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Visiting MoMA PS1
An Auteurist History of Film
September 9, 2009–Ongoing
Read curator Charles Silver's weekly An Auteurist History of Film posts at INSIDE/OUT, a MoMA/P.S.1 blog.
This ongoing screening cycle is intended to serve as both an exploration of the richness of the Museum’s film collection and a basic introduction to the emergence of cinema as the predominant art form of the twentieth century. The auteurist approach to film—articulated by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and brought to America by Andrew Sarris—contends that, despite the collaborative nature of the medium, the director is the primary force behind the creation of a film. This exhibition takes this theory as its point of departure, charting the careers of several key figures not in order to establish a formal canon, but to develop one picture of cinematic history.
Second-Chance Screenings
Throughout the month of June, we present repeat screenings of several Auteurist History programs from the past eight months.
Organized by Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film.
Yamaha Modus H1 piano generously provided through Yamaha Artist Services, New York.
Related Film Screenings
Upcoming
All Quiet on the Western Front
1930. USA. Directed by Lewis Milestone. Screenplay by Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. With Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, Raymond Griffith, Slim Summerville. This was one of several revisionist looks at WWI during this period, including Rowland V. Lee’s Barbed Wire, John Ford’s Four Sons, G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, and Ernst Lubitsch’s The Man I Killed. The film is most noteworthy for its fluid battle scenes and sensitive performances, helped along by the coaching of a fledgling George Cukor. 129 min.
Westfront 1918
1930. Germany. Directed by G. W. Pabst. With Fritz Kampers, Gustav Diessl, Wladimir Sokoloff. Pabst had returned from studying the new sound technology in England just as Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel opened on April Fool’s Day. The excellence of Pabst’s first talkie was also overshadowed by the international success of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was buoyed by its faithful recreation of Remarque’s bestseller. Perhaps the greatest honor bestowed on Pabst’s film was Hitler’s banning of it when he rose to power In German; some English subtitles. 93 min.
The Big Trail
1930. USA. Directed by Raoul Walsh. With John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, Tully Marshall, Tyrone Power, Sr. The Museum’s restoration of the widescreen Grandeur process reveals a sweeping epic, extraordinary in the early sound period for being shot almost entirely outdoors. The film contains images of great natural beauty, not the least of which is twenty-three-year-old John Wayne in his first major role. Special thanks to the Film Foundation 121 min.
The Love Parade
1929. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. With Maurice Chevalier, Jeannette MacDonald, Lupino Lane, Lillian Roth. Although King Vidor’s Hallelujah had key musical elements, Lubitsch’s film is the first great Hollywood musical, and it set the standard for subsequent works by the director. He would remain unrivaled in the genre until Arthur Freed’s M-G-M unit in the 1940s and 1950s. 110 min.
Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris)
1930. France. Directed by René Clair. Cinematography by Georges Périnal. Sets by Lazare Meerson. With Albert Préjean, Pola Illéry, Gaston Modot, Edmond Gréville. Clair’s first talkie is a charming, lyrical musical evocation of a magical Paris of the mind, a Paris in a state of grace, long before Max Ophuls, François Truffaut, and even Jean Renoir. In French; no subtitles (full plot synopsis coming soon). 95 min.
Past
D. W. Griffith’s Competitors: Ince and DeMille
Although D. W. Griffith dominated the second decade of the twentieth century, he was not without rivals and claimants to his throne. Thomas H. Ince (1882–1924) remains a shadowy figure in film history, both because he frequently ignored the line between production and direction and because of his untimely and mysterious death. Many of the films he produced beginning in 1910 had a distinctively Ince-like look to them, even though they were signed by other directors. His association with William S. Hart helped Ince to play a major role in the development of that most uniquely American of genres, the Western. Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) also started with Westerns, but he soon discovered the audience appeal of another commodity: sex. He would go on to a forty-year career as one of the most famous and commercially successful, if not venerated, Hollywood directors.
