“To me history of cinema was
Vincente Minnelli, Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann”.
Jacques Rancière
“Fritz Lang is the ancient choir.
It is very important for me that in the movie the director
Fritz Lang is called Fritz Lang,
but then again I wasn’t making cinéma-vérité.
Lang represents the entirety of cinema”.
Jean-Luc Godard
In a note from her The Haunted Screen (1981), in the chapter dedicated to the stylization of the fantastic, Lotte Eisner (to whom Werner Herzog dedicated a documentary in 1982, after he had walked from Munich to Paris to visit her in 1974 and, through this pilgrimage ritual, had vainly tried to heal her), recalling the eclecticism of Fritz Lang, who quotes the Thousand and One Nights (which delays death…) and the film Cabiria (1914) in his Der Müde Tod (1921), which was translated as Destiny — a Name in which Lang’s cinema is inscribed — writes that Douglas Fairbanks, in Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924), “borrows” the scene of the flying carpet put in frame in one of Lang’s episodes. This scene, in turn, will be transposed “with all his mastery” by Murnau in his Faust (1926). The problem is not about quoting or borrowing, it’s not even the anxiety of influence, but it is to know how to do it with finesse and not only géométrie.
Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) describes how poetic influence, which is the story of inter-poetic relationships, operates. There are strong poets and weak poets. The first ones are those who look to the past, who emulate the history of poetry that preceded them, but mis-understanding it; while weak poets tend to idealize tradition. However, even poets with vast imagination, the strong poets, appropriating the existing are equally indebted to the past and this debt causes what Bloom calls “anxiety”. Strong poets are original poets: the poetic influence does not necessarily determine a loss in the poet’s originality, on the contrary, often when poets misunderstand the “classics” or the “fathers”, they make them more original. Lang, while retaining a “very personal vision”, is “strong” but affected by the influence of Max Reinhardt, for instance. Murnau quotes Lang, but he does it with finesse, so he is “strong”.
Andrew Sarris, in his famous American Cinema: Directors and Directions (1968), distinguishes directors in the Pantheon, second-rank and fallen idols. In the sacred enclosure there were Chaplin, Flaherty, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Ford, Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Ophüls, Renoir, Sternberg and Welles.
As Tag Gallagher explains in his colossal book on Ford, he only became Ford in 1927, after meeting with Murnau. Jean Douchet also talks about the influence of Expressionism and especially Murnau on Ford. This influence, desired and sought after, actively assimilated rather than passively suffered, allows the filmmaker to introduce into his work what the refined French critic calls dichotomy between story and discourse, between what is narrated and the forms of the narrated. This dichotomy is what fascinates in Ford’s writing, that which had captured the attention of «Cahiers du Cinéma» in 1970, whose editors saw in the director’s writing precisely those distortions, curvatures, cracks (discourse), which deconstructed the apparently ideological and apologetic content of his films (story).
Murnau was brought by Fox to the USA, where he exerted a considerable influence on many directors such as Borzage, the young Hawks and Ford himself, who was charmed and fascinated by Murnau’s intense stylization, by his figurative invention capable of making the psychic, emotional and impulsive world of the characters so palpable and sensible. Gallagher places Ford in the group-Murnau, opposed to the group-Lang. In the group-Murnau, Ford and Sternberg work on characterization, passions, gestures and realistic style, through which the characters, despite the determinism of the environment, exercise their choices and actions. On the other hand, in the group-Lang, with Ejzenstejn and Hitchcock, we find symbolism, action, stillness, pictorial geometrization, anti-realist style and, above all, a mechanical and implacable determinism that nails the characters.
***
What about Raoul Walsh? Let’s go back to Lotte Eisner’s note. Where Walsh isn’t even mentioned. Whose film is The Thief of Baghdad? Is it Walsh’s? But he is not an author. He makes commissioned films in Hollywood, where movies are made by stars and producers — and Fairbanks was both. Bogdanovich recalls that in the US it was Sarris, with his article dedicated to popular American directors in Jonas Mekas’ «Film Culture», who “brought out a new critical common sense” and triggered the ferocious reactions of Dwight MacDonald — still lingering on “Avant-garde and kitsch” à la Clement Greenberg, who had already seen him as the protagonist in the thirties — and Pauline Kael, always ready to miss the mark — as in the famous, even infamous case of the querelle around Citizen Kane (1941) by Orson Welles (on which, recently, the cold and sharp David Fincher has also slipped). Sarris devotes attention to Walsh in unsuspected times. He writes that Walsh’s characters are devoted only to adventure, while Ford’s to tradition and Hawks’ to professionalism. The first ones die with their boots on, expensively, consuming themselves; the others are supported and support a worldview, in Ford’s case, and they improve in a daily exercise, an ethical self-care, in Hawks’. Bogdanovich confirms Sarris’ reading: Walsh is the adventurer of cinema, his characters are full of vitality, they love adventure. But most importantly Sarris places Walsh in his Pantheon of directors, along with Lang. Even though Eisner did not recognize him as an author, evidently.
***
In a conversation with Bogdanovich, Walsh recalls that it was actually Fairbanks who commissioned the film. And Walsh has no problem talking about it in the plural: “We came up with the idea, we worked on it, and then we made the film”. It’s a movie with many tricks, observes Bogdanovich, and immediately Walsh talks about the flying carpet. At a certain point he says that according to Fritz Lang — with whom Bogdanovich had spoken — Fairbanks bought his film Destiny so that he could exploit the tricks. Lang, in his conversation with Bogdanovich, says that the star bought it for five thousand dollars, copying everything. So even for the old Lang — who had worked in Hollywood for years — after all the “author” of the film — and of the plagiarism — was Fairbanks. Walsh says: “I’ve never heard of this. It’s not like Doug, because he never wanted to do something already done by others. He always wanted to invent”. Reiterating, among other things, that yes, Fairbanks, the actor, the star, was also the inventive type. Perhaps, speaking of carpets, Mitchell Leisen — at the time costume designer — made a more important contribution to the film than Lang did with his Destiny.. Lang, after M (1931), refused Goebbels’ proposal to oversee all of German cinema, although he did not say no, but left Germany after buying some time. In Hollywood, his relationship with producers and critics was not always easy, on the contrary. Bogdanovich in his book John Ford (1967) recalls that Joseph L. Mankiewicz — who in the years of McCarthyism was president of the Screen Director Guild — told him how one day he was attacked by Cecil B. DeMille, venerable Hollywood director and fervent anti-communist. The great director accused the liberal and tolerant Mankiewicz of being red. Very dangerous accusation at the time. And he asked for his resignation. At that meeting there were many directors present, even Lang. But it was Ford who took the floor and shut down DeMille.
What about Walsh? The one who wouldn’t be an author, who would let producers and stars take credit for the movies? Walsh recounts an anecdote to Bogdanovich. One evening he was having dinner with “Jack” Ford and others. Ford kept complaining about his bad eye. Like Fritz Lang he had spent too much time under the spotlight, like him he had an eye patch. Two pirates. Well, Walsh tells Bogdanovich that at one point he turned to Ford — who had silenced DeMille, who made John Wayne cry, who was filming under the bombs in the Pacific, who had directed 250 operators in D-Day — saying: “Come on, Jack, I’ll take it off for you so you can forget about it. He looked at me menacingly, but at least stopped whining”. Walsh prevailed over Ford, a rare case, comments Bogdanovich. But maybe because Ford well knew that Walsh had been blind in one eye since 1927, when he lost it in an accident while shooting, also as an actor, In Old Arizona.
***
A few years after the establishment of the “Politique des auteurs” and in the years when Jean-Louis Comolli still claimed for the director the same dignity as the painter or sculptor, in the art world (the world of originality, authenticity, individual talent, etc.), the tendencies grouped in the primary structures were reshuffling the relationships between anonymity and authorship; the anonymity of Frank Stella’s black paintings or Ed Ruscha’s photographs, and more generally of Minimalism, were calling into question the very notion of authorship, while Conceptual Art radically reflected on the interdependence between authorship and production. Roland Barthes spoke of the “death of the author” and Michel Foucault of the “death of man”. Barthes: “la voix perd son origine, l’auteur entre dans sa propre mort, l’écriture commence” and “la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur”; it was 1968. In 1966, Foucault in his The Order of Things had announced that the sciences of man dissolve man, and that moreover it (man) is a recent invention and its end is near. In 1969 Foucault wrote that the notions of “work” and “author” are at least problematic. Author is not a simple proper name (à la John Searle) but it is a certain way of characterizing discourses. A “function” more than a creative subject or romantic genius. In 1967 and 1972, Peter Wollen had already reformulated the concept of auterism, explaining that the conception of cinema as art was “rooted in the idea of creativity and the film as the expression of an individual vision”, while the very idea of the individual had long ago entered a crisis. Each film, wrote Wollen, is a “network of different statements, crossing and contradicting each other, elaborated into a final ‘coherent’ version”. Althusser would have spoken of over-determination. The subject – according to Stuart Hall’s audience positioning theory – is there but he is positioned and he re-positions itself.
The author, if they are such, are in discourse, even though, of course, the author doesn’t lie in discourse like gold in the bank, but appears under certain conditions in the order of discourse – also that of Hollywood and the cultural industry. The author is articulated in discourse and its modifications. The author’s freedom always rests in the depth of tradition, language, discourse, which has rules and even constraints. Much has been written about all this, even by us and in reference to Walsh. Beyond the easy and lazy opposition of author and discourse.
Comolli was chief editor of the «Cahiers du Cinéma» in the second half of the 1960s, when John Ford was already valued and qualified as an author, on the same pages which had almost ignored him in the 1950s, in particular with its most fervent vanguard: the jeune critique. In an article dedicated to Howard Hawks and published in the Cahiers in 1953, Eric Rohmer writes that he prefers Hawks to Ford and that generally the former is more respected as well as more personal. Hawks himself would probably have been embarrassed if someone told him he was superior to and more original than Ford. In the 1960s, with a new generation of critics (Comolli, Narboni, Biette, Daney, Skorecki), Ford would have finally stood out over all the other authors loved and admired by the Jeun Turcs: Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray.
It’s no coincidence that it was precisely Comolli who dedicated a first historical piece, which made an era, to Walsh in the pages of the magazine founded by André Bazin. The article was entitled L’esprit d’aventure and the issue, 154, was dedicated to Walsh. The individual’s adventure is the universal adventure. In his famous Praxis du cinéma (1969), Noël Burch could still speak of Walsh’s cinema — with the presumption typical of a very militant Structuralism (from which Burch himself later distanced himself) — of “transparent mediocrity” and “banality”, forgetting, however, that his book had originally appeared as ten articles in the same «Cahiers du Cinéma» which, although a little late in comparison to the mac-mahonniens, had dedicated a special to Walsh in 1964 with an article that is still remarkable by Comolli, an interview with the director, as well as a filmography commented by Walsh himself.
Late in comparison to «Présence du Cinéma» and the programmes of cinema d’essay dans l’avenue Mac-Mahon, au n. 5. Pierre Rissient, Michel Mourlet, Jacques Lourcelles and others who animated the room, the debates and then the journal’s pages. The «Cahiers du Cinéma» sided with Rossellini, and «Positif» with Fellini, with Preminger and Losey and with Walsh and Lang. “Cahiers contre Positif, Mac-Mahoniens contre tout le monde?” (Mourlet). At the entrance of the hall, in the eighties, one could still find black and white photographs of Walsh, Lang, Preminger and Losey. All “authors” for the mac-mahonniens. But Mourlet had published an article-manifesto in 1959, right in the pages of the «Cahiers du Cinéma» when Eric Rohmer was rédacteur en chef, which gave no space to either Losey or Preminger or Walsh. The title was Sur un art ignoré: “ce texte, éminemment symptomatique, comme notre lecture de certains de ses contemporains l’a vérifié (de Rohmer et l’école des Cahiers en général à celle de Présence du cinéma), a l’immense mérite de poser avec limpidité les prémisses essentielles, et aussi certaines des conséquences, d’une telle définition de l’art du cinéma” (Aumont). Mourlet had a certain affinity with the views of critics like Rohmer and Rivette but, at the same time, the article posed serious problems to the “Politique des Auteurs” elaborated by Rohmer, Truffaut and the other Jeun Turcs. In fact, Rohmer prefaces Mourlet’s article with a short editorial note. Walsh was a strong point of disagreement. As mentioned, a few years later not only Comolli but also other important young «Cahiers du Cinéma» critics such as Serge Daney, Jean-Claude Biette and Louis Skorecki would appreciate Walsh as an author, at the same time freeing themselves of the cult of personality still inherent in the politics of the Jeun Turcs. Author Walsh but, to say it with Stuart Hall, positioned at the intersection of a multiplicity of articulations, to cite Louis Althusser. Not to mention the fact that, as Mourlet says, “la singularité du cinéma” is the “reproduction mécanique des formes du réel”. Mourlet cinephile and (malgré lui) benjaminian too. The invention of cinema is modernist, but its technical reproducibility brings it closer to Rauschenberg than to Manet or Picasso, that is to say to the Postmodern, which ends it with the concepts of creative subject, originality, authorship, presence, etc.
What happens to presence in cinema if the filmed already was and again always will be? What happens to originality if we consider the multiples of reproducibility, and not only analog ones? And what about originality if the film is both Walsh’s and Fairbanks’? Much has been written about this, and also by us.
***
Bogdanovich’s answer, regarding the originality/reproducibility dilemma, is in his filmic praxis. In The Last Picture Show (1970) Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) enters the spookily empty room, where billiards and tables appear as in stills, spacetime suspensions. That void is inhabited by ghosts, by Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart who, in High Sierra (1941), embrace each other intensely. Outside the saloon, on the street, is the burning car of Glenn Ford’s wife in The Big Heat (1953) and, at the corners of that phantasmatic space, Lee Marvin shooting at Gloria Grahame. On the dusty floor bounces silently the girl’s ball from M, the firedust blown by Roy Earle fluctuates. Like Robert Mitchum in Pursued (1947), Bogdanovich also pursues the traces of the past, a night without an end, that of stardust. The great night of cinema, as Marguerite Duras used to say (Un barrage contre le Pacifique): “nuit artificielle”, “consolante”, “plus vraie que la vraie nuit, plus ravvisante, plus consolante que to le toutes les vraies nuits, la nuit choisie, ouverte à tous, offerte à tous, plus généreuse”.
Boganovich’s image is a trace, to say it with Derrida: an image, a sign generated by other images and other signs, or rather the difference between these images and signs. Phantasmal writing, ghosts, obsessions, simulacre, as Pierre Klossowski would say, that communicate the lived fact and the obsessive memory of the cinéphile and critic Bogdanovich and, at the same time, connecting the soul of classical cinema with the body of not only modern but even postmodern cinema, they express as an incommunicado, a hiatus, a waste, a difference between those now auratic images and the dust of time, but not only historical time — that separates this classicism from a present lost in the search for references, but of filmic time, narrative, of the story, dust narrated, which becomes the central, decisive element of the story, even more than the characters who, precisely, are spectral, no longer heroes. Bogdanovich’s cinema imitates in the aristotelean sense, because he learned from Hollywood genres, from horror to western to screwball comedy and noir. As Klossowski observed about the simulacre it is both an obsession and an exorcism. Bogdanovich makes films with other films, the body of his films is animated by phantasmatic and re-written cinema history. Bogdanovich simulates the original, rather than maddening it (the Subjectile), introduces even subtle slippage so that his cinema is not only a gaze at things — transparent as in the vouloir-dire of Hollywood classicism — but also informed by perceptive patterns, by visual and cultural patterns: his gaze is charged with the theory and history of cinema. His filmic bodies are animated by the ghosts of a cinema that, although disappeared, is still insistent. So his filmic écriture — or archi–writing — as simulation, perverts the actual imitation, that is reproductive; it not only recalls but also questions those images, those ghosts of an extinct Hollywood. There is no irreverence, nor cultic contemplation, but an exchange between his bodies and the soul of classicism. A difference. Bogdanovich’s filmic bodies are signs of the absence of a presence and an ever-absent present, those of “Old America”, Hollywood and the becoming-image of a certain world that the director puts on scene in Nickelodeon (1976). The simulacre is “original lack”, it is the trace, that is a language — postmodern and deconstructive — which, Derrida would say, carries within itself “the need for its own criticism” — and Bogdanovich, in fact, was also critical. His imitating/learning/misdirecting classicism is not only nostalgic and cinephile but also critical.
Like Walsh and Lang before him, Bogdanovich also had to deal with the obligations, the deadlines, the conditions of production and reproduction and with the “frame”, forcing it as much as he could. He was able to film because it was already filmed. Walsh and Lang did it by trying to return “the-things-themselves”, the order of presence, as Derrida would say: that’s what is called classicism transparency. Bogdanovich, already beyond modernity, inscribes his écriture as kind of late on that text which is classicism, his language is already, since the beginning, inside an even older inexhaustible language.
His simulacre are inventions rather than reproductions because they build different meanings and levels than the prototypes. The cinephile-mimetic strategy of Bodganovich cancels both the identity of classic cinema – which is exchanged, rewritten in his films – and that of “his” films – already always split by the other, expropriated by the phantasmatic history of cinema that crosses “his” film. Klossowski would speak of moment souverain, extase, as the one that transpires from Ben Gazzara of Saint Jack (1979): “simulacre of death”, as a crisis, if not disappearance of the subject. What remains is not the “Self” (or genius) — as Bloom would later suggest in The Western Canon (1994) — but a simulacre.
***
Author Lang, but even Walsh, but the condition is that the author always be related to the discursive formations (Foucault). Besides, as Bogdanovich reminds, even Lang was underrated in the US, where they preferred the German Lang, perhaps just as a matter of principle, because his German films were more difficult to find. Just like they preferred English Hitchcock.
But not in France. One of the founding articles of the “Politique des Auteurs”, written by Truffaut, is dedicated to Lang: Loving Fritz Lang. The article published in 1954 emphasizes the element of the struggle of Lang’s characters immersed in a hostile universe. But in the US, notes Bogdanovich, the American Lang was not so esteemed. Bogdanovich, in his Fritz Lang in America (1967), cites critics and magazines who underestimated the Hollywood Lang. Bogdanovich, who between the late 1950s and the late 1960s watched between 300 and 500 films a year, notes “the struggle against destiny continues from Der Müde Tod (his first success in Germany) to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt”: the 1956 film with Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine is just as cruel. Rancho Notorius (1952) is like Die Nibelungen (1924), a film about the bitterness of revenge and hatred. In fact the article signed by Truffaut confirms in advance the observations of Bogdanovich. Even Truffaut points out that some critics in France consider Lang to be irreparably compromised. They hate his Hollywood films. But Truffaut writes that in Lang “one is surprised by how much of Hollywood was present in his German films” and at the same time “by how much he wanted to remain Germanic in his American works” — in that “wanted” lies all the romanticism, if not the voluntarism of the “Politique des Auteurs”.
What changes, according to Bogdanovich, with Lang’s arrival in Hollywood, is that the director abandons the out of the ordinary characters of German films — who do not fit the expectations of the American public — to show average men, the John Does, which work in American cinema and therefore also worldwide. But this passage makes his American films even more disturbing.
The “common man” of his noir and detective films is even more disturbing than M’s monster. University professor Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window (1944) enters a dimension suspended between dream and nightmare, wobbling on the steps of the club entrance where he drank more than usual. His presence in itself is in crisis and the academic, husband and father, once again approaches the window to admire the image of the portrait and the woman portrayed — just as in Laura (1944) by Preminger. The glass of the window is a filter that Robinson crosses with his scopic drive to penetrate the image of the woman who, at some point, overlaps the portrait. The image is doubled, the image refers to the woman and the desire for that woman. The glass is now haunted, to say it with Henry James.
Bogdanovich notes how Lang enters American cinema by adopting the conceptual grid of “social realism” through his first films (producers told Lang that Americans don’t like symbols): Fury (1937) and You Live Once (1937) — which both Nicholas Ray and Terrence Malick would then remember — but then he abandons these “social aspects“ to focus on the “universal qualities” of his almost haunting motives: the struggle with fate, with destiny and above all, as Lang says to Bogdanovich, the struggle itself, which is more important than the outcome. So, while showing and telling about normal men, Lang remains little interested in “normality”. The characters in Scarlett Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953) are credible, it’s true, but they’re also “warped by life”. The dream of Edward G. Robinson turns into a nightmare in which, however, nobody wants to believe, denying them even penance and redemption. The Glenn Ford cop movie is sadistic and cruel, and the normality displayed is “insulted and injured”. The Hollywood Lang does not make products from dreams that enchant, but creates “nightmares”.
***
Destiny in Walsh? The thief’s fate — in the famous film with Fairbanks — is his character. Gangster Eddie in The Roaring Twenties (1939) lost everything, even his life, but found his character again by escaping fate. The boxer Jim Corbett in Gentleman Jim (1942) has a character that is beyond (if not against) fate: it resolves and dissolves.
Roy and Wes in High Sierra (1941) and Colorado Territory (1949) as the walsh-flynnian Custer of They Died with Their Boots On (1941), are characters more in act than in action. Their character does not find an end in actions (successful or failed), nor does it yield to the plot of the machination, rather it crashes against the gears of the social machine, the destiny described by Benjamin: the “demonic state” of unhappiness, guilt, that demands a sacrificial victim, “a naked life”, “a bearer of guilt”. Character and destiny co-incide in Walsh. To be fulfilled in White Heat (1949) is to dissolve into catastrophe not as a result of a dark plot or a script that chokes, crushes, separates, but to escape this fate by destroying oneself, in the light of flames, as an object of conspiracy, of betrayal.
Struggle and destiny in Lang, destiny and character in Walsh. Both loved and admired by Peter Bodganovich – to whom we dedicate this piece.
“How bootfifull and how truetowife of her, when strengly
forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals
so as to will make us all lordy heirs and
ladymaidesses of a prettt nice kettle of fruit”
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Toni D’Angela
Translated by Elisa Mancioli
Revision by Will Straw
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