The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (156 page)

Just as Griffith’s lament, “give us back our beauty,” when sound came in revealed a limited view of cinematic beauty, so Gance tied himself to a stake—the triptych Polyvision—that was irrelevant to real cinema, even if it epitomized the grandiose, individualistic venture that obsessed Gance. Allow that he was a director inspired by superficial feelings, undiscriminatingly inventive, and it becomes possible to see him as an immensely appealing pioneer, as the source of many important enlargements of cinematic perception, and as one of the first apostles of the medium. Gance loved cinema, and that is why the New Wave reclaimed him.

Gance grew up at the turn of the century. He described his youth as if it came from a Victorian novel: the young man constrained to work for a solicitor, but preferring to sit in the Bibliothèque Nationale reading Racine, Rimbaud, Omar Khayyam, Edgar Allan Poe—it is the romantic notion of art held by the young man in
Lola
. He loved to act, and in 1907 he wrote a screenplay, the first of many that he sold to the infant French film industry. Watching others direct inspired him to do better. His first films are characteristic of the period, if already inquisitive and exploratory.
La Folie du Docteur Tube
employed distorting lenses to convey a psychological impression of fantasy. The sheer novelty enthralled Gance and he thrived on the opportunities of newness.
Barbereuse
and
Les Gaz Mortels
were filmed concurrently with the same actors on the same location after Gance had been instructed by Film d’Art to take actors and crew on a train and come back with two features.

But as Griffith rose above such frenzy on the wings of the Gish sisters to enshrine them in throbbing emotional dramas, so war crystallized Gance’s grandiloquent view of human history.
J’Accuse!
was his turning point, an emotional onslaught on the folly of war, strangely allied to martial visual imagination. The film’s idea of the dead returning to ask whether their loss was justified is an instance of emotional self-inducement on Gance’s part, as moving but as contradictory as the shots of crowds in
Triumph of the Will
. In other words, there is a naïve passion in the conception that has more to do with melodramatic pageant than with true disenchantment. His inventiveness makes the film cheerful, and there is an awful irony in the way Gance enlisted troops on leave to play the dead, days before they themselves were to be killed at Verdun.

It is true of all his career that Gance’s technical developments, his stress on the novelty of the image, are seldom related to the meaning of his films.
J’Accuse!
is vibrant with the energy that a few years later made
Napoléon
—Gance’s great hero, the model of superhuman energy and enterprise. What is marvelous about
Napoléon
and
La Roue
is the narrative enthusiasm, the sweeping exposition of events, and the way images reveal interior feelings through dynamic editing. But the attitude to Napoleon was a banal and thorough endorsement, so much so that Charles de Gaulle was among the film’s greatest admirers. It is a remarkable film, but recollect that 1926–28 was the period of
A Girl in Every Port, The General, Metropolis, Sunrise, Underworld, Seventh Heaven, Queen Kelly
, and
The Crowd
.

The least important thing about
Napoléon
is the most talked about: Polyvision, or the simultaneous projection of three images. The famous example is of a central close-up of Bonaparte, flanked by two screens showing his armies marching in long shots. In practice, few have seen that effect: Gance was always hampered by the technical obstacles to such projection. But the device abandons the thread of cinema: the need to select one image at a time, and to relate one to another in a sequence. The effect of three images simultaneously may be spectacular, but it dissipates the viewer’s concentration. Especially as Gance uses it—as a crude addition of image in preference to choice—it is downright silly.
Chelsea Girls
arguably uses the idea more creatively, by projecting unrelated images. That very openness may regenerate an audience’s sensibilities, compelling them to find connections. But three images of the same action speak for lavish indecision.

Far more satisfying are Gance’s “intimate” emotional melodramas. He was an unabashed wallower in trite feelings and he overcame silliness only when his images made nonsense credible and moving. In this area,
La Roue, Un Grand Amour de Beethoven
, and
La Vénus Aveugle
are truly impressive. They deal with emotional triangles, thwarted love, overweening selfishness, and the recurring theme of blindness. These ingredients of pulp fiction are invested with Gance’s emotional imagery, his rapid cutting, and the communion with his players. Thus Severin-Mars in
La Roue
, as the engine driver who loves the girl he has adopted, is a forerunner of the man destroyed by passion. And the train is used as a marvelous commentary on that destructive but exciting force. Seen today,
La Roue
is one of the most unashamed of silent movies. Make the effort to imagine it in 1921 and Gance’s importance becomes clear:
La Roue
trembles with feeling, like a building shuddering as a train passes by.

