By Fred Camper
The last three sections of this article are written to be read by those who have seen the two principal films discussed, Rancho Notorious and Johnny Guitar. I assume that the reader knows their plots, and I have not worried about “spoilers.” Wikipedia can be an OK source for plots.
1.
About two decades ago, in an online film discussion group I then co-moderated, a justly well-respected film scholar announced that there is no such thing as genre. If you believe, as I do, that words are defined by their usage, his claim was wrong: people talk about “genre” all the time, and there are some generally agreed-on meanings for this word. In cinema, some films can be discussed as major examples of a genre: Hawks’s Red River as a western¹; Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows as a melodrama. The more interesting question is how helpful this identification is in understanding a film and deepening our experience of it. In my view, only a little. Thinking about the ways in which Red River1 is a western is certainly one way to begin, but it won’t get you close to what is for me most interesting about, and dare I say it, great about, this masterpiece.
The issue of what one considers “great” in cinema is too rarely discussed with any seriousness, aesthetics having been replaced by politics and sociology and “theory,” and my position is very much in the minority. A generic film fan might talk about plot and acting and excitement and emotion. An auteurist might talk about a director’s “personal style” or “consistent themes,” neither of which make for good — or bad — cinema. Go a little deeper, and an auteurist might acknowledge King Vidor’s “contributions” to Beyond the Forest in vague terms that might serve as well to describe Bette Davis’s acting. I do not say that acting cannot play a role, but few talk about films without prioritizing story and acting. There is typically too much focus on mood, on “vibes,” on how a film makes us feel, a consumerist attitude that passively expects the delivery of immediate results rather than offering the kind of exploration that requires multiple viewings, trying also to understand an artist by viewing multiple works. To paraphrase a 1961 remark by John F. Kennedy that at least in our politics seems sadly outdated today, ask not what a film can do for you, ask what you can bring to the film. One might say this about any art.
It is a commonplace that “cinema is the greatest art” because it combines all the others, literature and theater and photography and music and dance and interior design and fashion and makeup. There is another, different, view of art, which is that most of the best works start by being true to their materials, rather than borrowing from or trying to imitate other media. Photographers Paul Strand and Edward Weston argued this position for their medium in two essays about a century ago, when it was still seriously questioned whether a “mechanical” reproduction could even be an art work. Strand wanted photographs to be worthy of being hung alongside great paintings in museums not by imitating painting but through exploring the unique processes and potentials of photography. I wish to make the same demands of cinema.
Cinema is an art for me not for any of the usual reasons, as I wish “art” to mean using the formal and aesthetic potentials of the chosen medium, in cinema’s case a rapid succession of images presented in a fixed time and space. Since great films can be silent, and can be completely abstract, we know that films featuring paid actors walking around and talking are only one of many possibilities for our medium. Their uniquely cinematic artistry should primarily reside in their use of the element common to all films, that fixed rectangle of light within which one has precise control over whatever is displayed. It should not be hard to imagine, however vaguely, how the shapes displayed therein might add up, in time, to a representation of a subjectively constructed space, a particular vision of a world in which multiple if subtle entrapments can have one thematic consequence and their opposite, a freer play of almost weightless forms, a quite different one. Images juxtaposed with each other can combine to construct imagined worlds with very particular geometries, geometries formed in the viewer’s memory out of the particular effects generated as one image follows another, geometries with their own emotional and thematic implications. A moving painting, visual music, the meetings of continuous imagery that coincide with and give meaning to a narrative film’s moments of drama — all of these are possible.
From this perspective, genre is going to matter a lot less than is usually assumed. Yes, there are genre conventions; yes, often part of a film’s statement is the way they are observed, or violated, or both. But how rigid are these conventions? How useful is it to know them? A standard textbook, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art, gives a brief account of the Western as characterized by a conflict between order and lawlessness, with a typical hero often “poised between savagery and civilization.” As approximations, these are true of some, or many, westerns, but not of my two principal examples, and those were not difficult to find. How helpful are such generalizations accounting for the finest Westerns? Like the majority of scholarly writing about film, genre approaches do not address aesthetic values. Even when a film is praised, it is most often with vague terms for moods or emotions that ignore the medium-based structures that produce cinema’s particular beauties. When I complained to a film scholar friend that a recent article on a film by Stan Brakhage, which he had recommended, had useful information but virtually nothing to say about why the film was any good, he replied with a touch of irritation, “Oh, nobody tries to do that,” and then, after a pause, “except maybe you.” I was glad to hear myself identified, certainly somewhat hyperbolically, as a lone voice, and felt needed a bit more than I had before.
