Learning from directing
IN a film industry that is actor-centric, it is heartwarming to discover a simple—and succinct—book on directors. Written by Dian G. Smith, the book is about the Great American Film Directors, a categorization that is also the title of this exciting resource. In listing, one always has to encounter the question: Who are these top directors? The sub-title of the book, From the Flickers Through Hollywood’s Golden Age, settles that inquiry. You guessed it: there are ten of them—d. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, John Ford, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Orson Welles, and John Huston. At this point, you may be ransacking the files in your brain in search of those names missed but it cannot be denied we do have a sterling and blockbuster list.
The directors are arranged according to historical appearance—a short history, according to Smith, which includes from D. W. Griffith’s The Adventures of Dollie to John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor.
Thin and yet encyclopedic, the book sums up each filmmaker’s biography vis-a-vis the life history of Hollywood cinema, a tradition that certainly informs all kinds of cinemas in other parts of the globe. There may have been resistance later from so-called national cinemas of Europe, i.e. Italian and French cinema, but it is precisely the massive machine that was Hollywood that provided the impetus for other nations (and cultures) to come up with their own templates and traditions of filmmaking.
The book has this opening salvo: “Griffith was not just a director of film masterpieces. He directed the very first film masterpieces.” Quoting the critic James Agee, the book says: “To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language: the birth of an art.” We learn from the book how Griffith was concerned with realism: “With the camera so close, he urged his actors to be more ‘subtle and expressive’ than they would be on the stage.
In The Birth of a Nation, we learn the range of techniques now common that Griffith as a director introduced: the fade-ins and fade-outs as way to create transitions and “masking,” which was the crude (by present standard) technique of covering the camera lens to block off part of the image, the main aim of which was to create drama.
Who can imagine cinema without invoking the name of Charles Chaplin? Who can think of Chaplin without the image of the Tramp? According to the book, Mack Sennet, the film comedian and founder of Keystone Comedies, had some gags in his mind and asked Chaplin to put on “comedy makeup.” Chaplin went to the dressing room and rummaged through the available costume. Smith writes of the result of that auspicious moment, quoting Chaplin describing the meaning of the “accidental costume”: “The derby, too small, is striving for dignity. The mustache is vanity. The tightly buttoned coat and the stick and his whole manner are a gesture toward, gallant, dash and ‘front.’” The writer further articulates this point: “He is trying to meet the world bravely, to put up a bluff, and he knows that, too. He knows it so well that he can laugh at himself, and pity himself a little.” All those words from Chaplin and Smith sum up the art and tragicomic narratives from the Tramp.
Lost in the icon and celebrity of Charles Chaplin and his Tramp is a classic comic, Buster Keaton. We always think of Keaton as the Face, the Actor, forgetting in the process that he was first a filmmaker. Having been born in an age where the new artistic medium of cinema was being judged against the theater, Keaton’s take on this comparison was how he saw filmmaking and the camera as allowing the filmmaker to “show the audience the real thing.”
Keaton did his own stunts, which was ironic given his popular portrayal of a weakling. He also preferred locations instead of using sets. Smith talks of the power of Keaton’s works by referring to the structure of his narrative: “The structure of Keaton’s films is also a source of laughter. They are often symmetrical, moving back and forth, with endings neatly tied to endings.” Smith gives as an example Keaton’s Seven Chances, which begins with the character running after potential brides and ending with the brides chasing him.
When Chaplin and Keaton are mentioned, there is bound to be a debate as to who was the greater comedian. The book sort of resolves this by stating that Keaton was the greater filmmaker. It cites the parodies made by Keaton out of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, certainly a near-sacred artifact for film enthusiasts.
Buster Keaton would have a resurrection in the 1950s and 1960s courtesy of film critics who saw gems in his works. To the celebrations organized around his celebrity, Keaton is described in the book as responding with modesty. This humility seems to be found in these words from the comic: “I never realized I was doing anything but trying to make people laugh when I threw my custard pies and took pratfalls.”
From the same book on the great American film director, a wonderfully poignant quote from Buster Keaton’s autobiography closes the chapter on the comic: “I think I had the happiest and luckiest of lives .... I had always known life was like that, full of uppercuts for the deserving and undeserving alike.”
It is true what they say: comedians, with their gift of humor, can be the saddest beings in this world.
More on the other filmmakers and the lessons they never taught that we would learn from. Geniuses like John Ford, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Orson Welles, and John Huston will be part of my gallery in this column next week. n