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3
Lois
Weber, writer of cinema 4
Lois
Weber, writing exigence 5 Lois
Weber and the mirror of cinema Lois
Weber's imaginary movie was called Life's
mirror. It did not work the way an ordinary
mirror does, however. Instead of reflecting the characters
in Idle wives, it reconciled them:
what they saw in the movie was not what they were but what
they could be. The title of this imaginary film and the way
it works suggests quite strongly that Weber's idea
of the cinema was derived from the commonplace
Aristotelianism of her day. We may suppose that she believed
that true art holds a mirror up to nature - it is an
imitation of life - but the artful image in the mirror is
refined and heightened: it shows the essential - crafting a
moral or a conclusion. The cinema is peculiarly susceptible
to this kind of interpretation because of its apparently
close relation to reality (it "reflects"
what is before the camera like a mirror) and its less
obvious malleability. This
idea of the mirror of the cinema is based upon the deception
of appearances, that is, upon the fundamental notion that
real things stand for something else, more real than they
are. The cinematic mirror is intended to reflect that
hyperreality through the mundane
reality of appearance. Mirrored structures allow a
progressive building up of what is truly to be shown by
using analogy to strip away the inconsequential from
appearance. Such
an understanding amounts to a fundamental instruction for
cinematic writing by defining in advance the essential
nature of film language. "Good directing"
comes to involve respecting and enhancing the properties of
the cinematic mirror - and this would seem to be precisely
what Weber set out to do. Her films are made of parallel,
mirrored, constructions which radiate out from a central
character or a group of characters. Such structures seep
into and subtly deform the linear impetus of the narrative
into a spiral, for in this kind of universe stories only end
to begin again. If one character does something to protect
his car from the rain, other characters will soon be engaged
in the same activity, but in a significantly different
manner. The fate of any character cannot be comfortably
settled until each one of its aspects has been similarly
finished off. In The blot this
involves gathering all the young men in the movie into one
place at the end and paying each due attention so that the
film forgets no one. In
order to produce an artful mirror through film making, as in
other arts, it would seem that the obdurate materiality of
the medium must be thoroughly tamed and trained
lest it show too much. This surely
accounts for the urgency of Lois Weber's need to
control all aspects of film production. But it is just this
materiality that is the cinema's own urgent
truthfulness. The camera cannot
lie, only those who wield it can. Thus the need for a
preacher - a woman, a figure of unblemished honesty,
l'ouverture - to take on
that role. Two different truths are at war here - and
neither can afford to recognise their difference or, indeed,
that they have anything to fight about. To
illustrate this exigency of cinematic writing I can think of
nothing more elevated than Harpo mirroring Groucho in
Duck soup. Together they dance the
phases of writing Blanchot describes. And in the end, as we
know from the beginning inevitably it must, a mistake
reveals that the mirror is no mirror and all bets are off.
That is, material reality, here the same as writing
"outside language", overpowers its
"idealist" variant. Let
me try to describe the same process as it plays itself out
over four moments in Lois Weber's
Hypocrites.[25] [25]
There is some doubt about the correct title of this film.
Anthony Slide, Kevin Brownlow and the scholars of the
American Film Institute have called it The
hypocrites. At least one surviving publicity
still is labelled Hypocrites!. I
take the title from the opening credits of the 16mm print
currently circulated from the Australian National Film
Collection by Cinemedia Australia and which has provided the
basis for the research for this article. That print was
struck from a 35mm print originally held in the Australian
National Film Archive which is the single most complete
original print of the film and is, I think, of the earliest
release (1915). The same title is used on the videotape
restoration produced recently by Jessica Rosner for Kino On
Video, which makes use of material from the later (1916)
release version as well as the Australian material. Both
these sources also correct both Slide's and the
AFI's divergently inaccurate plot
summaries. At
the beginning of the film a photograph of Lois Weber appears
immediately following the last written credit,
"BOSWORTH Inc. presents HYPOCRITES written and
produced by LOIS WEBER Copyright 1914 by Bosworth
(Inc)". Hypocrites:
portrait of the author This
image acts as a kind of confirmation of what we have just
read. But it is also, of course, A Portrait Of The Author.
