Monthly Archive for December, 2009

ONE

The history of cinema is filled with tales of once prestigious films now relegated to the dustbin of history. Such is the fate of the silent version of Ben Hur from 1926. Others, such as Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game, victims of bad release timing, distribution ineptitude, or censorship, see their status grow through the decades. F. W.Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is such a film. Ironically, while Ben Hur occupies a full chapter in Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By… Sunrise merits less than a full page in his 1968 history of silent film and then only in the context of a chapter on the career of cinematographer Charles Rosher.

Sunrise did not prove to be a popular film at the time of its release. It opened at the end of the silent era when audiences were clamoring for sound. It debuted in larger markets with an effects, music, and a few non-synchronous words, on a  soundtrack in the new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system; since it was filmed as a silent picture it posted inter-titles rather than dialogue. In this sense it is a real anomaly, not quite a silent, not quite a sound film. And the brilliant German director whose American career promised to be boundless on his arrival in Hollywood, did not even live to see his film rehabilitated as one of the great movies of all time; he died at 43, within a few years of its release, in a car accident near Santa Barbara.

It is the DVD and home video market that is largely responsible for the revival of interest in this film. Like most badly preserved silent films, it was often judged harshly by later audiences—until digital techniques that could restore contrast and resolution, as well as adjust the projection speed, revealed its once lost photographic subtleties.  Even worse, the original negative was lost in a fire in 1937 in Fox’s New Jersey storage facility; subsequent prints (until one from an alternate European version was found recently in the Czech Republic) were made from a di-acetate print or from a damaged dupe negative. One of the reasons the film may have failed at the time of its release despite critical acclaim is readily apparent to an audience today. It is really a foreign film—a German Expressionist one at that, but made in Hollywood. It represents along with a few German films of the mid-twenties, the apogee of the silent era, films that had all but conquered the apparent limitations of the mute medium. At the end of “The Talking Picture” chapter of Brownlow’s book there is a quote from Mary Pickford about the merits of sound versus silent cinema. She says, “It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way around.” I also remember cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, hardly a man of the silent era, saying in an interview in the film Visions of Light that movies were all downhill after the introduction of sound, a perspective shared by many cinematographers.

In recent years so much has been written about Sunrise that it is more than time for an anthology of critical essays to be published. But the film itself is now readily accessible and it reveals its riches on multiple viewings. We are fortunate to have several versions to choose from. In 2003 Fox Studios released a beautifully restored version for home video without overworking the film by exploiting digital tricks. After the restoration was done, I was asked to provide a commentary track for the DVD. Having loved this film since I was a film student, having met Struss at a museum retrospective, and having collected his still photography, I felt a special connection to him. I initiated what research I could at that time to help me place the film in the context of its era’s aesthetics.

The only problem with this DVD release was that it was not available for separate purchase, but was gifted by submission of a coupon after purchase of a boxed set of other Fox classics. But, a few years later another edition was released through the British Film Institute, and then last year came a 12 DVD box set from Fox that includes a number of films of Murnau and Borzage:

Slant magazine link

Just recently a Blu-Ray version has also appeared. All of these iterations have included the commentary track, which is a running shot-by-shot discussion, principally of the production design and cinematography.  Some reviewers have found the perspective of a working cinematographer to be interesting; some would have preferred a more historical analysis from the perspective of critical studies— but that semantic thicket is my own personal bête noire.

In June 1926 Murnau arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of William Fox to begin production on a film of his choosing; he was promised full creative control with unlimited resources—and he used them. The resultant film, Sunrise, was from a story by Hermann Sudermann, with a scenario written by Carl Mayer. The art director was Rochus Gliese. Much of the initial pre-production was done in Germany; Gliese even built some of the set miniatures there and had them transported to Hollywood. Sunrise reveals its Germanic roots in every way imaginable. It looks and feels like a German Expressionist film but exploits all the technical resources of a major American studio.

TWO

For the clips that will be referenced here the YouTube version will be helpful as time markers only. The image quality is poor, so please secure one of the DVD versions readily available in order to watch the whole film.

The opening montage section, “Vacation Time,” like all of the even more complex multiple exposure sequences throughout the film, was done in camera on a single strand of film, by masking part of the frame, then rewinding and exposing another section.

Sunrise was made several years before optical printers were developed; some of the really intricate city montage sequences had well over a dozen separate exposures. It is believed that Struss rather than Rosher executed these scenes as principal cinematographer; this was exactly the kind of technical material that was red meat to him.

The film’s first full scene, about three minutes into the clip, shows a boat arriving at a lakeside dock and the passengers disembarking. The approaching village looks positively Old World, but the entire set was built and shot at Lake Arrowhead in the Southern California mountains. We know that the cinematography of this sequence was the work of Struss alone; Rosher was ill at the time and missed the first week or so of filming. There is a wonderful rising crane shot from on board the boat that reveals the village; it drops again as the boat docks.