Custer’s Last Fight
1912. USA. Thomas Ince. Approx. 50 min.
The Cheat
1915. USA. Cecil B. DeMille. Approx. 50 min.
And Yet More Competition: Walsh and Tourneur
Politics aside, Raoul Walsh (1887–1980) was not entirely unlike the rakish, swashbuckling John Wilkes Booth, whom he portrayed in The Birth of a Nation. His half-century as a director produced many cinematic milestones, if few genuine masterpieces. Maurice Tourneur (1876–1961) brought with him from France a sense of Gallic, Méliès-ian whimsy and a distinctive visual style that probably influenced his protégé Josef von Sternberg. Politically, he was suspect, first sitting out World War I in America and, after returning to France in the 1920s, running the Vichy film industry during World War II.
Regeneration
1915. USA. Raoul Walsh. Approx. 60 min.
The Blue Bird
1918. USA. Maurice Tourneur. Approx. 65 min.
D. W. Griffith on a Smaller Canvas
After the massive scope of The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and his World War I epic Hearts of the World, Griffith wisely narrowed his ambitions, and his realization that conveying monumental emotions did not require grandiosity and a cast of thousands led to some of his most memorable films. Most of these smaller masterpieces starred Lillian Gish, the preeminent actress of the silent era.
Broken Blossoms
1919. USA. D. W. Griffith. Approx. 65 min.
True Heart Susie
1919. USA. D. W. Griffith. Approx. 65 min.
Foolish Wives
1922. USA. Erich von Stroheim. 106 min.
The Chaplin Revue
From 1914 to 1917, Charles Chaplin moved successively from Keystone to Essanay to Mutual, and each step increased his wealth and independence. Along the way, he was refining his characterization of The Tramp and developing the technical skills to become an accomplished director. The Chaplin Review, compiled in 1959 (with Chaplin-composed music), consists of three small masterpieces he made for First National after his contract with Mutual expired. The films show that Chaplin had far transcended the confines of slapstick and achieved a unique ability to engage the emotions of his audience.
A Dog’s Life
1918. USA. Charles Chaplin.
Shoulder Arms
1918. USA. Charles Chaplin.
The Pilgrim
1923. USA. Charles Chaplin.
Buster’s Planet
Buster Keaton was ultimately Chaplin’s only serious rival. His inimitable use of space and timing, extraordinary athleticism, and superhuman imagination opened doors to which no other film artist ever even found the knobs. This program contains two of his most accomplished films.
Our Hospitality
1923. USA. Buster Keaton, John Blystone. 66 min.
Sherlock, Jr
1924. USA. Buster Keaton. 44 min.
The Lubitsch Touch
Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) went from playing a Jewish clown in crude farces to becoming one of the most sophisticated directors in film history. His German career lasted nearly a decade, intermingling satirical comedies with historical spectacles. Mary Pickford summoned him to Hollywood to direct her in Rosita, a film the actress hated and tried to eradicate. (MoMA has a print of the film in spite of her best efforts.) Lubitsch decided to stay and, heavily influenced by Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris, he ran off a string of excellent films that brought a large measure of European maturity to Yankee filmmaking. In the course of these efforts, he developed what became known as “the Lubitsch touch,” which, although not easily definable, has something to do with revealing his characters’ inner reality through means unavailable to any medium other than cinema—and it’s usually funny, too.
So This Is Paris (excerpt)
1926. USA. Ernst Lubitsch. Approx. 10 min.
The Marriage Circle
1924. USA. Ernst Lubitsch. Approx. 85 min.
Nordic Gods and Directors
Siegfried (Part 1 of Die Nibelungen)
1924. Germany. Fritz Lang. Approx. 86 min.
Swedish Cinema Classics
1959. Sweden. 36 min.
The Big Parade
1925. USA. King Vidor. Approx. 125 min.
Eisenstein Double Bill
No first film (at least, prior to Citizen Kane) had the initial impact of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike. His montage style, borrowed in part from D. W. Griffith’s films, was the antithesis of the long takes characteristic of F. W. Murnau and the German Expressionists and led to much theoretical writing by Eisenstein and others on the nature of filmic art. Eisenstein (1898–1948) followed up with his most famous film, Battleship Potemkin, the story of a 1905 naval mutiny in Odessa against the czar. In an era when the Bolshevik Revolution was relatively fresh and new, even bourgeois audiences in the West could admire the stirring, manipulative magic of Eisenstein’s work. Later, he would run afoul of Stalin and struggle for his career and his life.