A filmmaker who has a consistent style and consistent themes may be called an “auteur,” but such a filmmaker could also be a maker of works that while entertaining, and perhaps pack an emotional wallop, are to my eyes aesthetically worthless. Whether a film is a Western or not has little to do with any of this. For the filmmakers I love, it is their own films in other genres, rather than Westerns by other filmmakers, that can most illuminate their own Westerns.,
Peter Kubelka once argued in a lecture accompanied by a matrix-like diagram he drew that every part of a film affects a film viewer’s perception of every other part, that the sound accompanying shot 29 will have an impact on one’s remembered perception of shot 1, and the memory of the image of shot 2 will at least unconsciously change how you hear the sound accompanying shot 30. In other words, a film is a matrix in which the parts can potentially interact with and reinforce, or intentionally clash with, each other. Each element can also act as “viewing instructions” for every other, by suggesting the terms in which each part can be seen and understood. I write “potentially” because most films are not only not well organized, but aesthetically resemble the contents of a dumpster — an aesthetic mess, whose main cinematographic purpose seems to be to place the stars’ pretty faces, or the too-exciting explosions, in the center of the screen.
An important qualification to my statements is that aesthetic value, existing only in the subjective perception of the viewer, can never be proven. The viewer who finds it can only point to what appears to be its transmission agents in the film in question, in the hope of deepening the spectator’s experience on a second or third or fourth viewing. Whether the echo-in-memory of one shot interacts with a later one to produce a moving painting of both beauty and meaning remains up for debate for every part of every film, and will vary not only with the viewer but with the number of times and degree of concentration with which the film is viewed by that spectator.
Commentaries on genre rarely focus on cinematic styles. Style varies from film to film, but it is worth noting that there are stylistic elements common to many examples of film genres. The melodrama, with key scenes often set in homes, can make expressive use of interior décor, sometimes connecting the arrangements of furniture and other objects to character emotions. The musical often uses music and dance as fantasy elements, so that such films attain a dream-like quality, always ready to leap out of the quotidian drama and into the singing-and-dancing alternative. The war movie not surprisingly often depicts struggles for space. The Western often shares war movie themes, at times also portraying the exterior world in a similar manner, especially since it often depicts war between Whites and Native Americans, but then with very different treatments given to the spaces inside the film’s more “civilized” homes. But “war movie” mode is far from the only way the outdoors is portrayed in Westerns. In John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), well-ordered interiors contrast dramatically with the twisting, less measurable spaces of the rock formations outdoors, with their poetic hints of limitlessness. Merely identifying a movie’s genre will not get you very far.
2.
Rancho Notorious is a 1952 Hollywood film directed by Fritz Lang, 33 years into his long career and eight years before its end. While it most obviously reads as a “Western,” it has elements of melodrama. Despite the Western setting, its preponderance of interior scenes and narrative betrayals calls to mind the urban film noir. Observing all this doesn’t tell one much. What is telling are the geometrical compositions throughout the film, which assert a somewhat creepy authority over the organic human bodies that inhabit these frames. When viewers, and the character Frenchy, are introduced to “crooked politicians” in the “very next cell” at 27:302, Lang pans from a high angle shot of Frenchy sitting on the floor to an almost head-on shot of the bars separating the two cells; from this angle, the bars feel strongly imprisoning. We then cut to a centered head-on shot of a building exterior that links to the previous shot both geometrically and because it bears a banner demanding that these politicians be voted out of office, followed by a tilt down to the lower part of the building revealing that it’s also the polling place, where voting could lead to their ouster. There are other angles from which the jail bars are filmed, but soon after, at 28:18, there is a head-on shot of those bars, a composition whose stark brutality informs, in memory, every other shot of the film.
In many less well organized works a striking stylistic moment is lost in the soupy muddle of a film’s incoherent spaces. Lang, like so many other of the finest filmmakers, constructs his imagery in a manner consistent enough with those head-on jail bars so that memory of them can enter, even when his angles are diagonal rather than frontal. These and other such devices create a film’s “moving image in memory.”
Auteurism also proves its usefulness when one realizes that for many filmmakers, “viewing instructions” in one film can help us understand many other films in a filmmaker’s career. Lang is no exception, and in fact his very last film contains his most stunningly explicit “viewing instruction.” In The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, we are engaged in typical movie watching fashion by a restaurant scene between a man and a woman. Suddenly we cut to a shot of these two main characters that has strikingly low resolution, immediately followed by a zoom out that reveals that they are being seen in a television monitor; in other words, that they, and presumably much else, are being surveilled. We are no longer possessed by the feeling of being “with” them; we are now with their evil observer, transforming our awareness of the film that we have been viewing, as if everything we see is subject to the gazes of others. If moments in Lang’s first sound film, M, in which something, often a human hand or arm, enters from outside of the frame to remind us that there is a larger entrapping world beyond the composition’s borders, this one shot makes that assertion global, and reminds us that so often in Lang the organic world of the characters, which is so much at the center of the art of, for example, Howard Hawks, exists inside a prison of which we can be completely unaware.
M is replete with brilliant uses of offscreen space and offscreen sound. Offscreen sound can also close down an image, signaling the presence of the killer, Beckert, in this film and other threats in other Lang films. Physical intrusions can hinder Beckert, and other characters as well. More than once a carefully planned composition or camera movement reveals a trap. Often actions are immediately thwarted by something else offscreen. The world is seen as full of threats coming from beyond what we can see.
We see only a small part of the trap in a shot in Rancho Notorious at 45:10 in which money is arranged geometrically on a table filmed from above at only a slight angle, coins in stacks and bills crossed with each other, and when the camera pulls back and tilts, the geometry of the money is unchanged, but the angle on the table, with three characters arranged on each of three sides, becomes more symmetrical. At 49:40, we cut to a medium long shot of a piano as the outlaws gather around to hear Altar sing. The line of a clutter of objects in soft focus on a table in the foreground is parallel to the wall in the background, and the piano, arranged at a roughly 45 degree angle to the walls, reinforces rather than disrupts that geometry. In a new composition at 50:26, Altar walks while singing down a line of men in an array that roughly echoes the piano’s diagonal, the geometry of the initial shot thus maintained in our memory. As she sits to continue singing, Vern notices she’s wearing a brooch that he had gifted to his wife just before she was raped and murdered, and as he views Altar from further away than is Frenchy, and at a side angle, his facial expression disrupts the space, as do the POV closeups of the evidence, the brooch, that follow. His angry face is then intercut with close-ups of pleasant expressions on two of the men, perhaps the two he suspects. This soon leads to an intense short montage of face close-ups of the five other men, which reveal nothing. The rage we guess Vern now feels is absent from these faces, which do form a kind of closed group. This montage creates a kind of editing enclosure within the film, also suggesting that all the men who support Altar bear some of the guilt for Vern’s fiancée’s murder. Faces, of course, are rather the opposite of rectilinear geometry, but here the regularity of the montage traps them in a formal editing pattern, one which can also be understood with reference to a brief face montage during a lynching scene in Lang’s first American film, Fury. Indeed, when Vern later learns the identity of the murderer, he confirms this interpretation by telling Altar, “It could have been anybody who came to Chuck-a-Luck to hide behind your skirts.”
This scene occurs a little more than halfway through the film, and it offers the first evidence Vern has of a connection between Keane and the murder. Thus this scene, and in particular its close-ups, serves as a kind of hinge around which the film turns, becoming a bit of a closing-down. I am thus arguing there is a fatalistic formalism to the film’s narrative structure as well as to its imagery. Contributing to this is the way that the film’s location, shifting in the first half, now becomes largely Chuck-a-Luck, as Vern’s pursuit has ended there. The film’s space, in effect, follows the progression of closing in on the killer.
A key to understanding Lang’s films is that almost no locale, no shot, ever feels spontaneous or free. The characters are similarly unfree. Lang reinforces his fatalism in a variety of ways, depending on the film. The opening shot of Rancho Notorious is unconventional for a western or for its time: an extreme close-up of Vern kissing his fiancée, who will soon be raped and murdered. The close-up traditionally gives us the presence of the character it depicts, but this close-up of the opening kiss, and especially for the viewer who has seen the film before, itself creates a trap, showing not so much a moment of passion as the impending loss of something that Vern can never recover but whose loss he will spend much of the film trying to avenge. If the film had not begun with this close-up, this notion would still be present, but not nearly as strongly or as cinematically. Instead, that close-up, and Vern’s memory of the kiss he will never have again, arguably brackets the entire film. Also adding to the film’s fatalism is the opening song about one man’s “hate, murder, and revenge.”
