornate's specialized audience, to see silent cinema as a dreamy experience, a desire to enjoy these movies as fantasies and relics fromthe past, a certain naivety which is somewhat condescending to silent cinema. Yes, there is wonder, and magic, and adventure, but we should be able to also see these as works of art, with the rigour that implies. It's refreshing to see a film such as The Unknown, that engages with the audience – so aware of itself, of its medium, of the relationship it has to the spectator, so modern – a film that actively challenges the spectator and the spectator's will to surrender in awe to the screen, challenging this view of a stale, naive silent cinema.
Browning's work, at first glance, is impressive. Seen it contextualized within the silent era, it's nothing short of astonishing. Even compared to other late-1920s silent masterpieces, the audacity with which it constructs its narrative and provokes emotions is something completely original. In Pordenone 2022, among Gance, Flaherty and even Hitchcok – whose traditional sadism is much more present in Browning's film than in The Manxman – The Unknown triumphs. Even after its final resolution and its bliss, we cannot unsee what we've seen: the unknown terror of human passions.
Artists make art to find release, to mitigate their contradictions, to please themselves and captivate others, to lose themselves in a world where they stop “not being in the world,” to “escape from hell.” This they do by descending into this hell to probe its bottommost depths and to be enthralled by the excesses that they adorn with the enchantments of anxiety and dread; they are “enchantments” insofar as the beings that are plunged into it offer us an incandescent image of the human that projects us outside the banality of everyday life into a world where the soul is expanded, pierced, and sees the measure of its possibilities. Held in a knot of anxiety and exaltation, the being is revealed to itself, projected beyond oneself to a more authentic self with a passion that fulfills and justifies it, that sets it reeling in a vertigo from which it emerges whole. Taken to its extreme limit, the contradiction is resolved by coming to an awareness and knowledge of it in such a way that it is elevated to the sacredness of a necessity, hence of an acceptance, of a balance, of a peacefulness. This is the whole purpose of tragedy in art. The confrontation, the “crisis,” involves twisting the being around itself, so that once the complete circle has been traveled, we find ourselves back where we started but luminously and serenely naked. Or else they do this by negating this hell and, right from the start, emerging into happiness, light, calm, or the movement of joy. The fact that all art that does not proceed from an order of the sublime is hollow, useless, and of no interest, and that all art that is not exclusively intimate and passionate, destined to excess, precious, and aristocratic is frivolous and trivial, this is at once evident from our desire and a logical consequence of art’s existential function.
– Michel Mourlet, On a misunderstood art6
– GABRIEL CARVALHO
English translation found here: https://theseventhart.info/2019/10/21/on-the-harmfulness-of-film-language-on-its-uselessness-and-on-the-means-to-combat-it/
My thanks to the Cinemateca Portuguesa's retrospective on the works of Ernie Gehr.
G. K. Chesterton, "The abstract is the symbol of the concrete".
English translation by Alexandra Berlina, available here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist2017-18/art_as_device_2015.pdf
"Sur un art ignoré", Cahiers du Cinéma nº 98, August 1959. Translated by Gila Walker, here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/718620