tw -,_ . a. Ike 14'hexrpk'i9ed ZdOPI4 "If 914" By RICHARD CENTING THE "Olympia Review" (January 1962) carries a fragment from a novel by Jack Caroll to be called Bottoms Up, one of the funnier satires on the implications of photography in modern society. The hero, Arthur King, has an unex- pected triumph as a prize-winning pho- tographer which causes him to leave his home and to make photography a career. On a flight to Hollywood, he sees a heli- copter which has crashed atop a plateau. Near the plane two people are frantically stamping out H-E-L- in the snow. The pilot of King's two-passenger plane has not seen the marooned pair but the pho- tographer realizes that this is his oppor- tunity for a great human interest pic- ture. Instead of taking the photograph immediately he waits until the plane has almost passed the site. The couple, realiz- ing they have not been seen, slump to their knees in anguish. Finally, King clicks the shutter of the camera, as the long shadows of twilight accentuate the tableau. After contemplating the achieve- ment, he comes to a philosophical con- clusion: We are essentially alone. Although he is only being humorous, Jock Carroll gives us an example of the questions that must be asked about the correlation between aesthetic form and dramatic content, not only in artistic pho- tography but in the motion pictures as well. By exaggeration, he has shown how meaning might be interpreted from the surface reality of photography-in this case perhaps too much interpretation. On the other hand, when properly used, pho- tography is an art and deserving of its own serious standards of criticism. Mo- tion pictures, in fact, depend on a unifica- tion of photography and dramatic action for their greatest effects. Photography in films can interpret life and not be mere- ly graphic illustration. IN HENRY MILLER'S collection of es- says, "The Cosmological. Eye," he de- scribes the effect of a photograph in a way which sums up the emotional satisfaction one receives from masterful photography: "On my wall is the photograph of a chair by my friend Brassai. To me it's a poem. I no longer see a wire chair with holes in the seat but an empty throne." A greater utilization of this kind of artistic photography would greatly im- prove contemporary films: m o v i e s tend to be more prosaic than the intri- cate shapes and colors of experience. The movements of crowds, industrial construc- tion, oddities of clothing, expressive hands, motions of animals, patterns of buildings, arrangements of sky and land and even the contents of refrigerators are animate and inanimate objects which can enrich film drama if directors have the courage and ability to use them. Artistic photography does not have to make the cinema as static as non-repre- sentational Celtic illumination, in which geometric design was the basic form. Dwight MacDonald has said, "A movie is much more than a collection of photo- graphs. Like music, it unrolls in time and like literature, it makes a statement about human life." Yet photography can make statements about life if we are se- lective in the use of its techniques. The outstanding achievements of artistic photographers like Edward Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, and more recently, Robert Frank, have found few counterparts in recent films. How- ever, Frank's short, "Pull My Daisy," was less interesting than his evocative col- lection of photographs, "The Americans.." Production schedules of films may not allow enough time for an individual to master a subject. "Last Year at Marien- bad" was great because it had such visual imagination. The people in the film had turned into pieces of furniture and statuary, but there was a dynamic feel- ing of motion none the less. In Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player," the outdoor winter scenery seen through a car win- dow has a fascinating clarity, almost like a projection of the natural attitudes of the hero. THE HISTORY of the cinema contains examples of the uses of photography that seem to have been forgotten by our, modern directors. "Lot in Sodom" (Wat- Visual Image's Are As Vital- To Cinema As Dramatic Content Photography as an interpreter of life in "The Seventh Seal". son-Webber, 1933-34), a poetical treat- ment of the Biblical legend was stunning for its rhythmical arrangement of sym- bols. Discarding a realistic, chronological reconstruction of events, it succeeded in transmitting more emotion than the bet- ter-known religious epics. One might favorably compare "The Life and Death of 9413-A Hollywood Extra" (1928), a satirical fantasy written and directed by Robert Florey which portrayed the rise and fall of a would-be star, with self- critical films from Hollywood since that time. For example, Sir Carol Reed's "Odd Man Out" (1947), opens with an at- tempted robbery photographed in docu- mentary style and proceeds to quiet sim- plicity when the revolutionary leader dies in the snow. The list of films that transcend recent American experiments is long and versa- tile, to say the least: the pastoral beauty of Dovzhenko's "Earth" (1930), the hu- mor of Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936), and even the fragments of Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mevico!" surpass the most daring innovations of recent years. In the masterpiece by Preston Sturges, "Sulli- van's Travels," (1942), a train sequence near the end expresses the irony of the situation completely. No one who has seen Eisenstein's "Potemkin" (1925) can for- get the horrifying realism of the Odessa steps sequence or the beauty of the ships at twilight. In the pre-credit footage of some Hollywood films we may have a few "silent" scenes that are visual inter- pretations of the story; then we quickly lapse back into the "talkies." "The Public Enemy" (Wellman, 1931), made a socio- logical fable out of the usual gangster movie by using swift scenes almost like metaphors in poetry. Remember James Cagney mashing half a grapefruit on the face of his mistress? It is lamentable that Hollywood, which once fostered many great movements in motion pictures (Griffith, et al), is not now producing films of significant inter- est despite the more sophisticated equip- ment available to them. Those of you who find patriotic fur rising when any- one knocks Hollywood, please check Time's article "A Religion of Film" (Sep- tember 20, 1963), which contains a map showing the location of the world's great film directors: Not one is American. Probably the last great American films were "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (Huston, 