At 1:03:44 we fade in on a scene with five of the outlaws and Altar in the room with the piano. At first glance it doesn’t look particularly geometrical. Then we notice that Altar is to screen left of the men, that four of them are arranged in a line from the foreground to a doorway in the background, and the fifth leans on the piano at screen right, balancing Altar, all of which articulates before it begins that the scene will include an argument between Altar and the men. But such literal connections between plot and style are not always the point of Lang’s geometries. In fact, that often there is no such connection that suggests that fate doesn’t only flow from the decisions of characters, but is more global, and exists outside of anything characters can do. As it happens, the men are protesting Altar’s change in the house rules. The arrangement of characters soon changes and becomes less geometrical, but the composition of the opening kiss soon changed too, yet in both cases more formal compositions continue to echo in those that follow. Only a minute after the latter scene’s opening, Kinch, the murderer of Vern’s fiancée, recognizes him as Vern rides off with Altar, realizing that he is probably searching for the killer but has not identified him yet. The very next shot shows Altar dismounting, and she walks forward to a spot in which the distant desert is framed between two giant rock formations. This is arguably a visual hint that Kinch is now trapped, as they all will be by the end.
In the very next scene Frenchy lays out plans, by using playing cards on a table to represent a street, for robbing a bank, with two additional cards representing the Marshall’s office and a location from which someone could shoot the Marshall. In the next scene Altar and Frenchy speak in a head-on side shot, with Altar shown as being almost as tall by standing on a stone shelf that extends out of the fireplace. They face each other directly, rigidly. The scene ends with a dissolve from Altar’s face in close-up saying she doesn’t mind that Vern is included in the robbery to a square window in the bank, looking out at the street from the inside. This places the viewer in the bank, which means in the position of being subject to the implied threat of law enforcement. The film then pans and cuts, showing several views of the robbery in progress, happening quickly, people frozen in place under the threat of the robbers’ guns. Two of the robbers, disguised as wealthy citizens, leave with the loot, and then we cut to a shot of Kinch in a building across the street, placed there so he can shoot the Marshall if necessary. The Marshall emerges unaware of the robbery, and we see him from a high angle as if from Kinch’s point of view, a shot of a man under threat from the possible POV of his killer echoing Lang’s sense of the world. Kinch shoots at him, and more shooting ensues, some of the robbers are hit, and the scene becomes chaotic — the opposite of the earlier well-ordered compositions. Understanding the meaning of cinematic devices such as composition can depend on understanding the action, but can also depend on shared social values. Planning the bank robbery was wrong, so the careful choreography of the robbery also registers as wrong, and the chaos that results was equally wrong, both disruptions to the natural order of things, even if that is for Lang an imprisoning one.
Vern learns from Altar that Kinch, the same man who recognized Vern a bit earlier, gave her the brooch. Their confrontation scene follows at 1:17:46 with a high angle shot of a bar, Kinch standing behind it. A few seconds after the dissolve to this shot ends, the brooch enters from offscreen at the right, Vern having sent it sliding down the bar towards Kinch. As he views it and his muscles tighten, Vern’s offscreen voice asks, “You ever seen it, Kinch?” This intrusion echoes similar shots, already mentioned, in M, again shifting our attention, as does the surveillance shot in The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, to realms beyond the screen. The brooch entering from offscreen leads to the camera’s also revealing the person who sent it into the composition, Vern, as the camera then moves and rotates to reveal both of them. Including that revelation in one take, as Lang often does, makes the threat seem to emerge from the space we have been inhabiting, rather than the potentially more manipulative device of a cut.
The final shot of Rancho Notorious offers a conventional ending, a long shot of the landscape as two men ride away. The landscape is in no way rectilinear, but it is curiously planned, even formal, with a road traversing the center slightly angled back, leading perhaps to freedom but with a feeling of its being foreordained, and thus hardly completely “free.”
Others are unlikely on first viewing to see the ways that the echoes of the various shots and scenes I discuss color all of Rancho Notorious, and doubtless some viewers will never agree with me even after more viewings. Seeing many more Lang films, some more than once, could help. But for me, such colorings of some shots by others shape Rancho Notorious into the expressive unity that characterizes most of the films I call “great.”
3.
As befits a European artist, Fritz Lang made films that refer to frameworks outside of the individual characters’ lives and psyches. One might even call that a giant understatement, as in his best films the invisible but cumulative effect of his imagery is to create a feeling of a seemingly crushing but often unsourceable weight on the characters. As befits an American artist, the spaces in Nicholas Ray’s films feel as if they originate from, and are expressive of, the neuroses of individuals, who are given a more typically American freedom to act and to move. Two perhaps simplistically expressive moments in Ray’s melodrama Rebel Without a Cause are a better tool to understanding his psychologically skewed 1954 Western, Johnny Guitar, than any study of the Western genre ever could be. One moment is not even “cinematic”: the character of Plato is observed while sleeping to be wearing two very different colored socks. “Must have been a nervous day,” his giggling friends conclude. In the other, Jim is positioned on the family couch in a kind of upside-down position, with his head inverted, and when his mother enters we get a POV shot of the living room upside down, and the camera rotates to rightside up while Jim seems to have adjusted his position a bit.
Though these two moments might constitute “viewing instructions” for Ray’s films, they are also not especially complex. The opening of Johnny Guitar offers much more. We fade in on a nicely composed landscape shot with mountains in the right background and a cliff perhaps leading to more mountains behind a trail at screen left. Johnny rides in from the right just as the shot fades in, his arrival seeming to fit in harmoniously, but before he even reaches the center of the screen, there is a large and quite visible explosion behind him, as intervening as abruptly as does the explosion that opens Samuel Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets, and with a similarly disruptive effect — viewing instructions for the rest of the film with an intrusive violence even more appropriate to Fuller than to Ray. In a way both serve as particularly revealing “establishing shots,” in that they “establish” that the film will include significant disturbances to any equilibrium. We cut to a closer slightly low angle shot of Johnny, his horse disturbed by the blast, and then to a POV shot showing another blast. Then as Johnny rides on in a high-angle shot a crew of workmen who engineered the explosions enter. Because of the steep terrain, Johnny seems uncomfortably located in space. He rides off to the left as the work crew rides past him to the right, and seconds later he hears offscreen gun shots and yelling and soon looks down on a stagecoach being robbed. Since we already remember mountains rising much higher that his position in space, the much lower terrain of the robbery locale places him in a precarious middle — precarious if you accept my argument that the implied space in which a film takes place is assembled in the mind from multiple images, in this case also reinforced by an extreme low angle shot of Johnny as he rides away. Also, on a narrative level, this can be confusing; we don’t yet know the reason for the explosions, and tend to wonder if the two actions are connected. Johnny observes the robbers riding off, and then continues in a different direction, soon arriving in a windstorm to a seemingly deserted street with a single building sporting a large sign, “Vienna’s.” These three locations are difficult for the viewer to triangulate, either spatially or even in the narrative, and the fourth, Vienna’s gambling hall and saloon that Johnny enters, elegantly fixed out with a cleanly-dressed attendant at the wheel but empty of customers, adds a fourth node to the puzzle. Soon it is solved for us, as we learn that the blasts were for the laying of tracks for a railroad line, that the deserted restaurant-casino was built by a canny entrepreneur named Vienna who hopes to get rich because of the coming railroad, and the just-robbed stage arrives in town.
