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3
Lois
Weber, writer of cinema 4 Lois
Weber, writing exigence People
should listen to siblings - even siblings who speak in
clichés. We assume that extraordinary films are made
by extraordinary people. But if something out of the
ordinary is required even to survive in the picture biz (and
they are always telling us that it does), then surely the
most unusual movies, the ones that look different from any
of the others, will be the ones exscribing an ordinary
vision, crafted by those ordinary people who by luck (or a
spouse's ambition) are vouchsafed cinematic
opportunity. I am not just being clever here, or at least
not in the matter of ordinary vision. The greatness of Henri
Rousseau=s painting is as dependent upon the
banality of what it discloses, its percepts, as upon the
uniqueness of the manner of its disclosure, its affects: it
is an extraordinarily ordinary vision. The same may be said
for other artworks called naive. [12]
Ethel Weber, qtd. in Elizabeth Peltret, "On the lot
with Lois Weber" Photoplay
(October 1917), rpt. in Slide 32. [13]
Lois Weber, qtd. in Aline Carter, "The muse of the
reel", Motion picture
magazine (March 1921), rpt. in Slide,
29. Now
there is an ordinary sentiment. It is a quotation from Lois
Weber encapsulating the message of one of her films for
Paramount: Too wise wives (1921).
This is also the message of many of Cecil B. DeMille's
"naughty" comedies of marital infidelity
made for Paramount around the same time. Weber is not
DeMille, although they shared a common sense of the mission
of the cinema. Weber's film is a transformation of
De Mille's sex comedy into a comedy of domesticity
and the everyday. When women change clothes onscreen in
Too wise wives it is because they
are shopping and the film wants to depict a desire for nice
things, not because they are provocative minxes and film
wants to inflame a desire for sexy bodies. And in the end,
the result is that the sincerity of Weber's attempt
to persuade is as clearly apparent as De Mille's
conflict-ridden prurience.[14]
[14]
On which see Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille
and American culture: the silent era (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994),
142-178. [15]
Lois Weber, qtd. in Bertha Smith, "A perpetual
leading lady", Sunset
(March 1914), rpt. in Slide, 37. [16]
Lois Weber, qtd. in "The Smalleys have a message to
the world", The Universal
weekly, 10 April 1915, rpt. in Kay Sloan,
"The hand that rocks the cradle: an
introduction", Film
history 1, no. 4 (1987): 341. Weber
(and DeMille) wanted to use the cinema to preach, to
editorialise, to educate. Just as it was for Lenin and
Lunacharsky, for them the cinema was the most important of
all the arts. Forget DeMille, Weber had the credentials. She
was the daughter of a minister who had spent several years
in missionary street work. Throughout her career, she spoke
about the uplifting potential of the motion picture and made
movies that were clearly intended to be good for their
audiences. Thus it seems clear to many of those who have
written about the director that her film making was the
equivalent of "the writing that has always (through
a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the
speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to day,
moralizing)". If her films appear naive, one would
assume from this understanding, it is at least in part
because that kind of moralising is old-fashioned, that kind
of idealism is old-fashioned. But
this is an idealist, even naive, understanding that depends
on taking the quotations attributed to her at face value:
accepting their authenticity and their intention, not
reading the events or the words very carefully at
all. Why
would we believe even that Lois Weber said the things that
trade papers and fan magazines printed when we know that
trade papers and fan magazines usually printed what
publicists gave them to print? Why would we believe that
Lois Weber, for example, said that her film Too
wise wives advocated making one's self
beautiful for one's husband, when the film does
nothing of the kind? In point of fact the woman in the film
who makes herself beautiful for her husband is "too
wise": she is deceiving him by pretending a
subservience to his desire that she does not feel. In this
film, the two wives who are too wise learn to treat marriage
rationally, as a partnership based on mutual respect and
trust. They learn not to be too subservient and not to be
too manipulative. This is a complicated lesson and it does
not make for sensational cinema - or, as we have seen, for a
sensational interview. And
the minister's daughter? Slide wants to discover in
Weber some trace of Mary Baker Eddy, but it is possible that
there may be some Aimée Semple MacPherson too.
