The Voluptuous Salammbô! With a Cast of Thousands!

 

 

poster for Grieco's The Loves of Salammbo (1960) 

     Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) resembles nothing so much as a ‘fifties Biblical or Classical epic, amounting to the verbal equivalent of a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacular with a cast of thousands, exotic sets and costumes, and a good share of sex and violence [1].  Just as such films focused on characters dressed in elaborate and strange apparel set in scenes of faraway times and places, Flaubert’s historical novel offers the reader exceedingly detailed descriptions of exotic clothing, jewelry, and even cosmetics.  Like a Cecil B. DeMille feature, Salammbô alternates warfare and torture with erotic excitement and love-longing, so as never to lack some appeal to the back-brain. 

     The author’s habitual obsession with precise concrete delineation of every scene, his famous pursuit of le mot juste, here is combined with the prodigious research with which he prepared to write the novel.  The reader of Salammbô, even with a good knowledge of French, might likely be slowed by the vocabulary for military units, maneuvers, siege engines, and the like.  (Latin scholars may recall a similar demand on readers of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.)  This fact, as well as the occurrence of numerous out-of-the-way terms for gems, fabrics, and the like, can make the text difficult.  Footnotes would often help.  One suspects that Flaubert was loathe to waste a single fact from his notes, as though the use of many obsolete, foreign, or otherwise out-of-the-way words would strengthen the substance, gravitas, and beauty in his story.

     After Madame Bovary, which had been meant as an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal with verisimilitude as its chief value, but which brought the author an obscenity trial (at which he was acquitted), he chose to direct his gaze to the past.  Just as Hedy Lamarr could be sexy in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), under the protection of the story’s antiquity and, in that case, Biblical authority, Salammbô can fascinate men in the novel with less danger of legal action.  Such exotic women had been popular in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as well as in visual art.  Though putatively representing antiquity the rather languid view of the past seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings or those by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or John William Waterhouse has more of a scent of nineteenth century Romanticism and, ultimately, Decadence than their medieval and classical models.  Artists who depicted Flaubert’s own invention, Salammbô herself, included Victor Prové (1893), Alphonse Mucha (1896), Desiré Maurice Ferrary (1899), and Henri Adrien Tanoux (1921) [2].

     While erotic elements are surely critically important for the book’s popularity, violence, just as in the movies, runs a close second.  To some the most boring stretches of Flaubert’s narration, battle sequences stretch on for page after page with few single combats and a great many compilations of nations of mercenaries, units of various sorts, slingers, archers, cavalry and the like, as though the book might be used to train officers in strategy.  But while such large-scale violence might at times be tiresome, the periodic massacres of prisoners and the recurring scenes of torture and mutilation are more disturbing.  In fact both violence and steaming sexuality are more nakedly presented in than in Bovary, but in the later novel a wash of ancient history makes the sensational more acceptable.

     Though aesthetic value is unprovable, Flaubert’s reputation as a stylist, reinforced very likely by the reader’s own experience, is sufficient to suggest that each passage is cunningly crafted to accomplish its effects.  The cinematic parallel would be, perhaps, the mature Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible in which every frame is artfully composed, a standard that few would suggest DeMille ever even sought to achieve.  The attention here is not to the actual complexity of a work of art, but the maker’s level of intention.  Whereas Flaubert was hoping to do something new and to  compose a novel of lasting value, based on its formal qualities alone, most Hollywood filmmakers seek to adhere to convention and have little ambition more far=reaching than to sell tickets upon the picture’s release. 

     Virtually all critics would agree that Flaubert’s prose is beautiful, and their expositions of this point are readily available.  In many passages the rhythm of Flaubert’s hypnotic periodic phrasing and the melodious sound of his descriptions is foregrounded even if a passage contains little specific information, like this.