Written testimony to its authenticity is inscribed on its
surface - "Yours, Sincerely Lois Weber".
It is a picture of a Woman, an authorising woman - one who
writes and produces. But it is also a picture of a
particular type of authorising woman, one who unmistakably
embodies the authority of respectability. More than that,
one who openly dedicates herself to us, one who urges her
sincerity upon us in writing, as if we could not see it in
her mothering gaze. Here
then, is this film's first figuration of its
director, a figuration heavily weighted with moralising
significance. It will need all of that significance to
counterweight the cinematic image it is about to
display. After
an epigraph ("What does the world, told a truth,
but lie the more'
Browning")[26]
and an intriguing, and disingenuously simple, display of the
characters we are to see in dual roles, another title
introduces a prologue, "The Gates of
Truth". These gates are shown, and in a moment,
Truth enters. [26]
In the new video restoration of the film, which uses some
material from the version re-released in 1916, these words
from Browning are dissolved over Weber's portrait,
over-writing and further
authorising it. Hypocrites:
naked Truth In
view of all I have written here (and leaving out of
consideration the way in which
Hypocrites itself deploys this
figure), there can be no doubt that this naked woman with a
mirror is also on some level a figuration of the cinema -
or, at least, of the cinema as Lois Weber intends it. But
there can also be no doubt that this figure raises questions
of another order for film maker and audience alike.
In
1974 Kathleen Karr described a device used in exploitation
cinema that she called "the square-up" and
which she had traced back to
1912.[27]
The square-up at its crudest and most direct is a
"prefatory moralistic statement of apology for
contemplating the discussion of nefarious subjects"
(108). [27]
Kathleen Karr, "The long square-up: exploitation
trends in the silent film", Journal of
popular film 3, no. 2 (Spring 1974): 107-128.
Further references to this article appear as page numbers in
brackets in the text. Later
in the piece, Karr quoted a classic square-up, prefaced to
Weber's 1916 feature, Where are my
children? (124-125). Given the history of the
device, I think that there can be no doubt that
Weber's Portrait Of The Author in
Hypocrites is intended to square-up
the figure of Truth, whose nakedness is both a literal and a
symbolic issue for the film and who appears many times in
it. Thus
the sign of the female enunciator, a sign exploited even
more elaborately later by Mrs Wallace Reid in films like
The red kimono (1925), is also a
sign intended to cleanse the film, to absolve it of prurient
intent. The image of Woman, conventionally only a figure
created by and for male lust, acts to purge that lust before
it has even been called forth. It is as though the
authorising photograph of the cinematic writer as Woman is
intended to be seen in front of the metaphorical figure of
naked Truth as Woman, a lens or an opening through which the
truth of Truth can be discerned. Put in another way, the
introductory picture is far more than simply a sign of a
woman's authorship. It is a sign which, however
naively, proclaims that a woman's vision - a
woman's cinema - is different from a
man's.[28] [28]
For what it is worth, Weber and Smalley are credited as
working together on five of the seven Bosworth films. Weber
alone is credited on It's no
laughing matter and
Hypocrites, released within a week
of each other. And
such devices change the ontology of the images we see,
animating them differently. A
sermon does not merely preach about the wickedness of the
world, it reflects that wickedness back upon its auditors -
making them party to it, making them guilty as it offers its
vision as a means to repentance. Which is to say that the
sermon's re-vision of the world, its deregulation
of the senses, is the first step to changing the state of
those who hear it. A sermon turns pleasure into displeasure
and vice-versa. In a sermon, the sense of the world shifts,
and the old world makes new sense. Or
does it? Can
l'ouverture which
Weber makes of herself force everyone to see
through Margaret Edwards, the naked
woman on the surface? The answers are obvious, and were
obvious even when the film was released, as the controversy
around it demonstrated.[29]
The obstinate, everyday materiality of the cinema, its
goes-without-saying literalness, registered the naked
Margaret Edwards as the naked Margaret Edwards. Those who
were so minded could abstract that specific, meaningless
