Creative freedoms and final cuts

What is frequently mentioned whenever Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) is brought up is Welles's contract with RKO, which allegedly gave him previously unheard-of creative freedom.

While there is no denying that Welles's contract was unusual, especially in the way it said that Welles was to have four responsibilities (actor, writer, producer and director) and a right to final cut. But disregarding the comparatively unimportant part of him also acting, this was not unique or unprecedented. Consider for example F.W. Murnau's contract with Fox for making Sunrise (1927), which gave him almost unlimited freedom (for his next two films for Fox that freedom was severely curtailed), or Ernst Lubitsch's contract with Warner Bros. in the early 1920s. ("Lubitsch shall have the sole, complete and absolute charge of the production of each such photoplay /.../ there shall be no interference of any kind whatsoever from any source, with Lubitsch, with respect to any matter or thing connected with the production, cutting and final completion of such photoplays.") That shows the high esteem in which the two Germans were held but it was not just already established directors from abroad who could get good deals in Hollywood. Consider Preston Sturges at Paramount for example, or Frank Capra at Columbia, and many other directors including some that are more or less forgotten today. Mitchell Leisen said once that since he was a "top director at Paramount" he just "snapped" his fingers and got whatever he wanted. (I wonder how accurate that was though.)

But the contract itself is not all that matters. For two case-studies let's look at two films from 1938, the year before Welles signed with RKO, at the height of the power of the studio system and at two different studies: Bringing Up Baby, made by Howard Hawks for RKO, and Jezebel, made by William Wyler for Warner Bros.

Hawks had signed a deal with RKO to make up to three films. After much time was spent on coming up with ideas and concepts Hawks settled on a short story by Hagar Wilde he had read, and called in Dudley Nichols to help make it into a feature-length script, gathered a cast and began filming. In Wyler's case, Warner Bros. already had Jezebel in mind for a film, and Wyler had many years earlier spoken about wanting to make it, so he was hired for this one film.

Once the contracts were signed Hawks and Wyler were in charge. They made all decisions, got the writers they wanted, went way over budget and over schedule, yet the studios could do nothing. The two films were made on Hawks and Wyler's terms and on their own schedules. They were responsible for the shape and form of the scripts too, and called for help with it from those they felt were right for it, in Hawks's case Nichols and in Wyler's case John Huston. (Wyler did on several occasions sign Huston up for writing or polishing scripts.) All the studios could do was hope for the best and write exasperated memos, such as one at RKO which complained that "All the directors in Hollywood are developing producer-director complexes and Hawks is going to be particularly difficult."

You could argue that Warner Bros. had been expecting to get a Warner Bros. film but instead they got a William Wyler film. But they had reason to be pleased with the finished result though, as Jezebel was a huge hit whereas Bringing Up Baby was not. RKO did not have any particular film in mind when the contract was signed but were still disappointed that they got a Howard Hawks production. Despite Hawks's deal for potentially three films only this one was made and then RKO had had enough of him.

The following year, 1939, Hawks made a film for Columbia and Wyler returned to his old partnership with Sam Goldwyn. Now though Hawks was more fortunate than Wyler, as he made Only Angels Have Wings without interference, a film that is not only one of his best but also what might be called the purest expression of all his themes and then current style. Wyler on the other hand made Wuthering Heights, where he and Goldwyn had different ideas of how it should end. Wyler's version was final and tragic, an image of Heathcliff frozen to death in the snow (the film is not a particularly faithful adaptation). That was not something Goldwyn could stomach and as Wyler refused to do a new ending Goldwyn had H.C. Potter direct a brief coda to lighten the mood, and removed Wyler's last scene.

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The point is not that Hawks, Welles, Wyler, Murnau, Lubitsch were unique but that quite a few filmmakers in Hollywood could make films with great creative freedom, and not necessarily with less of it than their peers among prestigious European and Japanese filmmakers. Another point is that one must differentiate between staff directors and freelancers. A third, central, point is that the actual, lived reality in which they and all other filmmakers work is complex, constantly changing from time to time, from film to film, and often unsuitable for general theories and generalisations. It is this complexity which makes studying film history so interesting and exciting.

