The Big Screen Read online

  You have to see—James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner

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  FOR DAVID W. PACKARD

  Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Prologue: Let There Be Light

  PART I. THE SHINING LIGHT AND THE HUDDLED MASSES

  A Cheap Form of Amusement

  The Era of Sunrise

  The Cinema of Winter

  M

  State Film—Film State

  The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Bolshevik in the West

  1930s Hollywood

  France

  Renoir

  American

  Ambersons

  Howard Hawks: The “Slim” Years

  Films Were Started

  Brief Encounter

  War

  Italian Cinema

  Ingrid Sees a Movie

  Sing a Noir Song

  PART II. SUNSET AND CHANGE

  PART III. FILM STUDIES

  PART IV. DREAD AND DESIRE

  Dread and Desire

  To Own the Summer

  Brave New Northern California World

  What Is a Director?

  Silence or Sinatra?

  The Numbers and the Numbness

  Epilogue: I Wake Up Screening

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by David Thomson

  Praise for The Big Screen

  Copyright

  THE BIG SCREEN

  Eadweard Muybridge, splash!, a sequence from 1887

  Prologue: Let There Be Light

  As I was writing this book, and trying to discover what it was about, I found myself muttering to friends, “Well, it’s a history, I suppose.” “Oh, a history of the whole thing,” they said, “how nice.” But when we pursued the matter, I tried to explain that “the whole thing” had to be more than Méliès to Melancholia—“it’s Muybridge to Facebook,” I said before I had entirely settled on that. I always knew it was a book about screens. Whereas the patrons of movie houses had once gazed at the imagery, the moving photography, the story, it was clearer now that we citizens are living with screens even if we don’t go to “the movies” or really concentrate on the screens. The screens then and now are alike, but they were big once, as large as buildings, and now they may be thumbnail size—yet they are vast in their ubiquity and their constant use. They make a taunting offer of reality, but I wonder if that isn’t a way of keeping us out of it.

  This is a time for such a history, in which proper celebration is mixed with skepticism and some regret. Film as a commodity is going out of use; that thrilling name “Kodak” is passing away (it turns out Kodak was only a moment); and the 2012 revival of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, as full as it could be at five and a half hours, may have been the last chance to see that passionate work as film. Moviegoing does not quite exist anymore as a consuming public preoccupation, no matter that the media and the Academy cling to the old notion. The technologies are carrying us forward so rapidly we become giddy with change—the motion smothers emotion.

  I have sometimes wondered at the drastic changes that could occur between the writing and the publication of this book—not least at the continuing advance in the habit of reading a book on a screen. (Why not, if that’s where books are written?) I was on a subway train the other day, going from San Francisco to Oakland, and three quarters of the people in the crowded car were focused intently on tiny screens (parts of their phones, in most cases) or dreaming to the sounds coming through their earpieces. There was no talk and little noticing, and this strikes a movie fan as disconcerting in that the movies always seemed to be about looking and the quality of things seen—as mood, narrative, or even beauty—and about the possibility of seeing inner meanings. So this book will exult over great films (and urge you to see them), and it will worry, too, over the ways in which the multiplicity of screens now are not just metaphors for our isolation and feelings of futility in dealing with the world but a fuel for that helplessness. (Once upon a time, we defined screen as a place where things were shown. But now an older meaning has crept back: a screen can be a masking device behind which things and humans may hide.) In the earliest days, the primitive movie shows seemed to be life in our lap, but now the many lap devices often whisper to us that we are not to bother with life. Isn’t it beyond salvation? Isn’t it, as the movies have always hinted, just a show?

  From the moment Eadweard Muybridge picked up a camera (in the 1860s) to the occasion of Georges Méliès setting his aside (as the Great War began), the world went mad with progress. It was a time of profound novelties: electricity; the telephone; automobiles; powered aircraft; psychoanalysis; women seeking the vote and so much more; immigration to America on an unprecedented scale; a new kind of city, or metropolis; the realization that the populace might be a mass, or a force, and a way of knowing strangers by their images. So many changes, so many needs, with photography and moving film striving to mimic the commotion. But moving film was a mixture of science and magic: when the film strip moved, the still world came to life. Or something so close to it as to be heartbreaking: it became lifelike.

  In E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, the family meet the Baron Ashkenazy, who has become an entrepreneur in the new craze of movies. This is the early 1900s. He tells them about the wonder of what he is selling:

  In the movie films, he said, we only look at what is there already. Life shines on the shadow screen, as from the darkness of one’s mind. It is a big business. People want to know what is happening to them. For a few pennies they sit and see their selves in movement, running, racing in motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, embracing one another. This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand.

  The possibility that in looking to see we might understand is the hope and the excitement in this book. It may be its tragedy, too.

  Eadweard Muybridge was one of those men whose work was needed to measure out the changes in what people were seeing and thinking. He was a still photographer, and arguably a troubled and violent person, but the stills were not enough for him. He guessed that they could be restored to the progress or the continuum from which they had been taken—motion, life, time—and that that past could be made present and lifelike.

  In advance of any official identification of cinematography and projection, audience or the show, he had divined key elements of what moving film, motion pictures, or movie* would do. He had made an illustrated analysis of our recent past that indicated a future medium, but he hardly knew whether to think of it as science or poetry. We are still grappling with the question of whether this thing is story or its own relentless technology.

  He was foreign or he was English. He came to America first in 1855 in a spirit of hopeful enterprise. He saw the prospect of men and women walking the beautiful land, and he would be of the generation of photographers who helped colonize that place in our imagination. But for the moment, he was only looking, without a camera or a plan. Simply, he was amazed and moved. Perhaps he wasn’t looking where he was going, because he had an accident while riding on a stagecoach and suffered a head injury. It may have been a concussion, or worse, and there was some suspicion after that that he was troubled in his mind.

  Then he went back to Englan
d. He may have been homesick, or aroused and confused by America. He had some reason to wonder if he was ill. So he thought he would change his name, pumping a little air and light into it.

  He had been born Edward Muggeridge on April 9, 1830, in Kingston, a small, pleasant Thames resort then regarded as safely out of London and to its west, on the salubrious side of the prevailing wind, the smell, and the smoke. The river at Kingston was clean, so the place called itself Kingston-on-Thames. In 1830, Princess Alexandrina Victoria was aged eleven, and seven years away from being queen. The population of Great Britain was about twenty-four million, but the small country had imperial possessions all over the world and the most modern and expansive domestic economy. Charles Dickens was eighteen and a young reporter. He met and lost his first love that year, but he had not yet written a book. His London was just a few years into the great experiment of gas lighting in homes and on the streets. So night had lost its first urban battle, but gaslight was the start of mood, atmosphere, and anxiety, a twilight and a half-light. Gaslight turned black into noir. In the early 1830s, in many places, but in London, too, people were taking and printing and showing photographs. Look, it’s the real thing, they said, it’s you! It’s yesterday’s light shining today.

  So it was. But it was something else, too: the photograph was a thing, not a being; it might make an identity card, but it was so much thinner than identity. In a few seconds its freshness became the past. You could tear it in pieces; you could watch it fade. It seemed like a precious imprint of reality, of love or desire—we usually take pictures of things we like or want—but the fragile and arbitrary nature of the picture warned us that desire was fleeting. We lose photographs; we forget them. But they helped people see that light was not just natural or divine. It could be a modern spirit, a mood, and a device. “Let there be light!” could sound like a hallowed principle and encouragement, the fundament of history, culture, and human purpose. But the photograph taught us that the light might be tricked up and manipulated—and now we live with that slipperiness all the time. We are close to the last moment when photography is still trusted as a record or a likeness. That steady social habit and function have been taken over by what we call effects. And “effects” are results, not primary wonders. The real thing is no longer definite or reliable. It’s shopped.

  He changed his name from Edward Muggeridge to Eadweard Muybridge. People had changed their names before, but this was such a bold attempt at romantic transformation. It was like an advertisement and an assertion, a talking to himself, and the suggestion of a “bridge” is on its way from fact to fiction.

  It was in Kingston in the early 1860s, that he first discovered photography, and that seems to have persuaded him to go back to California and San Francisco in 1866. He was some kind of publisher in the first instance, and he became a connoisseur of the new city and the beautiful wilderness to the east in the Sierra Mountains. He launched what became a successful photographic business and did pictures of the city and of the country—especially Yosemite Valley, which, two years earlier, had been identified by President Lincoln as a national treasure. There was no question about the spectacular quality of Muybridge’s landscapes, and his was not the only eye or lens attracted to them. The “wilderness” of Yosemite was altered by the photograph: it became a marvel, an adventure, a resort, even if visitors still die there in its wildness. Yosemite was hailed as the proof of America’s natural existence. Some felt God was there. The wildness was a kind of liberty, though taking pictures of it was a step toward restricting that.

  Was it an action suited to wild times, or was it part of the damage he had suffered in his stagecoach accident? Whatever the cause, Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover. In October 1874 he came to believe that his wife, Flora—they had been married two years, and she was his junior by twenty-two years; she was a photo retoucher—was having an affair with a former English military officer named Harry Larkyns, who was drama critic on the San Francisco Post. In that same year, Flora had been delivered of a son (Florado Helios Muybridge). So on the seventeenth, Muybridge left the city and made what was a lengthy journey north (by ferry and horseback) to Calistoga, where he expected to find Larkyns, and shot him dead.