Next, there is a cut to an interior scene that introduces the Woman from the City. As she moves about the room where she is staying, we see the sloped floors built with a rake, much like a Broadway stage. This and the forced perspective of her room and the dining room where the older couple is eating soup at a tilted table with a somewhat diagonally hanging lamp, show dramatically the Expressionist art direction that will pervade the interiors of the entire film.

At about four minutes, forty seconds into this clip the woman exits the house at night. The camera records it in deep focus, from the foreground couple watching, all the way to her at the distant door.

As she crosses the lens the camera pans and tracks with her, swinging around to follow her from behind as she approaches the man’s house and calls out to him. Like the famous scene in the swamp a few minutes later, this shot was likely done with the camera suspended from an overhead track. The man hears her call out and decides to sneak out of the house even as his wife prepares dinner.

As he puts on his jacket and exits frame, we can clearly see the sloped floor and false perspective. After his exit the empty frame holds for a long, almost Antonioni-like moment, until the wife enters.

The next clip contains the most famous scene in the film, the meeting at the swamp between the Woman from the City and the Man.

It opens with another overhead tracking shot that sweeps across the marsh, over a fence, pans off the man, and becomes his POV as it clears some bushes to reveal the Woman waiting; a full moon backlights her. We know that Struss operated this shot; his Bell & Howell camera had an electric motor and it freed him from hand-cranking so he could pan and tilt to follow the circuitous walk.

The man then enters his own POV. The couple engages in an intense love scene; the Woman tries to entice the Man to drown his wife and come with him to the city.

There is a rapid montage fantasy of the city, done with highly stylized miniatures and in a dizzying, surreal abstraction. It gives way at 4:00 to a brief multi-exposure scene of frenzied dancing and a jazz band playing, before dissolving back to the swamp:

The entire film is filled with many virtuoso shots that can go easily unnoticed, so intense is the unfolding drama. This story of love, adultery, betrayal, expiation, forgiveness and re-found love is so elemental in its raw simplicity that it has invited deep positive reactions as well as scorn from generations of viewers. Seldom has a film narrative been so visually sophisticated and so humanly raw. The art direction and cinematography create a fascinating dialogue between the scenic stylization and the primal emotional performances of George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.

There are a number of film historians and critics who have written very insightfully about this film. Here are a few links to their essays. The first one, by Roger Ebert, best describes the state of Hollywood movies at the time of Murnau’s arrival. It is also clear just how much Ebert loves the film, a personal revelation, not usually common to critics:

Roger Ebert Sun Times link

This next one is from Edward Lamberti on a London re-release:

Kamera.co.uk link

This next link provides both an historical slant on the film, full of production details, as well as a discussion of the 2003 restoration for DVD in the Fox Studio Classics series. It was written by Mark Bourne.

dvdjournal.com link

And here is a discussion of the Masters of Cinema edition and the recently discovered Czech alternate version that is almost 15 minutes shorter. It includes many comparative frame grabs:

myreviewer.com link

THREE

The next section I’d like to look at begins when the couple is already in the city and they watch a church wedding. The man experiences remorse for his infidelity and murderous thoughts.

He begs his wife for forgiveness; they exit the church as if their own vows had been renewed at the altar. From behind, we see them walk though the din of traffic; as they walk, the scene dissolves into a sylvan glade, then back to the city as they have stopped traffic with a kiss in the middle of the street; klaxons sound, breaking their reverie. The stopped traffic in front of them is captured either by rear projection (as Nestor Almendros believes):

They were walking on a roller (conveyor belt) and behind them was a projected film which included the dissolve from the city to the country, and back to the city.

Or, it may have been done by another complex matte shot, as we see in a famous photo of grips carrying a black backing in front of Gaynor and O’Brien.

After a series of cutaway inserts, we see the couple standing in traffic, but now in a production shot with live background; an angry driver comes into frame to berate them.

There is a clear mismatch in the traffic positions, as well as the angle of the sun, between the production shots and the matte ones. This clip begins with their exit from the church at 2:00 and the camera follows them at 2:30. The camera booms down (or possibly is descending the ramp on the church steps). The in camera dissolve begins at 2:45 and at 3:25 the cutback is to a production shot with the driver coming up to the couple from off frame right as they kiss.

It is known that Struss made the camera notes for the footage and frame matching in this scene; in the photo with the grips and the black backing, we see him standing on the church steps next to the camera as it dollies behind the couple.

