On ambiance

When we watch films there are different things, different aspects of them, that we react to and to which we attach importance. It can be a performance, the music, the message, the set design. Although what it really is we react to, and why, is often unclear. Afterwards we usually try to make a coherent argument to describe our instinctual response, which is often subconscious, and we may or may not be successful in this rationalisation of our feelings. But there are many things that influence us that we might not realise or that we are unable to articulate. One such thing is a film's ambiance.

I do not know to what an extent this term is used within film criticism or academia, if at all, but for me it might be the most important part of the film, even though it is difficult to capture and analyse. I have been reluctant to use it in my writings because it is sometimes seen as a vacuous word in itself, something used my ad-men to describe a restaurant or hotel lobby, but since the word and the meaning I attach to it matters to me, and not in a glib way but as something very real and fundamental, I have used it on two occasions this year, as a way of sneaking it into the conversation. First in the article about Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem 1955) and then in the long article about Ingmar Bergman in the 1940s. (Although the first time I used it was actually already in 2013 when I wrote about Krzysztof Kieslowski.) This is what I wrote concerning Bergman, about Thirst (1949): "In general the staging, pacing and ambiance just feels distinctly Bergmanesque for the first time."

On the one hand it is rather straightforward what the word means, almost. Here is Oxford English Dictionary: "The character and atmosphere of a place." and also "Quality or character given to a sound recording by the space in which the sound occurs." Here is Cambridge Dictionary: "the character of a place or the quality it seems to have" The definitions are not exactly alike. Fowler's Modern English Usage, a fabulous book, is somewhat sceptical of the word: "It has now become a prime favourite of journalists and critics, usually as a pretentious synonym for surroundings, environment, milieu, atmosphere, and the like." ("Now" does not refer to 2018, my copy is the second edition from 1965.)

With regards to film I use ambiance to describe the overall feeling the film gives me, but not to say that the film was sad, or cheerful, or angry, but the combined effect of every single detail of the film. How editing, lighting, sound, line-readings, costumes, shot-length, camera angles, blocking, visual clarity, camera movements, colours, grading, actor personality, and other aspects work together to create this ambiance. The ambiance is unique for each film and it is not in the script but always the surprising end-result of the filmmaking process, something that grows out of the cumulative decisions taken during the making of it, from casting and onwards. This is where the magic can happen, something never taught but which happen through chance. Of course, the filmmakers make decisions that are more or less informed, intelligent, sensible or sensitive (some will be better than others) but as there are so many imponderables and moving parts you can never be certain how it will all come together in the end.

There is something mysterious with all art forms, with our engagement with it. But not just with art, it is the same with people. We may say that we like a certain person because she is kind, or generous, or has a good sense of humour, but we do not like everybody with those qualities equally much. Some we simply like more than others, and some we deeply love, and why it is this person and not that person is beyond us to truly comprehend because we would have to go down on such infinitesimal details to separate them, even subconscious reactions. Like-wise, Edward Hopper's paintings are very similar in technique, brush strokes, colours, motifs and so on but there are some I like considerably more than others. Their difference in ambiance is the reason.

Automat (1927)

Ambiance works on many levels. For example, there is a certain ambiance to be found in French cinema in general, but it will also change over time, so that one film from the 1930s has a different ambiance from one from the 1960s, and there can of course be more than one at the same time too. But this ambiance does not just come out of the place in which it is made. Allan Dwan's 1932 film While Paris Sleeps is set in France but it is not shot there and the dialogue is in English, as it is an American production. Yet its ambiance is strikingly French and not necessarily that of a typical Hollywood production of 1932. The same year Dwan made a film in Britain, Her First Affaire, and this has all the ambiance of a British production. So here the film is inflicted with the ambiance of its place of making whereas in While Paris Sleeps the ambiance comes from its setting, and probably from Dwan having watched French films for inspiration. Dwan is a highly gifted filmmaker but as of yet I have not felt a distinctly Dwanian ambiance, unless a chameleon-like (or Zelig-like) ambiance is his own unique quality. Although perhaps his later films like Silver Lode (1954), Tennessee's Partner (1955) and Slightly Scarlet (1956) exemplify a more consistent ambiance. (Now that is a great trio which is far from getting its due.)

While Paris Sleeps

But in general most filmmakers have their own ambiance, which could be seen as the one particular thing that really separate one from the other. There is in general talk of style and theme, but they can often overlap between filmmakers and many times they can be more in line with studios, genres, eras or movements. But the ambiance is different. Henry Hathaway and Henry King were both long-time employees at Twentieth Century-Fox under Darryl F. Zanuck and their films overlap in many ways. But they feel different. King is religious and Hathaway is not, which is partly a reason. King has in general a more opulent mise-en-scéne, stronger colours and more elaborate lighting patterns, and Hathaway has a more stringent and less gaudy style, and this also contribute to this difference. But it is also a question of movement, blocking, gesture, acting, attitude, humour and emphasis, all those things that are often not in the script but directorial decision made on the spot, from instinct as well as from personal theories about how it should be done. And every director will have their own ideas of how it should be done and therefore all directors are different, just as all other contributors to a film have their own ideas about how their particular contribution should be done. This is one reason why it is so interesting and enlightening to compare two filmmakers as superficially alike as Hathaway and King. Anybody can see that Claire Denis and Nora Ephron are different so there is not much excitement to be had from talking about that (as opposed to discussing their similarities), just as it is obvious how a film by Chantal Akerman is very different from a generic Hollywood film. But so what?

I said in my article about Ingmar Bergman's films of the 1940s that they felt different from one another. How his first film, Crisis (1946), felt closer to an American melodrama whereas his second film, It Rains on Our Love (1946), felt much closer to a generic Swedish film (with a touch of French poetic realism) and this is also a question of ambiance. It is partly about non-specificity, i.e. there is not much that you would have had to change if the script for Crisis were to have been shot by Universal in Hollywood instead of SF in Råsunda, but also partly about the less tangible things which are hard to describe but are just there, which is what ambiance is.

It can also change within films. To take a recent example, the opening sequence of Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard et. al. 2018) was really bad. It was tonally off, the dialogue did not work and there was no chemistry. But after the opening was over (where young Solo and the female lead Qi'ra are introduced) and the main story begins, after a sign saying "Three years later", it was like a completely different film. The ambiance had changed from one cut to the next, and what had been a bad film turned into a reasonably good film. I do not know if this was because of the chaotic production or what happened there, but it was interesting.

But ambiance is difficult because it takes a lot of hard work and effort to locate it and recognise it, and you have to watch a lot of films. This is not something that you can learn by readings books, it can only be picked up by watching films. If I watch one film from a country from where I have seen no other films, by a director of whom I have seen no other films, I can tell whether I like it or not but I have no idea where its ambiance comes from. I will be at a disadvantage. (This is something I find annoying when people write about Bergman's films of the 1940s and 1950s without having seen any other Swedish films of that time, yet do not take this fact into consideration in their analysis.) Yet, as I said above, ambiance is a central aspect of any film, and of any filmmaker's oeuvre; it should be at the heart of any auteur study.

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami 1994)

But there is no right answer as to what a given film's ambiance is. That is part of the process of engaging with art (of whatever kind). I prefer to see our experience of, or engagement with, art as a process, or dialogue, between us and the art work, which tends to be unstable in what meaning we take from it. Ambiance is part of that meaning, might even be its meaning as art, distinct from whatever political or philosophical meaning we might see in the work. So I will just end this essay by suggesting that it is in a film's ambiance that the art of the medium is to be found. The ambiance is the art.

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Avant-garde films or installations are often pure ambiance, as they have no story, narration or actors.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Many years ago a friend said, after I had insisted that he watch A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1946), that it had a different perspective from how to view the world, and that it consequently made the spectators view the world from a new perspective too. I have always felt it was a good way of describing the film, and the films of Powell and Pressburger in general. There is always more to the world than meets the eye they seem to be saying, something I have discussed before regarding their film A Canterbury Tale (1944). Now I have had my students watch A Matter of Life and Death, and afterwards they spent two hours talking about it freely. It was great fun.

The film begins with a British pilot flying towards home, the only remaining crew member on a Lancaster bomber returning from a raid over Germany, and right before he has to jump out without a parachute he talks on the radio to an American woman working on a British airfield; spending his last moments alive with her. What happens in the rest of the film is not as easy to describe. Due to a mistake from higher authorities he does not die, instead he finds himself on a beach (where he has a strange encounter with a young, naked, shepherd) and then he meets the woman whom he spoke to on the radio. When, belatedly, he is summoned to the next world he refuses to go. He was ready to die then but not now, and since they made a mistake he argues that he should be allowed to remain on earth.

This is the literal interpretation of the film. There are other possibilities, such as him having a brain injury which causes these hallucinations of another world, or that he actually died in the beginning and this is his afterlife fantasy. The film does leave it open as to what happens.

In A Matter of Life and Death, Powell and Pressburger effortlessly breaks through such conventional boundaries as death, time and space, making them seem irrelevant and transparent. Several people die in this film, death is a key subject, but when they die they are not really gone, they just move, move to another world which is a kind of secular heaven open for everyone regardless of nationality, religion or ethnicity. But they can move in our world too, at least some of them. Moving between this world and the next is here comparatively easy, there is a huge, potentially endless, escalator between the two sides, the monochrome world (which is the other world) and the Technicolor world (which is ours). But is it literally happening, or is it just in the mind of a dying man? Well, it might not matter. Who is to say what is real anyway? Not Powell and Pressburger. This is the world, or worlds, they are presenting to us and it is up to us to accept or reject them, depending upon our fears, beliefs and prejudices. This is a deeply philosophical film, as their films usually are, speculating in various ways about mind, matter, space, time, love, history and nationality. What these concepts are, what they mean, how they affect us, how they conspire to make us what we are, how they are the bedrock of humanity itself. That might sound like a lot to deal with, and Powell and Pressburger are not timid filmmakers.

Besides love and death, time is also a central aspect here. In the other world, time does not exist. Time ends when you die, and becomes separated from space. "We are talking in space, not time." as one of the agents of the other world says. He also adds "After all, what is time? A mere tyranny." When he is on earth, time stops, or rather it pauses for the people who are alive whereas it continues (since it does not exist) for those who are dead. After you die you are forever exactly as you were at the moment of death, living in a constant now.