Stachka (Strike)
1924. USSR. Sergei Eisenstein. 80 min.
Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin)
1925. USSR. Sergei Eisenstein. 50 min.
The Documentary Expands
The documentary model set forth by Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) would not satisfy nonfiction filmmakers for long. Several divergent tendencies soon emerged, including epic scale and poetic lyricism. Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973) and Ernest B. Schoedsack (1893–1979)—soon to be parents of King Kong—opened up Flaherty’s anthropological approach to sprawling proportions in their Grass: A Nation’s Battle For Life, which captured the annual migration of 50,000 Iranian tribesmen in search of grasslands. The Dutch political documentarian Joris Ivens (1898–1989) began his long career with two stunning visual evocations of his native country.
Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life
1925. USA. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack. Approx. 64 min.
Die Brug (The Bridge)
1929. The Netherlands. Joris Ivens. 12 min.
Regen (Rain)
1929. The Netherlands. Joris Ivens. 12 min.
Street Angel
1928. USA. Frank Borzage. 102 min.
La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc)
1928. France. Carl Theodor Dreyer. 82 min.
The French Avant-Garde of the 1920s
Running parallel to the development of narrative cinema and actuality filmmaking was an experimental track. Influenced by the trick cinema of Georges Méliès and his rivals, it was particularly prominent in France during the Surrealist period. Many of the experimenters gradually moved into mainstream commercial cinema, while other artists ceased dabbling in the movies at all. This program provides a sampler of their work. All films made in France.
Le Retour à la raison
1923. France. Man Ray. 2 min.
Ballet Mécanique
1924. France. Fernand Léger. 11 min.
Entr’acte
1924. France. René Clair. 15 min.
Anemic Cinema
1926. France. Marcel Duchamp. 6 min.
Sur an air de Charleston
1927. France. Jean Renoir. 17 min.
La Marche des machines
1928. France. Eugene Deslaw. 6 min.
La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman)
1928. France. Germaine Dulac. 29 min.
Un Chien Andalou
1929. France. Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí. 16 min.
Dziga Vertov
Between 1922 and 1925, with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s full approval, the first great Soviet documentarian—the Polish-born Dziga Vertov (1896–1954)—produced a series of propagandistic newsreels called Kino-Pravda (Cinema-Truth). (Jean Rouch, the French originator of cinéma vérité, named his movement after the French translation of Vertov’s series, and Jean-Luc Godard named his documentary collective the Groupe Dziga Vertov.) Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera, which came at the end of a cycle of landmark city-symphony films (Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, etc.), is a stunning compendium of innovative cinematic techniques envisioned by the director and his compatriots.
Kino-Pravda
1922. USSR. Dziga Vertov. 14 min.
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (The Man with the Movie Camera)
1929. USSR. Dziga Vertov. 67 min.
Vsevolod I. Pudovkin
Although Pudovkin (1893–1953) shared Sergei Eisenstein’s predisposition toward montage, he was much more “Western” in that he built his films around individuals rather than the collective. Heavily indebted to D. W. Griffith, Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia—like Griffith’s Intolerance—relies a great deal on moving cameras and spectacle to capture the epic sweep of history. And like Griffith, Pudovkin takes pains to develop his characters as they travel across his broad canvas, as in his brilliant adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1925). This is something Eisenstein did not seriously attempt until the 1930s, at the cost of the audience’s emotional engagement.
Shakhmatnaya goryachka (Chess Fever)
1925. USSR. V. I. Pudovkin. 17 min.
Potomok Chingis-Khan (Storm over Asia)
1928. USSR. V. I. Pudovkin. 74 min.
The Docks of New York
1929. USA. Josef von Sternberg. 75 min.
Arsenal
1929. USSR. Alexander Dovzhenko. Approx. 85 min.
Hallelujah
1929. USA. King Vidor. 100 min.
Blackmail
1929. Great Britain. Alfred Hitchcock. 86 min.
Abraham Lincoln
1930. USA. D. W. Griffith. 93 min.
Applause
1929. USA. Rouben Mamoulian. 81 min.
Morocco
1930. USA. Josef von Sternberg. 92 min.
The Dawn Patrol
1930. USA. Howard Hawks. 108 min.
All Quiet on the Western Front
1930. USA. Lewis Milestone. 129 min.
Blackmail. 1929. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock