Howard Hawks: American Gesture
2006; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 58; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoIN 1927, A YOUNG FILM CRITIC NAMED LUIS BUNUEL, living Paris at time, wrote a review of Buster Keaton's latest film. College. In his review. Bunuel praised virtues of of filmmaking, epitomized for Bunuel by Keaton, over European. American cinema is defined by its vitality, photogeny, no culture and new tradition, while European cinema is defined by its traits of sentimentalism, prejudices of art, literature, tradition. The Europeans produce superfilms that repeatedly display their technique, while Americans hide their technique order to give lessons to reality (65). However, Bunuel is not merely rejecting European school of filmmaking technique (particularly its then-fashionable German Expressionist and French Impressionist forms); he is also rejecting a certain European style of film performance. He cites, epitome of this European approach, Emil Jannings, whose performances are dominated by explicitness facial expression and body language; Jannings, sorrow is a hundred-faced prism. By contrast, Keaton's facial expressions are as modest that of a bottle, even while face itself has its viewpoint in infinity (64-65). Through his monochord expression, Keaton embodies a kind of essence, idea about humanity that causes viewer to smile the smile of health and olympian force (64). For Bunuel, much of Keaton's greatness a comic artist has to do with his direct with objects, situations and other means of his work (64-65). This sense of direct harmony has little to do with character Keaton plays College, since comedy here is often predicated upon that character's failing to master object. Rather, sense of achieved occurs through Keaton's skill actor controlling these objects, a control that paradoxically is applied toward failure of mastery within film's diegesis. Such a mastery handling object is not, for Bunuel, utterly unique to Keaton (however gifted Keaton may have been) but rather symptomatic of general, suggesting a strong link between this kind of performance style and American culture. American often possessed healthy, streamlined bodies, highly mobile if not acrobatic, and were able to thoroughly dominate a space: Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Pearl White. But they were also able to control and command these bodies through subtle facial expressions and gestures that were much more closely attuned to motion picture camera's capacity to magnify small details. In writing on these kinds of performances Cecil B. De Mille's The Cheat (1915), Colette would declare that America is building conservatories solely for cinema actors (20). This fascination with things American was central to much of Europe during and after World War I. Through American culture, economically and a politically devastated continent imagine a positive (if not utopian) alternate universe, one which was, Bunuel notes, creating new traditions, unencumbered by formality and weight of history, a prosperous country fully embracing new and modem. Hollywood cinema was often at center of this fascination, its idealized representatives of this modern America. American moved and gestured with physical freedom, elegance, and a lack of self-consciousness that, for many Europeans, became hallmark not simply of American style of acting but of American behavior general. There seemed to be absolute between behavior and performance style of American and ideals of their culture. Sergei Eisenstein would write of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) a film that possesses an astonishing of all its component parts, a really amazing a whole while also adding that our age yearns for harmony (140). Moreover, Ford's could be students of American history their embodiment of this ideal image of (145). …
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