FOUR

In June of 2003 American Cinematographer Magazine re-published an analysis of Sunrise that was extracted from a 1984 student seminar conducted by Nestor Almendros, ASC. Writer Rachel Bosley has a sidebar at the end of the article that explains in detail how the 2003 Fox restoration was made; this new video master became the reference for all subsequent issues of the film. Here is the link to the Almendros/Bosley article:

American Cinematographer article

Like Citizen Kane, Murnau’s masterpiece fared poorly at the box office and like the Welles film it became for many years more of an historical citation than a film seen. In many ways, Sunrise anticipated a lot of the production design and cinematography conceits that have become so familiar to us in Citizen Kane. Unlike Gregg Toland who was able to use a high-speed 24mm lens to accomplish his deep focus effects, Struss and Rosher had to content themselves (per Almedros) with a 35mm lens for the wider shots. But it is this lens that captures the illusion of great depth through the planning of Rochus Gliese’s raked and forced perspective sets. Though Gliese was also nominated for an Academy Award, he did not win. My own suspicion is that his work was just too far out of the Hollywood mainstream and too deeply embedded in the dark shadows of Caligari-esque Expressionism for the Oscar to find a home on Rochus’ own raked mantel.

Sunrise is a film easy for cinephiles to appreciate on the level of its technical brilliance. More problematic for many people is its very open display of raw emotion. This mix of sophisticated technique and elemental drama may sit uncomfortably with some contemporary viewers. Scarcely more than a decade separates Citizen Kane from Sunrise; yet it is one that saw a major revolution in filmmaking technology. Some film historians have insisted that silent and sound cinema are almost different mediums. This is not a difficult case to make if you compare the sophistication of late silent German Expressionist films to the first few years of sound films. It can be argued that it was not until Citizen Kane, with its overlapping and rushing dialogue, that sound film truly began to equal the heady freedom that silent cinema had in its visuals.

One of the great unanswered questions in film history is what might have happened to American cinema had Murnau lived and continued working deep into the sound era the way that Ford, Hitchcock, Walsh, Dwan, King, and Wellman did. What if he and Struss had formed a real ongoing relationship? Would purely commercial factors have consigned Murnau to the margins of film production, since his two films after Sunrise also were commercial failures? Or would the old studio system have found a place for such an idiosyncratic artist? Would Struss have had a partner whose visual sophistication and daring rose to the level of his own inherent abilities?  Sadly, we will never know.

Murnau’s last film was a docu/drama called Tabu co-written and produced with Robert Flaherty. It was not meant to be a studio film and its making was not a happy experience for either men, both of whom displayed outsized egos during the filming. The one bright spot is that Floyd Crosby received an Academy Award for his cinematography; it was also a validation of the powerful visual acumen that Murnau exercised in all his work. But he died in that auto crash just a few weeks before the film’s premiere.

A measure of the regard that Murnau had in the international film industry were the filmmakers attending his funeral: Robert Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo, and Fritz Lang were, sadly, among the scant eleven people in attendance. It was Lang who gave the eulogy.

As I’ve done research for this piece on Sunrise I’ve realized how little is widely known about the actual making of the film. Even Lotte Eisner’s book on Murnau is not especially revealing. I would enjoy sharing any new information from a scholar. I also want to say that though my emphasis on Sunrise is focused on the known contributions of Struss, it is not my intention to neglect Charles Rosher’s work. It was Rosher who brought Struss onto the film.

And as a final word, I would encourage you, even if you feel you know this film, to find one of the restored editions and view it with fresh eyes. It will be a reminder yet again of what a magnificent history we have in silent film, which grew from nickelodeon amusement to high dramatic art in a mere two decades.

Karl Struss’ studio apartment at 6602 Yucca Avenue in the heart of Hollywood was just a short uphill walk from the Lasky-Famous Players Studio at the corner of Vine and Selma. Everything about this movie boomtown rising out of the surrounding desert hills looked fresh to the 33 year-old photographer: the open spaces, the intense sunlight, the palm trees. Nothing here reminded him of the New York cityscape that had been the subject of his exploring camera lens during the past decade. But the maze of Manhattan was a world to which he was determined not to return. He wrote to his mother, “The future is very bright and I know I’ll love the place… . Everything is also new and clean, and one doesn’t meet the crowds or poverty that abounds in the Eastern cities.”

Struss had no immediate contacts in Hollywood upon his arrival in early February 1919, but the portfolios of his New York photographs, especially the commercial work sent to him by his mother, was a viable calling card when he began to make the rounds of the studios seeking employment.

Struss knew that much of the publicity photography being done for movies was inferior to the tightly composed, well-lit and richly printed images he had created back in Manhattan. His own interest in the movies reached back to some of his fledgling work there, as well as to his encounter with cinematographer Charles Rosher in Bermuda five years previous. He was not a complete stranger to this new world of image making.

The April 1919 issue of Photoplay magazine featured an article by Anthony E. Anderson, a Los Angeles Times critic, titled “The Next Genius—A Cameraman.” In it he praised the preeminence of purely visual elements such as composition and lighting over plot and performance. In an era where scenario “writing” was limited mainly to inter-titles, and most of those were of a mundane nature, it is little wonder that large numbers of critics saw the future of the medium to be in an increasingly sophisticated use of images in photography and editing. In the next few years the influences of art direction and cinematography coming from German Expressionist cinema, and the montage techniques of Soviet filmmakers such as Eisenstein, would help move Hollywood pictures from melodrama and slapstick two-reelers onto the world stage of sophisticated visual narrative. Struss’ arrival in Hollywood could not have been timelier. In the “Karl Struss Remembers” section of the catalog of his 1976-77 touring retrospective, Susan and John Harvith quote Struss:

…I went to Hollywood because I wanted to get into the picture business. I’d seen plenty of pictures and that’s what I wanted to do. [Struss said that he had seen Hollywood movies on a daily basis while at Fort Leavenworth during the war]. Why? Because the majority of what we then called cameramen were not photographers. They knew nothing of lighting… . It was all guesswork.

