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2 On
writing and directing 3
Lois
Weber, writer of cinema 4
Lois
Weber, writing exigence 5
Lois
Weber and the mirror of cinema 6
Appendix:
Lois Weber's surviving
films For
writing about the cinema, Alexandre Astruc's
"caméra stylo" essay
signalled a detour into language, which was to make
directing a form of
"enunciation".[4]
But what impelled Astruc, initially at least, was the
parallel between writing and directing, not between film and
language. In his evolutionary understanding, film language
was being brought into being through cinematic writing,
created by praxis. When others (let us say, Christian Metz),
stopped (for many years) to explore the possibility of film
language, language and cinema, the impersonal enunciation or
the site of the film, Astruc
assumed that if these things did
not exist he and his film making friends would soon bring
them about. He was describing and advocating an activity, a
verb, not a state or material of that activity, not a noun.
[4].
Alexandre Astruc, The birth of a new avant-garde:
la caméra stylo" in
The new wave: critical landmarks selected by
Peter Graham (Garden City: Doubleday &
Company, 1968), 17-24. Published originally in
Écran français 144
(1948). But
at the same time, Astruc could only conceive of writing as a
deliberate engagement with
language. He criticised Henri Georges Clouzot for using film
imagery tinged with "heavy associations"
(19), and he said that the real problems for film makers
were "the translation into cinematic terms of
verbal tenses and logical relationships" (22). In
so doing, he bought into a model of "good
writing" which one can still see at work today in
most analyses of film texts. Directing
is most usually thought of as an activity intimately
involved with the conventions of film usage ("film
language"). This seems commonsensical enough. What
I will call "good directing" understands
itself as the proper use of film in film making - in other
words, as a good film activity rather than a good activity
in which film happens to be used. "Good
directing" easily becomes directing that is
conscious of the problematic relation between language and
discourse, conscious that this relation must be always
re-negotiated at every point in the text. In
"good directing" the text is seemingly
saturated with sense to the extent that it is saturated with
language: every image and every cut portends. Moreover,
everyone understands that there is a relation of complex and
profound significance between semiotic and structural levels
in this kind of directing (that is in directing as an art
and directing as possession) - between shots and sequences,
sequences and episodes, episodes and the
whole. This
is a model, as I have suggested, that owes its origin to a
model of "good writing", a privileged
relation between writing and language, that almost everyone
accepts. But there is also writing that does not conform to
that model and that may, nonetheless, be good. There is
writing "without identity" that takes
language for granted or that finds language a barrier that
cannot be surmounted, that is, writing that is entirely
inside or outside language - in which language is wholly
familiar or utterly strange. This is recognisably writing,
but it is not what one thinks of when one thinks of writing.
Edgar Rice Burroughs and Agatha Christie practised this kind
of writing. They wrote entirely within language,
comfortably, familiarly, taking language for granted, only
making themselves felt on the title page. So did Mickey
Spillane and the poet Julia Moore in another, unschooled or
naive, way. They wrote outside language: they were
uncomfortable with the limits of language, they had more to
say than language alone could say, they wanted language to
be themselves. In
such writing, the well-turned phrase is only an artifice
within the diegesis (usually a clever line of dialogue, a
"telling" camera movement), not an organic
part of the whole. Astruc would be disdainful (he was good
at that). Virtually all of the thinking and the art in this
kind of writing or directing happens somewhere beneath or
above language and is often apparent as aspects of structure
or of figuration abstracted from the verbal or the cinematic
- even sometimes in the form of "heavy
associations" at those levels. Nor
is it the case that this kind of writing
"stops" at a structural or figural level -
that it resists more detailed analysis. A
banal sentence truly chosen at random from
Burroughs: Tarzan
at the earth's core[5]
This
sentence is quite clearly an example of the delineation of
character through Roman Jakobson's "poetic
function". Poetry, or the foregrounding of
language, is apparent not only in the alliteration of the s
("suggestion ... smile ... smouldered ... his ...
eyes") - which surely dictates
"suggestion", in many ways the key word of
the sentence - but also in the way vowel sounds are deployed
from loose ("As Tarzan ate") to tight
("in his eyes"). One might also note that
one, clichéd, word, "smouldered",
acquires additional levels of sense in context as one
realises that in the scene, the food being eaten is not
cooked and that Tarzan is remembering a civilised
aristocrat's reaction to underdone fowl.
[5].
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan at the
earth's core (London: Mark Goulden
Ltd., n.d.), 65. What
provokes critical resentment in such analysis is usually the
question of conscious effort: did Burroughs work
on this sentence? Did he make the
"good writing" analysis can discover in
his work? This is for some the real question of
"authorship" (the critic, not the writer,
is the true author) - but in the end it is, I think, more a
question of the kind of writing involved, anonymous writing
that takes language for granted, that makes no demand on
language, merely makes a use of it. A writing
whose formal causes and results are not really
understood. And, for that reason, this is also
perhaps a question of writing in general, a question that
assumes that writing can happen sometimes because in spite
of language, as it does in Julia Moore's famous
dictum, "literary is a
work very difficult to do". This wonderful sentence
is not "good writing", but an example of
the very best, most precious, writing done because in spite
of language, outside
language.[6]
In
film one of the best known directors working entirely
within language is Howard Hawks.
The difference between Hawks's films and, say,
Josef von Sternberg's is simply that
Hawks's effects are never laboured and,
consequently, he is never caught pointing to the
cinema/himself as von Sternberg, a master of cinematic
language, always is. Some might say that working within
language is the common place of many "classical
Hollywood" directors, like Raoul Walsh, John Ford,
George Cukor and Dorothy Arzner. Some might even say that
such an approach was almost a necessity for survival in
Hollywood from the mid-twenties into the fifties at least.
Among
the notable women directors, Alice Guy, it seems to me,
always worked entirely within language. This is not
surprising, since she contributed quite a lot to the
formation of that language and was surely comfortable with
what she had done. But
certain film makers inside and outside Hollywood have tended
to use the cinema naively, displaying a certain
"archaic" sensibility even in films made
with great professional or aesthetic aplomb. Such directors
seem to have understood cinema as a barrier to be
transcended rather than as a medium of expression. Despite
their apparent primitiveness, they made use of film
"not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn back,
but rather so we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in
order to attempt to break the circle, the circle of
circles". I am thinking of Abel Gance, King Vidor,
Cecil B. DeMille, Ed Wood. And, I would say, Lois
Weber. [6].
Apparently the poet, known as "the sweet singer of
Michigan", used this sentence in the preface to her
last volume of verse, A few choice words to the
public with new and original poems by Julia A.
Moore, published in 1878 (see The
stuffed owl: an anthology of bad verse, edited
by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee [New York:
Capricorn Books, 1962], 233). A very wise critic once
cautioned me against using Moore's phrase as the
title of an essay because it was not at that time politic to
claim to be writing literature.
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2 On writing
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