image from the sensational figure Weber intended to make it
mean and instead create their own lubricous figures,
equally, if not more, meaningful and
sensational. [29]
See Slide, 72-74. This
means that the cinematic author whose rather smug and serene
portrait underwrites the film turns out to be something of a
pathetic or tragic figure after all. And indeed, as the
figure of the Truth-teller enters the diegesis - which is to
say, as the narrative begins - the haunted futility of its
mission becomes apparent. Hypocrites:
the truth-teller This
figure is a man. Weber has unsexed herself in a commonplace
way, as she did in describing what a director does - but
also to rather more drastic ends, as we shall see in due
course. That
this figure is nonetheless at least partly intended to stand
for the director herself is apparent from what it is doing
in its first appearance: preaching a sermon to a more or
less inattentive or discomfited audience. Moreover, the
written text of the sermon (Matthew
23.28) has preceded the minister himself, summoning the
scene and his presence in it, as the line from
The ring and the book summons the
figure of Truth.[30]
This is a figure of words or of writing, a cypher, a trope -
not intended to read as itself (indeed the character has no
name, only a title). [30]
This is not the case in the restored video version, in which
we see the minister preaching before we know the text of his
sermon, but it is the case in the 16mm print based on the
version found in Australia. This
scene of speaker and audience recurs nightmarishly in
Weber's work. The blot
opens with an emaciated, dedicated older man speaking to
(teaching) an audience of inattentive younger men. In
Too wise wives society women are
shown attending a political lecture given by a man to whom
they pay no real attention. In The hand that
rocks the cradle (originally titled
Is a woman a person?), campaigners
for birth control, one of whom is played by Weber herself,
are arrested before they can complete their speeches. In
each of these figurations, words fall on deafened ears, a
speaker's gift is scorned or balked. The compounded
vision is one of infernal torment that surely would be mete
only for the most notorious sinners of classical
mythology. In
Hypocrites the minister turns from
his hypocritical congregation to the visionary pursuit, and
capture, of Truth herself. "Since my people will
not come to you, come to my people," he importunes.
In his vision, he brings Truth back into the world, but not
as an object of display - rather, as the means by which he
is enabled to see beneath outward appearance and into inner
Being. Under his instruction Truth holds her mirror up to a
list of everyday scenes that might have found a place in
Borges' Chinese encylopaedia: and
Truth's mirror shows the hypocrisy of each,
displaying to him, and to us, the invisible evil behind the
bland surface of convention. In the simplest possible
fashion, life's mirror, the cinema, has been passed
from the director to her surrogate in the text - along with
the author's mission to expose what cannot
otherwise be seen. The minister then moves through life like
a television reporter shadowed by Truth in the role of his
video camera operator: in a circuit our eyes, his eyes, her
eyes. And
there is no scene that is not evil, there is nothing
ordinary behind the ordinary - only deception, corruption,
deception, sensation: lurid, all-too-lurid figures. This
reflected world cannot satisfy the desire of one who has
seen Truth as she is. Such a soul can find peace only the
realms of Truth herself, behind the gates where all the
unborn babies live.[31]
Thus the minister dies and the hypocrisy of the world lives
on. [31]
Such a gate is apparently figured at several points in
Where are my children? See the
discussion of the film in Kevin Brownlow's
Behind the mask of innocence (New
York: Knopf 1990), 50-55. Hypocrites:
"but lie the more" In
the list of scenes in which hypocrisy is revealed in the
mirror of Truth, one is marked by its titular difference
from the rest. "The mote in the eye" is no
clear kin of "Society" or
"Modesty", and that is because the
hypocrisy that it figures is of a radically different
order. Each
of the scenes has re-visioned members of the
minister's congregation, representatives of mundane
hypocrisy: a rich man, a society woman, a pretty young
woman, a philanderer, a young family. These are the people
faced by the minister in the opening scene - those at whom
he gazes and who return his gaze. The object of
"The mote in the eye", although also in
the church, is not someone at whom the minister looks.