Struss met an assistant director named Horwitz who was a fan of art photography. Struss showed him his New York photos as well as some portraits:

He went nuts over them. And he immediately thought, here’s DeMille, he needs a still man to take the burden off [cinematographer] Alvin Wyckoff, who had enough to do lighting the sets, photographing them, seeing to the operations of three different cameras, and running the lab. Then he took me to the studio manager who talked to DeMille about it and he said OK.

On March 17, Struss went to work at Lasky Studios for DeMille. C.B. was one of the first producers to understand that publicity and still photographs were as important to selling the film as the film itself, and he immediately knew that Struss’ artistry was way beyond what others could provide. One of the first photos Struss made was of DeMille in his office:

So desirous of bringing Struss on board, DeMille must have yielded up to him magazine rights; Struss sent staged portraits of the stars he photographed back home for East Coast publication. This became an added source of income for him. But he was careful not to reveal to East Coast publishers that he was actually under contract to a Hollywood studio. He worried that his photos could be seen as no more than promotion, thereby compromising their sale price.  His set and production stills, of course, remained within the purview of the studio.

Wyckoff took Struss under his wing and in a short time Struss was operating third camera for him, then second camera, and eventually sharing screen credit with his mentor. There were no barriers at the time to rapid advancement and it was clear that Struss’ artistic abilities, as well as his practical skills at invention and gadget-tering, was of a high order. Filming with multiple cameras was standard at the time; often a separate negative had to be made for foreign distribution. But director DeMille called for three or more cameras at the same time; he preferred to shoot as many coverage angles as possible for continuity and speed. Two of the major stars of the studio were Bebe Daniels and Gloria Swanson. Struss did photo sittings of both that received great acclaim.

Once he had become a noted cinematographer a decade later, Struss’ reputation as a specialist in lighting women stars landed him multiple picture contracts with Mae West, Dorothy Lamour, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert, even Mary Pickford, who had had a long-standing relationship with Rosher until her first sound film, Coquette.

Many of DeMille’s early films photographed by Wyckoff used a follow-spot technique that singled out the star as she moved around the set but which gave little attention to the reality of source light. It was called “Lasky Lighting” and it was not considered to have the cachet it aspired to—“Rembrandt-esque.” I saw this technique recently in a MOMA screening of DeMille’s The Cheat and it is indeed pretty erratic looking. When DeMille decided to remake his own film The Golden Chalice as Forbidden Fruit, Struss’ artistic vision became clear. Struss continued to advance in his technical and lighting skills at Lasky but in the summer of 1921, the bottom fell out of the Hollywood box office due to an economic slump. Struss took a cut in pay with the understanding that he would continue to be employed; despite this, he was let go a few months later.

On Valentine Day, 1920 Struss met Ethel Wall at a gathering of fellow Pictorialist photographers. She had been working in the studio of a photographer who owned a Struss Pictorial Lens. She had resolved to meet Struss and to get his advice on how to better use the lens. They spent the evening together, surely taking about more than optics because eleven months later they were married. She began to work with him, assisting him evenings in the studio darkroom, acting as a sometimes model for his personal work, and becoming a partner in the photo trips they made into the countryside.

Struss now found himself in a highly competitive market where many of the best movies were being made by directors who had ongoing relationships with more established cinematographers such as Charles Rosher, Joe Ruttenberg, Hal Rosson, Billy Blitzer, even Wyckoff. But Struss did land a job with director Marshall Neilan who introduced him to B.P. Schulberg at Preferred Pictures. It was here, where he was at last on his own and not sharing assignments, that his technical skills became evident—even on the quick, low budget fare that Preferred produced. This ability to make the most of little was a skill that Struss drew upon his entire career and which became his mainstay at Paramount decades after Sunrise, when he was assigned many “programmers” rather than the sought-after “A” pictures.

It was now that Struss invested in his own camera, a motor-driven Bell & Howell that he purchased for $4500, a princely sum. He had a plate affixed to the camera door with the stylized initials “KS” set inside a square logo. Shortly afterwards, the photographer Edward Weston, who had a studio in Tropico, between Los Feliz and Glendale, made a series of portraits of Struss standing next to the camera. One of these is the cover of Karl Struss: Man with a Camera. I made a photograph of the poster of this traveling exhibition with the glass frame reflecting myself just below Struss’ head, a marker of the high regard I have for Struss, my own reflection in appropriately diminished proportion.