Key to understanding Ray’s best films is to see the way that the shots in a sequence break apart from each other, becoming a series of subjective views that go beyond creating instability to suggest a disunity among the perspectives of individuals in isolation. In the history of Hollywood editing, in which the general rule is to unite different angles of the same scene to create a larger unity, Ray’s films stand apart. At 8:323 begins a short sequence in which Vienna puts on her gun belt upstairs, Johnny is seen seated eating a meal downstairs, a card dealer with no customers deals cards, another employee seems to be arranging a model train, all of them interrupted as a mob bursts in with the corpse of someone killed in the stage robbery. The ensuing confrontation is, echoing the opening, more than two sided: Vienna and her employees, the mob led by Emma, the Dancing Kid and his three companions, the railroad agent, and Johnny. Only a few images into the scene, at 9:21, there is an extreme high angle shot of the mob from Vienna’s POV on a balcony, followed by a low angle shot of Vienna. These power dynamics are binary at first, though they rather disprove the cliché that people seen in high angle shots are rendered less powerful, as it is Vienna who is under threat. Soon there is an eye level shot of Johnny in an adjacent space. Then we see an eye level shot of Eddie spinning the wheel. In an eye-level of the mob from behind, Vienna appears to be obeying their command to come downstairs. Then there’s a cut to a close-up of Vienna still on the stairs as she draws a gun. When Vienna is partly down the stairs, there are a series of eyeline match cuts between her and Emma in response to a rivalry between them over the Dancing Kid. There’s also a cut to Andrews, the railroad agent who is still on the balcony as Vienna mentions that the railroad is coming. After Vienna has mostly descended, there’s a high angle of Emma threatening her. She talks with Emma again further down the stairs. A stairway is perfect for a Ray scene of characters in fragile relationships with each other because it suggests they are easily moveable and changeable, and indeed a stairway in a family’s home is the setting for the strongest scene in what is perhaps his greatest film, Bigger Than Life. As this scene in Johnny Guitar proceeds, the whole dynamic changes, and new camera angles are introduced, when the Dancing Kid and his three companions enter. There is a change even during their boisterous entry, when they go silent after seeing the assembled mob. The point here is that for Ray, camera angles are not simply a question of the best way to display a character at that moment, which is the way most cinematographers might think, but of how to place one shot of a film into a coherent whole, in Ray’s case by finding a way to use juxtaposed compositions to evoke the lonely isolation of individuals locked into different perspectives. When one of the three companions, Corey, approaches the bar and lets his empty glass spin on it, we cut to another observing it, but then to Johnny’s hand — though we had last seen him sitting and eating — grabbing it as it falls, and then to a tilt up to Johnny’s firm expression. These images of two different groups showing their reaction to Johnny complicates the dynamic. Johnny then takes over the scene for a few minutes. He also introduces a new, potentially calming, perspective into the angry confrontation when he declares that all a man really needs is “a smoke and a cup of coffee,” a response to the evident ambitions of most of those present. A still newer dynamic appears when Johnny plays his guitar and the Dancing Kid dances with Emma.
Much later in the film, virtually the same mob, led by Emma, enters Vienna’s again. It now seems that the Kid and his three associates have robbed a bank. At 1:14:30, the mob moves forward, and the camera tilts down as they move into a higher angle. We then cut to them closer, and at eye level, as the Marshall says, “Either you side with them, or with us.” The shift to eye level emphasizes the now-confrontational aspect of the action. Soon there is a low angle medium shot in which the Marshall says, “We won’t take that.” Vienna rebuffs them in a speech that could be addressed to the mob mentality of McCarthyism, an American anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s, but which causes one of the four, Turkey, to reveal that he has been hiding in the same room. A variety of new perspectives result, including the crowd pulling the Marshall away from making a minimal reference to the rule of law, making clear that this is a lynch mob. When one of Vienna’s employees gets shot, and she is cradling him on the floor asking why he intervened, he looks up, and as we see two low angle POV shots of the mob, he notes that everyone’s looking at him and that this is “the first time I ever felt important.” His particular subjectivity at the moment of his death, represented in the two floor-level low angle shots, is not present elsewhere in the film; offering another example of the atomization of Ray’s characters.
After Emma uses her gun to start the fire that will burn down Vienna’s place, she and her shadow dance with the flames in a moment of startling witchiness. A match cut from her arms-raised shadow to her arms-raised body cements the connection. Then we cut to a shot from outside the burning building as Emma emerges facing us, then walking backward to savor the flames, and then turning as she grows closer to the camera so that her twisted smile is seen in closeup. There follows a match cut to a longer shot of Emma, but from a high angle, and we might wonder why the shift; just more instability? But there is a more practical reason, for as the camera moves and pans and tilts a bit we see that high angle on Emma makes it close to eye level on Turkey and Vienna, on horses with their hands bound and about to be lynched, and the camera pauses to move in on them as Emma runs past. Connecting the three in a single take not only makes cause and effect — Emma demands the lynching — more vivid, but continues to display the clash of perspectives, as our immediate memory of Emma’s shadow in the burning room and her crazed face in closeup contrasts with Turkey’s sad but sober expression; madness has doomed the sane. Cause-and-effect is but another way in which combinations of camera angles, movements, and facial expressions connect.
Vienna escapes hanging with Johnny’s help, and as they flee the film intercuts shots of the mob riding in front of the burning building. While the silhouetted-by-fire riders display none of her perverse wickedness, they have become a mindless mob as a result of it. The theme of mass neurosis destroying individual difference is evoked in those several shots of the mob riding in front of the burning building, a bit of Hollywood action-favoring hokeyness that also makes the thematic point that the mob is now merged into a single mindless unit repeating the same action over and over, unified in their un-thought-through goal of capturing Vienna. This group consciousness, normal in many films, becomes another pole in Ray’s collection of human perspectives. Those varieties combine with the film’s spatial alterations and instabilities to result in an image-in-memory of tilts and diagonals and undercuttings, which is colored with varieties of passions.
Ray also uses locales and stagings to evoke instabilities — and in a Western, no less, in which the eternities of land and sky inform so many of the genre’s more classical examples. There is a secret waterfall that the characters — and later, invaders — traverse to reach “the lair.” There is also Johnny’s act of rescuing Vienna from hanging, by lying on the bridge from which her noose has been dangled and cutting it at precisely the correct moment, interjecting a new spatial perspective into a pre-lynching scene which was depicted mostly horizontally but whose outcome depends on the vertical force of gravity.
I feel the need to repeat that one cannot prove anything with analyses such as these. A film could precisely fit my description yet have none of the effects I am claiming. My point is rather to try to make vivid to the subjectivity of other viewers the forces that inform all of the not always visible choices behind a film’s many elements.
4.
Most film analysts place far too much emphasis on plots and characters. An old friend likes to tell the story of how decades ago I said I did not remember even the basics of the plot, a rather memorable one in fact, of a film I had seen and liked, because “I was just looking at the camera movements.” And in fact it was only recently, well after deciding to focus on these two films, that I realized their stories have two core similarities. First, it is a woman, not a cowboy, who sits at the center of each, a strong and proud woman played by a major star in both films who has built an establishment of which she is the boss. Second, a large subgroup of characters robs a bank. I will admit that I was looking for Westerns which on a plot level would not likely be chosen as representatives of the genre, but in hindsight I could have chosen two that were unconventional in different ways. If I was in psychoanalysis, perhaps I would come to my next session with my thoughts on strong women and bank robberies, especially since I was not previously aware that I had any particular fascination with either. I hope it is my analyses, not of the specifics of plots, that are the point of my writing here.
There are many more and different examples that would make my point in different ways. One might have a look at King Vidor’s Man Without a Star, and note instabilities not unrelated to but also quite different from those of Ray, and further note the glorious celebrations of human subjectivity — a man sees a vision of a rabbit in a bare plank of wood, and then carves a rabbit out of the wood — in his very early The Jack-Knife Man, differently evoked in his very late “experimental” film, Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1964). Or one could consider Blake Edwards’s Wild Rovers, a not-so-rare case of a film by a respected director that was mostly disregarded on its initial release but that I find to be one of the director’s very best (Borzage’s Smilin’ Through and Mulligan’s Clara’s Heart also come to mind). Wild Rovers can seem, as it did to Roger Ebert, like another “beautiful, dumb cowboy movie” (Westerns having not yet shaken off back then their old reputation as nearly illiterate kiddie-fare) with some nice photography and one good and one poor performance. Indeed, the photography in this film could be meaninglessly pretty in the hands of another director. But to someone who appreciates the euphoric, weightless, almost inebriated spaces of some of Edwards’s best works, The Great Race or The Party, with their collapsing or floating endings, the whole visual space of this film will, I hope, reveal itself as deeply expressive, something I doubt I would have appreciated were this my first Edwards. Or one could look to the three Westerns by the under-appreciated Gerd Oswald, whose use of aggressive block-like forms and compositions might seem banal until one sees their meaning revealed by a single shot of a floor in his finest film, certainly not a western, Brainwashed. Or there is of course Monte Hellman, whose two “existential Westerns,” as they are sometimes called, should be seen together with his modern road movie Two-Lane Blacktop rather than alongside The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. When the visual aspects of film art are better appreciated, perhaps all this can come about, and more.
Notes
- Editor’s Note: We deviated from the standard “film mention” structure we normally use – and that is used throughout this number. We did so as requested by the author himself. ↩︎
- In the version used by the author “Directed by Fritz Lang” appears at 1:37 and “The End” at 1:28:56. ↩︎
- In the version used by the author “Directed by Nicholas Ray” appears at 1:29 and “The End” at 1:49:47. ↩︎