But A Matter of Life and Death is also about England, England at war (although war was over by the time the film opened). In one spectacular sequence in the beginning a main character, a doctor called Frank Reeves, is observing the small village in which he lives through a camera obscura. With it he can see everything that is going on in the village from a room in his house. In one sense he is spying, or being the eye of God, but there is nothing malevolent about it. He is not like Peeping Tom, from Powell's later film, a disturbed and homicidal man. Reeves does it out of joy and love, even though that does not prevent it from being slightly unsettling. What he is observing is Powell's England, a brief love letter to the place of his childhood, to some extent a rural fantasy (like A Canterbury Tale). This is what is contrasted with the celestial fantasy of the other world. England is also contrasted with America, of two different cultures fighting the same war. (England's colonial crimes are also brought to light, albeit briefly.)

Powell and Pressburger and their team at the Archers, such as cinematographer Jack Cardiff, production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth and editor Reginald Mills (the composer Brian Easedale had not joined them yet, he came along with the next film, Black Narcissus (1947)), have always been pushing the medium, all aspects of it, to go further and be bolder, than what might be considered possible or practical. There is such an unrestrained imagination at work here that it is thrilling just to watch and see what they are up to, how far they are willing to push things, and A Matter of Life and Death is perhaps their most audacious film. In that respect re-watching their films will always be a slightly lesser experience from one angle, because the aesthetic surprises constantly coming at you will now already have been experienced. But that does of course not mean that their films should be seen only once. The craft, the ideas, and the powerful emotions remain from one viewing to the next, in this world and in any other that might exist.

Judging by the two-hour discussion I had with the 60 students, they seemed quite taken by it, and approached it from all possible angles. The use of colour, the concept of time, the acting, ideas on nationality and heritage, narrative structure, ethics and philosophical viewpoints. I had provided them with some keywords before but they went beyond them, and everything was meticulously analysed. They also pointed out that when the "conductor," the man sent to collect the dead, first meets the pilot a game of chess is suggested, ten years before Bergman picked up the same subject. 

A Matter of Life and Death was a huge hit when it came out, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in interviews Powell often said it was his favourite among his own films. It is comforting to know that it still enthuses new generations.

Walter Hill

I have long had a soft spot for the films of Walter Hill. He has been doing his thing since the 1970s, although it was a long time since he was fashionable, and his films are tense, terse and focused. But they are also very stylised and often they have a ballad-like quality as if they were inspired by songs by Woody Guthrie. Often they are set in the past and often in the American south, and they are always filled with music. Local music, depending on where they are set, and in about half of the films he worked with composer Ry Cooder. He has one weakness and that is the role of women. They are hardly ever more than prostitutes, often they get beaten up, and while they are not necessarily different from the men in that respect they have no agency. It is only the men who act, most often single-minded but they do act.

Yet Hill was also a driving force, as writer and producer, behind Alien (Ridley Scott 1979), which has a very powerful female lead, and the subsequent films with Ripley as well. Hill was also a producer to Prometheus (Ridley Scott 2012). But that just shows how Scott made Alien his, and set the tone. It is a better film than any of those that Hill directed himself.

Before Hill began directing his own scripts he first wrote a couple of scripts for others, such as The Mackintosh Man (John Huston 1973), The Drowning Pool (Stuart Rosenberg 1975), a belated sequel to Harper (Jack Smigth 1966), written by William Goldman. Best though was The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah 1972). Then Hill made his directing début, Hard Times (1975), set in the past and in the south (New Orleans).

Charles Bronson plays Chaney, a bare-knuckle fighter who happens to come into town on a freight train. After arriving he meets "Speed", played by James Coburn, who organises prize fights. The two become a team until Chaney has to move on, leaving on another train. It is cool and crisp, as it should be. He followed it with The Driver (1978), as lean and pared-down.

But Hill's best film might be Southern Comfort (1981), an incredibly intense and terrifying film set in a Louisiana swamp where a group of national guardsmen on training duty encounter the local population. Due to their stupidity and racism the guardsmen enrage the locals and are killed, one by one. The men deal with this is very different ways, some going crazy, others growing with the challenge, and part of the appeal of the film is to see who will survive and how. That, together with the wonderful cinematography and the music, is what makes it such a great film. The last ten minutes or so in particular are really remarkable.

The film is also set in the past, 1973, and is easy to read as a comment about the war in Vietnam. It also revisits the same story as in The Warriors (1979); a small group of men in a hostile area must, after having lost their leader, fight their way back to safety. After Southern Comfort Hill made one of the key buddy films, 48 Hrs. (1982), with Nick Nolte as a cop and Eddie Murphy as a convict working together in the search for a vicious killer. It is good (Janet Maslin was a fan) although more gritty and less stylised than many of his other films. That stylisation, by the way, might have reached its peak in Streets of Fire (1984).

Many seem to think that the 1970s and early 1980s were Hill's only good years but I like his later work too. There were a number of weak years with minor work such as Red Heat (1987), and a few films are rather nasty, such as Another 48 HRS. (1990), but in the mid-1990s he was back in form. Films such as Wild Bill (1995), Last Man Standing (1996) and Undisputed (2002) are almost as good as the best of the early ones, and they stay true to his style, themes and influences (such as Raoul Walsh, Jean-Pierre Melville, Sam Peckinpah and Akira Kurosawa). The good ones outnumber the bad with a large margin.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

What do you care about Black Rock?

