D. W. Griffith



D. W. Griffith, 1900

It goes without saying that great artists are controversial. In fact, there's almost a direct correlation, even a cause and effect element. And the greatest, most controversial artists seem to be those on the technological and ideological cutting edge of their art. Around 1900, a new art form was in its infancy. Edison and the Lumiere Brothers had barely demonstrated the technology much less delineated its artistic potential. It wasn't even entertainment yet, more a mechanical scientific curiosity. Porter was still three years from making The Great Train Robbery. Cinematography was a crude and unknown art form analogous to cave painting at that point in the history of art. In the next ten or fifteen years, there was progress. Film making became entertainment The Nickelodeon was born. The industry moved to Southern California where interior shots could be filmed outdoors in the 300 days per year of brilliant sunlight demanded by the "slow" film of the time. During that time, an adventurous young artist was learning his craft. His name was David Wark Griffith.

Griffith was born in 1875 in Crestwood, Kentucky, just ten years after the end of the Civil War. He grew up during the latter years of Reconstruction listening to his father's colorful and no doubt highly embellished first-person accounts of wartime heroism and the justifiable outrage over one of the darkest political eras in U.S. history. He took these stories with him, believing every word of them, when, in 1908, he left for Southern California (Hollywood didn't even exist at the time) to become a movie actor. His acting career was short and uneventful. He took to moonlighting as a director at Biograph Studios; and during the next seven years churned out over 450 "shorts." In the process, he completely mastered the art of film making such as it was at the time. But he saw his 20-minute "one-reelers" as a terrific waste of a great storytelling medium. By that time, film making had progressed figuratively from cave painting to comic books and in Griffith's eyes, it wasn't all that great a leap. He longed to do more with the medium.

Birth of a Nation
theater poster

Not surprisingly, he drew upon his childhood lore, his own and borrowed money, and near total creative independence to recount the Civil War and the Southern culture at the time as he knew it. Nothing even remotely comparable had ever been done before. Birth of a Nation's four hours of running time tested the patience and bladders of even the most devoted history buffs. There were over 11,000 scenes, 25,000 players, and $750,000 involved. Griffith's film innovations such as dissolves, masking, close-ups, flashbacks, his battlefield action footage, and dramatic editing were unprecedented at the time and breathtaking in their visual impact. The cadre of assistant directors he trained or influenced (Orson Wells, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and others) would go on to make movie history themselves.

But Birth of a Nation was irretrievably flawed, reflecting the deep racial prejudices Griffith had known growing up and seemingly never questioned, at least until after the film was released. Then, in spite of its daring cinematic breakthroughs, it unleashed, or at least unveiled, a deep racial schism in American society. Based on the abhorrently racial novel, The Clansman, Birth of a Nation was as much fantasy as it was propaganda--history as seen and believed in the South at a time when such regional boundaries were evaporating.

Intolerance theater poster
featuring one of the film's
 four morality mini-movies

Biographers would have us believe Griffith's next work, his 1916, Intolerance was an attempt to atone for the racial stereotypes and prejudices he'd ignorantly projected in Birth of a Nation. That's questionable. In any case, its effect in mitigating the damage done by Birth of a Nation was minimal. With Intolerance, Griffith again went too far. He'd followed up his bigoted blockbuster by creating the first "art" film, intermingling four separate morality tales into a complex cinematography that audiences at the time were not prepared to decipher. Though critically acclaimed, it was a box-office disaster. Griffith went on to make several additional outstanding, seriously moralistic films of a more intimate nature up through the advent of "talkies," but by then, his style, his vision, his nineteenth century point of view, were all decidedly old-fashioned. The industry he helped to create had quickly passed him by, casting him aside. He died in 1948, in virtual exile, a talented genius who never quite recovered from his greatest triumph and the hateful seeds of his own destruction which it spread.

Sergei Eisenstein

Battleship Potemkin, 1926, Sergei Eisenstein, director.

Sergei Eisenstein, 1925

If you're a serious film buff, you've no doubt heard the name, Sergei Eisenstein. If not, probably not. Eisenstein was a Soviet Russian film maker born in Latvia in 1898. His father was of German, Jewish, and Swedish blood. His mother was Russian. His father was an architect who moved around a lot so the boy grew up all over eastern Europe during the first two decades of the 20th century. Sergei, like his father, studied architecture before WW I and his enlistment in the Red Army (his father was a tsarist). He got his start in film making while working in an army propaganda unit after the war in support of the Bolshevik October Revolution. However Eisenstein's first creative efforts were with the Moscow theater, in the role of set designer. There he directed his first short films of theater productions while writing articles on film theory, especially montage editing. His first feature film, Strike, made in 1925, dealt with a strike at a pre-revolution factory in which metaphorical shots of cattle being slaughtered were intercut with scenes of violent strike suppression.

