They Had to See Paris

Notes on Borzage's First Sound Film, Which Was Very Much an "Event-Picture"

This man Will Rogers, with the perfect hairline and hair-volume, shakes his finger and controls the scene, — he is a coach without a headset.

They Had to See Paris by Frank Borzage, 1929:



The filmmakers in this period (Year One of synch-sound, of 'talking') invent the conversation-initiated shot/reverse-shot grammar because they don't know what else to do. But the bulk of the master-shots are similar to those of Lubtisch from this period — they're 'the shooting of men'. A tension between this 'set' (in the sense of 'group', not 'shooting location'), and another set (and thus an overarching dialectic of dialectics): shots that bear a concerted attention to the rigorous geometries of space (and social order) lie within the vicinity of shots that evince the hayseed-ethos's compulsion toward deflation and the loosely (and sharply) improvisatory.

They Had to See Paris by Frank Borzage, 1929:




Like sidereal cosmos-dust dispersed by meteorite: insane gay-subplot with barmy Russian aristo.

The melodramatics are topsy-turv'd to comedics in the moment when the Marquis can no longer court(-to-marriage) or be persuaded to court on her own terms the Oklahoman's dear daughter Opal, as a result of Pike's/Rogers's monikering of the bearded Frenchman "Plugnickel". The Frenchman's entrance and declaration of insult are pure Feuillade.

They Had to See Paris by Frank Borzage, 1929:




Resplendent documentary shots pervade the fiction/action — no, just action — like the pillow-takes of Ozu a few years later.

They Had to See Paris by Frank Borzage, 1929:



There's no need for montage when the words are strong enough to put across the cuts. Borzage holds it in medium-shot, and when he's over goes back to the master. Everything's stoned-still.

Pike: Oh, Ross, — a thing like this might be all right with a few people over here in Paris, and it might be tolerated in some places in America, but I — oh I don't know, I — it ain't hardly what you and I was raised up to...

Ross: Why that's a lot of puritanism. My mind is made up! I've got my own life to live and I'm gonna live it my own way!

Pike abandons women. Gumjawed long-shot sincerity. Hand-clasped hysterics. Sinister cheek-raise, gulping shoe-stare introspection. "A WOMAN. Oh Ross — tell me THAT's not TRUE." The family clings to casual adultery confessions. A sitcom filmed in 1929. The whole family doesn't even come together until 1h 18m into the thing. The last scene, 'virtuosic' posing as 'virtuous', is one of Borzage's most terrifying climaxes.

They Had to See Paris by Frank Borzage, 1929:



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Street Angel

Ratiocination

The core of the mystery: How did Frank Borzage's 1928 Street Angel go not just from 1.33:1/1.37:1, to (the Movietone-soundtrack-accommodating) 1.20:1 — but from an image track with normal proportions, to an image track with proportions nearer to a gravitational singularity? That is, to proportions of a markedly different nature than those found in the other 1.20:1 Borzage features of the same period (and in the same box set). In other words: why's it squished?

A 1928-era printing anomaly? Perhaps some odd one-off William Fox-sanctioned experiment with an abandoned technical process? Or a print-duping anomaly? — maybe having to do with something odd having occurred around a duped source-print used for the transfer? — maybe — and this is what I suspect — the extant source-print having contained a blow-up of the 1.20:1 image, onto a 1.37:1 frame, cropping off some of the top or bottom (or both top and bottom — but judging by these frames, I suspect "the bottom") of the frame edge — which print was then "reinstated to its original 1.20:1 aspect ratio" during the creation of a new print, or solely at the DVD-authoring level, in a very nonsensical way indeed — that is, by "squishing" the (cropped, missing a piece of the top/or-more-likely-the-bottom of the original 1.20 frame) 1.37 image back into 1.20 — never mind that the image would now be subjected to a kind of funhouse/inverse-Wii-Fit grotesquerie of proportions, and (ostensibly) missing a sliver from the top or bottom of the frame...

Alternating, below: an image taken from the new Street Angel DVD included as part of the Murnau, Borzage and Fox box set, presented in the 1.20:1 ratio; followed by the same image, modified by me in Photoshop, with its proportions reinstated to fill out the 1.33:1 frame.



























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Divides

A Time to Love and a Time to Die by Douglas Sirk, 1958:



"[...] Vivian and Patricia, do you have any ideas about why the world of cinephilia is so predominantly male? I do know a lot of women who are movie-lovers, but of course you’re right. I have a feeling it has something to do with the greater culture. When I was a kid, there wasn’t really anyone else my age who I could talk to about Howard Hawks or George Cukor. When I was in my 20s, I knew plenty of people who liked movies, but there was a difference: as a close friend of mine put it, you’re seeing life and death up there on the screen and your loved one is saying “Wasn’t that nice” and then thinking about where to go for dinner. So there was always a feeling of solitude and privacy that went hand in hand with loving cinema. I’m reminded of Jim Jarmusch’s anecdote, quoted by Jonathan Rosenbaum, about going to Italy and being able to talk to the bartenders and waiters about Dante. Whereas “if you walk into a bar and quote poetry here, they stick a gun up your ass.” Denigration of the arts in general is still quite acceptable here. How much this has to do with the differences between men and women and their respective approaches to cinephilia, I don’t know — let’s just say that while it’s not quite as bad as it was when I was younger, it’s still true that certain things are expected of men, and a familiarity with the arts is not among them. Opportunities to talk about movies in the most frivolous way are numerous, while opportunities to have in-depth exchanges about them are few and far between. In my experience, men flock to such opportunities when they arise. Women do a bit less.