Indeed, in his account of her early life, Slide does not
describe a minister's daughter who happened to end
up in show business, but a person with a strong desire to be
noticed who turned ceaselessly to performance and
self-display, no matter what the circumstances of her life
happened to be. Jayne Mansfield no less. She
did not spend her teenage years preparing for the pursuit of
God nor for the pursuit of a husband. Instead, she was a
concert pianist at sixteen (1895?), quitting within a year.
She did not retire to a convent, nor did she return home to
pursue a husband. Instead, she joined a group of religious
performers, the Church Army Workers, for two years.
Apparently they played mainly for prostitutes (her street
missionary work). Yet when the minister, her father died,
she did not take up his preaching, nor did she take up the
so-often-postponed pursuit of a husband. Instead, she took
up the advice of an uncle and a career on the musical stage,
joining Phillips Smalley's touring company when she
was 25 and marrying him a year later (1905), when he was 40.
Smalley may have been an intelligent man; he certainly was a
snob with good family connections, a womaniser, and (at
least later) an alcoholic. Had
she pursued this husband? Marriage apparently meant that she
could no longer perform on stage. Nothing daunted, while the
theatre company was touring, she began to work in films. She
was soon a writer-director-actor of talking pictures for
Gaumont (1908), then under the management of Herbert
Blaché, husband of the first important woman film
maker, Alice Guy, who may have been in temporary retirement
at the time and at any case does not seem to have been much
in evidence in Weber=s life. Smalley, seeing an
opportunity (and perhaps also protecting his interests in
other ways), joined his wife in films and the two worked
mostly in partnership after that until 1919, when their
marriage seems to have begun a final downward spiral (they
were officially divorced in June,
1922).[17]
[17]
The events summarised in this and the preceding paragraph
are covered in Slide, 19-45 and
passim. [18]
Lois Weber, qtd. in Peltret (see note 12), rpt. in Slide,
21. The same story apparently occurs also in Smith (see note
15), but perhaps not in the same words. This
account of why Lois Weber quit being a concert pianist is an
interesting one. I do not think that she took her
commonplace accident as a religious or mystical call, but
she surely seems to attribute to it, to the event, a
significance beyond the common. There
is an obvious psychological level here: a commentary about
the forging of character, about someone who needs to be in
control, about growing up. But there is also a level of
reading and writing, of the cinema, in the story. We can see
what happened in close-up: the key breaking, the hand
reaching (it is a right hand, we sense this with certainty
because we can see the hand trying over and over to strike
the missing key as the tempo increases, until, in futility
and in long shot, the girl slams both hands down upon the
keyboard and dissolves in weeping, running frantically from
the stage while the concert master wrings his hands and
wonders if he will have to refund everyone's
money). This anecdote is the climactic incident in the
imaginary film of Lois Weber=s life; and what
happens in this incident is that something very ordinary and
quite contingent is transformed into something filled with
fate and import (a woman detects perfume in a letter, or
sees her mother in the act of stealing food): meaning is
exscribed, writes itself out of the mundane so that it can
be read anew, exchanging the thing for a
symbol. [19]
Slide, 64. He cites only Memories
(1913) and Even as you and I
(1917), which was produced at Universal, but released as the
first "Lois Weber Production"
(105-106). On
the contrary. All of Lois Weber's work is
allegorical, like the story of the black key. Rather than
the most realistic, hers is the most unreal, most literary,
most symbolic cinema. Nothing in it is as it appears.