I have a signed, variant photo from this series, a profile angle that frames Struss with the noisy Cooper-Hewitt tube lights that so fascinated Weston. At the time, Weston secured commissions for studio portraits of the wealthy and of celebrities, and he was still working in the Pictorialist tradition. It was only a year later with his trip to Mexico that he fully embraced “straight photography.” This session with Struss is well within the style that Struss also embraced. Struss recalls Weston’s visit to Preferred Studios:

We worked together as judges several times at the Los Angeles Camera Pictorialists’ big international salons. He was very fine, very friendly, and I admired his work. I suppose he wanted to photograph me because he had seen [my] transition from pictorial photography to the movies. Nobody from the pictorial crowd had ever done that—I was the first.

Struss continued to use his B&H camera until sound came in and he went over to Paramount in 1931. But he was ever mindful of controlling his compositions (one of his New York work’s signatures was over-all composition, tightly compressed to the edge of the frame, often incorporating dynamic framing of foreground elements.) To preserve the same integrity as his still photo framing when he transitioned to the movies, he had a metal matte cut to insert into the gate of his camera. He was not about to allow a projectionist to tinker with his compositions.

Struss never abandoned his love of still photography and he continued it throughout his Hollywood years. He took his cameras on location and he was always on the lookout for photographic opportunities during his rare free time.  He took stills on the set of Sunrise for production promotion and for himself. And during this time, he continued to exhibit in Pictorialist exhibitions. A small portfolio of his California work is included in the photo section of the 1930 American Cinematographer’s Annual.

Struss’ cinematic star was very much on the rise. He was called to MGM in 1924 by Irving Thalberg to interview for Ben Hur but he did not get the assignment. The picture began filming in Italy, quickly got into trouble and experienced severe cost over-runs, constant strikes and fights between fascists and anti-fascists with Mussolini acting as spoiler. The problems warranted the new studio head L.B. Mayer’s going to Rome. Mayer sent for Struss and director Christy Cabanne. Once there, they were told that the current director, Fred Niblo, was staying on and the French cinematographer, René Guissart, was taking over as principal cinematographer. Cabanne and Struss remained in Rome for extra camera and 2^nd unit work. But eventually the picture was shut down in January, 1925 and was returned to Hollywood. Struss photographed many sequences that were to be re-shot, including that of the healing of the lepers. This sequence utilized an in-camera effect that Struss devised; he used green make-up on the actors, filming the scene with a red filter in the camera matte box, causing the skin to photograph black. He then slowly slid a green filter of the same density across the lens, replacing the red one as the camera continued to roll; it made the make-up photograph pale, as if the lepers were miraculously cleansed. Struss reversed this effect years later for the transformation of Frederick March from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in the 1931 Rouben Mamoulian film. All the knowledge of filters and mattes that Struss had acquired in his New York days served him to great advantage in Hollywood.

Struss bridled at his second-place credit on Ben Hur. He said he had shot at least 50% of the finished film; Guissart got top billing only because he had a first place clause in his contract that Struss did not know about (Struss was soon to have a similar complaint about his smaller font credit in Sunrise).  Struss photographed many of the two-color Technicolor sequences for the film.

But who can ever know the truth about Ben-Hur, one of the most labor-intensive and expensive movies in the history of cinema? IMDB credits five directors alone; for the second filming of the chariot race (in which Struss was not involved), at what is now the corner of La Cienega and Venice Blvds., 62 assistant directors were hired, one of whom was William Wyler, who directed the 1959 Ben Hur re-make. A mind-boggling and hilariously fascinating detailing of the scale of the film is at this site:

IMDB trivia link

It also constitutes a lengthy chapter in Kevin Brownlow’s seminal book from 1968 on the history of silent cinema as told by its witnesses, The Parade’s Gone By…

Charles Rosher called upon Struss to work with him on the Mary Pickford film Sparrows; Struss happily shared credit. Rosher absented himself part of the time as he was also preparing to shoot Sunrise for German director F. W. Murnau who was to make his American debut with this groundbreaking film. Rosher had met Murnau in Germany two years previously; he had offered Murnau and cinematographer Carl Hoffman technical advice on the Hollywood “look” during the filming of Faust.

(The story of Sunrise and the collaboration of Rosher and Struss will be the fourth and last part of this essay.)

After Sunrise, Struss went to United Artists for three years, a period where he worked on some of the most prestigious films of his career. D. W. Griffith had returned to Hollywood after an eight-year hiatus in New York; he asked Struss to photograph Drums of Love along with Billy Bitzer. Struss shared credit with Bitzer on three of the four Griffith films he did, though it is believed Bitzer’s contribution diminished with each one. And Struss’ lighting and camera style is evident in each film. On Abraham Lincoln, Griffith’s first sound film, Struss receives sole credit. Bitzer’s own autobiography, “Billy Bitzer: His Story” makes no mention of the late Griffith films and fades into a twilight reverie of the heady early years. There is a photograph, however, of Bitzer and his wife, Ethel, (same name as Struss’s wife) attending the premiere of Lady of the Pavements in 1929.

