The first modern film

In Laura Mulvey's book Death 24x a Second there is a chapter about Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1953). She writes: "In Journey to Italy, out of a minimal plot line and two bewildered Hollywood stars, Rossellini managed to create, in the opinions of many critics, the first modern film." She is right in saying that many others have called this "the first modern film" and the reasons for this are, it seems, the film's improvisations, meandering narrative and how it pauses and gives the audience time and space to reflect on what is happening on the screen.

As readers of this blog are no doubt aware there are few things I am more allergic to than claims about something being "the first". These claims are usually about concrete things, such as a particular stylistic achievement, a narrative convention or a technical breakthrough, and since they are concrete it is easy to point at a film and say that "there it is". This claim about Journey to Italy, or any other film, being "the first modern film" is much more abstract and therefore trickier to argue about. But it is also all the more reason why it is an almost meaningless statement. Why is it that this particular form of filmmaking is "modern"? Why for example are not experimental films made in the 1920s, such as Entr'acte (1924), modern? Why should Journey to Italy be deemed modern but not Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924) or Jean Vigo's films, including L'Atalante (1934)? Sometimes these films from the 20s are called "modernistic" instead, rather than "modern", which I think is cheating, but even if we were to go along with that argument then why is for example Stromboli (1950) or Umberto D. (1952) not modern but Voyage to Italy is? Besides, many 1930s films by for example Jean Renoir and Kenji Mizoguchi have the same approach to narrative and characters as these post-war films so could be called modern according to this definition. But they are not experimental in the way as some of those films from the 1920s and should consequently not be called modernistic. And what is to be done about Howard Hawks? His often blatant disregard for story and narrative, and the way the films are based on improvisation, makes them equally modern. Just think of The Big Sleep (1946).

Hawks's films also constantly refer back to other films, and make fun of genres and actors. They are also self-referential. Yet many, including Jean-Luc Godard, have argued that the generation who emerged in the 1950s (Godard's generation) were the first filmmakers who were conscious of the medium's past and made films that were reflections of earlier films, and that this is an important aspect of "modern" cinema. I am not sure there is any truth to this claim. Many filmmakers of the earliest generations have said that they learned how to make films by watching other films, and watching filmmakers at work, They did perhaps not go to film schools or cinematheques, but they learned by way of apprenticeship and by going to the cinema. Is it not condescending to earlier filmmakers to say that they were not aware of their own history, unlike the alleged enlightenment of later generations? It would be more accurate to suggest that this awareness is as old as cinema itself. When Chic Johnson finds a sled named Rosebud in Hellzapoppin' (1941) and says "I thought they burnt that.", it is very much a sign of awareness and reflexivity. Filmmakers have always made films that are consciously built on earlier films, and are reflecting upon film history, either repeatedly like Billy Wilder, or occasionally, like Hasse Ekman.  And let's not forget that Hollywood has always been fascinated by films about itself, exemplified for example by Show People (1928), Sullivan's Travels (1940) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), to name three beginning with S.

In general history modernity is often said to have appeared with the renaissance in 14th century Italy. In art history modernism is traditionally said to appear at the beginning of the 20th century, such as Picasso's cubist paintings (following Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky and others, going back to the second half of the 19th century). In literature there was T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and the others in the 1920s (also with forerunners of course such as Proust, Kafka, Lawrence, Conrad), simultaneous with popular modernist film movements.  But definitions of modernity, what is "modern" and what is "modernism", are never clear, and cannot be. If we are talking of storytelling then "modern", as in something that is not linear, sometimes fragmented, and that lacks a clear closure, is almost as old as "classical" storytelling. Perhaps even older.

In many ways cinema and modernity go hand in hand, and are intimately connected, right from the start. But I do not think that there is a film which can be called "the first modern film" and nothing is gained by trying to find one. These arguments often make me think of children who argue about who's father is the tallest ("my film is more modern than yours"). And now I, too, have indulged in this.

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Perhaps it can also be argued that a poem like Eliot's The Waste Land is post-modern, just as well as modern, which one might perhaps say about The Big Sleep as well.

Detroit

Last year, after we had seen Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2008), my brother and I debated where it was set, until we came to the conclusion that it had to be Detroit. Why? Because it's the motor capital of the world. No, because it was. There was a time when General Motors was the biggest car company (if not even the biggest industrial company) in the world, and the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) ruled the auto-industry, around 80% of all the cars in the world were made in the Detroit area at one point, and the car workers union UAW wielded considerable influence. In the 195os Detroit was one of the riches cities in the US and it was a huge town, its area bigger than Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan combined. It was the Motor City (and home of the Motown record label, now own by Universal and with offices in New York). It could perhaps have been called Modernity City as well.

In Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), the nurse Stella, played by Thelma Ritter, tells of a client, a boss at GM, she had had. He said he had problems with his kidneys, but she had a different diagnose. "Nerves I'd say" and then she adds "When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, this whole country is going under." (or something like it). For the last decade, or even longer, GM has probably had plenty of days when they went to the bathroom even more often than that. This is not the place to elaborate on what went wrong, other than to say that there were a number of factors that has led to where it is now, recently on the verge of bankruptcy.

This process was already well under way when Michael Moore made his documentary Roger and Me (1989), which tells about how GM is letting staff go, and in effect killing the city of Flint, close by Detroit, despite the fact that they're making a lot of money. That at least is Moore's spin. But GM had also been in deep problem ever since the oil crises in the 1970s, so Moore's populist take doesn't really give full justice to the situation. But flawed as it is, it's still an entertaining film.

As is Gran Torino, which, in many ways, is deeply symbolic of how things have changed. The old white man, haunted by memories of the crimes he committed during the Korean War, is killed, and his car, the symbol of America and American traditions, is bequeathed to a young Asian immigrant. The future is now in his hands. The question is only what kind of life Detroit has to offer.

The fact that all of the Big Three, GM in particular, have been on life support for a couple of years has had an immense effects on the city of Detroit. It's getting poorer and poorer, and smaller and smaller, from a population of 1.9 millions in 1950 to half of that today, and some parts are turning into ghost towns. Naturally crime has been increasing for a long time. There's something very symbolic over the whole thing, the end of an era, the end of modernity? Is Detroit the flash point were modernity visibly changed in to postmodernity?

The destruction is something that you can see on YouTube. There are a number of films showing the decay of many areas in and around Detroit, especially the old Michigan Central Station, now an empty shell. Films such as this one:



There's also Julien Temple's nice, but over-edited, documentary Requiem for Detroit? (2010), which is also available on YouTube. To think Detroit was once even called "Paris of the West". (But, at least, now they have the creperie Good Girls Go to Paris.)

But perhaps Detroit is beginning to pull itself together. This recent article in The Economist sums things up. And this article in The New York Times talks about new entrepeneurs. Hopefully it won't end up is in RoboCop (1987)

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Detroit was also the city of union leader Jimmy Hoffa, so Hoffa (1992) might be worth watching for those interested, and why not Paul Schrader's first film as a writer/director, Blue Collar (1978), also about the unions and the auto industry.