The (Missing) Sunday Intertitle: Hanky-Panicky

THE SEALED ROOM (1909) comes from that phase of American cinema where nearly every scene opens with a spoiler, and intertitle helpfully explaining what we’re about to see.

This always seemed like a real false step in film history, as movies started aspiring to tell more elaborate stories but didn’t know how. Adaptations of famous books allowed for plottier yarns and could, in theory, rely on the audience being somewhat familiar with the tale, so maybe you didn’t have to explain everything? But critics complained that these movies were getting pretty obscure, and foreign imports were often based on books more familiar in their native lands than to US audiences.

But maybe this admittedly dumb and frustrating development isn’t so much a false path as a necessary stage on the journey out of what Tom Gunning calls “the cinema of attractions” and into the kind of moviemaking where the filmmaker undertakes the telling of a story, using not just performances and title cards but shot choices. It could be argued that it’s a small step from using title cards to signal plot developments to using closeups, POV shots, intercutting, coda-shots (a Griffith nicety Gunning identifies as one of his underrated inventions) for essentially the same purpose.

The cinema of attractions never went away, of course. The individual startling moment is still a key thing in movies, especially the most commercial ones. I think narrative cinema today strikes a balance whereby it’s hard to be sure whether the story is an excuse for the big sensational moments, or the moments are an excuse for the story.

Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett are both in this scene as extras, apparently. Maybe on the right of frame there?

This quasi-horror period pic shows Griffith pushing into the action, cutting his stars off below the shins — to allow subtler performances? But these do not eventuate. There are still people framed full-figure in the background, perhaps to silence the “Show us their feet!” crowd, if such a crowd really existed. So we get to see at least somebody’s feet. A sop to the shrimpers.

Early scenes suffer from film warping (or maybe paper warping, if this is from a paper copy?) so that the supposedly impregnable room feels instead rickety and subject to wobble. Not quite clear WHY this room has been constructed but everybody seems happy about it, so definitely not for walling-up-alive purposes. Some kind of early panic room, I suppose.

Funny bit at 4.25 where a melodramatic messenger rushes in and everybody starts waving their arms in a frenzy. Either an intertitle has gone AWOL or Griffith just decided we didn’t need to be let in on what all the fuss is about.

There’s a lateish instance of the explicatory mime at this point as the troubadour, far right, mouths some enthusiastic realisation — I *think* I can lip-read the words “She’s mine!” This kind of thing would happily be rendered redundant by the interpolated closeup which could emphasise a silent moment of emotion without the need for thespian telegraphy.

As soon as hubby has run off to wherever everybody’s been waving their arms about — perhaps on a crusade, perhaps just seeing to a sick cow, we don’t know — wifey’s waving arms turn from (faked) alarm to joy at being alone with the lusty troubadour.

While wifey is showing trouby her Single-Entrance Room, hubby, a sort of hot Karloff figure, returns unexpectedly having presumably won his crusade in record time or healed his ailing livestock, whatever. Contiguity editing allows him to peep in on and react to the innocuous/incriminating goings-on in the S-ER, and he does a big dramatic cringe. This shot exchange allows Griffith to depart from the one-room-one-shot technique: the S-ER is framed closer than the big room, and when he cuts back to get hubby’s reaction he’s taken the opportunity to punch in closer. The big cringe is ridiculous enough to make us kind of wish he hadn’t, but it’s good film technique in principle.

We now get a huge bit of explicatory pantomime as hubby plots his Terrible Revenge via the medium of hand-wringing. His acting is so big he has to actually draw his sword to put the point across with the force he wants, even though he doesn’t use it. Instead he’s able to get a whole construction team to show up on the spur of the moment (it’s good to be the king) and silently transform his Single-Entrance Room into the titular Sealed Room, with wifey and trouby still inside.

The bowl-cutted bricklayers look like they’re all set to perform some proto-Stooges comic relief slapstick with the mortar, but this is avoided.

Wifey and Trouby’s illicit activity in the now-Sealed Room mainly seems to consist of triumphant laughing and zieg-heiling at how clever they’re being, which kind of makes us eagerly anticipate the moment when they try to pass through the curtain and bash their foreheads on the brick wall noiselessly assembled behind it.

Do construction teams charge extra for working in dead silence? If so, it’s money I’d be happy to pay.

Hubby does some more enormous acting, directed at the curtain and the brick wall behind it and I suppose at the man and woman behind that. Again he picks up his sword, just so he can act even bigglier.

The discovery of the immurement is where a wider range of camera angles could really help a filmmaker. To make his actors’ responses visible and central, Griffith has them walk to the centre of the shot and perform their horror outwardly at us. But the dramatic shape of the scene would seem to demand that they stay for a bit at the new wall, trying to comprehend it, comprehending it, trying to scrape at the mortar, failing, trying to comfort one another, all that. The need to capture performance while confronted with a blocked doorway is what led Kubrick to shoot Jack Nicholson from below in THE SHINING, a moment William Friedkin thought was horribly gimmicky — surely it’s a very practical solution to an unusual dramatic situation — a man talking to a door.

The troubadour is the first one to go into a mad panic — these fancypants loverboys talk a big game but one spot of immurement and they crumble like chaff. Montresor or whatever his name is gets a case of the galloping cabin fever. He is Henry B. Walthall, an important early Griffith star, and his frantic pounding on the walls, extreme though it is, forms an effective background for Marion Leonard’s stillness.

Recriminations! The lovers blame one another for their entombment. Might be just as well blaming the bloke that bricked them up.

I guess people got asphyxiated faster in the good old days, because soon Walthall and Leonard are gasping for air, while the Count (apparently he’s a count, not a king, per IMDb, played by Arthur V. Johnson, not such an important early Griffith player) crows triumphantly without.

Walthall is evidently one of those actors who likes his props — it’d take a heart of stone not to laugh as the suffocating minstrel attempts to fan himself and his lover with his mandolin. Waft those last particles of oxygen down your windpipe! I shouldn’t laugh, I might do the same in his position.

I was waiting for hubby to have a change of heart, as the film still seemed to have a minute to run, but it stops right there, the lovers die, and the last bit is taken up with a restoration demonstration in which the AFTER image seems to have more dirt on it than the BEFORE. Like, “we digitally added dust motes to the picture to make it look like a proper 1909 film.” There’s an app for that.

One thing I should admit: the intertitle-as-autospoiler arguably has its own dramatic value, one of building anticipation. It’s one thing to see a man escape or a baby get rescued from an eagle’s nest, but if you’re forewarned that it’s going to happen, you can enjoy suspenseful anticipation. This happens in books all the time, when the author inserts a line hinting at more dramatic goings-in to come — be patient, gentle reader, things are calm now but later you’ll get to hear all about “that madman business.”

“Horror Films No Longer Had to Make Sense”

An interesting observation by Stephen R. Bissette when I interviewed him for my Bill Rebane piece — the understanding that seemed to pervade horror movie makers in the early eighties that logic and coherent plotting was obsolete, that it was potentially scarier, and easier, to just throw random shit at the audience, to baffle and disorient them with impossible plot twists and contradictions.

This was so widely understood — whether audiences LIKED it or not, and I think audiences often get cross about this stuff, even if it works on them emotionally — that Bill Rebane, who was hardly at the centre of the horror genre and professed not to be a fan of it, could apply it wholeheartedly to his DEMONS OF LUDLOW, and Stanley Kubrick could impose it on his adaptation (with novelist Diane Johnson) on THE SHINING. (Stephen King’s novels are fairly coherent but he usually depends on the forces of evil, when the story is supernatural, having vaguely-defined and conveniently-expanding powers.) The novel already mingled telepathy, violent psychotic breakdown, and ghosts, which is nearly triple voodoo, but Kubrick inserted the weird time-slip material, deciding that the Overlook shouldn’t blow up, and eventually rejecting the conventional closeup-of-a-bee ending he’d shot where the Overlook manager is somehow an avatar of the hotel — which didn’t make any sense but feels like other horror movies.