His strength and limitations are revealed in this comment from Gabriel de Gravase, an actress in
La Roue:

What actor wouldn’t want to make pictures with this innovator, this marvelous director, this perfectionist, who obtains the most impressive lighting one can get in photography and does it all with simple means, which are available to every director. Indicating, thinking, playing, living each role with each player. He is not merely the author of the scenario, the cutter, the chief mechanic, the electrician, the cameraman—he is everything: the heart and soul of the film. During the shooting of the scenes, he invariably repeats the same words: “Human, simple, great intensity.” Everything is contained in those words.

Bruno Ganz
, b. Zurich, Switzerland, 1941
For thirty-five years, Bruno Ganz has been the ideal melancholy angel, watching over sad times even if there’s little he can do to improve them. Though Swiss, he seems to link hands with the ages of Harry Lime and George Smiley. He is the kind of actor who might have been trained by Trevor Howard or Gérard Philipe—which is a reminder that both of those actors could ignite a love story and knock women off their feet. Ganz can be battered, hangdog, at the end of his tether, but he has charm and humor just beneath the surface. He has been a wandering actor, with much work done for German television (including a Faust as recently as 2000. He is modest and restrained in most of what he does, as if touched by a Graham Greene–like realization that we are too far gone now for tragic heroes. He has a way of watching more showy actors that rivets attention.

This list cannot be complete, but its range is still awesome: he began acting in about 1960, but it was only in the 1970s that he came into his own:
Lumière
(76, Jeanne Moreau); the Count in
The Marquise of O
(76, Eric Rohmer);
The Wild Duck
(76, Hans W. Geisendorfer), with Jean Seberg; as Jonathan in
The American Friend
(77, Wim Wenders);
The Left-Handed Woman
(77, Peter Handke); obsessed by chess in
Black and White Like Day and Night
(78, Wolfgang Petersen); breaking up in
Knife in the Head
(78, Reinhard Hauff);
The Boys from Brazil
(78, Franklin M. Schaffner); as Harker in
Nosferatu
(79, Werner Herzog);
The Girl from Lorraine
(80, Claude Goretta);
Lady of the Camelias
(81, Mauro Bolognini);
Circle of Deceit
(81, Volker Schlöndorff);
Hands Up!
(83, Jerzy Skolimowski); never better than as the man increasingly lost in Lisbon in
In the White City
(83, Alain Tanner); an angel in
Wings of Desire
(87, Wenders); brilliantly irresponsible in
Strapless
(89, David Hare);
Especially on Sunday
(91, Giuseppe Tornatore);
The Last Days of Chez Nous
(92, Gillian Armstrong);
Faraway, So Close
(93, Wenders); as Saint-Exupéry in
Saint-Ex
(97, Anand Tucker);
Bread and Tulips
(00, Tornatore).

He played the lead in a film of a stage performance,
Faust
(01, Thomas Grimm and Peter Schönhofer);
Epsteins Nacht
(01, Urs Egger);
La Forza del Passato
(02, Piergiorgio Gay);
Luther
(03, Eric Till); as the most carefully researched Hitler in
Der Untergang
(04, Oliver Hirschbiegel);
The Manchurian Candidate
(04, Jonathan Demme);
Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II
(05, Jeff Bleckner);
Baruto no Gakuen
(06, Masanobu Deme);
Vitus
(07, Fredi M. Murer);
Youth Without Youth
(07, Francis Coppola);
The Reader
(08, Stephen Daldry);
The Baader Meinhoff Complex
(08, Uli Edel);
The Dust of Time
(09, Theo Angelopoulos).

Greta Garbo
(Greta Lovisa Gustafsson) (1905–90), b. Stockholm, Sweden
The only way men can respond to a star is to gaze at it from their remote planet. And even when a star passes out of our sight in the sequence of orbits, we believe that it exists still and feel the gravitational pull it exerts. Garbo is the extreme definition of stardom in the cinema: not only because she is the star most people would name first, but because her life and work were made into contingent expressions of the domination that a star treats us to; and because within that inscrutability, what drew audiences was the impression of its antithesis—anxiety, vulnerability, distraction. The energy needed to burn bright hurt Garbo, and that pain permeated her appeal. That is why retirement never altered her career but extended it. Her films frequently show her on the verge of withdrawal, and fifty years of inactivity did not deprive us of her. The logic of the gloomy woman made radiant by artificial light was inevitably to retreat. Those magazine photographs over the years kept her in contact and the curious dying words before death—“I want to be alone”—are not resented, but accepted as the clinching proof that Garbo was natural, homely, like us, in wanting privacy. For in the cinema, the audience is alone, sheltered by the dark. Coming into our hearts and minds, Garbo aspired to that shelter; in making the journey away from fame into privacy she established herself forever as a magical figure, a true goddess, remote and austere, but intimate and touching.

In his chapter on Garbo in
The Celluloid Sacrifice
, Alexander Walker begins with a wrong direction that he quickly abandons: “The only way of trying to penetrate the mystery that has gathered round Greta Garbo is to assume that it does not exist; to think oneself back to her screen beginnings; to refuse to be decoyed by the legends put out about her; to acknowledge the metaphysics of personality, but also to look for the less abstract ways in which she employed her talent to gain her effects; in short, to see Garbo plain.”

But it is a fallacy to believe in a plain Garbo, or to expect legend to peel away, disclosing truth. Her essence is a matter of myth and the conjunction of natural performance with legendary and supernatural personality. She speaks and appears on behalf of the millions of plain people who require a lofty “She who must be obeyed,” but who can secretly possess the goddess and see in her the elevated traces of their own inadequacy and diffidence. The goddess must be indifferent to her worshipers, not quite able to concentrate on them. That feeling of distraction draws them to her so much more securely and confirms their secret belief that she too has worries and moments of defeat.

Just as Christ simultaneously asserted godliness and humanity by going off—into the wilderness, into a secluded part of the garden, simply to be alone—so Garbo is forever held back from that peace by films, and ineluctably seeing her way through the action to eventual solitude. Her actual aloneness—retired; cut off from MGM; never married; away from her own country—was predicted in so many of her major parts. Time and again, her screen love affairs are fated to dissolve, impossible to realize: Queen Christina goes into abdication; twice Garbo played Anna Karenina—in 1935 and in
Love
—discarded by Vronsky; in
Flesh and the Devil
she falls to a death where lovers are reunited; in
A Woman of Affairs
she dies in a car crash; in
Mata Hari
she perishes; in
Grand Hotel
she chooses ballet rather than love; in
Conquest
she gives up Bonaparte for the greater good of the world; in
Camille
she relinquishes Robert Taylor to accord with the consumptive consciences of Dumas fils, MGM, and the bourgeois everywhere.

And it is the most curious manifestation of stardom that decent men and women all over the world would have been outraged by
Camille
’s dying happy—in the lewd way described by Jean-Pierre Léaud in
Masculin-Féminin
—but were moved to complacent pity by her self-inflicted solitariness.

Garbo’s films keep her for the audiences. They allow us to leave the cinema with the thought that she escaped the plot, the settings, and the other characters to perform endlessly in our dreams. Of course, that effect was not casual. Scriptwriters produced material that was in key with the “private” image of Garbo, itself promoted by the publicity department of MGM. There is no campaign to sell unattainability so enduring as that involving Garbo, and few cases where the “public” and “private” images are so threaded together in artifice. Thus, even Alexander Walker wonders whether the scene in
Queen Christina
, where Garbo roams around the room after a night of love to memorize it—“In future, in my mind, I shall live a great deal in this world”—is not founded upon a moment from her life when she came to the room of the recently dead Mauritz Stiller (her discoverer) and walked about touching things.