Rather, from the choir stalls behind and to one side, she
looks at him. She looks at him in adoration. Throughout his
vision, she goes where he goes. In a long allegorical
sequence set in mediaeval times, she continues to gaze,
enraptured, at him and at the figure of Truth that he sets
before the people. And
this scene exposes the hypocrisy of her seeing, the mote in
her eye (but not the beam in his). If it had not been
obvious before, in this scene it becomes obvious that the
shape of Truth's mirror is the outline of an eye -
for what the mirror now reflects is another eye, the
voyeuristic eye of this woman, an eye that gazes in a
circuit of her eye, his eye, truth's eye, our
eye. But
something (not a mote, I think) is also reflected in her
eye. Her eye is also a mirror, a mirror now one with the
mirror of Truth. But her eye is not a blank. There is
something caught by the cinema in it. As the figure of naked
Truth dissolves away, it begins to reflect (inadvertently?)
a motion picture camera and a man cranking the camera. Her
eye shows the cinema where we know truth to
be. Hypocrites:
the beam Almost
before that reflection has been fully absorbed (and
certainly before one can decide whether it is
"deliberate" or a
"mistake"), another image is superimposed
upon this eye that reflects the truth, that is the mote. It
is the face of the minister, and it is not unlike a
skull. Hypocrites:
the mote When
he recognises the image in her eye, the minister gestures
his revulsion and departs with Truth and the mirror, leaving
her alone, looking at nothing. There
can be no doubt that he is the mote in the eye that hinders
her sight. Her hypocrisy has been to pretend to love the
Truth when she loves only him. In effect he spurns her
because she has misrecognised him, mistaken the outward form
of a man for the inward, invisible aspiration, the body for
the spirit, nakedness for Truth. And if in some way she
stands for all of us in the audience, he and Lois Weber
spurn us too, insofar as our love for her cinema of truth,
for the cinema, is only, as it is in my case at least, a
love for what it is and not for what it would like to
be. But
it is somewhat harder to reflect on the image of the camera
operator we have seen - the later-to-be-famous man with a
movie camera (who is also reflected in a woman's
eyes in Vertov's film of that name). In two senses
the camera operator (Dal Clawson? George W. Hill?) is
another figuration of the cinema. First, he figures the
cinema in his aspect (the camera),
as the figure of Truth does in hers (nakedness). Second, his
appearance is a result of the materiality of cinema,
throwing us outside idealist and moralising language just as
Margaret Edwards throws us outside language with her body
that cannot be inscribed. If
this is an accident - if it is, as I take it, an instance of
a naive relation with the cinema - it is nonetheless,
and inescapably, a moment in which
a certain sublimity is articulated that "good
directing" can never know, a moment in which the
world is made sense by the cinema, sense manifests, rises
up, is born to presence, where before there was only
appearance and meaning. It is a moment one lives
for. Where
is the camera? The image of the minister is in the choir
singer's eye because it is in her heart. The image
of the camera seems to be in her eye because it is in the
mirror - the camera is the heart of the mirror. Yet the
point of Hypocrites is at least
partly that Truth has no human heart, no place for love.
Here, as elsewhere (in Lacan for example), the mirror is
cold, lacking feeling, as austere as the rejecting minister
who does not recognise the beam in his own eye. And indeed,
the heart of this mirror is not human, but a machine, a
mechanical heart whose beating corresponds to the frames of
the film it registers without compassion. In
this image, the minister overlays the machine: an unfeeling
other overlays another, equally unfeeling, and equally
dedicated - in the middle of what can only be described as a
pool of love. The love spills out, beyond the face at its
focal point, suffusing the machine, contaminating the
mirror. And we can see what the minister cannot. That he is
driven by his lack, as she is by hers. That his ascetic
desire for absolute nakedness dooms him in this world - and
that what might redeem him to life is here, exscribing its
finite longing in the mirror, transforming the mirror and
the cinema itself if only for a moment. A
blink of her eye.
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5 Lois Weber
and the mirror of the cinema
The
"square-up" soon became a stock element
of practically every example of the silent exploitation
film. It was very much of a protective device and most
interestingly foreshadowed the Supreme Court's
later guide-line decision on obscenity (regarding
Lady Chatterly's
Lover) that in order to be obscene a work
must be "utterly without redeeming social
importance." (109)