I don't care anything about Black Rock. Only it just seems to me that there aren't many towns like this in America. But one town like it is enough. And because I think something kind of bad happened here, Miss Wirth, something I can't seem to find a handle to.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Well, I know this much. The rule of law has left here and the guerrillas have taken over.

The Americans and the Japanese have had an awkward relationship ever since 1853 when Commodore Perry's gunboats opened up Japan to the outside world and brought the Tokugawa Shogunate to an end. They are now close allies but in the 1980s USA was convinced that Japan would take over as the number one power and buy up America (a fear which can be seen in films as diverse as Gung Ho (Ron Howard 1986) and Die Hard (John McTiernan 1988)), and during the 1930s they were enemies and fought each other during World War 2, after which the US occupied Japan until 1952. Many films have been made about the war in the Pacific between 1941 and 1945, including John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945). Considerably fewer films have been made about what happened with the Japanese who were in the US during the war, and the Japanese-Americans. One of those rare films is Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges 1955).

It is set in 1945 and takes places during 24 hours, from when the Southern Pacific makes a brief and unexpected stop at Black Rock (stopping for the first time in four years) until the train comes along the same time the next day, again making a brief and unexpected stop. In between a stranger, Macreedy, played by Spencer Tracy, has been forced to take on almost the whole town as the people in it first want him to leave and then want to kill him. Once something bad happened in Black Rock and ever since the town has been walking dead, consumed by fear and guilt. For some Macreedy is seen as a threat but to others as a chance for redemption.

The town's unofficial leader as a man called Smith, played by Robert Ryan, and he is clearly responsible for the bad thing that happened, whatever it was. Macreedy has come to Black Rock to visit the father of a friend, a Japanese man called Komoko. But he is not there anymore and his place has been burned to the ground. In one particularly powerful sequence Macreedy is trying to coax Smith into admitting that he killed Komoko, and that he killed him only because he was Japanese. Macreedy is gentle, soft-spoken and sitting down, Smith is tense, aggravated and standing up, menacing.

The film was shot on location in the dry, hot inland of California, close to where during the war there had been a relocation camp in which thousands of Japanese-Americans had been locked up. This is also something that comes up in the dialogue. The different men in the town all have their different reasons for why they acted like they did, and now act like they do. For Smith it is a combination of disappointment (for not being accepted by the army when he tried to enlist) and pure racism; hatred of the Japanese. But it is also because he knows that his way of life and his breed is doomed, they have no place in a modern, post-war America. In some ways he is related to Ethan Edwards in Ford's The Searchers (1956), another embittered man for whom there is no place in a post-war era. (It is also possible to draw a connection to the Bundy gang who are currently occupying a wildlife refuge in Oregon.) But he is not unique, and maybe he is called Smith to emphasise how ordinary he is. He could be anybody.

Perhaps unexpectedly this is a MGM production, produced by Dore Schary, who was keen on having his liberal inclinations seen in the films he produced. Bad Day at Black Rock had a pointed progressive political message, and the heads at the studio were not keen on it, but Schary prevailed. It was also MGM's first film in CinemaScope, and likewise its director John Sturges' first film in that format. Sturges said he would do it on condition that he was left alone on set, and he did get to make it his way. One thing he did was to get rid of all the extras. The only people seen in the film are the main characters, except for the first and last scene. Sturges did not want any distractions in his compositions, and they are powerful. He is one of the great Scope directors, a natural for compositions, and this was obvious already here in his first try. It looks spectacular, and Sturges seems to be thrilled by what he can do with the wide frame and frequently, by his staging and blocking, draws attention to the images so that they become like still lifes. In some scenes it is as if Sturges suddenly freezes the action for a few seconds, like in this impromptu meeting between several men in a series of elaborately composed shots. The point is not so much what they are talking about as for Sturges to show what he can do, and what the format can do.

The script by Millard Kaufman, is very good, and the dialogue as well, but it is Sturges's handling of the material that makes the film the great work of art that it is.

There is one absence in the film: they all speak of the Japanese but no one is seen, which is part of the force of the film. They are not there anymore because bad things happen in places like Black Rock.

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For those who wish to explore more of Sturges at his best there is The Law and Jake Wade (1958) and The Hour of the Gun (1967).

Here are two earlier related articles:
On the two Sturges, Preston and John.
On The Great Escape (1963).

Another recommended film is House of Bamboo (Sam Fuller 1955), see accompanying post here.

The Law and Jake Wade

Equinox Flower (1958)

What is said about directors, regarding their style or themes or message or some such, is frequently wrong, partly because most directors are a lot more eclectic and flexible than the popular view of them can account for. This is also true of course for Yasujiro Ozu, even though he might appear to be the most consistent and rigid filmmaker of them all. But too many seem to base their view of Ozu on just one film, Tokyo Story (1953), and suggesting that he was conservative, that there is no camera movements, that the camera is always placed at the height of somebody sitting down and that they are all about the family. But there is much more to Ozu's style and themes than this. Explicitly so if you consider both his pre-war films and his post-war films, and less obvious but still indubitably if you only consider the post-war films. And the post-war films should be considered, most of them. Those who have only seen Tokyo Story have but a partial view of Ozu. His humour, irony, visual wit, discussions about class and allusions to the war, and his exquisite use of colour; these are things that are not necessarily present in Tokyo Story, which, although a very fine film, should only be considered a starting point.