 

The Battleship Potemkin around 1905, before the mutiny.

The final shot from Eisenstein's
 Odessa steps massacre sequence.
Subtlety was not his forte.

Eisenstein's most memorable film, and probably his best effort, was the silent Battleship Potemkin from 1926. Eisenstein is often compared to the American film maker, D.W. Griffith, in which case Potemkin is his Birth of a Nation. Both films are propaganda pieces, Griffith's landmark effort somewhat more subtle in that regard than Eisenstein's, but no less influential from a cultural and technical perspective. Although Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) was made more than ten years before Battleship Potemkin, it's uncertain whether Eisenstein had ever seen Griffith's film.  In any case, both covered much the same ground. The two films also have much the same look and feel, though Eisenstein's focus is narrower, his interest and expertise more on the emotional impact of editing and in managing large crowd scenes than the melodramatic love stories and moralistic themes Griffith pursued. Moreover, Griffith was relatively subtle. Eisenstein was far from it (left).

 

Eisenstein's Massacre on the Odessa steps, Battleship Potemkin, 1926.

The Battleship Potemkin, after the Mutiny.

The Potemkin was a Russian battleship built for the Black Sea fleet about 1903. The story revolves around the mistreatment of its crew by their tsarist officers. One memorable scene early in the film involves the crew rebelling against being served meat infested with maggots. With the onslaught of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the crew mutinied. Sailing out of Odessa, the most famous scene comes late in the film when a group of townspeople are seen waving goodbye as the ship leaves port, whereupon they are attacked by tsarist troops at the top of a seemingly unending, broad flight of steps. They flee down the steps only to be met and massacred by Russian Cossacks at the bottom. Even in black and white, the blood splatters freely. The sequence (which can be seen in the video clip near the bottom) ends with an unattended baby carriage rolling suspensefully down the steps toward the slaughter and the water. Eisensteins' editing is masterful, though possibly a bit slow by modern standards. The only problem is, the whole scene never actually happened. Yes, there was a great deal of bloodshed in the Crimean area at the time, and the Potemkin did come under Bolshevik control, but, ever true to his propagandist calling, Eisenstein simply made the worst of a bad situation.

 

Eisenstein's dramatic confrontation on the Odessa steps, Battleship Potemkin, 1926.

Seconds later...

During the 1930s, as a result of the critical acclaim heaped upon Battleship Potemkin, and his 1928 silent film,  October (Ten Days that Shook the World), Eisenstein was something of a celebrity in Russia. He traveled and lectured on his film theories all over Europe. He eventually came to the United States and flirted with Paramount's Jesse Lasky, though the two never came to any agreement as to an American project. Eisenstein's free-spirited film making techniques did not fit well with the American factory-studio approach. Moving on to Mexico, he did actually shoot a few miles of film, though his financial backers pulled the plug before the film Que Viva Mexico (Long Live Mexico) could be completed. Moreover, Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin smelled a deserter and called him back to mother Russia. There, he made such epics as Alexander Nevsky, Seeds of Freedom, Land of Freedom, Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II, as well as numerous short films and documentaries all of a predominantly socialist realism genre (read propaganda). Eisenstein's Communist idealism led him to envision a sort of film maker's utopia free of studio bosses and budgetary restraints which he saw as hampering his creative freedom. He died in 1948 at the age of fifty, disillusioned by the fact that bosses and budgets were as much a part of Communism as Capitalism.

Eisenstein's most powerful editing:

Eisenstein's suspenseful baby stroller scenario was copied by Brian De Palma in his 1978 film, The Untouchables, during the climactic massacre scene filmed in New York's Grand Central Station.

 

Top Ten American Movies of All Time

Several months ago I went out on a limb and chose the top ten paintings of the last thousand years.  Well, inasmuch as the favorite topic at the moment among my friends seems to be movies, I'm going to crawl even further out on the proverbial limb and list the top ten movies of the last thousand years. I know, that sounds like a bit much, but since movies have only been around for a little over a hundred years, it's no great stretch. Speaking as one who has taught both film making and film history, I may not be the greatest expert in the world, but I do have some basis of judgment on the subject. Unfortunately, I am not conversant enough in foreign films to consider them in this list. Likewise, these are not necessarily my favorite movies; and the order of placement in the list may be arguable; but I feel firmly that these ten motion pictures are classics in every sense of the word and should be lodged in the film memory vault of every individual alive. 

10.  West Side Story--winner of ten Academy Awards; classic Shakespearean plot updated; still as relevant today as in 1961; young people who later became screen legends; the film boasts music and choreography as good as Broadway or Hollywood ever gets.

