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Bridging the Great Divide: Hollywood Versus the Avant-garde Tina Butler, mongabay.com May 8, 2005 Conventions of Hollywood film are so deeply imbedded in its products that they are almost invisible. This is indicative of the Hollywood project--to achieve a level of transparency, utter seamlessness in style and appearance. These pictures are astoundingly well crafted, through the practice of continuity editing; they do not draw attentions to themselves and audiences begin to lose themselves in the narratives. Additionally, the star and studio systems created standardized and recognized commodities of the people associated with each film. Directors and stars alike belonged in a way to studios, signing contacts for multiple picture deals, so that the public could consistently associate specific people with specific studios. Within the Hollywood system, as an arm of the culture industry, "all culture is standardized, organized and administered for the sole purpose of serving as an instrument of social control" (Huyssen 21). By determining and defining cultural norms, the system can regulate and manipulate on its own terms. In contrast, the conventions that characterize European ‘art films,' specifically those of the German Expressionist school are considerably apparent. There is no obscuring or hiding of form. Over the top performances by the actors, dramatic and exaggerated chirascuro lighting and the use of techniques like forced perspective give the films an overarching sense of artificiality. They work in direct opposition to those of Hollywood. The composition of the films often seems motivated purely by the richness of the aesthetic qualities, contrary to practicality, functionality or relevance. Unlike Hollywood films, aspects of style are rarely stimulated by plot. The Expressionist style was Lang's forte; it was only his exposure and subsequent submission to Hollywood that tainted his craftmanship. As Lang, forced from his homeland, was given the illusory freedom to work in the United States, he had to operate in a new system that severely undercut the messages of his work. Hannah Arendt writes in her essay Work, "There can be hardly anything more alien or even more destructive to workmanship than teamwork" (161). Lang's personal stamp is all but lost in Scarlet Street by the politics and practices of Hollywood and specifically, the Production Code. The Code operated under the pretense of fostering the creation and distribution of wholesome, popular entertainment while in actuality, asserting control over the masses. According to Dwight MacDonald in A Theory of Mass Culture, "The serious artist rarely ventures into the media of mass culture: radio, the movies, comic books, detective stories, science fiction, television" (59). He equates, like many others, mass culture with the impersonal and high culture with individual vision. In the United States, it seems near impossible to use mass mediums to speak personal conceptions. This fits nicely with Arendt's sentiments and speaks to the fate of Scarlet Street. M is made in Germany in 1931. Scarlet Street is made in the United States in 1945. The change in venue and time is staggering in consideration of the artistic properties of the end products. One of the most marked distinctions between the two films is the way in which violence is portrayed. In Lang's earlier film, the audience never sees the direct depiction of murder, an impressive feat considering the plot follows a serial killer. In M, the representation of each murder is implied, and is therefore more demanding of the viewer. Watching Elsie Beckmann's balloon float away and tangle among telephone wires is far more harrowing and insidious than witnessing a straightforward and obvious killing. With Lang's use of subtlety in certain key scenes, the audiences' imagination is engaged and provoked. Conversely, in Scarlet Street, the audience views Kitty's murder directly; it is graphic, heavy-handed and obvious. The viewer sees the act itself as well as its aftermath, as characterized by the bloodied sheets. Lang originally had an expanded and more striking stabbing sequence for the murder scene perpetrated by the enraged character of Chris, but the Code censors blocked it. In transitioning to the popular system, it seems the director loses his sensibilities of subtlety; he begins to hit his audiences over the head with his intended messages. Filmic action commences to take precedence over artistic primacy. Perhaps the scene is reflective of his growing sense of frustration from being forced to create and operate in such regulated conditions. In any case, in Scarlet Street, implication is gone and overstatement has taken its place. Additionally, the film's narrative and look are dark in nature, but Scarlet Street comes out of the Noirist tradition. Lang's later film is far removed from the spheres of production that created M and it shows in his adoption of a style originating in the United States. The film is substantially Noir in character, a genre which itself took inspiration from the Expressionist tradition, and this very fact works against Scarlet Street's artistic integrity. The emergence of Noir in the 1940s says much about the socio-politic-cultural environment of the United States at the time, however all insight value aside, the genre merely commandeers certain facets of Expressionism in such a way that makes them attractive to a wide and vulgarized audience. Noir then, assumes the title of kitsch, even if it is a high-class incarnation of it, a term identified by Clement Greenberg in his essay, Avant-garde and Kitsch (41). MacDonald borrows from Greenberg the following about kitsch: "[It] predigests art for the spectator and spares him the effort, provides him with a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art" (61). Scarlet Street makes elements of the avant-garde easy and fitting to a large audience and undermines the style of the ‘art film' with its mimicry. Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. "Work." The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1958. Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review. 6.5. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indianapolis: Indiana U Press, 1986. Lang, Fritz. M and Scarlet Street. 1931 and 1945. MacDonald, Dwight. "A Theory of Mass Culture." Mass Culture. Rosenberg and White, eds. Glencoe: Free Press, 1957. News index | RSS | Add to MyYahoo! Advertisements: Organic Apparel from Patagonia | Insect-repelling clothing |
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