Stuart Klawans,
Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order.
London/New York, Cassell, 1999.
ISBN 0 3047005 41
188 pp.
US$19.95 (paper)

Uploaded 12 November 1999

There are occasions when the composition of film history seems governed by the principles of Social Darwinism. The speed and frequency with which the reputations of individual films, their stars or their makers rise and fall with all the predictability of stock prices amazes one time and time again. Film festivals, for example, nowadays seem less the occasion for deliberations over artistic merit than marketplaces for the acquisition of “buzz” and the pursuit of ballyhoo. Even more perplexing is the degree to which the general public as much as the film industry has succumbed to this obsession with status. Box office grosses, senior executive golden parachutes and star salaries seem as much common knowledge to the man on the street as this week’s grocery prices. This omnipresent hodge-podge of statistics, suppositions and innuendo is fueled by such sources as the regular grade-giving in Entertainment weekly; popular narratives of on-the-set catastrophe exemplified by Stephen Bach’s Final Cut: Drama and Disaster in the Making of “Heaven’s Gate“; the Medved Brothers” “Golden Turkey” Awards; the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s thumb’s up or down critiques of the week’s releases; and even the canon-mongering contained in Andrew Sarris’s groundbreaking The American Cinema. Any number of sorry results fall into place by virtue of these circumstances, one of the most telling being how, once a film has been assigned the position of a “bomb” or “overrated” or “cult movie”, any alternative assessment of whether or not the picture is worth one’s time is besides the point. What has become the common wisdom is all we need or might wish to know.

Stuart Klawans addresses several of the most well-known or notorious films disposed of by this system of appraisal in his very readable and rewarding Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order. At first, cruising the index, one might think, “just what one needs, another knee-jerk dismissal of Apocalypse Now (USA, 1979)or Cleopatra! (USA,1963).” However, Klawans, the film critic of The Nation, has not come to bury these works yet again but, instead, bare them to the light of a consciousness drawn by the opportunities offered by the aggressive pursuit of excess. As he states, these are works that draw upon, if not increase, one’s attention to art’s very perimeters, for the “aesthetic interest” of their extravagant obsessions “arise principally from the excitement of seeing filmmaking pushed beyond all rational limits. These are movies for people who want to die from too much cinema” (1). Klawans organizes his assessment of the folly that drives these narratives through a variety of analogies, most notably the forms of architectural excess that flourished in the baroque environment of the 18th century and found their most public manifestation in the ornate monuments erected as part of the nationalistic fairs and exhibitions that flourished with regularity in the United States from the mid-19th century to the present day. For Klawans, the out-of-control motion picture and the public spectacle of a world’s fair share the practice of juxtaposing seemingly mismatched styles; outdistancing an audience’s sense of logic or appropriate development; and spending money, whether public or private or both, with a spendthrift obliviousness to cost. Too often, our approach to such enterprises is narrowly governed by an attraction to the attractive prerogatives of personal expression and a conviction that the makers of such out-of-the-ordinary material must be either “a rebel drop-out or a genius employee” (3). However, Klawans feels, such an antinomy forces us to assume one of two inhibiting propositions lies behind all cultural production: either “cheap cynicism” or “consumer good cheer” (3). He proposes in Film Follies to consider ways in which specific films allow us to abandon such a scheme and, instead, inquires how “the people who directed these pictures behaved as if they were making a glorified home movie … yet had in their hands the full apparatus of studio production” (3). As a result, rather than questioning whether we are confronted with a masterpiece or a “golden turkey,” Klawans wishes instead to assess representative instances of willful grandeur, assemblages of emotions and images that shirk any attraction to either the reasonable or the routine.

To illustrate how Klawans illuminates a territory one would assume had been long ago overwhelmed, his comments on two films, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (USA, 1916) and Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (USA, 1925), bear examination. The common wisdom attached to the former castigates the director as being overwhelmed by the success of Birth of a Nation and therefore oblivious to the fact that his conflation of a sequence of temporally separate narratives would confuse rather than captivate an audience, thereby losing his personal investment of some $126,750 dollars in Intolerance‘s $385,906 budget and laying in place the debts that would, amongst other factors, undermine his career. Klawans correctly asserts that Intolerance in fact did almost as well as its predecessor in the early months of its release and was ecstatically received in Europe but failed to attract equally sizable audiences in the small towns of America. Furthermore, the narrative structure of the film permitted Griffith to separate one storyline from the other and reissue them as individual, internally coherent films. More to the point, however, Klawans concocts a compelling hypothesis for what led Griffith to the film’s form. As he was filming Intolerance, the biggest attraction of 1915 on the West Coast, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, was occurring in San Francisco. Griffth visited the fair as he was filming prison footage for the contemporary plotline, “The mother and the law.” The juxtposition of elements in the fairgrounds and the efforts simultaneously to educate and entertain the public inspired the director to create a work so out-of-the-ordinary in its very substance that people would not only compare it to a World’s Fair but also be equally dazzled by it. One can see in the mixture of periods and visual styles of Intolerance the same kind of collision of “futurism and antiquarianism, patriotic swagger and a fascination with the exotic” that typified the national exposition (10). Specific elements of the visual design of Intolerance seem to have their antecedents in the fair; the lavish “Tower of jewels,” built at a cost of $500,000, resembled in its visual self-regard the film’s gates of Babylon. Even the very individuals who built Griffith’s sets came from the fair, the Italian sculptors having left their completed tasks in San Francisco for Los Angeles. Previous assessments of Intolerance have too often laid the cause for the film’s failure at the director’s feet; consumed by hubris, he left audiences out of his considerations altogether. Instead, if we focus upon his attraction to the Exposition and bring attention to bear upon Griffith’s understanding of fairs as “more than amusements, more than commercial ventures, more than didactic accumulations of this and that from every nation and period,” we will then understand that Intolerance was Griffith’s endeavor to create a summation of all of human culture itself because it encompassed the whole range of human achievement pursued in the face of factionalism and fanaticism (14). Ironically, it is partly the resemblance of the film to the fair that leads to the problems with its narrative structure. At the former, a visitor could choose what period of time or national form of culture to examine and how long they might stay, whereas “in a movie, the attractions were brought together in time, rather than separated in space, the spectators had to be led by the hand, rather than being left free to wonder” (23). Additionally, Klawans observes in Griffith’s excessive ambitions the influence of Wagner, whose music played such a vital role in the cobbled-together score of The Birth of a Nation (USA, 1915). The composer’s performance center, Bayreuth, was, like the fairs, a man-made environment that aspired to be as complete and self-referential as a work of art. Perhaps the director’s greatest liability was that he observed in these various enterprises the ability to draw together disparate phenomena whereas his jarringly sentimental manner of resolving his narratives made their lack of consistency all the more obvious. The optimism at the conclusion of Intolerance in particular seems altogether self-willed in the face of all the misery and agony which precedes what it chronicles.

Erich von Stroheim comes down to us, if we attend to common wisdom, as an individual similarly plagued by a self-destructive fascination with misery and misfortune. He is the touchstone for the self-possessed artist who bucked the system only to be destroyed by the process, an auteur avant la lettre whose personal signature is indelible in every frame he shot. Klawans alternately examines von Stroheim in the historical context of his film’s production, underscoring the manner in which his character in Blind Husbands (USA, 1919) connected with the anti-foreign sentiments that fueled the Palmer raids of 1919, whereas by 1922, when the spendthrift Foolish Wives (USA, 1922) was released, the country was consumed by a form of Americanism whose commitment to normalcy collided with the licentiousness of von Stroheim’s European protagonists. Furthermore, the latter film had the misfortune to open on the same day as the second of Fatty Arbuckle’s trials for the rape and death of Virginia Rappe. In other words, if von Stroheim embodied an element of the zeitgeist, it was a short-lived phenomenon. When he came to produce his masterpiece Greed in 1923, the public spaces of consumption where films were displayed had come to possess a level of ornate excessiveness that inevitably collided with the kind of every-day behavior von Stroheim wished to depict in his adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel. The middle-class public that could afford such luxury wished their forms of entertainment to gratify their desire for material satisfaction even if they were, at times, willing to entertain plotlines that seemed to challenge the status quo as did Von Stroheim’s earlier work. That challenge was, admittedly, tempered by the fact that those who embodied the spirit of epater le bourgeois in their works were, like the director, of European extraction and, therefore, easily distinguished from the work of domestic creators and dismissed by an American audience. Having set in place some of the factors that led to both the film’s truncated form – its producers sharing many of their audience’s assumptions about filmmaking – and its poor reception, Klawans illuminates why Von Stroheim pursued such an enterprise against obvious odds, for Greed remains, he admits, “perhaps best understood not as a motion picture but as an act of sabotage – the flinging of something unassimilable into the machinery” (53). Paradoxically, it is not so much the unrelieved grubbiness of the story that repelled audience and executive alike but the manner in which Von Stroheim, unlike his earlier work, broke with the Romantic elevation of the artist and removed himself, deliberately and completely, from the picture altogether. So complete was his recreation of a workaday world, so labored was his effort to create that world over some 64 weeks of production, Von Stroheim made his mark upon Greed by effacing his presence from every frame all the better to affirm the very person he was, for, Klawans argues, “the more fully he affirmed that character, the more he needed to build up the illusion that Greed showed an autonomous, ‘real’ world”(59-60). Even his characters were expressions of a loss of self, the driving motivation of the plot being the withering away of whatever small amount of dignity his protagonists possessed in the first place. The final irony is that the common wisdom perceives Greed as the embodiment of von Stroheim’s conceit whereas “his most distinctive achievement in Greed was to have established an expressionistic, satirical tone without imposing an authorial ‘I’ ” (67). It would seem that the work is not the embodiment of a kind of nihilistic abandonment of the self, and Hollywood, ironically, took Von Stroheim at his word and denied him his artistic “self” not too many years after its compromised release.

The remainder of Film Follies is resonant with similar well-conceived and thought-provoking readings of such out-of-control enterprises as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Germany, 1927), David O. Selznick’s delirious western Duel in the Sun (USA, 1946), as well as more recent debacles such as Jacques Tati’s Playtime (France/Italy, 1967), Mikhail Kalatozov’s I am Cuba (Soviet Union/Cuba, 1964), and Leos Carax’s Les amants du pont-neuf (France, 1991). In each instance, as is the case with his readings of Griffith and Von Stroheim, he approaches these virtually sui generis narratives with the open-minded attitude of an explorer who comes upon a temple in an unexplored portion of the jungle convinced that his job is not to abandon himself to amazement but, instead, bring back to those left behind some sense of what we abandon when we fail to consider that even the miraculous has its own rationale.

David Sanjek