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

Edwin Porter's The Great Train Robery

Few lights, one camera, but lots of ACTION!

If there's one word most beloved by historians, it's the word, "first." One might argue that their second most favored word is "last." The problem with both words is coming to a general agreement as to the criteria involved. Around 1890, a new art form was taking shape--motion pictures. Everyone always wants to know the first movie ever made. Immediately, such a definition starts to involve criteria. Does three seconds count? How long should the first movie be? In 1891 Men Boxing was twelve feet long--a breathtaking five seconds. (I wonder if they had an intermission between rounds.) Even as late as 1896 they were still measuring most films in seconds rather than minutes. Then the following year came more men boxing--The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, a sports documentary directed by Enoch J. Rector. The first film shot in widescreen, running an astounding hour and 40 minutes. At that early date and with that sizable jump in length, it's safe to say this was the first feature-length film ever made.

After the Ball, 1897, Georges Melies. She really wasn't completely naked.

Once there is little doubt as to the first "first"...whatever...the next step is to trace a long chain of developmental firsts. In cinematic history that means everything from the first kiss in a film (The Kiss, 1896) to the first nude scene (After the Ball, above, from 1897). Due to the limits of technology, films of the 1890s were mostly under a minute long and, until 1927 motion pictures were without sound. The first decade saw film moving from an experimental novelty to becoming an entertainment industry. Films became several minutes long consisting of several shots making up sequences (as with scenes in a play). In talking about technological firsts, the first rotating camera allowing panning shots arrived in 1897. The first film studios were built about that time. Special effects were introduced and film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, began to be used in the late 1890s. In the 1900s, continuity of action across successive shots was achieved and the first close-up shot was introduced (some claim by D. W. Griffith). Most films of this period were what came to be called "chase films." Edwin S. Porter's classic The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, set the early standards for this genre.



Click above to see the film in its entirety.

Producer-director, Edwin S Porter

When Edwin S. Porter set about filming The Great Train Robbery, he came to the task with a great deal of experience (if anyone could make such a claim in an industry barely a decade old). Porter had been Thomas A. Edison's cameraman during the 1890s filming such block-busters hits as Monkeyshines 1 (1890) and its sequels Monkeyshines 2, and 3. None were ever released to the public. They were internal tests designed to discover what "worked" and what didn't (mostly the latter). Nonetheless, Porter was in on the ground floor. The Great Train Robbery may not have been the first movie ever made or even the first ever made in the United States (Mon-keyshines 1 has that distinction) but it was the first "western" ever made (even though it was shot in New Jersey). At twelve minutes in length, it was much longer than most films being made even as late as 1903.

A century later, still a classic.

The Great Train Robbery ,was based on an 1896 story by Scott Marble. Featuring the first parallel development of separate, simul-taneous scenes, and the first close-up (of an outlaw firing off a shot right at the audience), The Great Train Robbery is among the earliest narrative films with a "Western" setting. The opening scenes show the outlaws holding up the passengers and robbing the mail car in the train, before escaping on horseback. After being knocked out by the bandits, the tele-graph operator regains consciousness and heads to the dance hall to get a posse together. The posse takes off to hunt down the outlaws and the chase is on. I won't give away the ending but the photo below might provide a clue. It was originally intended for the begin-ning of the picture.



Justus D. Barnes: BANG...BANG...BANG, you're all dead.



Broncho Billy Anderson,
the chief thief.

Inasmuch as The Great Train Robbery was made in the days when actors received no film credits, it's only appropriate that I should mention them here: Alfred C. Abadie, Broncho Billy Anderson, (right, who went on to become the first cowboy "movie star", playing the lead role in over 140 Broncho Billy pictures as well as many other westerns).Justus D. Barnes (above), and Walter Cameron. As of 1903, the "western" genre hadn't gelled yet in that all the stars of the film were the bad guys. The Great Train Robbery ran for twelve minutes and was made on a budget of $150 ($4,170 today). In 1805, Porter made a parody of The Great Train Robbery titled The Little Train Robbery, (below) with an all-child cast featuring a larger gang of bandits holding up a mini train to steal their dolls and candy.

 

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

Billy Wilder

Just a few of Wilder's best.                        

Some twenty-three years ago I taught an "Introduction to Film" class at our local community college. As a longtime lover of great motion pictures, doing so was one of the most enjoyable and rewarding teaching experiences of my life. It was a ten-week course, each class about three hours in length. That gave me the chance to present great movies as individual works of art as well as in the context of the development of motion pictures as an art form. With the advent of videotape cassettes at the time, in some cases I could show entire films, sometimes two in one class if they were not too long. In other cases, I simply showed memorable clips from various films. I started with Edwin Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) and finished with Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993, just out at the time). I also tried to touch upon the lives and times of the great film makers from D.W. Griffith to Spielberg and George Lucas. One of the most enjoyable of such Hollywood greats was an old geezer named Billy Wilder. If the name rings a bell but you don't immediately call to mind any of his films, let me refresh your memory--Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Spirit of St. Louis, Some Like It Hot, Irma la Douce, and my favorite, also the one I used in the film class, The Apartment. Any of those ring a bell?

Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it one five, including Best Picture, 1960.

Wilder with the five Oscars won by
The Apartment in 1960.

Actually, the list above is less than half of the twenty-two films Billy Wilder directed over the course of his fifty-year career in Hollywood. There were also several others for which he wrote the screenplay but did not direct. The total number exceeds sixty. In fact, Wilder always considered himself a writer first, only secondarily a director. His tombstone bears the words: "I'm a writer, but then, nobody's perfect." He was far more than a writer and far from perfect so the epitaph is more clever than accurate. The Apartment was by far Wilder's most successful film. The film won Wilder an Oscar as producer for Best Picture, as well as Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (the first person to ever be so honored for a single film). They were not his first, though. Wilder had also won two Oscars in 1945 for The Lost Weekend and another in 1950 for Best Screenplay for the film classic, Sunset Boulevard.


Wilder's first Oscar nomination
for Best Screenplay, 1944.

Billy Wilder was born in 1906. Wilder was Jewish, originally from Poland where his parents owned a bakery. His older brother, William Lee Wilder was also a successful screenwriter specializing if "B" movie science fiction. If that seems confusing, blame their mother who nicknamed her younger son "Billie" (he later changed it Billy). The name change came in 1933 when Billy, and his brother, being Jewish, had the good sense to head off, first to Paris, then to Hollywood in order to escape the rise of Nazism in Eastern Europe. It was fortunate that they did. The rest of his family perished in the Holocaust. Once in the U.S., he became a naturalized citizen in 1934 and proceeded to pay his dues as a screenwriter for the next five years collaborating with a number of future greats in the profession. He hit the jackpot in 1939 with an Academy Award nomination as co-writer for Best Screenplay for his comedy, Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo (left). He lost out to Sidney Howard's heavily rewritten Gone With the Wind.

Scenes and poster art from Wilder's The Lost Weekend, 1945

Wilder's directorial debut, 1942

From that point on, Wilder was nominated either for his writing or directing virtually every other year, making his directing debut in 1942 with The Major and the Minor (right) starring Ray Milland and a thirty-one-year-old Ginger Rogers (no minor point). The Lost Weekend (above) came in 1945 when Wilder won his first Oscars, a double play for best Screenplay and Best Director. The film was the first to ever deal with alcoholism on a serious basis, having been disallowed by Hollywood censors in previous years. This was largely the same situation Wilder was to face in 1959 as he proceeded to write, produce, and direct The Apartment, except that this time the film dealt not with alcoholism but adultery. However Hollywood was changing by the late 1950s. The catalyst for that change was the new piece of furniture which had invaded virtually every living room in America--television.

The 1955 film that made Marilyn
an American icon

A 1953 war movie with comic
undercurrents.

Jimmy Stewart as
Charles Lindbergh, 1957

In the history of Hollywood, the film industry has endured three major landmark events. The first was the advent of sound around 1929. The second came with the gradual introduction of Technicolor starting in 1939 and continuing for more than twenty years thereafter. The third, was television. When theaters all across the nation began going dark as the result of Milton Berle and Lucille Ball during the early 1950s, Hollywood sat up, took notice, wrung their hands, cried a lot, and ask themselves, what can we do about this entertainment upstart which is about to put us out of business? There was no single answer. Color was one weapon. Money was another. Television productions had budget limitations restrained by what advertisers deemed it wise to pay. Movies (more or less) did not. The blockbuster was born. A crude form of 3-D made its debut(and mercifully exited). Optical inventors developed the zoom lens and Cinemascope. TV screens at the time seldom exceeded 24-inches (measured diagonally). And finally, TV, being first and foremost family entertainment, had censorship rules which made Hollywood's Hayes Production Code seem liberal by comparison. While Lucy and Desi slept in separate twin beds, and the word "pregnant" was verboten, movies were sometimes allowed to say the word "damn" (on a limited basis).

Wilder's hilarious tale of cross-dressing hide and seek musicians
was rated in 2000 by the American Film Institute as the funniest movie ever made.

Wilder's final film, 1981.

By 1960, censorship in Hollywood was on the wane. By 1968 the Motion Picture Producers of America (MPPA) had introduced the forerunner of our current movie rating system. Had it been in effect in 1960, The Apartment and Wilder's Some Like It Hot (above) from the previous year, would likely have received "R" ratings. Despite the fact that by the 1960s Wilder had pretty much switched over to writing and directing comedies such as Irma la Douce, Kiss Me Stupid, and Fortune Cookie, given the conservative social climate of the time, all were racy enough to likely have earned such a parental warning. Billy Wilder made his last film in 1981, the "R" rated Buddy Buddy (right), starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (the original Odd Couple on Broadway). He was seventy-five years old at the time. In 1987, the Motion Picture Academy awarded Wilder the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production. Billy Wilder died in 2002 at the age of ninety-six, his death coinciding the same day with that of two other Hollywood comedy legends, Milton Berle and Dudley Moore. Wilder was laid to rest not far from three of the stars he helped make famous--Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Walter Matthau.

Two of the three "ladies" from Some Like it Hot.
(Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon)