A Car Ride with King Vidor

A promotional still from Show People, directed by King Vidor

King Vidor came to Hollywood by car. He, his wife Florence and a friend slept in their Model T and paid for gas by shooting newsreel footage for the Ford Motor Company. It was a wild country then: you almost imagine they'd run into Indians or herds of buffalo the way he describes traveling across pre-highway America--all forests and deserts, rocks and tumbleweeds.

One of the first shots in his 1928 film Show People is of a man and his daughter in a car; an intertitle tells us that he, like Vidor, has driven all the way from Georgia (Vidor’s trip was a little shorter—from Texas) to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood.

Few directors understand movement the way Vidor did. Not stylized movement, everyday movement—the speed of trains, of carnival attractions that made so much of the 20^th century seem like a race to those born in the 19^th. The camera is riding alongside the speeding car (presumably in another car—the scene appears to be shot “on location,” if such a thing was possible in the Hollywood of the silent era), and the effect is that we do not as much perceive the car as moving as the city around it, which becomes a blur of street signs and intersections behind the characters’ heads. What a difference two decades makes: automobiles had seemed like speeding rackets to the early filmmakers, but by 1928, they had become commonplace; now it seemed as though the world was becoming fast as well.

The film’s beginning is dominated by the car, which the father and daughter don’t leave for quite a while; even at the gates of the studio, the father talks to the guard from the behind the wheel, the motor still running. Throughout Show People, we see cars in use; Hollywood in the 1920s, at least for those involved in the film industry, is not designed for public transportation. Cars are not only glamorous (that those who’ve “made it” get driven around by chauffeurs), but practical: the studios, offices and locations are far apart, and the concept of a “community” is largely imaginary—like the concept of “America” in westerns, it’s constantly being undermined by the reality of the landscape, only instead of Monument Valley, it’s California’s hills and winding roads. Though used differently, they’re a bit like the cars in the films of Abbas Kiarostami—a persistent detail that becomes an astounding indicator. It's like looking through a keyhole at a distant culture: in this case that of that small bit of the 20^th century that was mechanized but not yet homogenized: when tools for bridging geographic gaps were in use but had not been implemented to their full extent. Like seeing peasants in an engraving plowing wild lands—simultaneously seeing the past and its future. The car becomes a crystal ball.

Another indicative detail: the way, during a break from shooting, a camera man drapes a filthy cloth over the camera, like the kind you’d put over a table saw when you aren’t using it.

The Vague and The Painstaking

A still from Kenneth MacPherson's 1929 film Borderline

Borderline is an action movie. Kenneth MacPherson's only feature takes place in a universe of reactions--in fact, the movie seems overtaken, distracted by them, like someone trying to tell a story all the while following a tennis ball with their eyes, back and forth. The plot is reduced a series of title card interjections, the movements at the heart of it so fetishized, so examined that we no longer recognize what they are: climbing a staircase, opening a door--simple actions become so alien through the emphasis placed on them. It's like looking at the world through binoculars--we identify individual parts, but they become so fascinating that we can no longer grasp the whole. It's a re-examination that would make Francis Ponge proud, one where a new object seems to be created simply by describing an old one. The door knobs and coffee cups in MacPherson's film are not the same as their analogues in our world, all thanks to the miracle of transformation at the heart of cinema's alchemical side.
It's a terrifying world sometimes, too--the sheer interconnectedness the editing suggests, cutting to "reaction shots" of motionless objects, creates a sense of constant consequences. The film's small town is so tangled with the reaction a chair has to someone sitting down on it that we miss the melodramatic story that supposedly forms the film center, with Paul Robeson and his wife as two black outsiders in a community vaguely defined but painstakingly described, more vivid as a set of sensations than a set of buildings and people (a feat considering the small cast and repeated use of recognizable exteriors and interiors). So perhaps it isn't just Ponge that the film evokes, but Kafka as well.

The Advent of Sound

from a promotional still for Queen Kelly

With the advent of sound in American cinema came the advent of censorship. The Production Code first reared its head in 1930, the first year dominated by "talkies;" in 1934, it became standard practice.

Perhaps it was because the movies were too real now; they were no longer merely aesthetic objects. Silent films had been distant enough from life to fall under the umbrella of "art" and therefore escape heavy censorship--the people who complained were "moralizers," maybe a tad self-righteous. "Someone might be offended, but it's not like they have to watch," the logic went. A taboo suggested or "portrayed," after all, was merely scandalous (and, after all, scandal sold). But to hear it said (by real people, no less!) was downright subversive (and to see a woman disrobe is not the same when you cannot hear her clothes rustling).

Censorship seemed natural with the introduction of sound cinema: movies ceased to be simply flickers on a screen--they could stand on their own two feet without the help of an organist or a pianist to keep the audience's ears amused. It made movies dangerous. It made them potent. Sound cinema is a medium with extreme immediacy. For all of the power of their images, silent films couldn't compete with even weak talkies. Images are merely pictures, just a step up from photographs, but when those images spoke and sang and made noises as they walked around the set, they became something much more. Sure, they are powerful (even still images, with which we'd done very well until the 20th century rolled around), but can the people in ordinary images compete with the people who seemed to be able to do everything but breathe?

Notes on Two Chaplin Shorts: A Dog's Life / The Idle Class

In A Dog's Life, during the lengthy dance hall scene, there is a sequence where Chaplin is on the dance floor, the titular dog on a flimsy leash behind him; at one point, the dog stops, and stares off-screen--at a crew member, or possibly its owner, clearly looking for approval. The moment is short, but disarming--not because it subverts the fictional nature of the film, but because that moment we realize how little a movie means to a dog: the dog, however well trained, does not realize what a camera is or why it's being filmed.
So is it still cinema if the subject in unaware that they are being filmed? Or do "hidden camera" films constitute a different form of expression altogether--the more I watch movies, the more I realize how essential the relationship between the subject and the camera and microphones (the audience's eyes and ears) is. The dog is incapable of completing this relationship--it becomes "a part of the landscape," a true non-actor.

The Idle Class finds Chaplin and leading lady Edna Purviance playing rich people named Charles and Edna. But it's a double role for Chaplin, as he also appears as the Tramp, and a case of mistaken identity leads Edna (Charles' wife) to flirt with the Tramp at a a costume party.
How is Chaplin both the Tramp and the rich man? How is he able to parody himself (a rich man with marital problems) while remaining a different character, a yet be instantly identifiable with both? It's Chaplin's greatest strength--that the concept of Chaplin can be identified with both the innocent Tramp and Monsieur Verdoux, with the tragic clown of Limelight and the farsical demagogue of The Great Dictator. The real Chaplin, like the characters in The Idle Class, was both the symbol of Hollywood glamour and a working class hero. It is a conception of identity that only the cinema could have invented.