Lady of the Pavements was Struss’ last silent picture and it incorporates some of his most glamorous lighting effects. The two women stars, Jetta Goudal and Lupe Velez, are luminous. It was for the latter actress that he developed the “Lupe Light,” a soft-frost bulb in a reflector on a movable arm, positioned below camera. It provided a shadow-less fill and eye-light a decade before Lucien Ballard’s “Obie Light.”

Mary Pickford was always much involved in the pre-production elements of her movies. Coquette, her first sound film, presented new challenges because of the space requirements of the sound department. When Charles Rosher saw how his lighting space was going to be severely restricted, even compromised, he said he could not photograph Pickford as he needed to. She wouldn’t accept this, terminated their long-standing alliance—and asked Struss, who had been on Sparrows, to take over. I can find no record of how this came down, and what effect it had on the Rosher/Struss relationship that had begun over fifteen years earlier in Bermuda. This is what Rosher told Brownlow: “I expressed myself freely, and as a result my career with Pickford came to an end… . I took no part in the production.” He does not mention Karl Struss.

Since his earliest days in Hollywood, Struss had a reputation for technical innovation and flexibility; after Sunrise he must have felt his time had finally arrived. Technical flexibility was a quality demanded for Coquette. Struss used up to four cameras, much in the style of the DeMille days with Wyckoff a decade earlier. Pickford received a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in this film. Struss’ relationship with Pickford must have been mutually rewarding since he photographed three of her sound films. His next few assignments presented better opportunities for him to find ways to free the camera from the constricting “iceboxes” they had been relegated to the first few years of sound. Struss also developed a rolling tripod to help move around the cumbersome new blimped cameras. Even though the caption indicates it, I am not at all convinced Struss had developed this compact blimp and tripod in time for Coquette:

On several United Artists films, Struss worked with the great art director William Cameron Menzies, whose own sense of stylized sets was compatible with the deliberate aesthetics of Struss. Their relationship came to an end, however, once United Artists failed. Struss left for what would become a fifteen-year stay at Paramount. It started with Skippy for director Norman Taurog, for which screenwriter Joe Mankiewicz received his first Oscar nomination (Mankiewicz is the subject of an earlier two-part essay on this blog.)

“Film Author, Film Author” Part One

A few films later, Struss himself was nominated for an Oscar a second time, for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as the following year for The Sign of the Cross, directed by his old boss from the Lasky days, C.B. DeMille. The future looked bright for Struss at Paramount, just as it had back in 1919 when he headed out to California after the dim days at Fort Leavenworth. But his tenure at Paramount would, at times, come to resemble the prison term he barely had avoided in Kansas.

In one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” facts, he was born on the same day, same year, as the great Portuguese film director Manouel de Oliveira—on December 11, 1908. Not only are they both alive, they are both still working. Tempting as it is to write about Oliveira, it is the redoubtable American composer Elliott Carter that I want to focus on: this December 11th. the classical music world will celebrate his 101^st birthday.

Within a few weeks of his birth (for those of us who chart years by film references) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were gunned down in Bolivia and the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi ascended the throne at age two. In the industrial world, Henry Ford rolled out the first Model T; and in Carter’s own chosen profession of music, both Mahler’s Seventh and Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony were premiered. It was the height of Edwardian England and the First World War was still six years in the future.

Carter attended the American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall in 1924; it was conducted by Pierre Monteux, who had also led the notorious Parisian premiere a decade before. And in another of those fortuitous congruencies, Carter heard the Rite again, the evening of his 100^th birthday, again in Carnegie Hall, conducted by his friend and musical champion James Levine.

Here is the opening section of Stravinsky’s Rite in a dazzling performance by the LA Phil under Esa-Pekka Salonen, at the inaugural, October 2003, concert of Disney Hall. The camera work picks out each soloist’s turn as the melodic lines weave around and through each other. Imagine the effect of this “swimming sound” on the ears of a 16 year-old boy whom nature seems to have destined for this moment.

Carter’s family was well off enough that shortly after the end of WWI the boy visited the French battlefields with his father. This was the start of his life-long Francophilia. Back in the USA, he was befriended by eccentric amateur composer Charles Ives, who headed a respected insurance agency, Ives and Myrick. He sold the Carters lots of insurance.

At Ives’ behest, Carter entered Harvard in 1924 intent on becoming a composer. Unlike his fellow students, many of whom were performing musicians already well schooled in theory, he had little theoretical background. The still teen-aged Carter composed a quite dissonant piece for his Beginning Harmony class. He was laughed at for the music’s lack of “sophistication”; Carter abruptly changed his major to English,though he continued to study composition outside Harvard’s curriculum . Discussing it years later, he said that he wanted his music to sound like that. He was, even then, not interested in traditional harmony. Today, Carter insists that he started to listen to and think about music from the “wrong end.” From the very start he was attracted to modern music. And his vision never wavered. Beethoven became “bearable,” he says, only much later in life. And in case you are tempted to think an artist mellows with age like a great Scotch, have a listen to this excerpt from a piece that was premiered at his centennial concert. He was only 98 when he wrote it. It’s called Interventions and is for piano and orchestra. (In the box below Carter’s picture, click the link.)