9.  Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)--Dating from 1963, not all the great ones win Academy Awards or strut their stuff in glorious color. Stanley Kubrick's chilling little cold war farce (which he wrote, produced, and directed) just before 2001: A Space Odyssey (tough call between these two) showcases George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn (son of Ed Wynn), and the late, great Peter Sellers in three different leading roles. (I know, that sounds impossible.) James Earl Jones and Slim Pickins also put in appearances. You know a movie has made an impact when it becomes an adjective--strangelovian.

8.  Birth of a Nation--Dating from the early silent era (1915), D. W.  Griffith taught Hollywood how to make movies. His four-hour epic is loaded with the blatant racism of its time, but the daring scope of its content, and its cinematography rise above that to achievements unknown in its day. Even today it remains a virtual "how to" book on basic film making as well as propaganda. It's American history (albeit from a Southern point of view) as well as film history of the highest caliber (best taken in small doses or with one finger on "fast forward").

7.  "Casablanca--Even 1943 "B" movies sometimes achieve greatness. This is a sentimental favorite with probably more unforgettable lines than any movie ever made. Like Strangelove, it demonstrates you can make great movies without great budgets. Bogart and Bergman--film chemistry just doesn't get any better than this.

6.  Titanic--Which just goes to show, you can also make great movies in spite of great budgets. Eleven Academy Awards and a zillion dollars in box office loot can't all be wrong. And to give credit where it's due, sharp directing, editing, cutting edge special effects, another Romeo and Juliet plot rip-off, and a great score don't hurt either.

5.  The Godfather (Part II)--The Mob never looked so good...or so human. Coppola's dark, mafia masterpieces are not among my favorites but I have to respect his work. Like so many great films, this 1974 sequel, is a blockbuster which could easily have gone terribly wrong, but didn't.

4.  Ben-Hur (1959)--The first motion picture to ever win eleven Academy Awards, with two or three of the most memorable sequences ever put on film. Easily the best film of the 1950s, it's a biblical saga with a powerful spiritual message, which yet manages to avoid becoming a Sunday school lesson.

3.  Gone With the Wind--What can I say about this 1939 epic that hasn't already been said a hundred times over? It's not a perfect movie. Selznick's pedantic paraphrasing of Margaret Mitchell's dialogue would not give Shakespeare cause for alarm; yet if movies are about greatness--pictures, music, drama, and great stories about great events told with great feeling--then this one holds up quite well now seventy-two years after it was made.

2.  Citizen Kane--Considered by many to actually be the "perfect movie," it's amazing how many films on this list were virtual one-man-shows. Maybe a single individual dominating every facet of the work is one of the most important prerequisites for greatness. Whether his name is D.W. Griffith, David Selznick, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, or James Cameron, in so many cases a single artist made the movie great despite sometimes incredible odds. This 1940 masterpiece wrote the sequel to Birth of a Nation insofar as cinematography is concerned.

1.  Schindler's List--I'm not ashamed to admit it. Spielberg made me cry.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles, age 21, 1937

The term "genius" may be one of the most overused words in the English language, especially in the arts, especially in this century. Picasso had it. So, of course, did Einstein. In literature there was Hemingway, possibly Eugene O'Neill. In music--the Gershwins, Irving Berlin. In poetry--Frost and Sandburg. I know I'm leaving out dozens of others, but it's hard to know where to draw the line. Where does genius stop being genius and become merely outstanding? Overused, yes, but what else can you call a young boy who is memorizing Shakespeare by the age of six, studying art, music, writing poetry, and publishing cartoons by the age of ten; writing plays, producing them, and acting in them by the age of fifteen; and is doing Broadway by the age of eighteen? Want more? By the age of 25 he was writing, producing, and starring in his first Hollywood production, a film that today is ranked by film critics as among the best two or three films ever made. To put it in perspective, if Michelangelo had been such a genius, he would have finished the Sistine ceiling in his mid-twenties (instead of 35).

Panic radio, H.G. Wells meets Orson Welles

George Orson Welles was bedecked with the "genius" label almost from birth. Underneath, in parentheses could also have been the French "L'enfant Terrible." Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1915, the son of a part time alcoholic inventor and a talented pianist, who died when he was six (his father died when Orson was fifteen), Welles had a troubled, turbulent childhood until the age of eleven when he was enrolled in the highly progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois. There, given practically the run of the drama department, he wrote, directed, produced, and acted in everything from nativities (he played the Virgin Mary) to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in which he played both Antony and Cassius so effectively the production was disqualified from a drama competition for cheating (the use of ringers).

Run for your lives, the Martians have landed!

His first professional roles came at the age of sixteen when, on a vacation in Ireland to paint,  American actress, Catherine Cornell, tagged him for her touring company of Romeo and Juliet. He played Mercutio, and later, on Broadway, playing both Chorus and Tybalt. His deep, resonate voice won him roles both on stage and in radio during the thirties, most notably in the famous The Shadow. He was so busy he was often unceremoniously dumped into an ambulance to get him from one job to another on time. Working for the Federal Theater Projects he learned the arts and crafts of directing, staging such innovations as the first all-Negro production of Macbeth in a Haitian setting. In 1937, he founded his Mercury Theater Players and opened with a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar which drew bold comparisons to Fascist Italy of the time. But it was his 1938 Halloween radio production, War of the Worlds (above, left), about a Martian invasion of New Jersey which brought his name to national prominence; and despite disclaimers at the beginning, was so realistic it caused a national panic (above).

Three Oscar nominations, one win.

Three years later, in 1941, Orson Welles was in Hollywood with carte-blanche to do just about anything he wanted with the film medium. What he did was Citizen Kane (right), a thinly disguised film biography of William Randolph Hearst. So devastating was his portrayal of Kane, the script which he co-wrote with Herman Mankiewicz, and the cutting-edge film techniques he employed as the film's director, he was nominated in three categories for an Academy Award. He and Mankiewicz won for their script.  Enormous pressures were put on RKO not to even release the film (principally by the Hearst media monolith); and while it was a critical success, it was never a box-office hit.

No other single individual ever mastered
virtually all aspects of the dramatic arts.

Welles went on to direct and perform in over forty productions during the next twenty years, among them such classics as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Jane Eyre (1942), The Third Man (1949), Othello (1952, left), Touch of Evil (1957), and Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff (1966).  Add to that work as an actor or narrator in another 42 films, everything from Canterbury Tales to Bugs Bunny Cartoons. Awards flooded his last years--an honorary Oscar in 1970, a Life Achievement Award in 1975 from the American Film Institute, the French Legion of Honor in 1982, and The Directors Guild's D. W.  Griffith Award in 1984. Yet, ironically, he may be best remembered for his "We will sell no wine before its time" TV commercial for Paul Masson wines, or for his 300-pound bulk. Welles died of a heart attack in 1985. Friends complained in his later years, that those in Hollywood most willing to applaud his accomplishments were the same ones who wouldn't give him a job. But perhaps his greatest contribution to the arts came from the fact that his work probably inspired more filmmakers than that of anyone since D. W.  Griffith.  And not only that, he was also known to be quite a good painter.

Orson Welles Self-portrait, early 1980s

The Greatest Impact

As the year 2013 draws to a close, journalists and pundits love to expound upon "the year in review." I could do the same with regard to art but...pfft... Why bother? Art this year didn't exactly deprive anyone of their socks. Instead, I thought it might be interesting to discuss which century had the greatest impact on the fine arts. As a matter of necessity, I've limited my consideration to those eras from the Renaissance to the present. Before that, progress in the fine arts was simply too widely dispersed and disorganized to have had much of an impact. Thus I've chosen three centuries as contenders. First, the Renaissance itself, basically the 15th century to which we'll add an extra twenty years (1401-1520), inasmuch as the era doesn't fit neatly into a typical hundred-year span. Second, would be the 19th century (1801-1900), and finally, the 20th century (1901-2000).

 

Spanish Mannerist painting, ca. 1550.

Why not the 16th, 17th, or 18th centuries? The 16th century period following the Renaissance was saddled with the misbegotten excesses of Mannerism, whose only saving grace was in planting the seeds of the Baroque era. The 17th century had the Baroque style over much of Europe and the Dutch Golden Age--impressive, a real contender, but not quite making the cut. The 18th century had French Rococo, a tasteless overindulgence that would easily, and deservedly, place it at the bottom of any list of great art eras.

 

The Renaissance--Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, the big three, almost a mantra in academic art history classes, and deservedly so. But bolstering these three great masters are names like Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Alberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Titian, Ghirlandaio, da Massina, Verocchio, and some others of lesser stature. The period began with Lorenzo Ghiberti winning the Florentine Baptistery door panel competition in 1401 and ended with the death of Raphael in 1520. In between, Brunelleschi taught Italian artists how to use linear perspective; Bramante got St. Peter's Basilica off to a good start; Michelangelo's David hopped up on a pedestal outside Florence's Palazzo Vecchio while his Pieta took up residence in the Vatican. Leonardo had a disastrous Last Supper, but succeeded in making Mona smile (sorta). Meanwhile, Raphael did some pretty impressive redecorating for Pope Julius II and nearly made a career out of painting baby pictures of Jesus. Art and science had a race to see which could make the most progress. It was neck and neck at times, but in the end, art won by a furlong.

 

The 19th Century--Jaques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Eugene Delacoix, Theodore Gericault, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne--quite a cast of characters and every last one of the stars of the show speaking with a French accent. England provided J.M.W. Turner, America added the names of Whistler, Cassatt, and Sargent. Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Morisot, and a few others all turned in superb performances in supporting roles. Eiffel raised his tower; Manet had a picnic on the lawn, Rodin did some thinking and kissing; Whistler proved to be a mama's boy; Monet made quite an impression; and Seurat invented the dot. David, Ingres, Delacroix, Gericault, Cabanal, Bougeureau, Gerome and way too many others, manned the Academic ramparts against the likes of Monet, Courbet, Millet, Degas, Renoir, van Gogh, and Cezanne. For all its fame, faults, and frivolities, nothing like the French Academie des Beaux Arts had ever existed before (or fortunately, since) nor had such a powerful impact on the arts. Only the Catholic Church during the Renaissance came close to the near total artistic domination of the Academie and its all-powerful Salon competition. The century began with David's Classical Oath of the Horatii (above, left), and ended Georges Seurat taking a day off on A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte (above, right). Both were massive paintings but had little in common beyond that. In between, photography poked its nosed into the art world, trains carried artist into the countryside to paint, and a little guy with one ear ended his painting carreer prematurely with a gunshot. It was a wild and crazy century.

 

The 20th century--Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Norman Rockwell, Salavador Dali, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Frank Lloyde Wright, Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Steven Spielberg, Jeff Koons--the list of stars grows longer and longer with each century. The list of secondaries becomes longer than both your arms--Braque, Chagall, Duchamp, Vlaminck, Balla, Boccioni, Munch, Gaudi, le Corbusier, Mondrian, Frankenthaler, O'Keeffe, Griffith, Hitchcock, Moses, Close, Gottlieb, Nevelson, and about a hundred more. The list of 20th century art "isms" is enough to choke a horse, starting with Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Art Nouveau and Deco, Expressionism, Futurism, Orphism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Op and Pop, and finally a kind of artistic suicide in Minimalism. The 20th century, fortunately, had no institutional dictatorship even faintly reminiscent of the Academie des Beaux Arts, though some might suggest Hollywood's Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPASS) comes close. If the technology rather tiptoed into the 19th century with the advent of primitive photography, the 20th century art world literally got WALLOPED by it, starting with motion pictures, then television, and finally the computer. Painting peaked with Abstract Expressionism, Popped a decade later, then Minimalized itself into irrelevancy shortly thereafter. Frank Lloyde Wright epitomized architecture, the Bauhaus reinvented the box on a grand, soaring scale so we could watch in horror as two of them came crashing down during 9-11. Modern Art became Post-modern. Pixels replace pigments. D.W. Griffith gave birth to a nation of racists, Selznick went with the wind, and Spielberg phoned home with Schindler's List in hope of Saving Private Ryan. And finally, Stanley Kubrick taught us how to love the bomb and then summed up the entire century with an psychedelic, overly optimistic space odyssey scheduled for 2001.

 

And the winner is...you decide. Not to unduly influence the outcome, but my vote goes with the 20th century by a landslide. Alvin Toffler had it right in Future Shock. It's not a matter of change itself, but the pace of change that counts. The 20th century changed many things. The 21st century will change every thing. There will always be change. In the most fundamental sense, "change" is, in fact, the very definition of life. If you don't change, you die. And even the dead change physically. When people can no longer cope with change, especially the pace of change, that's when they face death. Daily we read about the divisions, not just in American society, but the world as a whole. A great deal of what accounts for this division boils down to those who can and do deal effectively with change and those who can't, don't, or won't deal with change. In art we see a microcosm of the ever-increasing pace of change in the world. Any attempt to slow down this pace of change (or worse, reverse it) is fruitless. The only hope is to try to guide change, and perhaps lessen somewhat its impact. At this time, the second decade of the 21st century, it's way too early to evaluate the impact of this century's changes in the fine arts. The year 1913 gave no hint of two world wars, nuclear weapons, television, or space travel, much less microwave ovens, the Internet, in vitro fertilization, digital photography, or virtual reality. 2013 and the year following is likewise ignorant of the future. Coping with change is best achieved by hoping for the best rather than fearing the worst. Happy New Years!

 

Alfred Hitchcock

Legendary storyteller, legendary films.



I've long insisted that modern-day motion pictures are the most viable art form known to man (stretching the definition now to include video). In effect, this one medium encompasses virtually every other art form into one, utilizing the best each has to offer into a single, highly effective, medium of expression. Likewise I've delved into the art and artists marking the best of the best in this endeavor, from my favorite, Steven Spielberg, to perhaps my least favorite, Francis Ford Coppola. Recently in reviewing the AMC (American Movie Channel) listing of the Greatest Directors of All Time, I came face to face with a glaring omission in my coverage. There, at number one, top of the list, was a man, whom I'd mentioned often, but never really written about--Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

 

 Hitchcock's Rebecca,
his one and only Oscar.

