George Kouvaros,
Famous Faces Not Yet Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4747-7
US$24.95 (pb)
304pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

My first experience of John Huston’s The Misfits (USA 1961) was not of the film itself, but of an Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn Monroe on set. Monroe is wearing a denim jacket and stands with her hands to her mouth, looking down. She stands in the centre of the frame, alone against a backdrop of salt flats and distant hills. But for the appearance of a large boom microphone in the background, it could be a picture, not of Marilyn the film star, but of her character Roslyn. This ambiguity obtains in most movie stills, of course, but here, the elegaic tone of the film (about ageing cowboys struggling to define their identities in a changing world) echoes the circumstances of the film’s making itself. Three of its major stars were soon to die, the filming was fraught with difficulties (not the least of which was the constant travail of working with Monroe), and cinema and the craft of acting were changing. The prominence of the film’s movie stills in visual culture is also significant. I don’t think I’m over-generalising from my own experience here; Arnold’s photo of Monroe is one of the best-known from Arnold’s oeuvre and of The Misfits, thanks in part to the Magnum photo agency’s efforts in publishing its movie work in volumes like Magnum Cinema (Alain Bergala, London: Phaidon, 1998) and the photobook dedicated to the film (The Misfits: Story of a Shoot, Arthur Miller & Serge Toubiana, London: Phaidon, 2000).

The prominent role of photography in the reception of The Misfits is the starting point for George Kouvaros’ Famous Faces Not Yet Themselves. The Misfits was a movie project that, among other things, represented a chance for Arthur Miller to write a script for Marilyn Monroe and for John Huston to make a film with more creative independence after a period of rocky relationships with producers. Part of the publicity efforts involved getting Magnum photographers to participate in the film’s documentation, which meant for the photo agency a source of income and for the movie the prestige of being associated with some of the most prominent photographers of the period. In addition to Eve Arnold, photographers like Dennis Stock and Henri Cartier-Bresson worked on a rotating schedule of a few weeks on set, shooting both the action in front of the camera and behind the scenes. The resulting photographs provide not only a record of the movie and its production, but a document of a significant period in Hollywood history. As Kouvaros says, what they do is “bring us closer to the film and give us insights into the broader historical moment of its production” (pp. 96-97).

Kouvaros begins with the photographs as film stills and historical record, but his analysis quickly expands to one of the iconography of film stars, the representation of bodies in repose, the work of acting, and the evolution of late Hollywood style. One could easily imagine a book about The Misfits that uses photographs as mere illustrations, but Kouvaros does something more subtle and interesting here: he pays attention to the photographs as photographs. Yes, he uses the images to tell us about the narrative (the salt flats atop which the cowboys round up their wild horses also act as a barren canvas to their hopes of financial autonomy, for example). And he uses an image of John Huston and crew asleep on the ground to remind us of how much the production had to wait on Monroe. But he also reads the production photos to make another point about the nature of acting. The photographs don’t merely reinforce the idea of Monroe as the source of delay, instead, with numerous pictures of her and the wider cast waiting and sometimes wilting, they place the actors in “the struggle to accomodate one’s self – physically and mentally – to the difficult time of cinematic acting” (p. 137). Kouvaros pays attention here to details like a Bruce Davidson photograph of Monroe being made up, where she is framed in a car window, towards the bottom of the picture, separated visually by the car roof from a crowd of onlookers. Davidson portrays acting as halting and uncertain work, achieving “this effect by displacing the actor from the centre of the scene” (p. 119). Kouvaros then goes on to discuss the pictures of Robert Frank from his book The Americans. In Frank’s photographs (of ordinary, non-movie star life), the perfect visual confluence of activity famously rendered by Henri Cartier-Bresson as decisive moments are absent, replaced by depictions of lingering uncertainty. Kouvaros uses the photographs from The Misfits to make a broader point about the changing understanding of acting since Lee Strasberg’s Method, and how it was part of a wider shift in the cinematic and photographic and cultural rendition of time.

One of the qualities of photographs, especially the iconic ones that Kouvaros examines, is their ability to describe a specific moment while at the same time alluding to all that is not within the frame, to evoke an “expansion of significance” (p. 99) beyond what they record. Kouvaros’ argument follows a similar trajectory. He starts with specific and familiar iconography and draws in other images: connecting Magnum movie stills to Robert Frank’s new way of doing documentary, as I’ve referred to, but also taking us from pictures of Monroe at rest to Gustave Courbet’s painting and Denis Diderot’s writing. He uses theory as established as Roland Barthes’ and as recent as Laura Mulvey’s recent work on the meaning of a paused DVD. He discusses Hollywood stardom and eighteenth-century painting. It is all grounded in the materiality of the photograph and in the connections that we as viewers can draw from our own gestures to those of an actor being awkward in a publicity shot. The story of the photographs from The Misfits is not just about what they depict, nor is it just about how they came to be. Their story, as George Kouvaros so richly tells it here, is also about how acting is understood, how Hollywood and the society it was a part of changed, how cinema and photography are connected, and about how we apprehend the passing of time.

Mike Lim,
Flinders University, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 4 November 2010