NPR.org audio link

As a Harvard major in English Carter became enamored of American modernist poetry. Throughout his career he turned to the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashberry, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost to express thoughts and emotions beyond the non-verbal beauties of music alone.

In 1932, Carter returned to Paris and began studies with the eminent theorist Nadia Boulanger, mentor to several generations of American composers from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass. In 1935, he received a doctorate from the Ecole Normale in Paris. Later that year he returned to the United States. Fluent in French, his love of French culture has never abated.

The mid 30s was a period of strong nativist accents in American concert music. Even Copland, who had begun as a spiky modernist in the early 20s, adopted a populist voice of the time with pieces such as Appalachian Spring. Carter made few forays into this accessible, even tuneful style, the singular example being music for the ballet Pocahontas in 1939.

From about 1950, Carter’s music found its roots and he began to develop a unique voice; while never embracing the Second Viennese School’s 12 tone method, his music became ever more rhythmically complex, atonal, and structurally adventurous. A technique he called “metric modulation” placed extraordinary demands on musicians to keep apace of the ever-shifting time signatures. His most daring experiments in time coalesced in his string quartets, the mode of chamber music most often associated with a composer’s most intimate thoughts—from Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok, and Shostakovich—to Elliott Carter. His first string quartet was completed in 1951 while on a Guggenheim Grant making a personal retreat in the Arizona desert. The second quartet appeared in 1959 and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, the first of two he received. The next three quartets followed at intervals of about a decade. The five quartets, which span his mature career, are one of the landmarks of 20th century music, even though they are just now finding an impassioned audience.

On November 2, 2002 the young Pacifica Quartet performed the complete string quartet cycle at Columbia’s Miller Theater. I was there, as was Mr. Carter; he signed my program. For my generation of classical music lovers this would be akin to having Beethoven sign your program at a concert in Biedermeier Vienna:

Six years later the same quartet, now veterans in the thorny intricacies of Carter’s music, performed the cycle again as part of the Juilliard and Lincoln Center Carter Centennial—and again I was present. Shortly afterwards the Pacifica Quartet released the full set on CD for Naxos:

Amazon.com CD link

At the end of every January the music school of Juilliard presents a weeklong series of concerts, an in-depth journey into the music of a country, style, or composer. Last year, this series, Focus, was dedicated to Elliott Carter. The opening night’s program included music of Carter, Boulez, Stravinsky, and Varese. Boulez was the conductor. At the conclusion of the program, the 83 year-old Frenchman descended the podium and walked to the stage left apron to shake hands with the near 100-year-old American, who was walking slowly towards the stage from his sixth row aisle seat. Flashbulbs exploded out of nowhere, a veritable frisson of light. To see these two titans of 20th century music, who had first met at a music festival in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1952, embrace, was a moment I will never forget.

Carter spent most of the 60s composing just two pieces, the Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra. These large scale works, as well as the string quartets, were so demanding of his time and energy that he decided to now commit more of his time to small scale commissions for voice or for solo instruments. Always involved in tonal color, his dedication to the single instruments allowed him to explore the full range of each and to work in close collaboration with the soloist who had commissioned the work; it was a further distillation of his already intense concentration on chamber music. Especially in the past decade, these works have become extremely popular with musicians.  Here is a short piece, Canaries, for solo tympani, yes, solo:

Here is a piece for flute and cello called Enchanted Prelude from 1988:

I know this is not the easiest music on the ears if you are not familiar with the demands of Carter’s style—but it’s tonal and rhythmic variation may sound more hospitable to you if you can think of something like “free jazz.” Cecil Taylor, anyone? Or maybe John Cage or Frank Zappa?

What comes as a surprise to most people on first meeting Carter in person, or on hearing him in an interview, is how charming and friendly he is. Here is a brief interview with Carter conducted by Frank Oteri, in the Greenwich Village home where the composer has lived for 60 years:

Boosey & Hawkes.com Podcast link

Surprised? Could anyone think such spiky music would come from such a sweet man? And it’s not that his recent work is any more “listenable” than what he wrote 50 years ago. Maybe, though, we are finally starting to catch up with him. When I was a college student I listened to his music from the ballet Minotaur, a sort of modernist, but accessible, work for orchestra, from 1947. Then I heard the Double Concerto and the Piano Concerto and decided that, not being a musician, I could never understand or enjoy this stuff. I don’t remember how I was able to come to terms with Carter’s music; maybe it’s a kind of creeping geriatric synesthesia—you know, how it is that many people tend to not want sweet food as they age; maybe an aversion to aural sweetness is contributory, or maybe just the years spent listening to so much classical music, it has made my ears more open, even though I don’t know much about music theory or play an instrument.

In late October of 1998, Columbia’s Miller Theater celebrated Carter’s 90th birthday. This was the first time I heard Carter’s music “live”. He was there, sitting in the row in front of me. Just before the concert began, and after well wishers retreated to their seats, I leaned forward with my program and a pen and asked him to sign it. He paused, looked intently at me as though I had just shouted, “fire,” but he did sign it and gave it back, smiling.

Maybe that was the turning point for me. Just those few seconds of human connection—from then on, so much of the thorny late 20th century music whose charms had eluded me, suddenly seemed not only approachable but enjoyable. The first piece on the program that night was for solo guitar. It is called “Shard” and here it is:

And if you want to rock—here it is “electric”:

The Piano Concerto is Carter’s most tragic work. He finished it in 1964 in Berlin. The Cold war tensions over the building of the Wall were fresh; according to his biographer, David Schiff, there was a US Army target range near Carter’s Berlin studio; the sound of the range’s gunfire seems to echo through the second movement. Critic Michael Steinberg wrote that “ Carter’s Concerto established the most dramatic confrontation of soloist and orchestra since Beethoven.” Pianist Ursula Oppens has recorded the concerto twice. She is an inveterate champion and performer of Carter’s music. Here she is, playing a solo piano piece from 2000 called Retrouvailles. Carter was 93 when he composed it:

Carter is such an amazingly articulate and witty person that he needs no critical champion. But the composer and critic Steven Stuckey, who has been composer-in-residence at the LA Phil and a frequent speaker at its pre-concert discussions, interviews Carter, again in his home. It opens with a shot of Carter composing on hand-ruled paper with a pencil, the way he has done since his student days. He talks about his time at Harvard and of his abiding love of American poetry:

This interview is in 4 parts; it is a personal walk through the arts of the 20th century by a man who was in the thick of it. As you listen to him, be aware that he was well past his 99th birthday when this conversation took place. If you want to watch all four parts, the screen should show an icon for next part when the previous one ends.

While Carter may not have needed an amanuensis, his wife, Helen, was a soul mate. Here is a photo from 1987. Two years later, they celebrated their 50th anniversary. Carter wrote a short piece for orchestra for the occasion called Anniversary that “compresses fifty years of partnership into six minutes.”  (Schiff)

David Schiff was a student of Carter’s; in 1983, he published a book about his teacher that is part critical exegesis and part biography. The 2nd edition from 1998 includes Carter’s more recent work, though at the rate he continues to compose, they will need a 3rd edition by the end of next year:

Amazon.com The Music of Elliott Carter link

Before the Pacifica Quartet became the current “go-to” group for the Carter string quartets, the venerable Juilliard Quartet had recorded them.

Here is a video that shows Carter giving the Juilliard players notes as they rehearse the last, 5th Quartet. His detailed notes on dynamics show a man in complete command of his own vision. The camera work for this historic video is, sadly, amateurish. Also, look at the comments posted below the video. I am so used to seeing nothing but the most inane abuses and the expressions like “douche bag” turned into a mantra on these YouTube sites. Even though one guy referring to the quartet opined, “It’s just a bunch of messing around,” most of the comments are way more literate put downs between advocates and dissenters and show a degree of passion not unlike that of pop music fans:

It is no surprise that a man so articulate and detail oriented is also an engaging writer. A collection of his writings that dates back to the mid-40s includes essays on the state of American concert music, lectures, memoirs of major musical figures, and events in his career, as well as reflections on his own work. His essays on the life and music of his mentor Charles Ives are especially enlightening:

Amazon.com Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 link

I have saved one “goody” for the end of this ramble. On December 10, 2008, the day before his 100^th birthday, Carter appeared on the PBS Charlie Rose show, along with conductor James Levine and conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim, in a freewheeling talk. Wearing suspenders and a flaming red sweatshirt, Carter tells Rose that even though it is his birthday tomorrow, he will be a his desk in the morning, as he is every day, composing. Levine adds, “He is still in his prime.” At about 6 minutes in, Barenboim talks about the concept of “late style” in the work of an artist’s last years. “But I don’t dare say this is Elliott’s late style.” He speculates that Carter could write another 20 years, always moving toward a new horizon. He says that Carter is creating a new style, one that contains all the complexity that has been his hallmark, but which is becoming ever more “distilled.”

Charlie Rose interview link

For almost a decade Carter’s works have become shorter, scored for fewer instruments, more reductive in structure, yet more vibrant, quicker in time—more and more the essence of what it is that he wants to say. Maybe even he feels time nipping at his heels.  But at the rate he is going, Elliott Carter will, within another decade, attain that most sublime state of distillation that all music aspires to—pure silence. And he will carry us there with him. Lenny Bernstein is somewhere in the empyreum waiting for him.