And when John Carpenter and Debra Hill realised they couldn’t sell THE FOG as a restrained, spooky ghost story, it was easy enough just to add a few zombie scares that didn’t exactly make sense, and they could be confident this wouldn’t stop the film being commercial.

Does this date back to SUSPIRIA? Who invented the incoherent narrative? It seems to make sense that it would be an Italian, though I wouldn’t put it past the Japanese — but it would be less likely to cross over.

(Afterthought: THE TENANT isn’t logical either — it predates SUSPIRIA — but doesn’t seem like it had the same broad influence.)

In DEEP RED, there’s a murder mystery with an answer that kind of makes sense, though for a moment there the hero has to be quite convinced that the killer was someone who was with him at the time of the first murder, an unbreakable alibi one would have thought. But in SUSPIRIA, randomness rules. The giallo knifings aren’t really motivated by anything in the story, which turns out to be about witchcraft, the first time that the earlier Italian Gothic horror genre infected the giallo — unless I’m missing something.

Argento’s dream illogic is his second-best trait, below his flamboyance — for me, now that he’s lost the wild visual imagination he’s lost everything. His dreams are amazingly banal. Men with knives chase women. And of course, he’s rewriting his dreams to make them about sexy girl victims instead of himself as victim, making them more commercial and more banal. By rendering the situations preposterous, overheated and surreal, he at least frames them in an unusual way.

The abandonment of logic is the second major step in the evolution of horror movie narratives. And the first was an Italian development also: in BLACK SABBATH, Mario Bava presented what seems to be the first horror movie with an unhappy ending –in fact, three of them. Previous horror movies might be a bit tragic — we feel sorry for Larry Talbot each time he perishes, at least until he’s done it once too often — but the ending was always about reestablishing the natural order, as in a Shakespeare tragedy. Mario Bava realised that was making things LESS SCARY, and why would you want that? And without the Breen Office or a similar censor imposing a morally uplifting The End, Finis or Fine, why should you let the viewer off the hook?

Similarly, even in a dark, violent story in which terrible things happen and evil wins, a logical, sequential story is somewhat reassuring. Pull that rug away!

Here’s an image that ties in directly with yesterday’s post…

Of pre-Argento horror movies, DEMENTIA and CARNIVAL OF SOULS feel somewhat “non-Cartesian,” as he would say, but their narrative frameworks put the weird events into some kind of structure that does make sense, even if the precise events we have to watch are somewhat inexplicable. The endings wrap things up neatly rather than exploding them in our faces.

Next question: can we imagine a next stage in the evolution of horror that would make the films generally more terrifying, less reassuring? I can only think of ways of intensifying the insanity, which isn’t a paradigm shift, just a small evolutionary step.

There’s also been the opposite movement towards realism, where you get HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and his more melodramatic cousins.

And the most interesting combined approach might be THE EXORCIST, which tries to make everything seem forcefully real (like HENRY), follows an accepted mythology (like DRACULA), AND has a crazy, why-is-this-happening randomness and a willingness to let plot points be obscure which anticipates Argento and his goofy followers.

If anyone has a great idea for how to transform the medium, let me know!

Catalogue of Cruelty

I picked up secondhand Blu-rays of THE SHINING and PSYCHO and decided to look at the extra features, even though I think they’re basically the same as the unwatched ones I had on my DVDs. Well, I’d watched Vivian Kubrick’s The Making of The Shining. But not with her commentary.

I blame Tom Cruise for getting Vivian “Squirt” Kubrick into Scientology, and I blame Scientology for her now getting into crazy rightwing memes including antisemitic shit. If you want to have The Great Stanley K’s most misanthropic views confirmed, just look at how short a span it took for the progeny of JEW SUSS director Veit Harlan to get back into Nazism — two generations. With a Jewish son/dad in between. [CORRECTION – Stanley married Veit’s niece.]

In her commentary, VK sounds incredibly young, which she was when she made the doc — just finished school — but couldn’t have been when she recorded the VO. So maybe she’s just preternaturally and eternally young and naive. Whatever, she’s gone down a very nasty rabbithole (or into a sinister maze) since then. Her commentary is fairly informative.

Steadicam inventor/operator Garrett Brown’s commentary on the main feature is super-informative — it really illuminates SK’s process, in a sympathetic way. Kubrick (and everyone else) biography John Baxter’s part of it is less so. He starts off by asserting that the rolling credits are an oft-used Kubrick trope — I struggle to think of any mature Kubrick film outside of THE SHINING that uses them.

I *think* Brown may be mistaken when he explains the impossible high-angle shot of Wendy and Danny in the maze. I’d long puzzled over this, and found the explanation in a later SHINING doc not on this disc — Kubrick moved the entire full-scale maze to a plaza in front of a nearby tower block. Brown claims instead that he only moved the centre of the maze, and optically inserted it into a shot of the miniature. This is what a reasonable person might do, but I don’t see strong evidence that Kubrick was entirely reasonable.

Firstly, the model maze Jack’s looking at does not resemble the maze in the aerial shot. Apart from the fact that it’s clearly been rotated 90 degrees, it’s just a different maze. Totally different layout. Which ties in with the geographic tricksiness of the Overlook sets and lends weight to those who see the “bad continuity” as part of a deliberate scheme, its origins and purpose still a total mystery. (It would not have been more work to ensure the model of the maze matched the full-scale one. The map of the maze is completely different also.)

To zoom in on an optically combined model and life-sized maze, Kubrick would have had to optically enlarge the film, with resulting increase of grain (which would already have been amplified by the necessary duping) which I don’t see. The matching of the shadows is perfect — well, Kubrick would certainly have gone to that trouble. But since he had built a full-size maze out of wooden frames and chicken wire and real leaves, moving it to another location would not be hugely expensive or difficult, so I can easily imagine him doing it. Sure, it’s an insane amount of work for one shot, but Stanley’s not the one doing the work. And the shot is worth it.

Seeing Wendy Carlos and her cats was fun, and hearing unused tracks from THE SHINING and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was illuminating — one piece, “Boulderado”, written in advance of the shoot, intended to convey the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, has a Miklos Rozsa BEN-HUR feel (only on the Moog) wholly out step with the finished film. Delightful.

But my favourite extra was the documentary View from the Overlook — costume designer Milena Canonero says something that genuinely made me see the film anew. Kubrick didn’t want a lot of wear and tear on the costumes, which good designers usually apply to make them look used. She got the sense that he wanted a sort of catalogue model look.

Somehow it’s there. You can’t unsee it. THE SHINING takes place in a leisurewear universe. This mainly feels true of the early scenes, before the Torrences take up residence.

Oh, Vivian Kubrick points out the nasty seventies carpets in the Gold Room (along with her own presence as extra, the girl in black to the left of Jack’s butt, below). Which raises a point. The carpet is still there when Nicholson strolls into a party from the 1920s. And when Wendy sees the party comprised of skeletons. So the room hasn’t reverted to the past, which would be one possible interpretation of what’s going on. THE SHINING projects a kind of time-warp vibe, all but confirmed in the closing shot (top). But here we see the room populated by celebrants of a bygone era, but the room itself is anachronistically late-70s. It ties in with Kubrick staging Alex’s biblical fantasies in CLOCKWORK ORANGE in cheesy Hollywood manner, down to Alex’s centurion speaking in an American accent, “because I thought that’s how he’d imagine it.” So the Midnight and the Stars and You party imports a whole crowd scene of bygone guests and staff, but doesn’t remember to redesign the carpet, because Jack wouldn’t think of that detail.

Or, you know, you can consider it an oversight. At the Overlook.

I might have something to say about PSYCHO’s extras too…