Hollywood, fighting to make a difference between reality and fiction

From The New Yorker : fact : content

“I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality.” [says 24 TV show screenwriter]
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan—wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals—aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his “call” was.

I agree people can, but I’m not sure Hollywood can.

a dreary world

From The Show Off (1926)
Youth, and Louise Brooks’ hard glaze, give this close-up its power.

You talking to me ?

Any idea as to what those two birds are saying to each other ?

Chaplin defeats the Kaiser !

A Night in Casablanca (1947)

Gary Giddins was right (Comedy, Film, Music and Books) when he described the Marx brothers as

grown-ups pretending to be children pretending to be grown-ups

The exhilaration of watching their crazed zaniness in action comes not just from the slapstick and the fun of well-timed gags, but also from the innate optimism. Nothing is impossible, and everything is fun: need to break out of jail ? fly an airplane ? manage a hotel ? find Nazi loot ? outsmart crooks ? The Marx brothers evolve in a world where no one seems to notice that they’re crazy, one of the foundation of their humor as Giddins also writes. But even when people do notice (the Nazi in this instance, or the captain of police), they can’t take them to task since the child-like aspect is obvious to all. And so, from illogical gag to logical absurdity the brothers hop around and restore good sense and human relationship against all the nasty down-to-earth grabbing war-mongering serious authorities, and restore hope against hope. They dare to dismiss the most dangerous of men with a side-step and with the force of a child dismissing rational arguments for the power of the imaginary world. And the beauty is that they win, in the end. Especially if winning means, as in here, finishing the film not with a celebration of the victory of good over nazi evil, even if that’s an underlying issue of course — but with a chase after the hapless girl who dreams of being kissed with the three brothers around…

a silent film as a musical ?

Music, costumes, scenery, dancing, all meshed into a gloriously dreamy whole: this was already a possibility back in 1922.

Another of those pleasing Music Films is at the Rialto, also. It is called “Arabian Duet,” and was produced under the direction of J. F. Leventhal, with a setting by Claude Millard and choreography by Ted Shawn. The dancing, done by Martha Graham and Charles Millard, does not seem as graceful as that of Lillian Powell and Miss Graham in the “Bubble” and “Egyptian” pictures, but the setting is effective and the colors, reproduced by the Prizma process, are clear and bright without being harsh. So the eye is satisfied.
There Music Films are, indeed, something more than a novelty on the screen. As compositions of movement, color, mass and line, they are cinematographic creations, entertaining in themselves and significant of the beauty and expressiveness which may be achieved through the medium of kinetic photography. An additional value possessed by them is that they may be shown accompanied by music played in time to the dancing, wherever a screen and one or more instruments can be brought together, because the arms of a director beating time are shown in the foreground of each picture and, according to Mr. Leventhal, all the musicians have to do is follow the lead of this figure on the screen. If this is the case, however, the films have not been exhibited to the best advantage at the Rivoli and Rialto, for, instead of sitting down and letting the orchestras follow the leader in the pictures, the real leaders at these houses have remained on their platforms and directed as usual. As a result, spectators have been disconcerted by seeing simultaneously the unsynchronized movements of two leaders.
(”The Screen”, New York Times, 15 may 1922, p. 24)

it’s the drama, stupid, now as then

We have found out it isn’t necessary for a photodrama to have only one dramatic scene, but each scene must be a drama in itself. The whole picture must be made up of a series of small dramas. This makes the completed drama a mosaic of little ones. Scenes that have no dramatic value in them, or say nothing, must be eliminated. So the scenario writer must bear in mind at all times not what he can put into a picture, but what he can leave out. If each scene has a why and a wherefore and an excuse for being, then you get a perfect continuity.
Jeanie Macpherson, Moving Picture World, 11 july 1917

Rhetorical punctuation and noir films

Detour (1945)

A gripping noir film, talkative at times and a bit unconvincing in the depiction of Roberts’ emprisonment by Vera, but gripping nonetheless. Noir films replace love or power as the driving forces of tragedy, and replace it with the more democratic force of money. Instead of kings, bums and outcasts. Instead of Fate, greenbacks. But the tragic incapacity of its characters to break through, “to crash” as High Sierra’s Roy Earle say it, is more poignant and just as powerful. Bums who want money, can’t think of nothing else, and will never get it, we’re sure. Their tragic flaw ? Some kind of naive sentimentality, some sort of belief that there is love, that with or without money the world will be theirs someday. That maddening belief, a romantic left-over, pushes them deeper into situation where money would be required, and the more they need it, the less they’ll have it. And thus popular, down-to-earth objects, a car, a telephone, a cigarette or an empty liquor bottle, a hat, a shrunken overcoat, a drugstore, those familiar objects of America, are transformed into tragic signs, figures of a fate bigger than the hero. Detour in its simple straighforward way gives a good example of this modern, regular tragedy.
a coffee mug
a juke-box
or a car…

But because familiar objects are so overpowering on the screen, doesn’t mean that a little rhetorical punctuation is not in order here and there, as in this change of light:

putting words on the image

From Harold Lloyd’s Just Neighbors.
The only instance I’ve seen so far of anything at all written on a moving image in silent films is to indicate any noise, sound, usually of non-human origin,, and usually for comic purposes.
For instance in this sequence (where Bebe Daniels is, incidentally, doing a lot of looking at the director off-camera, who is probably directing her — on top of the usual slapstick look-at-the-audience routine)

This sequence is what silent films traditionally do. Shot #3 is ridiculously short, just a flash on the screen, since there is no time between the two lines, and practically this is a case where the audience is engrossed in reading funny lines, rather than looking at images. There could be no image in between and it wouldn’t matter much, except that it’s a bit more comfortable anchoring the Bebe’s reply to her image of shock, however brief.
But then the parrot in the background joins the shouting match with:

Words flash on the screen. Rather than dialogue, this is a background sound which belongs materially to the image itself. The other solution would have been a close-up, an insert of the parrot “talking”, as with instruments, trumpets, horses’ hooves, and so on. But since the parrot needs to be shown talking and his word is also important, this is probably the most economical solution.

detour (1945)

Identify this road :