Everything means. Nothing is specific and itself: no pair of
shoes, no Ford motorcar, no lovely Claire Windsor, no
dashing Louis Calhern, no carefully chosen authentic
location setting (The blot). They
all stand for something else. No indices, only icons. The
mountain of detail that she assembled was never intended to
serve as a mere record of life as it is lived. Rather, it
was intended to present earthly stories with heavenly
meanings, to mirror truth, which is to say, to disclose the
Being beneath existence, God in the details, purpose of
life. [20]
Slide, 37. Allegory
insists on the unfulfilled nature of the text by gesturing
towards its (ultimately unsatisfactory) completion, which is
also its origin, elsewhere. It is a state of constant
reference, always becoming, shifting, troping. We have seen,
in Slide=s own testimony, how two of Lois
Weber=s films make this gesture turn upon itself
and into fiction (in Sunshine
Molly, an imaginary book by Lois Weber and in
Life=s mirror, an
imaginary film by Lois Weber). In other films, the gesture
is more palpable and the referents more
"real". In The
blot there is a famous instance, which most
sophisticated commentators take as the
"message" of the film, where an actual
issue of The Literary Digest is
cited and passages in it
reproduced.[21]
The hand that rocks the cradle, a
film based on events in the life of Margaret Sanger, quotes
directly from a speech given by Judge John Stelk on February
8, 1917.[22]
In Hypocrites (1915) there are
quotations attributed to Browning and Milton, a reproduction
of a painting by Faugeron and an article about that painting
by Elbert Hubberd that apparently appeared on July 12, 1914.
In 1915 at least, Weber claimed several times in those
interviews of dubious authenticity that she found
inspiration even for the films that did not explicitly
display them in newspaper editorials and
commentaries.[23]
The result is not only a cinema of preaching or
editorialising, but also, and consequently, a cinema of
allegory which manifestly highlights its own insufficiency
as communication, claiming only that it encrypts another,
impalpable text. Doubtless
we need to search carefully for what has been concealed for
us to find in these films. What
is the blot of The blot? One
particular intertitle seems to settle the matter very
directly. [21]
The issue is the one for April 20, 1921 and the articles
cited are "Impoverished college teaching"
and "Boycotting the ministry". See
Jennifer Parchesky=s excellent analysis of the
class politics represented in the film, "Lois
Weber=s The blot:
rewriting melodrama, reproducing the middle class",
in Cinema journal 33 (1999): 23-53.
[22]
Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, Is a woman a
person? [The hand that rocks the
cradle], Film
history 1 no.4 (1987), 363. The text is the
release continuity of a film that is lost. Subsequent
references to this film are also based on this
continuity. [23]
See Slide, 74-76. Slide
says that "The title [of the film] refers
to the blot on civilization, that is, that we
expect to hire the finest mental equipment for less than we
pay the common laborer"(118), and Jennifer
Parchesky, who has written the best and most thorough
discussion of the film, also accepts the fundamental
significance of this titular intertitle, claiming that
"Phil West's pronouncement . . . provides
a key to what goes without saying but is everywhere visible
in the film: the anxiety about the deterioration of the
collar line that had formerly distinguished white-collar
workers from blue-collar
laborers."[24] Of
course, both Slide and Parchesky are right - mostly right,
partly right. Weber, who usually wrote her own intertitles,
of course intended this one to remind viewers of the title
of the film and to indicate what it was really
about. And that was, of course, because
otherwise viewers might have missed the point. (As
Parchesky's comments suggest, even with this
prompting, viewers may still miss the
real point - of
course). But
we may agree to understand something more in these words, so
easy to copy incorrectly, which are, strictly speaking,
neither those of an intertitle nor something Phil West
pronounces. They occur, in fact, in an insert shot of letter
from West's father to his son and they are a
quotation from a letter written previously by West to his
father. That is, they are, most emphatically,
written words (twice, or even three
times written - if you count the once for us). The letter
contains more words than these - so many more, in fact, that
its contents must be extended over two insert shots. In the
first such shot, which contains the quotation,
West's father writes of the pleasure and
astonishment of his son's letter and a certain
guilt in having left his parental duty to West=s