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Charles Vidor directed a couple of re-takes with Rita Hayworth for Only Angels Have Wings. I am not sure why, but in any event it does not effect the film.

Some sources and references:

Thomas Schatz's book The Genius of the System (1989)
Scott Eyman's book Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (1993)
Jan Herman's book A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler (1995)
Todd McCarthy's book Howard Hawks - The Grey Fox of Hollywood (1997)
Vanda Krefft's book The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (2017)

Richard B. Jewell's article "How Howard Hawks Brought Baby Up: An Apologia for the Studio System" (1984)

Mitchell Leisen was interviewed by Leonard Maltin in 1970 but now I do not recall for which publication.

Speaking of lesser known filmmakers, I am curious about the contracts of someone like Mervyn LeRoy, perhaps the most successful and powerful person among the staff directors at Warner Bros. in the 1930s. Further research is definitely warranted, not just because he made such important and fine films as Little Caesar (1930), I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) or They Won't Forget (1937) but also because he and producers Hal B. Wallis and Darryl F. Zanuck can be said to have been particularly important in the creation of Warner Bros. particular style of filmmaking. And how did he compare to someone like Roy Del Ruth, even lesser known today yet Warner's highest paid director at the time? But having read whatever books and articles about LeRoy I could find (which was not much) I was not particularly more enlightened, other than that James Cagney was not at all a fan of him as a director or as a person.

100 years of Ingmar Bergman

Today is not only Bastille Day but also the centenary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, so he will (again) be the theme of this post. I was at a Bergman conference last month in Lund in the south of Sweden, the town towards which they travel in Wild Strawberries (1957), so he has had an unusually active presence of late. During and after the conference I read a lot of books about Bergman, some old ones I had read before and some new ones. Robin Wood's book really is one of the best, and as it has been updated and re-issued in 2013 (the version I read) it is both old and new. I was not particularly impressed by any of the entirely new books (you are better of just watching the films) but if I were to recommend one of those available in English it would be Alexis Luko's Sonatas, Screams and Silence (2016).

The Magician (Ansiktet 1958)

When I say I was not impressed by them I mean that I did not learn anything new about Bergman, so if you have not spent as much time with his film and his archives as I have you might find them more interesting, but I do think there are too many books about him. Despite there being many important topics that have not really been explored so far the books so often are about the same old things, or they use Bergman as an excuse to talk about other, unrelated things. Regardless of how important and good he was, the majority of filmmakers are vastly under-researched and among them there are many that are as interesting, or might be as interesting, as Bergman. Consider F.W. Murnau. How can it be that there has not been a single book in English about his life and work since Lotte Eisner's Murnau, originally from 1964, and then revised a bit in 1973? It is now out of print, and she did not say all there is to say about Murnau. The only Murnau book now in print is, I believe, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Ein Melancholiker des Films, published by Deutsche Kinemathek in 2003. And where are the books on, say, George Sherman and Márta Mészáros? (Catherine Portuges's book about Mészáros from 1993 seems to be out of print too.)

Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna 1963)

One reason why so many write about Bergman, as well as Hitchcock, is that they have not just made the films but also willingly talked about them and about themselves, and have had a strong public persona, carefully crafted. They are famous among people at large, not just among those interested in film, and fame obviously appeals to film scholars as much as to the next guy. It has become something of an industry, a self-perpetuating Bergman-Hitchcock-complex (and a handful of other directors), so there will be more books about them, and hopefully some might add something new.

But that apparent openness of Bergman to talk about himself and his films is also a problem because he is such a performance artist. Everything he does is an act, which is why you should never take anything he says as being true in any conventional way. He invents things, embellishes things or twists them around and adjusts them to his daily mood. Many of the stories he tells about his own life and his childhood are invented and often have little to do with what actually happened, whether it was something good or bad. Yet many critics and scholars use Bergman's own sayings and writings in an uncritical way as if he was telling it like it is (or was). He is not, and they should restrain themselves from relying on it. That is a topic I will have to explore further another day.

But here are some topics I have already explored because I too have written about Bergman of course. I do like his work after all, whether books, TV-productions, films or stage adaptations (his version of Yukio Mishima's play Madame de Sade was amazing), and because I have had so much to do with this work, professionally.

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/01/ingmar-bergman-stories.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/04/bergmans-films-of-1940s.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2013/05/bergmans-favourite-films.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2014/04/bergman-and-taxes.html

Mise en scène

The world is filled with film terms that are vague, ambiguous and over-used and mise en scène is most certainly such a term. Since it is a vague term, and is used differently in different contexts, it will never be definitively defined, and certainly not by me. Of course many have written about it, including some of the sharpest critics writing now such as Glenn Kenny and Adrian Martin. Kenny, when writing about Horizons West (Budd Boetticher 1952) in this post, focuses on the "clarity and momentum and the necessary information placed in the correct space with little sense of fuss or strain. Which could, in a sense, be mise-en-scene." Martin has written a whole new book on the subject, Mise en Scène and Film Style (2014). He there highlights the fact that mise en scène means different things to different people in different countries at different times, and he distinguishes between two aspects.

"There is mise en scène as the global history - still to be fully, comprehensible written - of how film-makers made their films, what structures and effects of style they created in their work; this could be called a history of forms in cinema. Then there is mise en scène as the history (again, global) of what critics, theorists and commentators have said, written and thought in their quest to define and use tools to understand the films they see, study, analyse and transmit to others." (Martin 2014: xviii)

The term comes from the theatre and it is not obvious that it should be something to argue about since it would seem to refer to whatever is within the frame (including the angle of the frame), and nothing else. So the actors, lighting, set, décor, depth of field and so on. But since it is a theatre term there is friction when applied to the cinema. Two obvious things is that 1) you have editing in films but not in the theatre and 2) in the theatre the stage is fixed and space is restricted whereas in film space is limitless, and the camera can move. When what is in the frame is constantly changing, the camera moving from one location to another, what becomes of mise en scène? When a film is shot outdoors is it still relevant to use the term? Is it Manhattan which is the mise en scène in the opening sequence of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979)? Some argue that it is. In The Film Experience: An Introduction, Patricia White and Timothy Corrigan talks about the desert in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962) as mise en scène. They also argue that "architecture of a town might be described as a public mise-en-scène" (2012: 64), but now we are getting to the point where everything is mise en scène...

In Film Art: An Introduction, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell provide four elements of mise en scène, setting, costumes and make-up, lighting and staging, and among their many examples they use a scene from Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) as an example, a lightning storm over the prairie. Likewise, in "Afterword: the Auteur Theory Revisited" (to be found in later editions of The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968), Andrew Sarris defines mise en scène as "all the means available to a director to express his attitude towards his subject. This takes in cutting, camera movement, pacing, the direction of players and their placement in the decor, the angle and distance of the camera, an even the content of a shot". But I find all this unsatisfying, and too broad. If mise en scène is simply what is seen in a film, what distinguish it from cinematography? Jacques Rivette had another answer. “Here's a good definition of mise en scène - it's what's lacking in the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.” (Incidentally, I think Laura Mulvey claimed that melodrama was “the genre of mise en scène”.)

If mise en scène is to be used I feel it should be used to refer to something more specific; something deliberately, artificially created, staged, for the purpose of the shooting of a scene, to return the term to its theatrical roots. But I would also include sound and colour grading as being part of it. What is required is unity, coherence and spatial awareness (space being integrated in the scene, with the actors and their movements). Some seem to connect it especially with "classical cinema", and some conflate it with long takes and elaborate camera movements, but I see no reason to do that. Editing can be a part of it when it is done within the context of the specific scene, such as from a medium shot to a close-up, or from a high angle shot to a low angle shot. But a tracking shot through a real city street would not count as mise en scène whereas this shot from Henry Hathaway's Niagara (1953) would.

But outdoor tracking shots are not excluded wholesale of course. In Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard does a very long tracking shot alongside a country road which is filled with cars, people, animals and various activities and set-pieces, staged by Godard for the film, and that might very well be regarded as a striking example of mise en scène. Instead of forcing the term into the straitjacket of a definition, I will leave it somewhat open, but I still want it to refer to something specific, the coherent, spatially aware scene I mentioned above. Its occurrences are all around us, in films, in video games, in art installations, in paintings. Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, from 1656, is an excellent example.

