The Power and the Glory (1933)

It is not unusual that, when Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) is written about, The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard 1933) is mentioned as a possible inspiration. The earlier film is not widely seen but it is worth seeking out both because it is similar to Citizen Kane and because it is a good film in its own right. It is also Preston Sturges's first original screenplay and one of the first times Spencer Tracy plays a leading role, even though he is not as extraordinary good as he would later become, so it is a historically significant film.

It is about a man, Tom Garner, who works himself up from humble beginnings to become a powerful and wealthy man (he is in the railway business) but who alienate his family and dies alone. At the moment of his death he utters one single word. The film begins with the death and is then told in non-chronological flashbacks that take place on three planes, the rise from childhood, the fall, and the present day, and is quite intricate. So the connections with Citizen Kane are rather obvious. Welles though said (in This is Orson Welles) that he had not seen The Power and the Glory and since he was in general not shy of highlighting his inspirations he was probably telling the truth. But it is of course possible that Herman J. Mankiewicz, the co-writer on Citizen Kane, had seen it.

The script was so advanced that a new word was coined in order to explain it, "narratage", a term that did not really catch on. It refers to the use of a complex flashback structure that is authored by a voice-over to help give a sense of order and continuity. The Power and the Glory was not the first film with a flashback structure, that was common enough, but it was pushing the concept further.

The person who tells the story is Tom's friend Henry, one of the few who actually liked Tom. But how does Henry know all these things? In one scene Tom asks Henry "Do you know?" Henry answers "No." and Tom replies "It's a secret." Yet Henry has told us about it, or rather, he is in fact telling us about it, so he does seem to know. Is he even to be trusted? There are many in the film who are deceitful after all. The most remarkable deception is when Tom's second wife becomes pregnant and it turns out that it is not Tom but Tom's son from his first marriage who is the father.

The cinematographer of The Power and the Glory is James Wong Howe and there are some striking deep focus shots (such as when Sally Garner decides to kill herself), and there is a fine visual connection between the beginning and the end, with lights beaming through the windows in the opening sequence (the funeral) and the scene at the end when Tom dies. Howe and the director William K. Howard did several films together and who was primarily responsible for the look of them is hard to say.

The director William K. Howard was listed under "Subjects for Further Research" in Andrew Sarris's American Cinema and he has not yet been properly research. But he has made a number of fine films, sometimes working with James Wong Howe, and he had style and force. An important early film is said to be White Gold (1927). Another is Transatlantic (1931) and then there is the inspired The Princess Comes Across (1936), where Carole Lombard plays an actress who pretends she is Olga of Sweden, whom she plays as if she was Greta Garbo. If ever there was a meta-performance...

The theme of The Power and the Glory is similar to Citizen Kane, and many other stories as well. It is perhaps one of the oldest of tales, how greed and ambition can ruin a person. On his deathbed Tom utters one word. The word is "Sally", his first wife and one true love. He lost her, and everything else that mattered.

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Here is an earlier post about Sturges. When Sturges directed his first film, The Great McGinty (1940), which he had also written, he was again telling the story of the rise and fall of a man through flashbacks. It is less complex and more light at heart, but a very good film.

The deep focus conundrum

I have posted several times about conventional film history and the many issues I have with it (links are at the end of this post). One such issue concerns deep focus and its history.

At a lecture about Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) at Stockholm University in the 1990s the lecturer was talking, among other things, about Renoir's "revolutionary" use of deep focus. The lecturer was bad, confused deep focus with deep space, and the central argument was very weak. Yet as I soon discovered this is how historians and scholars in general view deep focus, or depth of field. Here is typical quote taken from a standard textbook, David A. Cook's A History of Narrative Film (4th edition, 2004): "Renoir was the first major director of the sound film to compose his shots in depth." (p. 322)

Today almost all writing on deep focus is about Orson Welles, the cinematographer Gregg Toland and their work on Citizen Kane (1941). Here are some more quotes from textbooks that are often required readings for university students:

In the third edition of The Cinema Book (2007) it says: "Deep-focus cinematography, in which objects in several planes of depth are kept in equally sharp focus, is commonly associated with certain Hollywood films of the 1940s. Patrick Ogle dates its emergence at around 1941." (p. 149. Although the phrasing in the quote make it sound ambiguous there is no effort to question that association or Ogle.)

The above quoted Cook also writes that "the creative genius of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland, restored the cinema's physical capacity for deep focus". (p. 322)

In The Story of Film (2004, the book from which the series springs), Mark Cousins writes that in the 1940s "[t]he visual ideas of Welles and Toland started to influence John Huston and William Wyler" (p. 179).

Understanding Film Theory (2011) add this caveat to the section about deep focus in Citizen Kane: "This technique was not new and had been practised in France by Jean Renoir." (p. 47)

These quotes are just a few examples. A person who is reading a book or essay that mentions deep focus would almost certainly conclude that it was something that appeared in the 1930s in the films of Jean Renoir and then became common in the 1940s thanks to the innovations in Citizen Kane. What is puzzling is that this is transparently wrong. Despite these claims many major filmmakers such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Frank Borzage, Howard Hawks, Sadao Yamanaka, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Hathaway, William Wyler and John Ford used deep focus all through the 1930s, and earlier. Another key player was cinematographer James Wong Howe. Contra Cousins's statement it should be said that Wyler's films in the 1940s look rather like the films he made in the 1930s, deep focus and all, but not really like Welles's films. Generally Welles is more baroque and expressionistic whereas Wyler is more calm and naturalistic. An exception perhaps is Wyler's Dead End (1937), which Toland shot, and which is rather expressionistic, both in its use of depth and lighting, more so than usual for Wyler. But that was of course several years before Citizen Kane. If anybody influenced anybody it was Wyler who influenced Welles.

Dead End

But it is not just certain major directors that were using deep focus, all kinds of films by all kinds of filmmakers from all over the world used deep focus, from random B-movies to the Art Deco glory of Fred and Ginger musicals. It should further be noted that deep focus did not appear suddenly in the 1930s either, it was always there. To take one magnificent example among many; in Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström 1913) there is a sequence where a man (husband and father) is dying in the bedroom, succumbing to an illness, while in the next room, in the back, his children are playing and through the doorway we see them, oblivious of their father's death struggle. Instead of cutting back and forth, Sjöström shows both rooms at the same time, in the same shot, and this requires depth.

This is just after the wife has discovered that he has died.

F.W. Murnau was another master of deep focus compositions. Here is an example from The Last Laugh (1924).

So there is nothing new or special about Renoir's and Welles's use of deep focus. Actually, in itself deep focus is not particularly special at all. It is how you use it that matters, not that you use it. Here is an image from Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937), with a lot of depth, but the depth has a different meaning than in the examples above. Here it is to emphasis her solitude, like if she was modelling for an Edward Hopper painting.

On the right in the frame there is a poster for another film from 1937, Souls at Sea, by Henry Hathaway. That is a film that has a more expressionistic visual style, and often dazzling use of depth, and perhaps an influence, among many others, for Welles and Toland when they made Citizen Kane, not least its use of cramped sets with visible inner ceilings and canted angles. Another master of deep focus was Raoul Walsh, all through his career, from 1915 and onwards. His use of it is a visual expression of his ideas, and remarkable both in its depth and in its meanings. One day, hopefully, it will seem as strange to write about deep focus without mentioning Walsh, and James Wong Howe, as it would be to write about post-war Swedish cinema without mentioning Ingmar Bergman.

Where these mistaken ideas come from is not clear, possibly with André Bazin's writings on deep focus in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example the essay "The evolution of the language of cinema". It seems film scholars are more keen on reading books than watching films, and since most books write the same things the mistakes and errors continues. But by looking at films from the 1920s and 1930s it is easy to see how prevalent deep focus was, and in how many different ways it was being used. A film like Ford's Stagecoach (1939), that used expressive deep focus before Citizen Kane, is usually described as a rare precursor. Instead it should be seen as a good example of a rather common form of filmmaking. Often when film history gets distorted it is in order to simplify but that is not the case with the history of deep focus. It is not less simple to rightfully say "Deep focus has been a tool used by many filmmakers since the dawn of cinema." instead of wrongfully claim "Deep focus tentatively appeared in the 1930s and then became common after 1941."

Here, finally, is another marvellous Wyler shot. This is from Dodsworth (1936):

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Another thing to keep in mind is that what appears to be deep focus is sometimes an illusion, through matte paintings, set design or trick filming (such as splicing two different shots together through an optical printer), and not technically deep focus at all. This is the case with some of the most famous shots from Citizen Kane. Special effects has been used ever since the dawn of cinema, and that includes faking deep focus.

The eagerness to equate deep focus with Gregg Toland becomes comical in The Film Experience - An Introduction (2009). There his work on Wyler's The Heiress (1949) is mentioned (p. 102) which is peculiar because it was made after Toland's death. Leo Tover was its cinematographer.

Three earlier posts on problems with conventional film history:
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/09/on-film-history-and-art-of-studying-it.html

http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2011/03/max-weber-goes-to-movies.html

http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/03/on-history-of-auteurs.html

Cinematographers

"You have to understand the nature of light."

In my thesis I argue that the look of Hasse Ekman's films vary depending which cinematographer he worked with. The films he made together with masters such as Göran Strindberg and Sven Nykvist, and Gösta Roosling, are on a completely different level than the rest (which were often shot by Martin Bodin and Hilding Bladh). Ekman had an idea and a style, so you would not mistake a film by Ekman for a film by Bergman even if they would have the same cinematographer, but you will still be able to tell which of Ekman's films were shot by Strindberg and which were shot by Bladh for example.

When it comes to artists in film I think cinematographers are among the most important, and it is a shame that they, like so many other contributors, are often neglected by critics and scholars. Once I heard about an essay written about Gordon Willis and Carlo di Palma's work with Woody Allen. I got very excited that somebody was considering their vital contributions and I said to the writer that I thought Willis could light a set better than most. She replied that she did not know anything about lighting. She did not even know that this is what cinematographers do. I struggled to keep a straight face... But this is often the case. If you are not somebody really famous like Sven Nykvist or Jack Cardiff you seldom get any light shone on you, even though you yourself spend most of your time lighting others.

"Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem."

One of the greatest of all cinematographers, John Alton, has written a book called Painting With Light and that is what they do. The work of a good cinematographer (or DP - director of photography) can elevate the quality of a film far above the level of the script and the direction. A cinematographer, much like a director or a writer, can put his or her own individual mark on a film. Alton is an example of this, but there are others too. To name one example, the films Billy Wilder made with John F. Seitz look different from the ones Wilder made with Charles Lang. The films shot by Seitz have a harsher look, more clearly defined contrasts between white and black then those Wilder and Lang did together. But then again, the films that Lang did with Henry Hathaway look very different from than ones he made with Wilder.

"You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward."

Different DPs have their own fields that they work within. William Wyler preferred to have his films shot with extraordinary depth of field so he liked to work with Gregg Toland, beginning in 1936, who was an expert on that. They made seven films together, pushing the medium as far as it would go, much like John Ford would do with Toland on The Long Voyage Home (1940) and to a lesser extent on The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The following year Toland also worked with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane (1941). When Wyler made The Heiress (1949) he was unhappy about having to work with Leo Tover instead, who was not as good as Toland.

Speaking of Citizen Kane, it is worth pointing out that many innovations in film art have been made by cinematographers. One example is the above mentioned John F. Seitz, who took out 18 different patents during the course of his career. Another key innovator was James Wong Howe, the former boxer who became an ace cameraman. Among the things he is famous for his expressive use of deep focus on Transatlantic (William K. Howard 1931) and for using handheld cameras, while on roller skates, on Body and Soul (Robert Rossen 1947). Howe also wrote an article, The Cameraman Talks Back, because he was upset about the lack of recognition for his work, and that of his peers. The article also gives a good overview of what a cinematographer does. One of my favourites in Howe's oeuvre is Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick 1957), which looks absolutely fantastic. It too might have influenced the French New Wave, not least its scenes out on streets or in bars feels similar.

There were two key cinematographers of the French New Wave, Henri Decaë and Raoul Coutard. Decaë had made documentaries and short films, and preferred to work outdoors with handheld cameras. That way of working he brought with him when he began shooting films first with Jean-Pierre Melville (such as Bob le flambeur (1956) and later as part of the French New Wave. The most famous example is probably The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, François Truffaut 1959) but he also worked with Louis Malle and Claude Chabrol. But perhaps even more important was Coutard. He was cinematographer on films such as Breathless (A bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard 1960), Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste, Truffaut 1960), Lola (Jacques Demy 1961) and Vivre sa vie (Godard 1961). Coutard and Godard worked together for several decades, and hence they are among the key couples in film history. Other important cinematographer/director relationships are Robert Burks and Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Doyle and Wong Kar-Wai, Agnes Godard and Claire Denis, Gunnar Fischer/Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman and Billy Bitzer and D.W. Griffith. But some actors also form professional relationships with cinematographers, such as Greta Garbo with William H. Daniels (they did 22 films together and he clearly had a part in creating her aura and her fame).

This has not been a technical post but you can talk at great length about lenses, the film speed, candela and such, but that can wait for another day. Today the aim was just to celebrate their work.

"There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job."

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All the quotes are from Conrad Hall, one of the great masters. He was a treasured legend among cinematographers, and active all the way up to his death, in 2003. His last film was also one of his best: Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes 2002).

This post is based on one I wrote several years ago for my Swedish film blog. It has been slightly amended 2014-03-07.