1948), and "Monsieur Verdoux" (Chaplin, 1947). "David and Lisa", which Time called "The best U.S. film of the Year" in 1962, seemed more like a documentary about mental disease than representative of any new cinematic forms. From the point of view of photography, its structure is monotonous: the sequences seem about the same length and each-open on a low note and end on a high note. There was little variety in camera movement; the acting seemed wooden and the resolution of neurosis by all-conquering love was traditionally melodramatic. The . film succeeded in shaking up the preconceived notions in Hollywood about experimental films. For some reason, "David and Lisa" appeared more European than anything American producers have done of late, probably because it had a serious inten- tion. But the French film "Sundays and Cybele" was much livelier than "David and Lisa" for the photography in "Sun- days and Cybele," although highly imag- inative, never intrudes to spoil the flow of the story. It evoked a feeling of ro- mance and ritual that did not come across in "David and Lisa."' THE CINEMA'S special resource-visual complexity, the constand fluid changes of viewpoint and the ability to roam freely in time and space, were put to excellent use in another French film, Jean-Luc Godard's, "Breathless," (1961). The camera, handled by Raoul Contard, is spontaneous and comic, taking sudden turns and finding different angles to cap- ture the magic of Paris; it moves in and about the boulevards and side streets and bars and bedrooms of Paris, picking up details as the- microphone records the immediate sounds of the street. Those who have seeh the film usually remember Jean-Paul Belmondo stroking his lips with his fingers, almost as a gesture of skeptical defiance. Such a movement can express rapidly what the conventional film would try to talk out for two hours. The, screenplay by Francois Truffaut il- lustrates how stimulating an original script can be and the cutting in the film demonstrates the effectiveness of brief images over tedious, immobile sequences. In the Russian film, "The Lady with the Little Dog" (1962), directed by Joseph Hieftz; we have a remarkable blending of narrative content with artistic pho- tography. There is one scene in which a clarinetist plays a tune as white snow- flakes fall into a gray world which pic- torially creates the symbolic image of the frustration of the'characters. Adapted from a short story by Chekhov, this film rendered almost perfectly the dramatic tensions of the hopeless love affair. Like the novel, movies can convey tedium without being tedious by concentrating on the details of a situation that make up its basic conflict. It would be interesting to see how one would film any of the novels of Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe often is regarded as an undisciplined romantic, full of matter with no art, although his novels are crowded with a multitude of revelatory poetic details. The communi- cation of passion in film would necessitate the creation of a montage that captured the spirit of his individual observations. For example, three of the most praised American films of the- Fifties, "From Here to Eternity", "High Noon," and "Marty," were all small-screen black-and white films, which concentrated on little details that gave impetus to the narrative. "R ASHOMAN," the Kurasawa master- piece, merged exquisite photography with a clever story to evoke the very mys- tery behind the questions of truth and evil. In "Wild Strawberries," (1957), writ- er-director Ingmar Bergman used the dreams of an old man to present all his horror at having lived a pompous and meaningless existence, and in "The Sev- enth Seal" (1956) fashioned a film which is, I believe, a landmark. He makes us believe in a real world in which men and women are struggling and dying with the problems of immortality. The dance of death at the end of "The Seventh Seal" was the poetic culmination of the pic- torial action of the film. Throughout the film, from the .unearthly opening scene in which .the squire, Jons, plays chees with death to the procession of the flag- ellants and the burning of the witch, we are in the grips of pure allegorical trag- edy, The arrangement of many of the scenes achieve the impression of indi- vidual paintings: the lighting and the positions of the actors have an inevitable symmetry that is characteristic of the greatest art. Bergman has this to say in the introduction to his screenplays: "When we experience a film, we con- sciously prime ourselves for illusion. Put- ting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feeling . .. and film is mainly rhythm." A play such as "The Dream Play" by Strindberg may be exceptionally adapt- able to the film. Such a film could pro- duce the expressionistic dreams in a more credible way than the restricted sets of the stage. The camera can give us that intimate awareness of an actor's perform- ance which is often lost on the stage. The symbol at the end of the play, a growing castle which has a bud on its top that bursts into a giant chrysanthenum and a burning wall resembling faces in an- guish, could be presented as a powerful visual image. "Orange and Blue," a fifteen minute short produced at the Film Study Center of Harvard University, was more gratify- ing emotionally than the three-and-a- half hour long "Lawrence of Arabia." "Orange and Blue" was the imaginative creation of a visual journey of two rub- ber balls through a junk yard imitating the play psychology of children, express- ing curiousity, adventurousness, timidity, coyness, and joy. As in the short, "The Red Balloon," we are completely taken up by the screen creation of the feelings of youth uncommitted to the realism of adulthood. This is what films should do: make us believe ini a new kind of world, order our experience, permit our fancy to be aroused. The cinema is a visual lan- guage that even still our emotions; to do this, however, it must utilize its own sensuous elements of aesthetic experience. Photography implies the existence of a rhythm in the world of nature. If films are to communicate their subjects, the re- lationship between photography and dra- matic content must be recognized and maintained. A film depends not only on the receptive mind but also on the spec- tator's visual associations The plastic beauty of the film must not become a lost art. THE MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAZINE.. I "Ann Arbor's Fleeting Fall' MAGAZ IN E Vol. V, No. 4 Sunday, October 20, 1963 Page Eight