"This is my own experience, and I’m sure that other people have different takes on the matter. [...]"

—Kent Jones, in the comments over at Dave Kehr's place.

"At the cinema, the screen would light up and we'd shiver. But more often we'd be disappointed, Madeleine and me. The images seemed old and flickery. Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. We were sad. This wasn't the film we had imagined, the perfect film each of us had carried within us, that film we would like to have made or, perhaps, even to have lived."

—Paul/Léaud/JLG

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...and a Happy New Year.

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About Money: A Documentary on 'L'Argent', Marcel L'Herbier's Film

L'Herbier in Excerpt

A very quick post, as '08 purges itself with one last heave, simply to draw attention to Jean Dréville's 1928 film — revised in 1971 so that it be accompanied by beautiful, distant, scratchy recordings of standard 'classical' movements, and a voice-over commentary by Dréville himself (which voix off serves, at the same time, as a proto-"audio commentary") — about the making of Marcel L'Herbier's 1929 L'Argent [Money]. Dréville's picture is possibly the first ever "making-of" film, and arguably greater even than the (great) L'Herbier film to which it's ostensibly appended.

The title in full: About Money: A Documentary on L'Argent, Marcel L'Herbier's Film [Autour de l'argent, un documentaire sur l'Argent, le film de Marcel L'Herbier].

Sample frames —

Autour de l'argent, un documentaire sur l'Argent, le film de Marcel L'Herbier [About Money: A Documentary on L'Argent, Marcel L'Herbier's Film] by Jean Dréville, 1928/1971:






The film is available as part of the recent two-disc standard-def Masters of Cinema Series release — which not only contains the above Dréville film, but his one-minute, 1928 preceding film, L'Arrivée à Paris de Brigitte Helm pour le tournage de l'Argent [The Arrival in Paris of Brigitte Helm for the Shoot of L'Argent, 1928]; also, L'Herbier's feature; and Laurent Véray's very interesting 2008 video film Marcel L'Herbier, poète de l'art silencieux [Marcel L'Herbier: Poet of the Silent Art]. Footage of L'Herbier's screen-tests of the actors is also included. The 80-page book that comes with the release contains a Richard Abel essay about L'Herbier's feature; translations of excerpts from two interviews with L'Herbier from 1968 and 1978; and excerpts from period (1929) critical notices composed on the occasion of the film's post-'28 recut and public release.



Here's a translation I did of a dazzling excerpt from L'Herbier's 1979 book La Tête qui tourne [The Turning Head / The "Shooting" Head], which didn't make it into the book:

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Today, across the deep eddies of time long since past, I still perceive, as on some dotted thread, the impalbable fragrances of that second Belle Epoque of 1925, année folle... And within me lingers that idea that by way of two paths extending in parallel toward the same goal (a film of L'Inhumaine [The Inhuman One, 1924], a "Deschanel" Interior), I had doubly fastened myself to the more or less flamboyant flank of French Art Décoratif.

If this march forward had the merit of bringing me multitudes of unexpected joys, neither did it neglect to point out, to an ignominious troupe of nay-sayers, the way toward my little corner of the world. Up to the day, already evoked, in which to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the "Arts Décoratifs", I will see enthroned at the Palais du Louvre — such sweet revenge! — certain objects and effects created by the best names in the art-world, and some simply of my own invention, which acted as the tender accomplices of my deeply rewarding life, and which such obliging aristarques as Vuillermoz and Chavance had admired at my house.

But to come back to the matter at hand — the filmic aesthetic — we might wonder, after all, whether the humble reality of the world of forms, when it has been transformed into film images, and which, in this event, manages to be nothing but a faithful reproduction of planetary appearances, is not, herein, similarly hostile to the decorative motifs that one creator, infatuated by transfigurations, purported to add to the arrangement? To have doubtlessly been, on certain occasions, one of that sort, I come now to wondering: is the cinematograph so imbued with congenital humility that it must strike into filmic ostracism the likes of [von] Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Cocteau, Visconti, Delvaux, Ken Russell, or even Patrice Chéreau, and, along with them, other (Russian, or Japanese) hobbyists of the baroque — all because, in paying honor to the cinematograph, at times in fictive (but such pathetically endearing) vestments, they have in some way come to mythify it? Here I put forward a profound question that brings us back, through certain assertions of Hermès et le silence [Hermès and Silence — L'Herbier's 1918 essay], to some of the very recent cogitations of one Marguerite Duras declaring the primacy of the recording of the Verb over the recording of the image. This restores some currency to those old jottings of mine, so that these pages might presently lead us back in their direction.

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Merry Christmas

ENTR'ACTE

Small Post Meant for a Long Time Now, Respurred Upon Reading Something Irritating — To Demonstrate, Once-and-For-All, That Rivette's Out 1, Despite All Production-Stills Currently in Circulation, Is a Color Film

(no 'spoilers') — (posts on Jerry Lewis, and Seijun Suzuki, and Frederick Wiseman, still to come) —

Out 1 by Jacques Rivette, 1971/1990:































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