In films the term is for me especially connected to F.W. Murnau, Henry King and Douglas Sirk, because their mise en scène is frequently so striking, meticulous, sometimes overwhelming, and complete (or integrated), it is where they put the most emphasise and tenderly cared for. But this is more of a personal hang-up; there is no objective reason for emphasising those three and not, say, David Lean, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Akira Kurosawa, Wong Kar-Wai, or Carol Reed, among many others. Unlike Rivette in his comment quoted above, for me mise en scène is not related to quality, it is a neutral element of a film, and it might be good or bad. Whereas somebody like V.F. Perkins prefers unity and coherence and compare it unfavourably to fragmentation and disparity, I do not favour one over the other. It is not a contest but different ways of filmmaking, and to each his own.

Chinese Roulette (Fassbinder 1976)

The scene below, from Michael Bay's second Transformers film, Revenge of the Fallen (2009), is a favourite of mine, especially the part when all the marbles (tiny transformers) fall down the ventilation shaft and then come together to form a much bigger transformer, a large copy of all the small individual ones. It is both ingenious and beautiful, in its idea as well as in its execution. But Bay pays almost no attention to space here, or the surroundings, so this is not what I would characterise as great mise en scène. Or is it perhaps after all in line with my own view of mise en scène, narrow and vague as it is? But it does not matter for in any event the sequence is excellent.




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For those who want to read more about Adrian Martin's thoughts on mise en scène but have neither the time nor the money to invest in his book, try this piece. In his book he also suggests that should we want "a decent English translation for mise en scène, staging is not bad". (2014: 15) Yet he seems to think that there is a lot more to it than that.

Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman 1975)

A film from every year

People always ask me about my favourite films, sometimes in general and sometimes with specifications (best Japanese film, best film with Myrna Loy) and I answer as best as I can. I also like to make lists, as many do. Some frown upon lists, finding them demeaning and distortionous.* And they can be, if done badly or taken too seriously. But as a service to anybody who wonders about my favourites and as an excuse to make lists, they will be a more regular feature on Fredrik on Film from now on. Different kinds of lists, with different aims.

Today's list is chronological, featuring my favourite feature fiction films from (almost) every year since 1913. Before 1913 films were rarely of any great length, and the few that exists I have not seen. Neither have I seen any from 1914, as far as I can recall. (Unfortunately I have seen very few films from the 1910s in general, but those I have seen have in general been good, not least those by Cecil B. DeMille, who is undoubtedly one of the best filmmakers of that decade. Perhaps the best, together with Victor Sjöström.) But here is the list in full. I have tried to choose only one for every year but accept my apologies for those years when it was impossible to do so. It was especially hard in those magical years after World War 2.**

1913 Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström)
1914 ?
1915 Regeneration (Raoul Walsh)
1916 Intolerance (D.W. Griffith)
1917 Thomas Graal’s Best Film (Mauritz Stiller)
1918 Old Wives for New (Cecil B. DeMille)
1919 Don’t Change Your Husband (Cecil B. DeMille)
1920 Erotikon (Mauritz Stiller)
1921 Tol’able David (Henry King)
1922 Phantom (F.W. Murnau) Nosferatu (Murnau)
1923 A Woman in Paris (Charlie Chaplin)
1924 Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton)
1925 Tartuffe (F.W. Murnau)
1926 Faust (F.W. Murnau)
1927 Sunrise (F.W. Murnau)
1928 The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg) A Girl in Every Port (Howard Hawks)
1929 Asphalt (Joe May)
1930 The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh)
1931 M (Fritz Lang)
1932 Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg)
1933 Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch)
1934 Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks)
1935 Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen) Toni (Jean Renoir)
1936 Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir)
1937 The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey) La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir)
1938 Holiday (George Cukor)
1939 Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
1940 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
1941 Stormy Waters aka Remorques (Jean Grémillon)
1942 In Which We Serve (David Lean) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur)
1943 Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock) Changing Trains (Hasse Ekman)
1944 Laura (Otto Preminger)
1945 Brief Encounter (David Lean)
1946 My Darling Clementine (John Ford) The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks)
1947 Odd Man Out (Carol Reed) Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur) Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger)
1948 The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed) Letter From an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls) Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky) The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger) Rope (Alfred Hitchcock)

The Fallen Idol, with a for Reed typical angle.

1949 The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls) Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis) The Third Man (Carol Reed) Border Incident (Anthony Mann)
1950 All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
1951 An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli) Bullfighter and the Lady (Budd Boetticher) Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock) The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith)
1952 Casque d’Or (Jacques Becker)
1953 Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini)
1954 A Star is Born (George Cukor)
1955 The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis)
1956 A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson)
1957 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick) Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa)
1958 Man of the West (Anthony Mann) Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk)
1959 Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks) The 400 Blows (François Truffaut)
1960 Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard) The Apartment (Billy Wilder)
1961 The Hustler (Robert Rossen)
1962 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
1963 The Leopard (Luchino Visconti)
1964 Lilith (Robert Rossen) The Train (John Frankenheimer)
1965 Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger)
1966 Persona (Ingmar Bergman) Nayak (Satyajit Ray)
1967 Le samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville)
1968 Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone)
1969 The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
1970 The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci) Wild Child (François Truffaut) The Adversary (Satyajit Ray)
1971 A Touch of Zen (Hu King)
1972 Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah)
1973 The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann)
1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
1975 Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
1976 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
1977 Annie Hall (Woody Allen)
1978 Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi) Fedora (Billy Wilder)
1979 Alien (Ridley Scott) Manhattan (Woody Allen)
1980 Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme) Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
1981 Southern Comfort (Walter Hill) Thief (Michael Mann) Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Blind Chance

1982 The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese)
1983 The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan) Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola)
1984 A Passage to India (David Lean)
1985 A Room With a View (James Ivory)
1986 Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
1987 Hope and Glory (John Boorman)
1988 Chocolat (Claire Denis)
1989 The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley)
1990 Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami) Trust (Hal Hartley)
1991 La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette) The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
1992 Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood) In the Soup (Alexandre Rockwell)
1993 Remains of the Day (James Ivory)
1994 Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai) Quiz Show (Robert Redford)
1995 Heat (Michael Mann)
1996 Nénette et Boni (Claire Denis) Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson)
1997 Paper Airplanes (Farhad Mehranfar)
1998 After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda)
1999 Three Kings (David O. Russell)
2000 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
2001 Delbaran (Abolfazl Jalili) Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
2002 10 (Abbas Kiarostami)
2003 Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
2004 Collateral (Michael Mann)
2005 Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney)
2006 Still Life (Jia Zhangke) I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (Park Chan-wook)
2007 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov)
2008 The Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi)
2009 A Serious Man (Ethan & Joel Coen)
2010 Last Night (Massy Tadjedin)

It is perhaps worth pointing out that all films on the list are not equally good. There are many films not listed that are much better than some of those above, that is inevitable. And consequently some directors, such as Raoul Walsh and Wes Anderson, are not represented with the films I think are their best. And before you start writing an angry comment accusing me of dimwitted philistinism because your favourite film is missing, please remember that it is possible I have not seen it, or that it stands as a very close second on its year.

A final note: Murnau's reign in the 1920s is remarkable. He was some artist.

Faust

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*Why is not distortionous a word?
** This was harder than I thought. I got a few films attached to the wrong year and has made adjustments, and some films have been replaced. On some films I have noticed that my sources give different years, such as Gun Crazy (1949 and 1950), Journey to Italy (1953 and 1954) and The Adversary (1970 and 1972). I do not know why that is, but I have had to choose which year to use. Blind Chance was made in 1981 but the Polish censors kept it from being released until 1987.

Frank Borzage

In order to appreciate the films of Frank Borzage (pronounced Bore-zay-ghee), you might have to take a leap of faith. A faith in the director's ability to raise the most risible material to the level of the sublime. But also to succumb to the filmmaker's own faith in the power of love to transcend and transgress everything, including poverty, war, tyranny and even death. And such are Frank Borzage's gifts, and passions, that he more often than not rewards this leap of faith with films of extraordinary beauty and magic.

Andrew Sarris once said that just by looking at the titles for Robert Aldrich's films one might get an idea of what was on his mind. Some of Borzage's films also have great titles, such as 7th Heaven (1927), History Is Made at Night (1937) and Moonrise (1948) which hints at Borzage's romanticism, among other things. (It also suggests that he's considerably less cynical and nihilistic than Aldrich, who sports titles like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Ten Seconds to Hell (1959).)

There's a strong Borzage cult among cinephiles around the world but I wonder how many ordinary film scholars and/or film enthusiasts there are that are familiar with his work. Even a fan such as myself have seen precious few of the many films he has directed. But it's not like he's an outcast or anything like that, in his days he was both popular and celebrated, and he was the first person to win an Academy Award for best direction, for 7th Heaven, and he won again for Bad Girl (1931). In 1961, the Director's Guild of America gave him an Lifetime Achievement Award. But now there's much silence.

He began as an actor, and it was said in 1915 that he had "better control of facial expression than any other screen artist before the public today". When he began directing, he transferred his own command of the face to the actors he directed, with his camera watching them intently, to see what they were feeling. Because that's what his cinema is all about, feelings, and he found ever new ways of expressing those feelings visually. He could be both bold and experimental, and when he's not lingering on a face (or on feet), he sometimes moves his camera in the most remarkable ways, tracking, panning and dollying, up and down, left and right, or round in circles. And it's the combination of the deadly serious passion with which he and his actors tackle the powerful emotions the characters feel, and the elaborate and expressionistic cinematography with which they are shot that makes his films, at their best, so strong and unforgettable. The share exuberance of the camera work makes even a somewhat silly comedy like His Butler's Sister (1943), with Franchot Tone and Deanna Durbin, just dazzling. But one flaw with His Butler's Sister is that there isn't much at stake in it, as far as the lovers are concerned. Borzage's best films are those when the cruel and hateful world is constantly threatening to destroy both the love and the lovers, whether it is poverty or war or sickness or fascism. Borzage is not turning away from the world, he knows that it isn't pretty, but all the more reason to have faith in love. It's a strange thing that the most romantic scene in History Is Made at Night is towards the end when the two lovers have come to terms with the fact that they are going to die and sit together in the dark, looking at each other and whispering about the life they never had together. The last ten minutes of that film are about as moving as a film will ever get.

One thing about Borzage's style is that the camera is seldom detached or neutral. It often takes on a symbolic presence. It can become one of the characters, or the ghost of someone who has died, or some kind of ethereal being. In 7th Heaven there's even a point-of-view shot from the perspective of God. But as Borzage's is a cinema of images transcending words and scripts, I find it more suitable to show a couple of clips, rather than write much more.

The first one is from 7th Heaven, made in 1927, when most filmmakers wanted to be F.W. Murnau (Murnau is without doubt one of the, say, five most important filmmakers of all time). In this scene, the man takes the woman to show her his apartment, which is on the top floor.

Arguably the last great film Borzage made was Moonrise, a delirious and almost surreal nightmare of a film. Here's its most celebrated scene, on the ferris wheel:

As a humanist and romanticism, Borzage was early on attacking fascism and nazism. It is often said that before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, only Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) had dared to deal with Germany and nazism. That is of course an ignorant statement, and besides the likes of Lubitsch and Hitchcock, Borzage was another filmmaker dealing with the situation in Europe at the time. They attacked it from various angles, each using his own brand of filmmaking, with Chaplin through slapstick, Lubitsch through his patented combination of suave wit and satire and with Hitchcock making a shocking thriller. Borzage of course focused on love and friendship, how fascism is the opposite of love. The most oblique example is the horrifying and utterly sad The Mortal Storm (1940). This clip show how the two lovers, played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, are caught in a forest of arms raised to salute the Führer (the film is set in Germany) including people who were their friends and loved ones. The sequence is also one of many examples of Borzage's use of low ceilings to create an oppressive atmosphere. Unfortunately I can't embed the clip here, but you can watch it by clicking here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy2SaQjpERo (According to Kent Jones, rumours that Victor Saville, it's producer, directed most of it are not true.)

Film history is so extraordinary rich and surprising, and there's always more to watch and learn, and yet most people stay on the well-trodden pathways, seldom venturing far from the, often randomly, established centre of canonical films (which is perhaps a reason why so much of taught film history is just plain wrong) . But on a day such as this, Valentine's day, the cinema of Frank Borzage is perhaps the most appropriate to discover, or re-discover.