I could list a number of reasons for this oversight, perhaps principle among them being that I've never been a great fan of suspenseful drama. But that's really no excuse and doesn't in any way diminish the influence this groundbreaking producer/director has had on the art of film making. It's a tossup as to which should be the most legendary, the man or his films. As a Hollywood legend he ranks with D.W. Griffith, Orson Wells, David O. Selznick, Stanley Kubrick, and a few others. Like the others, Hitchcock rose to the top of his profession allowing him a great deal of control (if not total control) of his films. Like the others, he still often battled the "damned studio" bosses, not to mention, in Hitchcock's case, his frequent censorship run-ins Joseph Breen of the Motion Picture Production Code office. Yet even the preeminent studio boss and "control freak" David O. Selznick "let Hitchcock be Hitchcock." As a result of this indulgence, in 1940, Selznick Studios received a second "Best Picture" award (marking two years in a row, following GWTW) for Rebecca. Inasmuch as he already had on, Selznick graciously allowed Hitchcock to keep the statuette. Ironically, Hitchcock was competing against himself, his film, Foreign Correspondent was also nominated for "Best Picture" the same year. In what may be the all-time worst sin in AMPAS history, Hitchcock never did win an Oscar as "Best Director."


Hitchcock's first hit, 1927.

Hollywood legends have often been bigger than life, though in Hitchcock's case that might be difficult. Whether discussing his persistent cameo appearances in his films, his ending "twists," his love for shooting action sequences on location at famous landmarks, or his penchant for extremely thorough preproduction planning, Hitchcock was one of a kind. Born in 1899 in a northeast suburb of London, the man literally started at the very bottom of the 1920s British film industry. Trained as a graphic artist, he started by designing silent film title cards, moving up from there to film posters, then to writing suspenseful short stories in the company newsletter, Jesse Lasky's Famous Players Productions (later to become Paramount). Later he worked as a set designer and art director. His career as a director didn't exactly get off to a roaring start. His first two film (now lost) were never completed due to financial difficulties. His third film (Pleasure Garden, 1925) while eventually completed, was a box office dud. Hitchcock's first commercial success came in 1927, with Lodger: a Story of the London Fog (above left), said to be the first truly "Hitchcockian" film with several elements later to become his film trademarks.



Over fifty films, some familiar, some...not so much.

David O. Selznick brought Hitchcock to Hollywood in 1939, turning him loose on Rebecca--one great talent recognizing another. Although Selznick had signed Hitchcock for seven films, he was really more talent than the perennial spendthrift, Selznick, could afford. After Rebecca, they made only one other film together, Spellbound, in 1945. Mostly Selznick "farmed out" Hitchcock to other studios where he directed such classics as Mr. & Mrs. Smith (RKO), Shadow of a Doubt (Universal), Lifeboat (Fox), and Notorious (RKO-Vanguard). However, it was during the 1950s when Hitchcock really came into his own, working intermittently as a free agent for Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, and Universal on such instantly recognizable suspense classics as Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much (a remake of his 1934 British film), Vertigo, North by Northwest (below), and finally, in 1960, his biggest hit of all (some would say his best film), Psycho.

Alfred Hitchcock was never shy about putting his own persona into his work, whether in
his many cameo appearances or in promoting his pictures.

The scream heard round the world.

If he wasn't already, Psycho made Hitchcock a millionaire--some fifteen times over, in fact--out of a total box office take of $50-million. The budget was a measly $800,000, the shooting was in black and white on a rented, unused set with a television crew. Chocolate syrup stood in for blood in the stabbing scene. The film made Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, and John Gavin household names. It also instilled a deathly fear among women of taking showers in motels. Though Hitchcock lived and evolved as a director for another twenty years, making five more outstanding films showcasing his mature style of suspenseful drama, most people are most familiar with the Alfred Hitchcock of 1950s television. Along with Walt Disney, Hitchcock was one of the few 50s film makers to recognize television as a new medium to be embraced rather than a reckless upstart to be feared. Beginning in 1955, Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired on CBS every Sunday night (later on NBC, then back to CBS, and finally back to NBC again) for a total of 361 scary episodes. Though he was executive producer of the series, and introduced each episode with his trademark "Good Evening" over the iconic strains of Funeral March of a Marionette, Hitchcock never directed a single episode.

Hitchcock's dry, macabre sense of humor was always in the forefront.
The video above is long, but fun, perhaps the best part of each night's episode.

Seldom are great directors beloved by those who work for them. Part of that can be accounted for by their perfectionist tendencies. Such masters of their craft "don't suffer fools lightly." In most cases, such film making geniuses are, at best, respected. At worst, they're hated. Tippi Hedren (star of Hitchcock's The Birds) accused Hitchcock of misogyny and of ruining her career when she resisted his sexual advances. Other actors and actresses who have worked with him defend Hitchcock, reasoning that he considered actors as "animated props." As a rising young director in England, Hitchcock is said to have referred to actors as "cattle." Years later, in an interview, when questioned about his bovine reference, Hitchcock claimed to have been misquoted. He said instead, "...actors should be treated like cattle."

Another Alfred Hitchcock cameo appearance, Lifeboat, 1944

 

The Greatest Artist Alive Today

 

Steven Spielberg filming Lincoln.

I've often written about my admiration for the man, including him on my list of this century's most influential artists, however it occurred to me just this morning that I'd never actually given the man his due, despite having written about hundreds of lesser creative minds. (Not that he needs me to tout his accomplishments.) To begin, his first professional art endeavor cost $500. He made a profit of one dollar. It was a science fiction adventure film called Firelight. This first commercial "success" was later to inspire a second attempt, his somewhat more successful, Close Encounters of a Third Kind. Since then, Steven Spielberg has made three films which have set box office records in their time, Jaws, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, and Jurassic Park. Collectively, his films have earned $8.5 billion. Forbes estimates that he's been able to hang on to $3.2 billion of that--not bad for a kid who shot his first film in 8mm to earn a boy scout merit badge.

 

The Oscars are only the beginning.

Of course making lots of money in the movie business is not necessarily the mark of a great artist. Even his Academy Awards for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), while certainly indicative of the high regard in which he is held in Hollywood, would not, taken alone, elevate him to the lofty realm of my "Greatest Artist Alive." A great artist must move people. Many years ago I taught a survey course at a local community college--Introduction to Film. Schindler's List was one of the newer films shown and discussed in class. The final scene in which the descendants of those on Oskar Schindler's list each laid a stone on his grave in Israel caused me to choke up with emotion in class. That had never happened before. For many WWII veterans, Saving Private Ryan had the same effect.

 

The film that earned Spielberg his first dollar.

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1946 to Jewish parents, his mother a restaurateur, his father a very early computer engineer. He spent his childhood in New Jersey and Scottsdale, Arizona, where he began playing with motion pictures as a teen, filming model trains and cowboy epics. More than just earning a photography merit badge, by the time Spielberg graduated from high school in Saratoga, California, he was an eagle scout. After high school Spielberg studied film and theater at USC and Cal State, though it wasn't until he became famous that USC awarded him an honorary degree. (Nothing if not persistent, 35 years after starting, he finally earned a degree from USC.) A stint as an unpaid intern at Universal Studios got his foot in the industry door. A short time later, Spielberg became the youngest director ever signed to a long-term studio contract.






Spielberg directed Peter Falk in
the premier episode of the TV
series, Colombo. The show
ran for seven seasons.

Spielberg paid his dues directing episodic TV, Marcus Welby,  Night Gallery, Owen Marshall, and Colombo. From there he moved on to a number of made-for-TV films, which led to his first feature film, Sugarland Express, though the film fared poorly at the box-office. Then came the shark attack. Jaws was a film maker's worst nightmare, technically challenging, over budget,  behind schedule, and more than once nearly shut down. However, $470 million and three Academy Awards later, the film was an enormous hit. Spielberg went in search of a "bigger boat." He turned down King Kong and Superman in favor of his own screenplay, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, nominated for six Academy Awards and winning two. The Indiana Jones series and E.T. followed, cementing Spielberg's name in the history books as among the top two or three money-making film artists of all time.

 

No one ever deserved it more.

On a par with D.W. Griffith, David O. Selznick, John Ford, Orson Wells, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen Spielberg not only entertains, but makes an impact on the world outside Hollywood's hills. He's tackled the Holocaust, the slave trade, the Civil War, WW II (both in Europe and the Far East), racial injustice, artificial intelligence, not to mention a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex or two. Beyond all this though, the mark of a truly great artist is seen in those artists of similar caliber which he or she influences. The mark of Spielberg can be seen in the work of James Cameron (Titanic), Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down), and Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich), among others. Moreover, the man hasn't lost his touch, his most recent film, Lincoln is nominated for 12 Academy Awards. Spielberg has promised to make the movie available free of charge to high schools and middle schools once it comes out on DVD.

Spielberg's Lincoln--I've seen it; I highly recommend you do too.