  He was tried for premeditated murder in February 1875, and in his defense he claimed insanity or personality change after his accident. The jury discounted that argument, but they acquitted him nonetheless, on the grounds of “justifiable homicide.”

  Muybridge behaved oddly in other ways: after the verdict, Flora asked for a divorce, but Muybridge would not permit it. She died later in 1875, and Muybridge refused to acknowledge Florado as his. He put the boy in an orphanage, despite the fact that many observers believed the boy resembled him.

  He was also interested in gambling and in experiments with photography. Leland Stanford, a millionaire on the strength of business derived from the gold rush, a director of Wells Fargo Bank, and governor of California, had a ranch or farm at Palo Alto, south of San Francisco. He got into an argument, which led to a wager as to whether a galloping horse always had one foot on the ground. Many earlier paintings showed horses in motion as if spread-eagled in air—this was a heroic, romantic assertion that defied optics and the structure of a horse’s legs. But time and again we look through the facts before our eyes and prefer something we want to believe is there.

  Stanford asked Muybridge if he could help settle the bet. So in the years 1877–78 the photographer devised a row of cameras whose mechanical shutters were triggered by fine string lines set off by the horse’s motion. The result was a simple record of time and space, laid out in still pictures taken at what we might call split-second intervals. With the aid of a machine invented by Muybridge in the early 1870s, the zoopraxiscope, these images could be printed in sequence on the surface of a cylinder so that, with a peephole and a twirl of the cylinder, a viewer seemed to see the horse galloping. Understanding was altered by technology; time was separated into sections, or frames; the past and appearance could be studied on a kind of screen; and it was revealed that at many instants the horse was in midair, not spread-eagled, but with its legs tucked up beneath it.

  Muybridge was essential and innovative in the proof; he was a technological wizard and a rare talent; but he was about to be wronged. This pattern is not unusual with the figures in film history. Leland Stanford later published some of the photographs in a book, The Horse in Motion, but he did not credit Muybridge. The photographer sued and lost.

  Not long afterward, Muybridge went to Paris. He was already, by 1881–82, contemplating the work that would be collected as Animal Locomotion—the sequential study of ordinary animal actions—but in Paris he met and talked with Étienne-Jules Marey. The two men were the same age, and while Marey had begun as a cardiologist, studying the flow of blood, he became interested in the detailed photographic study of motion. In 1873 he had published a book, La Machine Animale, that centered on flight, and Muybridge had read that book and studied its series on birds and insects. Marey had invented what he called a photographic gun capable of taking ten or twelve pictures in a second. The two men talked, and Muybridge’s plan came into sharper focus.

  But he needed funding, so when he returned to America, with the help of painter Thomas Eakins (a Philadelphian), he sought a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he could carry out his research. By then he was able to record as many as twenty-four sequential images in a second. He used as subject matter anything that was at hand, or anything that interested him. He did a series on a mastiff walking and another on a horse and carriage; he photographed men and women ascending staircases; he caught men sparring and fencing; he shot little dances and juggling acts. He delighted in the manifestation of simple motion and passing time, and he trusted situations where nothing dramatic seemed to be happening. The pictures were the sensation. The viewer’s ability to sit at a distance and hold the light, the past, the animal, in his or her hand—that was the drama. It offered a mastery that was new a
nd thrilling. The world might be yours to dream over.

  He shot people, but he also shot light, air, and passing time. He took special pleasure in the splay and splash of water poured out of a jug or tossed on a little girl. The wonder of seeing the commonplace in the light was more thoroughly celebrated by Eadweard Muybridge than by anyone before him. It’s still the case that his sequences fill viewers with awe and excitement, no matter that they have no story or purpose. The pictures feel ravished by the play of light on ordinary physicality and by the tiny, incremental advances through time. If you’re interested in movie, you should spend some time just looking at these still photographs.

  Take whatever example you like from subsequent cinema, and its inheritance from Muybridge can be felt—take Astaire and Rogers spinning together in “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Follow the Fleet (1936); take the door closing on John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers (1956); or think of that instant from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) when the still picture of the young woman comes to life briefly and she looks at being looked at.

  Think of Julia Roberts smiling in Pretty Woman (1990) and the realization it gave you in 1990 that the archaic fantasy called “a star is born” was happening again with a knockout newcomer—a dream in which a hooker becomes a respectable, and possibly educated, woman and the sweet wife to a millionaire, and we enjoy all those faces and roles, without risk of infection, support payments, or boredom. Pretty Woman may be indefensible as “a work of art,” but what a show, what an extraordinary metaphor for a daft society—and what a face! What a thing to look at. And what appetite she had then for being looked at—what young faith she had in being recognized.