His first film in colour was Equinox Flower (1958), which is a contender for being his best work. It is about a family in which the father likes to see himself as a liberal, and with the times, but when his daughter wants to marry her boyfriend, and will not accept an arranged marriage, he forgets all about his enlightened talk and becomes implacable. He refuses to give his consent to this marriage, and the family becomes increasingly strained, or rather, he becomes estranged from the women, his wife and daughters.

But that is just the plot summary, and with Ozu plot summaries are usually beside the point. It is the style with which they are told that is the point, and the feelings expressed.

The father is played by Shin Saburi, who acted in many of Ozu's films. In the earlier The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) he plays a man who is married without children but who is supporting his niece against her having to be forced into an arranged marriage. "Don't let her have the kind of marriage we are having." he says to his wife in a moment of heartbreaking honesty. That is really the theme of that film, the unhappy marriage between two people with nothing in common. In Equinox Flower the marriage is happy, the focus is elsewhere; on the gap between two different generations. And Ozu, despite the claim that he was conservative and backward looking, is clearly on the side of the younger ones, they are in the right and their ideas are where the future of Japan lies. Ozu is however also sympathetic to the father; he is not a villain, he is just struggling with the societal changes. Or maybe he just does not want to lose his daughter. Maybe he just cannot accept that she has grown up. In one scene he angrily asks the daughter "Have you slept with him?" which she refuses to answer. It is not clear whether he has problems with her wanting to marry a man of her own choosing, or if it is that he cannot accept that she has grown up and become a person who has sex. It is possibly both.

The alienated salaryman.

And then there is the style. It might be Ozu's most perfectly shot and designed film. Every frame a marvel of precision and clarity, yet simultaneously brimming with beauty and wit. Ozu's images talk to each other, one might counteract another, or a shot might appear which is almost identical to an earlier shot, there is just one slight alternation, or there might be an insignificant object which has a disproportionately strong presence in several shots. Like this red tea pot.

Just two examples.

So the richness of Equinox Flower is incredible. It is perhaps a little bit narrow, compared to its companion piece The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, which also has that class aspect which is rarely mentioned when discussing Ozu (it is for example suggested, in a few sweet and understated scenes, that the husband in the unhappy marriage would be happier if he had been married to their maid, but that was of course not an option), and there is more humour in Green Tea, but visually Equinox Flower is a work of perfection, and that helps balance the more streamlined plot. The warmth and humanity is equal in both. This brief scene below captures all of this. The wife is played by Kinuyo Tanaka and here she and her husband is contemplating life and the passing of time. 

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Two earlier posts about Ozu:

http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2013/09/a-few-words-about-tokyo-story-1953.html
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2013/09/on-yasujiro-ozu-and-japaneseness.html

For those interested in Ozu and class, The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) is good place to start.

Ozu followed Equinox Flower with the equally exquisite Good Morning (1959), which is also required viewing. The cinematographer on them was an Ozu regular, Yuharu Atsuta, who shot all films mentioned in this post.

George Cukor, Hasse Ekman, Jean Renoir and a subject for further research

Initially I had planned to write about George Cukor in my thesis on Hasse Ekman, as the two have several things in common (and knew each other); for example their view of actors/acting and life as a theatre stage. But in the end that darling had to be killed, a thesis cannot cover everything, although I do invoke Ernst Lubitsch and Jean Renoir in my analysis of Ekman. But Cukor was and remains a favourite, one of the very best of directors, with an exceptionally fine sense of staging and framing, which I wrote about a few years ago in La Furia Umana (#2). Cukor's style is like that of someone who is slightly amazed and intrigued by what is going on in front of the camera. He does not want to disturb, so the camera stays at a distance, he does not want to interfere, so there are few cuts, and he does not want to impose, so there are not so many close-ups. Sometimes a shot lasts for over five minutes, sometimes without the camera even moving. Here too there are parallels with Ekman's style of filmmaking.

Once when I sat and studied a Cukor film, a fellow scholar came by and I mentioned that I thought that Cukor was perhaps the master of framing. He replied that Renoir was his favourite. The other day I was reminded of this because Joe McElhaney, an uncommonly sharp scholar, said that he thought that Cukor was among the best when it came to framing, and likened him to Renoir. It seems that we have come full circle... Of course, for Jean Renoir acting, actors and the theatre were also of great importance, and the connections and similarities between Cukor/Ekman/Renoir are definitely a subject for further research, or for future essays.

It is important to remember that framing is something dynamic, it is not a question of one perfect shot, or formal beauty, but the balancing of space and emotions, set design and actor, and of creating nuance and meaning out of the combination of these aspects of the shot. Even a slight camera movement might completely alter the emotional tone of a scene, so still images do not necessarily do justice to the framing in a particular film.