university teachers. In the second shot, which classically
completes and extends the narrative of the first, the letter
of the father declares his intention of seeing his son and
discussing the matter further "if you feel so
strongly about it", provided he is "not so
completely changed as to make recognition
difficult". It
is during that meeting that The Literary
Digest is produced and its printed contents
inserted on screen and into the film in two shots that
recall the two devoted to the typewritten letter. West shows
these words to his father, again using writing to make
concrete his personal sensibility as he had in originally
writing the letter we cannot read. All this writing
addresses his father for him before West himself speaks (in
written intertitles). And all that he has witnessed and
discovered during the long time that the story has played
itself out (the effects of low wages on the family of a
university teacher; his understanding of the prevalence of
this condition) is crystallised in writing, in a single
word, his trope: "the blot". Everything
else serves only to gloss his word, to fill it out, explain
it. The film is completed, swallowed, for a moment, in that
word, just as the film flowed initially from it, from the
title that prefaces the action. The
meeting between West and his father is displayed in an
interesting manner. It takes place over two locations,
neither of which play any part in the rest of the film: a
study or den and what may be a university campus. During the
time with his father, West does not mention the family he
has come to know or the woman who has won his heart. Instead
he speaks in banal generalities of what is owed good
teachers. Slide says that the scene is "an awkward
moment ... preachment rather than entertainment"
(118), but this may only be another way of recognising that
it exists in an uneasy relation with the narrative, tracing
actions of a different order within its different space.
Here, where we are at the point of
the film, so to speak, we are hardly in the diegesis at all:
we have been cinematically written outside the everyday
story and rapt into the realm of big ideas, that place where
the ordinary is transmuted into the extraordinary in the
touch of writing. Indeed,
this is an awkward moment, one of
the few moments when The blot's
naivete is frankly, even fulsomely displayed. The clumsy
blot of this sequence exscribes itself as something which
happens when one writes on heedless of propriety, a sudden
flood obscuring lines of careful planning, la
reste d'une ouverture saignante. Good
directing is enemy here, proper structure, organic wholeness
- the Film itself, yes. This is ciné-writing outside
cinema because the cinema cannot be trusted to declare what
must be said. Control must be wrested from the looped
certainty of seducing story, admonitory words deployed anew
to point at the point, heavy words that form the impossible
sounds of inner speech. The mark of the blot I cannot show.
[24]
Parchesky, 34.
9335 words
Abstract
| Printer
versionTable
of contents
4 Lois
Weber, writing exigence
"The
most extraordinary thing about my sister is that she is
so ordinary." (Ethel
Weber)[12]
If
women would only understand that many men are not half so
interested in a well-ordered house as they are in a
well-groomed wife, things might be
different.[13]
In
moving pictures I have found my life's work. I
find at once an outlet for my emotions and my ideals. I
can preach to my heart's content, and with the
opportunity to write the play, act the leading role, and
direct the entire production, if my message fails to
reach someone, I can blame only
myself.[15]
I'll
tell you just what I'd like to be, and that is,
the editorial page of the Universal Company. . . The
newspaper and the clergyman each do much good in their
respective fields and I feel that, like them, I can, in
this motion picture field, also deliver a message to the
world . . .[16]
Just
as I started to play a black key came off in my hand. I
kept forgetting that the key was not there, and reaching
for it. The incident broke my nerve. I could not finish
and I never appeared on the concert stage again. It is my
belief that when that key came off in my hand, a certain
phase of my development came to an
end.[18]
Aside
from Hypocrites, allegory does
not play a strong role in Weber's
films.[19]
She
used film as a central theme in her 1916 production,
Idle wives, in which a husband
and wife (played by Weber and Phllips Smalley) drift
apart. They, and others in the story, are brought back
together after viewing a motion picture titled
Life's mirror, which,
quite naturally, is advertised on the theater marquee as
a film by Lois Weber.[20]
it
is a blot on the present day civilization that we expect
to engage the finest mental equipment for a less wage
than we pay the commonest labor