 

 

It's About Time

Frangrila Flower time lapse photograph

When we talk about something being three-dimensional, we are usually speaking in terms of either illusion or reality. If it's illusional, it's rendered on a two-dimensional surface having length and width and giving the appearance of depth. If we're speaking of reality, as with a sculptural item, then the art object actually has three dimensions, length, width, and depth. What we don't often realized is that such work also has a fourth dimension--time. Without that most important element in its design the object simply wouldn't exist. When an artwork is, for some reason destroyed, it's first two or three dimensions cease to exist. Only the fourth dimension remains as fragments, ashes, gases, whatever. It's no longer a work of art, but in that man can neither create nor destroy matter, only change its form, as when an ice sculpture melts into water, then the remnants continues to exist in the fourth dimension--time.

 

Portrait with watch, 1560, probably of Cosimo de Medici I, Duke of Florence,
probably by the Renaissance master Maso de San Friano.

Su Song Astronomical Clock
11th century, Kaifeng, China

This fourth dimension has fascinated artists for centuries, probably since they first began to measure time...however crudely, as with the Su Song Astronomical Clock (left) dating from the 11th-century. More recently, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence has been tryin to date, and authenticate a circa 1560s portrait of a wealthy Florentine holding what may be one of the earliest pocket watches (above). Moreover, as artists have tackled the topic of time in their works, the one most common element to be found is our only known instrument for measuring time--the clock. Undoubtedly, the most famous such painting attacking the concept of time is Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory (below) painted in 1931. Indeed, time, especially since Dali, has been one of the most persistent subjects to be found in Surrealist Art. Time is both real and surreal. Real, as measured by various timepieces, and surreal as in dreams and memories. Each of us has a surreal time machine in our heads allowing us to travel back in time during both our waking and sleeping moments.

The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Salvador Dali

Though the fourth dimension has always been an element in all art, until the early years of the 20th century, it was mostly a static element, an absolutely essential factor but one which contributed little to the message conveyed by the art. The smile on the face of the Mona Lisa never changed, though in reality, it was probably momentary. Michelangelo's David is depicting in frozen contemplation of the giant Goliath, not in actually slaying him. Then with the advent of motion pictures, The Great Train Robbery depicted a crime in progress. D.W. Griffith moved on to depicting an entire war. In more recent generations, photographers and computer geeks have made it possible for still photos to suddenly come to life as with the time lapse animated gif at the top. Visually, having learned to speed it up and slow it down, we no longer see time in quite the same way as before.

Dance to the Music of Time, 1638, Nicholas Poussin

Until the modern era, artists had to be satisfied with illuminating the concept of time, as with Nicholas Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time (above), from 1638. Poussin could only work with the symbols of time. His four dancers represent the four stages of life constantly revolving around Man: Wealth, Pleasure, Industry and Poverty. There is a strong grip between the hands of Pleasure and Wealth, as Poverty desperately grasps for the hand of Wealth. Industry, Poverty and Pleasure all looking towards Wealth while she meets the gaze of Father Time. He plays the music for the dancers symbolizing the element of death which is always present in life. The little boy on the right watches the hourglass signaling the passing of time while the boy blowing bubbles on the left suggests the brevity of human life. It's no accident that we combine the two words "life" and "time" to created a single whole--a lifetime.



Cole's allegorical history approach to time.

Other artists such as Thomas Cole have taken a broader, philosophic look at time as seen in his five paintings making up his Course of Empire series (above). He paints the same landscape view as if looking out the window of a time machine traveling from the past toward the future yet ending far in the past. His view is at first brutally Savage, then comfortingly Pastoral, followed by the optimistic Consummation of mankind's yearning for wealth, culture, and prosperity. Then Cole suddenly takes on a pessimistic outlook as seen in his Destruction and Desolation. Cole could not depict time itself, but he did manage to depict its effects upon human existence.

 

Starry Night, 1889, Vincent, van Gogh

Tempus Pecunia Est,
(Time is Money), 
2010, Richard Harpum

Vincent van Gogh, in giving us his Starry Night (above), from 1889, tries to explore the momentary passing of time, though by today's standards, as lovely as the painting may be, he failed miserably in that effort. His stars glimmer, his swirls of paint suggests he'd like them to move across the sky, though he apparently had little understanding of the rotation of the earth in pursuing the painted illusion. My own efforts in dealing with the fourth dimension have taken a symbolic track, usually in the form of still-lifes such as It's About Time (below). Another artist, Richard Harpum, combines the still-life with both Surrealism and symbolic elements in his Tempus Pecunia Est (Time is Money, left), dating from 2010. Being a portrait artists, my strongest interest in time has to do with it's effects it has upon the human face. As a Junior in college back in 1971, I tackled the aging process starting with the face of a one-year-old boy, then tracing the effects of time for the next sixty-four years (bottom). I called it How to Grow a Man in Sixty-four Easy Lessons.

 

Copyright, Jim Lane

It's About Time, 1981, Jim Lane

Copyright, Jim Lane

How to Grow a Man, 1971, Jim Lane