In Cukor's Little Women (1933) there is a scene when a girl sneaks away at a party and talks to a boy among some flowers. It is nothing special about the scene in itself, but the framing of it, the distance of the camera from the actors, the leafs of the flowers getting between us and the actors, makes it something extra. Here are images from some of his best films.

A Star Is Born (1954)

Adam's Rib (1949)

Holiday (1938)

Born Yesterday (1950)

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

It Should Happen to You (1954)

Les Girls (1957)

Here is a whole scene from A Star Is Born, when Vicki Lester (Judy Garland) is talking about her alcoholic husband, in the dressing room between takes. It is remarkably good.



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In his book about Ingmar Bergman, Robin Wood compares Bergman to Cukor and says that "Bergman's handling of actresses in his more relaxed films is strikingly like Cukor's."

I should add that on both A Star Is Born and Les Girls, and a few more films in colour, Cukor worked closely with George Hoyningen-Huene, a fashion photographer who became Cukor's visual, and colour, consultant.

Henry King

When I first saw The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King 1952) a couple of years ago I was so bewitched, so enchanted, by a scene at a jazz club in Paris where Harry Street (played by Gregory Peck) and Cynthia Green (played by Ava Gardner) meet for the first time that I had to stop the film and watch the scene again, immediately. It is so wonderful; soft, tender, slow, musical, attentive to atmosphere and nuance, carefully staged and artistically lit; the room, the space is as vivid and as important as the characters in it. That is where King’s greatest strength as a filmmaker lied.

In an interview with King in Focus on Film (#26 - 1977) Scott Eyman complains that while "such obviously marginal talents as Douglas Sirk and Budd Boetticher" are being celebrated by the critics, Henry King is not. To call Sirk and Boetticher "obviously marginal" is perhaps petty rather than accurate, but Sirk and King do have something in common; the incredibly rich and meticulous mise en scène; where sets, props, scale, colours, actor movements, combined with sound, music and camera movements, are done with the out-most care and artistry. It is also something that is frequently mentioned in reviews of King's films (in her review of The Gunfighter (1950), in the Observer, C. A. Lejeune spent a lot of time describing the mise en scène - without using that word - because it has impressed her so much), and despite what Eyman may have felt, King seems to been treated rather well by the critics, and he does not seem to have had any enemies. In the 1920s he was even regarded by many as one of the best filmmakers overall, on the strength of, among others, Tol'able David (1921) and Stella Dallas (1925). They are both fine films, and Tol'able David in particular is interesting because it is close to King's own childhood. But a lot of King's silent films have been lost, and I have seen very few. Of the over 100 films King made I have about 20, and they are primarily from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and it is especially the period from 1943 to 1958 that is extraordinary. That is when he made, among others,  others, The Song of Bernadette (1943), Margie (1946), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), The Gunfighter, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Bravados (1958), all powerful, emotional and warm, made with total conviction. These are films that take their time, and the shots can go on for minutes and minutes, without very much, or even anything, happening on a surface level. King seems more interested in the inner lives of his characters, their spiritual lives, than what they do. And the mise en scène, as mentioned above, is there and the cinematography (frequently by Leon Shamroy) also glows; embedding the characters in both light and darkness, creating sophisticated depth and texture. King favoured medium shots; he wanted the whole space to be part of the images, that the background of a shot was as important as the characters. He once said that "a camera must talk", he wanted to convey the themes and the feelings visually and use everything within the frame for that purpose (so naturally he began using deep focus and low visible ceilings early in his career). This sentence from Bosley Crowther's review of The Snows of Kilimanjaro is also a rather apt summary of much of King's work "the overall production in wonderful color is full of brilliant detail and surprise and the mood of nostalgia and wistful sadness that is built up in the story has its spell". Even a completely unknown film such as Lloyd's of London (1936) has extraordinary richness, depth and tracking shots.

So the mise en scène is one central aspect of his films. Two other aspects are history and religion. All of the films mentioned so far, except Stella Dallas, are set in the past, and that is true for most of his sound films. He was perhaps a man most comfortable in the past, even though he was an aviator who flew his own plane well into his 70s. About religion he once said that "I have often explored religious themes in my pictures but I’ve never tried to be preachy or holier-than-thou." although the last part is debatable, especially in a film like I'd Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), about a priest in a countryside parish. It is a lovely and humane film but, well, preachy at times. Much better is The Song of Bernadette, a film of uncommon power and strength, with Jennifer Jones as the young French girl who believes she has seen the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is a sickly daughter in a poor family (there is a shocking scene in which her father has to dispose of contagious, bloody rags from the hospital as it is the only job he can find, the kind of job nobody else would take), and neither the authorities not the church approve of her stories and her visions. It is a sometimes cruel film. I am not religious but this film moved me, all 150 minutes of it, more than I would like to admit, and seeing it again did not diminish it. It has all of King's strengths discussed above.

Someone else who liked The Song of Bernadette was James Agee. After qualifying his appreciation by mentioning the limits on artistry he felt Hollywood provided, he had this to say in his review in The Nation:

I have seldom seen so tender and exact an attention to mood, to over-all tone, to cutting, to the edging of emotion, and to giving vitality, sometimes radiance, in terms of the image and the sound more than of the character, the story, the line, the music. Jennifer Jones especially, as Bernadette, whether through Henry King's direction or her own ability, impossibly combines the waxen circumspections of a convent school with abrupt salients of emotion of which Dostoevski himself need not have been ashamed.

King worked at 20th Century Fox for the last 30 years of his career, from the mid-1930s, under stuido boss Darryl F. Zanuck, and they seemed to have got along well. King was supposedly Zanuck’s favourite director at Fox, perhaps because they were so in sync, even though Zanuck was sometimes concerned about the slow pacing of the films and wanted to make them snappier, not least The Gunfighter. A Deleuzian might say that it was a battle between King's time-images and Zanuck's movement-images. But as a rule, King was pleased. "He'll watch the rushes every day and give you his opinion. If he respects you, that's all he'll give you. No dictatorial judgement. Generally he deferred to my judgement." One thing they argued about was the moustache Gregory Peck has in The Gunfighter. It was not good for box office according to Zanuck, but as you can see the moustache stayed. King wanted the film to be realistic, and he wanted it to be a low-key film about alienation and sorrow, and in that he succeeded. (King was less pleased with David O. Selznick, whose interferences destroyed King's last film Tender is the Night (1962), a film which he did not get to cut the way he wanted to.)

King would go off to a secluded location and work on the scripts, even when they had been assigned to him, and he worked on the film all the way through post-production. He was keen on the editing process to, and worked with the same editor, Barbara McLean, on some 30 films. He deeply cared for his films, and his characters, and this is of course partly why they are so good. But Zanuck was also sometimes deeply involved, not least on Wilson (1944), from the beginning to the end. Disentangling what was Zanuck and what was King is not always easy, even though it was King who was master on the set. But my research into King is still a work in progress, and there is much more to say. Suffice to say now that in 1968 Andrew Sarris put him in the category "Subject for further research" and I believe he probably deserves to be in "Far side of paradise".

I will end with a scene from King of the Khyber Rifles (1953). The film is not one of King's best but good enough and on occasion wonderful. It is a tale of adventures in British India, and as such rather colonial, but the main character, played by Tyrone Power, is an outcast among the British. Although his father was English, his mother was an Indian, and a Muslim, and so he does not have it easy. In this scene he is not welcome to participate in the celebrations with the other soldiers, and is sitting by himself, when a woman calls on him. The scene has all the quiet emotions and beauty that King excelled at, and notice the expressive sound of the wind; how there are people moving about in the background, and up in the watchtower, and how the camera keeps its distance from the couple on the porch. "[T]he meditative contemplation of humanity from the middle distance" is how Walter Coppedge described King's style and that is a nice way of putting it.



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The quotes from Henry King are from two sources:
Henry King Director From Silents to 'Scope, edited by Frank Thompson (1995)
Scott Eyman's interview in Focus on Film (#26 - 1977)
The quote from Walter Coppedge is from his book Henry King's America (1986)

The best book about King was published by the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2007, when they did a retrospective of King's films. Among those who contributed to it were Peter Von Bagh, Carlos Losilla and Miguel Marías.

Farran Nehme has a fine article about Margie in Film Comment here.

Both King and Henry Hathaway, whom I have written about earlier on several occasions, were at 20th Century Fox and Zanuck, but they are rather different. For one thing Hathaway frequently made films about violent men seeking revenge, and was often hard and cynical. King was the opposite of that, and disliked revenge. He was more interested in redemption. A character in a Hathaway film is much more likely to punch somebody out than in a film by King. Visually King was less showy, more subdued, whereas Hathaway was more striking and geometrical, using frames within frames for example, and sometimes flirting with surrealism. There was also a third Henry at Fox, Koster (they were known as the three Henry). I suppose I will have to write about him too some day.

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)

Five faces in Psycho

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Janet Leigh

Mort Mills

Martin Balsam

Anthony Perkins

Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

A scene from Girlhood (2014)

Girlhood (Bande de filles, Céline Sciamma 2014) takes place in the banlieues at the outskirts of Paris, among concrete and poverty. It is focused on the teenage girl Marieme who joins a little group of three other girls, much tougher than Marieme is, but she quickly becomes one of them, becomes like them, and even tougher in the end. In the process she takes on a new name, Vic. Their lives are hard, and it is a rough and uncompromising environment to grow up in, with bullying and street fights part of the routine.

At one point the four girls, with stolen money and stolen, pretty, clothes, check in to a nice hotel. They come to their room, play around on the big bed, and change into their new, nice clothes. They also put on make-up and make themselves as pretty as they can. Not for anyone else's benefit, but for their own sake. Then they start to sing and dance to a song by Rihanna, Diamonds. And the shot lasts the entire song.

This sequence is without a doubt the best I have seen all year, as energetic as it is immensely moving. It is so moving because even though their life is often shit, here, at this very minute, and with the help of Rihanna's song (which could be about them) everything is perfect and life is pure joy, a bubble of happiness, that is all theirs. The grading makes everything look blue, so in all aspects this scene stands out from the rest of the film.

Eye to eye, so alive

We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky

The scene was more or less improvised, and the girls, who are not actors but ordinary girls living in these neighbourhoods, just did what came natural to them when they came into the room. Sciamma had only decided beforehand that they would be in a hotel room, and had also managed to get the rights to use Rihanna's song. And no matter what it might have cost, it was worth it. The power and the exuberance of the scene is not only deeply moving, but also intoxicating, and a perfect example of the power of music and how it helps people bond and connect. Music can set you free and sharing a song together is about as powerful as it gets, and screw the rest of the world.

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Marieme / Vic is played by Karidja Touré. The cinematographer of Girlhood is Crystel Fournier and it is Céline Sciamma's third film. The other two are Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres 2007), which is fine but somewhat conventional and hesitant, and Tomboy (2011), which is exceptional and the best of the three.

Here is an article about one such banlieue, Sevran, which you pass through if you take the train from Charles de Gaulle airport to get into Paris.

The romantic expressionism of Michael Curtiz

A couple of years ago I was switching from one channel to another on the TV. On one channel there was a film showing. I did not recognise it, and since I had not seen it from the start I did not watch it for very long, only a few minutes. But I guessed that it was directed by Michael Curtiz, and to satisfy my vanity I had a look in a TV Guide later. It was indeed a film I had not seen and it was directed by Curtiz. I recognised his style almost immediately. Perhaps no filmmaker ever had such an infatuation with shadows, and few have been able to equal his expressive use of camera movement, mise-en-scène and lighting to make the images glow and dazzle. He had a remarkably dynamic style and I have always thought that Gunnar Fischer and Ingmar Bergman were visually influenced by Curtiz. Curtiz and Marcel Carné. It is not just the initials Curtiz and Carné have in common; Curtiz, like Carné (working with Jacques Prévert), was also something of a romantic, making his shadow play enhance the often doomed love affairs, or even the tentatively successful. James Agee once wrote that Curtiz "has always seemed like Franz Murnau under onions". I assume he meant F.W. Murnau, and I do not exactly understand "under onions" but although it is not perhaps a compliment he did notice Curtiz's expressionist style.

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932)

All of the films are not like this, he was too uneven and had many bad days but when he was inspired, which was often enough, he could make anything come alive and shine. His work in the late 30s and early 40s is usually singled out for praise, when he made films such as Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942), but it was there before and it was still there in his last films, at least as late as 1958, when he made The Proud Rebel, in which almost every single interior shot is a masterpiece. The story is not much, but it looks better than practically any other film you might see, and might be the most visually stimulating colour film Curtiz ever made. It was shot by Ted McCord, who worked with Curtiz several times in the later years. Perhaps the finest film they made together is Breaking Point (1950), a film that also has one of the saddest and greatest ending I know.

Breaking Point

The Proud Rebel could very well be the title for most of Curtiz's best films, it was one of his favourite themes. But themes are not all that important with Curtiz, style is what matters here. The producers and writers often complained that he did not care for the story but was only interested in compositions, and actors complained that he was not interested in them either. But there are many great performances in his films, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, James Cagney and Claude Rains for example, and Olivia de Havilland is marvellous in The Proud Rebel, much older than she was in Captain Blood or Robin Hood, and a better actress. What is more is a general warmth that fill his best films, which also help make them rise above their often humdrum stories. While We're No Angels (1955) is rather uninspired visually, a rare failure in that respect, it too is rescued by its warmth and charm. A better film, also filled with warmth, is Life With Father (1947), so well-directed it should be mandatory at film schools. Beyond the acting and the lighting there are three things worth studying: the use of mirrors, the use of space (which parts of the house are used and for what purposes) and how people move in that space between scenes.

Life With Father. Who but Curtiz would shoot a discussion between husband and wife this way?

It is conventional wisdom to consider Casablanca a happy coincident yet it is really a typical Curtiz-film when he is inspired. The combination of wit, romance and cynicism is intoxicating and a lot of it comes from writers Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers, but after being attacked and expanded upon by Curtiz's forceful personality and camera it became something else. In addition, Curtiz was Hungarian (with a large but rather unknown European body of work), and he lost family members in the Holocaust, so the subject of the film was probably close to him.

Casablanca

Although not his best, the film in which his visual creativity reigned particularly free was The Unsuspected (1947), a convoluted story about greed, jealously and murder told with extraordinary boldness. It was also the first film produced by Curtiz's own (short-lived) company Michael Curtiz Productions. The cinematographer was Woody Bredell and Curtiz made it together with his wife Bess Meredyth, who worked on the script. She often did that but The Unsuspected is one of the few times she got a screen credit.

A useful compare and contrast study can be made between Curtiz and Raoul Walsh. In the 1930s Curtiz was one of the top directors at Warner Bros. (together with Mervyn LeRoy and Roy Del Ruth) and Walsh came to Warner in 1939. They made (superficially) similar films, and often with James Cagney, Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, yet they were also very different, with Walsh being the more complete and more interesting filmmaker, and less uneven. They differ in style too, Walsh's visuals are nowhere near as expressionistic and energetic as Curtiz. Walsh had a more naturalistic style, with a few exceptions. A typical Curtiz image is claustrophobic but a typical Walsh image is open and boundless. But whereas Curtiz's style is more energetic than Walsh's, Walsh's characters are more energetic than Curtiz's, always on the move. Walsh also had a clearly defined and consistent outlook on life in his films. But even though Walsh is the greater artist, Curtiz is good enough.

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

The Sea Hawk (1940)


Mildred Pierce (1945)