 

     They were not Libyans from the area of Carthage who had long made up the third army, but rather nomads from the plateau of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derné, some from Phazzana and Marmarique.  They had gone over the desert drinking from brackish wells amid the bones of camels.  The Zuaèces, adorned with ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ, Garamantes, veiled with black masks, arrived on their painted mounts, others were riding asses, onagers, zebras, and buffalo.  Some among them pulled the rood of their boat-shaped with their families and their idols.  There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the water of their hot springs, Atarantians who curse the sun, Troglodytes who inter their dead laughing under tree branches, and the hideous Ausians who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachides, who eat lice, and the Gysantes, painted with vermilion, who eat monkeys. [3]

 

     Surely there is meant to be something incantatory in this list of place names.  The exotic customs, none of which, of course, play any role in the plot, far from reinforcing the historic verisimilitude, are curiosities, reminiscent of the dog-headed men in Pliny or the immense aspidochelone of the Physiologus.  Whether or not the reader is susceptible to Flaubert’s calculated cadences, the list of nationalities, all of which are likely unknown to the reader, in fact makes the narration not more “real,” but considerably more fanciful.  Still Flaubert’s self-consciously meticulous style is undeniable, but here its appeal is based neither on authenticity nor on painting an imaginable picture, but rather on the appeal of the unfamiliar and the charm of sound alone, as in  magic formulae. 

     The other characteristic that most fundamentally marks the contrast between Salammbô and a spectacular Hollywood epic is more objectively demonstrable.  Mid-twentieth century American movies made for a mass audience will present an unambiguous moral universe, with clearly demarcated heroes and villains and a strong tendency toward retributive justice.  The audience is cheering for one side because it is represented as fundamentally right whereas its opponents are not.  There is no room for doubt. 

     In Salammbô on the other hand, while the reader identifies with the heroine emotionally, there seems little to choose between the rulers of Carthage and their barbarian mercenaries.  Each side is engaged in corrupt power struggles [4].  The motivation that stands apart is the erotic bond between Matho and Salammbô.  Even there Matho's passion seems a weakness, contributing to the great fighter’s downfall, and Salammbô’s death at the end makes her a pathetic rather than an admirable character.  The reader is impressed with the power of these portraits, but has no wish to emulate them. 

     This pose of thematic indifference, a reluctance to delineate moral judgements or other conclusions about lived experience, is axiomatic in Flaubert’s realism.  To impose value judgements would be for him to compromise the representation of reality itself.  As Flaubert put it “stupidity consists of wanting to come to conclusions” [5].  For him true realism must be, like science, objective. 

     Far from  accidental, this distinction illustrates one of the principal characteristics distinguishing popular from “high art,” called in various contexts elite, courtly, or learned.  Every imagined portrayal of reality satisfies some reader expectations while challenging or twisting others.  Works consumed by a mass audience, both tribal or folk art without a known creator and modern commercial productions like movies, television shows, and potboilers, tend to confirm consumers’ anticipations and artistic conventions, while those with a smaller yet more sophisticated readership will more often deny expected ideas and point out problems, contradictions, and  mysteries.  The former serves the social function of confirming and perpetuating group values and customs, whereas the latter opens the way for change and allows for uncertainty. 

     Thus Salammbô may be read, just as a DeMille epic would be viewed, for its more sensational elements of sex and violence; it may be considered for its success in creating a world of the past through the accumulation of detail, or it may be contemplated simply as an aesthetic object, a series of melodious sentences. 

 

 

1.  A number of films have, in fact, been based on Flaubert’s novel, including Arturo Ambrosio’s Salammbo (1911), Domenico Gaido’s Salambo (1914), Réda Ait’s Salambo (1916), Pierre Marodon’s  Salammbô (1925), Sergio Grieco’s The Loves of Salammbô (1960), and Jacques Perconte’s Salammbô (2022).  The predominance of early titles and the fact that all the cinematic versions were made in Europe suggests that the reputation of Flaubert’ novel lingered into the twentieth century.  There are in addition operas by y Modest Mussorgsky, (1865, unfinished), Ernest Reyer (1890), and Philippe Fénelon (1992).  More recently Barney B. Johnson composed an opera-ballet on the theme.

2.  An exhibition in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rouen in 2021 collected many such works for an exhibit called "Salammbô: Fureurs! Passion! Éléphants!"  The costumes described in the novel are said to have influenced French fashion, particularly the use of veils, cloaks, and mantles.  In an odd legacy of the book the area, today a part of Tunis, called Le Kram in 1921 changed it s name to Salammbo after the discovery there of Carthaginian archaeological remains.

3.  Ce n'étaient pas les Libyens des environs de Carthage; depuis longtemps ils composaient la troisième armée; mais les nomades du plateau de Barca, les bandits du cap Phiscus et du promontoire de Derné, ceux du Phazzana et de la Marmarique. Ils avaient traversé le désert en buvant aux puits saumâtres maçonnés avec des ossements de chameau; les Zuaèces, couverts de plumes d'autruche, étaient venus sur des quadriges; les Garamantes, masqués d'un voile noir, assis en arrière sur leurs cavales peintes; d'autres sur des ânes, sur des onagres, sur des zèbres, sur des buffles; et quelques-uns traînaient, avec leurs familles et leurs idoles, le toit de leur cabane en forme de chaloupe. Il y avait des Ammoniens aux membres ridés par l'eau chaude des fontaines; des Atarantes, qui maudissent le soleil; des Troglodytes, qui enterrent en riant leurs morts sous des branches d'arbre; et les hideux Auséens, qui mangent des sauterelles; les Achyrmachides, qui mangent des poux, et les Gysantes, peints de vermillon, qui mangent des singes. (From Chapter 12)

4.  Some characters are more attractive than others.  Spendius, for instance, the former slave, is depicted as more venal than either Matho or Hamilcar.  Yet these distinctions do not guide the narrative or shape a definitive theme. 

5.  Letter to Louis Bouilhet of September 4,1850.  “L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure.”  Later in the letter the sentiment is repeated: “Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.”

The Comic World of Flip the Frog

 

    Long recognized as one of the greatest animators of American film during a time when movie theaters typically showed a program including cartoon, newsreel, and perhaps other short subjects as well as one or two feature films, Ub Iwerks created a marvelous comic world within the conventions of his form.  Doubtless best-known for his work with Disney – they had worked together since both were teenagers -- he was the first artist to draw Mickey Mouse and went on to make significant contributions to many Disney cartoons, as well as drawing for Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Columbia’s Screen Gems. [1]  Yet he resented Disney’s dominance and for a time headed his own studio making Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper features among others in which he was able to develop his own vision during an era when animated shorts were made to appeal not to children alone, but to audiences of all ages.

     Flip the Frog first appeared in Fiddlesticks (1930), the first color animation with sound.  The sound is significant as many cartoons of the period foregrounded music while neglecting plot.  The Disney studio had produced a number of Silly Symphonies shorts providing fanciful visual accompaniment to pieces of music and for this series, Iwerks produced Autumn and Springtime. [1]

     Flip appears on the initial title holding a single-stringed instrument, a buoyant troubadour with a huge smile.  On the soundtrack one hears Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, to become familiar to many several decades later as the theme music for the Alfred Hitchcock television show.   The sinister tone of this melody may seem discordant, its solemnity and melancholy the opposite pole of the vivacious frog.  In fact, the macabre occupies a significant space in the cartoons of the era, those by Ub Iwerks among them, yet it is always a comic, fundamentally joyous fear like that evoked in celebrations for Hallowe’en and the Day of the Dead as well as in the devils and death figures that often feature in Carnival celebrations. 

     More froglike than he will become in later cartoons in spite of four-fingered cartoon white gloves, a smart bowtie, and a few buttons on his ventral side, Flip leaps from one sylvan lily pad to another and then begins dancing like a trouper with theatrical high spirits.  He grins and faces the audience; his ebullience becomes the viewer’s.  He punctuates his movements with an odd squawk, more like a duck than a frog, eventually dancing atop the shell of an annoyed turtle who ejects him into the water.   

     Temporarily shaken, he soon resumes his merry dance until he comes upon a scene to rival Breughel’s peasant festivals: a group of small animals, mostly insects, but including mice and other creatures, several of whom are drinking while many play musical instruments.  There is, in fact, a sort of symphony orchestra in these woods which Flip enthusiastically joins.  They play the local version, one can only assume, of the music of the spheres, the dance of earthly life.   Upon his arrival, Flip seizes center stage on a stump and bows with every ego’s vainglory, then dancing with abandon until a second hint of the sinister aspect of life appears.    Ready for anything, Flip climbs a line that suddenly appears next to him only to discover that it descends from the web of a threatening spider from whom he retreats in fear and, a moment later, resumes his vaudeville-style dance.  The music varies, but the frog is always euphoric, sometimes closing his eyes in bliss.  When he takes a bow, all the animals, including the once malevolent-looking spider, unite in appreciative applause. 

     A piano has now appeared on the stump-stage and Flip begins to play along with a mouse violinist (who resembles the earliest Mickeys).  They play for a time in harmony but before long Flip has taken a direction of his own, picking out “Ach du Lieber Augustine” until the mouse bops him with his violin.  Though briefly interrupted by a tobacco spitting bird above, they resume playing to such effect that not only they but the piano and itself bench as well are soon capering in a chorus line.  The music takes a sad turn and before long all are weeping at the tragic spectacle of life which had earlier seemed so worthy of exuberant affirmation.  

     Flip loses himself in delicious melancholy, miming violin movements until the annoyed piano kicks him.  This drives the frog into a Jerry Lee Lewis-style performance aggressively banging the piano keys with fists and feet until the instrument explodes into the air and a rain of ivories descends on the bemused frog. 

     The film then depicts a harmonious world in which all sentient beings are united in celebration to the rhythms of time.  This melodious affirmation is punctuated by reminders of aggression and suffering.  The turtle’s hostility, the spider’s predatory threat, the mouse’s rivalry, even the piano’s frustration provide the counterweight to the choral singing, producing a tense energetic dialectic of disorder and order.  The collapsed piano of the conclusion represents the dissolution of familiar reality into chaos.  This bipolar opposition structures the life of Flip the Frog and the lives of his viewers as well.

     While all of Iwerks cartoons are meant to be funny, the malevolent aspect of life is foregrounded in many as well as in those from other studios. [2]  The embrace of life and flight from death are both reflected as clearly as in the pairs of benevolent and malevolent aspects of deity in Hinduism.  Indeed, in  the fifth Flip the Frog cartoon, The Cuckoo Murder Case, the cat is out of the bag and mortality itself is Flip’s antagonist. 

     For the opening credits sequence Flip has acquired a pair of shorts as well as white gloves and plays a kind of ragtime piano behind the title card.  Though his tune is sprightly, this story highlights the mixture of comedy and horror that characterizes so many cartoons of the period.  A sleepy cuckoo occupies a clock in a shabby home.  The bird is humanized; it is so sleepy it must be repeatedly poked by the clock to call out the hour.  Death itself enters as a robed skeleton and shoots the cuckoo bird whereupon Flip as a private detective is summoned by the clock itself to investigate. [3]

     Once more, the entire world is animated, acting as a great orchestral company cooperating in producing the grand pageant of phenomenal events.  Flip’s car pauses to tiptoe through a puddle.  Storm clouds and lightning flashes are playing portentous games in the sky.  The very house grimaces menacingly as the frog approaches, but, when he tries to retreat, an irresistible karmic wind drives him back toward it.  A crew of police arrives as well while Flip is sneaking about the house.  Eventually Flip comes upon the robed skeleton representing mortality studying the book of life on a table with an hourglass.  He stamps “out” on a page bearing the cuckoo’s name, then turns the page to reveal that Flip is next on his list.  Flip makes a mad dash to escape, overturning furniture and finally dives through a set of double doors into what looks like a great abyss.  Surely he has made his appointment in Samarra, though he is resurrected for a good many later features. 

      In Spooks (1932) Iwerks avoided that sort of conclusive denouement.  During a storm a less frog-like Flip approaches a remote house occupied by sinister skeletal characters similar to the one in The Cuckoo Murder Case.  A band of such figures then plays a danse macabre like those depicted in art as well as enacted in village rituals and court masques from the fifteenth century on. [4]  Oblivious to his danger, Flip happily dances in the arms of a female skeleton until she falls to pieces, signifying the transience of love.  At this point his host assumes a wicked expression and clearly plots to add a frog skeleton  to his collection.  The cuckoo even reappears in skeletal form.  When it is time to go to bed, Flip asks for the bathroom and is directed to a dark space where he is ambushed.  He next appears tied to a table as his host sharpens a knife.  Flip manages to take off, smashing his antagonists’ bones on every side until he lands out of doors on the back of his trusty horse.  He apparently makes his escape but, just when he feels he is in the clear, his mount suddenly turns to bones at which point he leaps off and dashes into the distance.  For the moment, he has successfully dodged death, but the viewer knows that his victory is only temporary.

     Flip lives in a world that pulses with life.  All creatures enthusiastically participate in the rhythmic celebration of their own existence, so brimming with the elemental joy of life that they sing and sway.  Flip’s irrepressible optimism is temporarily jolted by conflicts arising from appetite and ego, but he rapidly recovers.  Like his viewers, he is pursued by death, but he reacts as though engaged in a playful game until either a sudden descent when he is swallowed by darkness or a narrow escape.  Just as the makers of medieval cathedrals designed them to emphasize the supernal promise of salvation yet included frightening representations of death and of demons, sometimes including actual bones in the crypt, the movie audience, basically there for a good time, is not allowed to forget conflict, aggression, and the ultimate dissolution of the flesh.  In fact, by playing with the fearful recognition of frailty and in the end of mortality, though it may amount to whistling in the dark, the doughty frog may be a role model for his viewers, whose specters are formed not by the cartoonist’s pen, but by pain, suffering, illness, and violence. 

 

 

 1.      The film was simultaneously released with King of Jazz, a musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, which included a Walter Lantz cartoon depicting how Paul Whiteman, the music director of the film, "became the King of Jazz."

2.      Notable examples include Iwerks’ film for Disney The Skeleton Dance (1929) and the Fleischer Studio’s I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You 1932 in which Betty Boop appears with Louis Armstrong.

3.      An indication of the adult audience for such cartoons is the telephone’s frustrated "damn!" in the detective office says when it fails to wake up Flip.  In later films he tries to peep on a showering young woman and then to run out on a hotel bill (in Room Runners 1932), while in A Chinaman's Chance (1933), Flip smokes opium. 

4.      Similarly jocular presentations of death not only influence practices for Mardi Gras and All Souls Day, but also countless comedy horror movies.  Many critics think Whale’s sequel Bride of Frankenstein superior to the original film primarily because added considerable humor.

Hell’s House

Last night I watched a 1932 B movie directed by Howard Higgin called Hell’s House, notable primarily for early performances by Bette Davis and Pat O’Brien. When it was first released, the New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall found it “hardly adult” despite a few “moderately interesting interludes.” Its very ordinariness, though, is central to its popular character. In spite of what might seem to some elitist, intellectual, and counter-cultural tendencies (I don’t care to watch most contemporary popular films), my pleasure in watching such a narrative doubtless derives from the same source as its original broad audience. The specific “popular” character of such works may thus transcend the decades in the same way that today’s mass market movies leap across seas both physical and cultural to claim the international audiences that American films have enjoyed since Hollywood’s founding.

In its themes popular art undeniably tends to reinforce attitudes which are socially normative, the sort their critics might call idées reçues. On the other hand “high art,” especially since the Romantic Movement, has sought especially to suggest problems, contradictions, and tensions in established ideas, if not to challenge or replace them altogether. Every work may be located somewhere along this continuum.

Hell’s House, like many popular works, is lavish with sentiment, melodrama, and shocking horror. At the outset our young hero Jimmy’s mother dies in his arms; the reformatory where he finds himself practices harsh discipline that borders on the absurd. Boys work like slaves in a brickyard are subjected to such punishments as standing toes to a line staring at a point on the wall and being sent to solitary confinement so neglectful it can be lethal. Once the hapless Jimmy’s own suffering is relieved (in a typical happy ending), the film-maker inserts then a recollection of the deceased Shorty to allow a wallow of emotion and send viewers out of the theater with a tear in the eye.

But such recreational indulgence in excessive pity and fear cannot itself explain my affection for Hell’s House and the success, not just of American films worldwide, but also of such different genres as Bollywood musical productions and Hong Kong martial arts films, suggests that their appeal is not exclusively thematic, though they do comfort the consumer by reaffirming his community’s specific preexisting attitudes. There is in addition a formal, structural delight in seeing oppositions raised and then dissolved that more resembles the patterning of a musical piece than it does other sorts of less predictable stories.
As the movie is presently little-remembered by either critics or cultists, it is doubtless necessary to explain the plot. I hope the parallels with a thousand other works will suggest themselves.

The film opens with an idyll of country life. Jimmy appears as consistently virtuous and naïve, a model of filial piety despite what the viewer imagines to be his wholesome and active boy-life. Suddenly, without reason or warning, the calamity of his mother’s death strikes. Dissolved in tears, he cradles her lifeless body.

The specter of mortality itself is here multiplied by the distress of the boy, the more shocking since it was caused by a callous hit-and-run driver. Yet, in the film, this problem is rapidly resolved. Jimmy travels to the city where a kindly Uncle Henry and aunt Emma Clark take him in. Lingering mourning, a unqualified or uninterested relative, a host of possible complications are all ignored to introduce the next opposition: honesty and dishonesty.

It seems a certain Matt Kelly (played by Pat O’Brien) boards with the Clarks. A boastful but amiable fellow, he claims to have high-level connections, though in fact he is a low-level bootlegger. Bette Davis plays his girlfriend Peggy Gardner, a character who consorts with petty crooks, yet seems altogether decent herself, if a bit street-smart.

Impressed by Kelly’s blather and exceedingly naïve, Jimmy becomes entangled in his business and gets arrested and sent to a reformatory while the real criminal remains free. Here the story’s central theme is established: an exposé of the juvenile justice system. The time-serving superintendent of the institution is not so much vicious as opportunistic. He would like to have the resources to run the place responsibly, but, failing that, he conceals its cruelty, presumably protecting the politicians who gave him his position. He acts as though he will assist campaigning newspaperman Frank Gebhardt, but conceals his institution’s failings. Despite its reformist theme, Hell’s House fails to evoke even a hint of the drama and pathos of Ford’s Grapes of Wrath or even Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

In the reform school, Jimmy meets his bunkmate, Shorty, who is not only small of stature but has a bad heart. At their first encounter, Shorty proactively knocks him down, suggesting the place’s pervasive brutality, but they soon become friends. Taking a rap for Jimmy, Shorty ends up in an isolation cell where his illness becomes critical. Desperate to assist him, Jimmy finds a way to escape and enlists Peggy’s help. They contact the crusading writer who is able gather from Jimmy the facts he needs to enlighten the public about the school’s shortcomings. Matt is pressured by his concerned girlfriend to confess his own role, exonerating Jimmy, but it too late for Shorty who dies, alone and ignored. The senseless death of Jimmy’s mother at the hands of an irresponsible driver is echoed in a nice unifying touch by Shorty’s death in a society that shirks responsibility for its “delinquent” youth.

Just as Jimmy’s orphan status was relieved by the generosity of his kindly uncle and aunt, Matt Kelly’s criminal habits are erased. Due to beneficent female influence, he is willing to abandon his lying and bootlegging, do his time, and presumably return to society prepared to marry Peggy and live as an upright citizen. It seems the newspaper’s coverage will be sufficient to produce more humane and effective juvenile facilities, and all is well in the world again, as in the opening rural idyll. Mortality itself, individual immorality, and social injustice are all resolved, though the closing scene milks poor Shorty’s memory for just a bit more pathos.

Like one of Dickens’ individual philanthropists saving a suffering poor boy from the dog-eat-dog lower depths, Gebhardt’s intervention magically settles the social question. This maneuver is no more convincing on the realistic level than the swift replacement of Jimmy’s mother or Matt’s moral awakening, but it doesn’t matter. Even on the thematic level, such stories are a sort of sympathetic magic. By such “happy endings” popular culture reassures its audience that all is well, that life is livable, people may stray but are all right in the end, and society is in fact operating smoothly -- any problems require nothing more than the spotlight of publicity.

Even apart, though, from the satisfaction derived from such exemplary unknotting of contradictions, there is surely an abstract pleasure in the pattern of thesis, antithesis, synthesis that goes beyond specific cultural data. This is one reason that widely divergent audiences in different lands who share few values may enjoy the same stories, and a critic who believes little of the moral, psychological, or social implications such a film presents about lived experience can still watch an inconsequential film with satisfaction. Such a narrative generates complacency beyond any ideology, reassuring the viewer that, despite difficulties and even traumas, all will come right in the end.

Eisenstein's Strike and the Problem of Realism

Most people in most times and places, have derived their identity from their agreements with others. This is the case with church-goers and patriots. Others create a sort of artificial fraternity with sports loyalties or ethnic identity. It is only in our belated post-Romantic era that differences tend to be more highly prized. In the eighties I knew a critic who championed Night of the Living Dead as the greatest modern movie, proud of his choice for its singularity. Even a conspicuously individualist twentieth century critic, however, can enjoy assenting in a common judgment. With just such a pleasure in aligning myself with a widespread opinion, I regard Sergei Eisenstein as a very great filmmaker indeed. The work of this intensely original and idiosyncratic artist under a system where the collective received official endorsement when opposed to the individual poses aesthetic problems as well as the personal ones Eisenstein spent his life negotiating.

I recently watched Strike for the first time in decades and found it as rewarding, frame by frame, as I had in the past. Above all else, Eisenstein is a great master of montage, the most purely cinematic of techniques. His dazzling sense of composition satisfies the viewer in nearly every shot. What other director provides his audience with such an array of fascinating faces, each photographed with light and angle cunningly arranged to display every expressive irregularity? If Ivan the Terrible is operatic in its grand spectacle, Strike is a dramatic, intricately worked sonata, in which waves of formal beauty succeed each other one after another.

Curiously, Eisenstein’s formalism, which has brought such delight to cinephiles, would have been proof of its degenerate corruption for the Stalinist enforcers of Zhdanov-style socialist realism who oversaw his projects. Finding himself in the position of a medieval stained glass artist confined to Christian motifs, he, like they, produced work of captivating power. Though forbidden the pursuit of themes other than those prescribed by bureaucrats, he worked out his own dialectic between the generalizations of a vulgar Marxist vision and the myriad and unpredictable details of observed reality. The tension is encoded in the film’s casting, plotting, and montage.

The idea of “socialist realism,” while based in the precise and nuanced realism of Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, avoided the chaos, ambiguity, and obscurity of experience in favor of simple didacticism. Thus, while insisting that the work was true to life in a way unprecedented in earlier art, Eisenstein substituted a flat morality tale for the complexity of life, all the while claiming to be more “real.” While the result is considerably more palatable than the brilliant Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl, its plot-lines are as unconvincing as the “eight model plays” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

For instance, Eisenstein’s fondness for selecting non-actors for many roles might seem to narrow the gap between the art work and observed reality. Instead of Hollywood-style stars, one sees “real people.” In practice, though, the director selected people who most strongly suggested stereotypes -- the strong young worker, the capitalist, the priest – as little “real” as glamorous actors. Again, the pretense of heightened realism leads in fact to stylized convention as tight as that of the commedia dell’arte.

The concluding massacre of the workers, unforgettably presented with slaughterhouse images, belies the “optimism” that was prescribed for socialist realism. The intertitle listing places where such repression had in fact occurred reinforces the fidelity to lived experience. Yet the viewer experiences the denouement as a tragic ritual, a sacrifice which expands the worker’s suicide earlier in the story and presents death as redemptive ritual, very much resembling the passion of Christ.

Is Strike realistic? Of course, a film is a series of images on cellulose acetate with virtually no resemblance to life, just as a novel is ink marks on two-dimensional pages. The degree of realistic illusion differs from one work to another, but it is always dialectic, conflicted, and ambiguous. In Eisenstein’s great film, the pretense of reproducing data from lived experience allowed the artist to produce great formalist works. (His colleague Dziga Vertov, with his kino pravda, illustrates one further possibility of the aesthetics, less monumental and dramatic, more lyrical and loose, of claiming to reproduce reality.) At the same time in America, one might note Dos Passos’ USA trilogy for its combination of modernist technique and representation of documentary truth. Art is always art; reality, reality. The implicit claim of realism is simply one of a variety of artistic techniques. The difference between realists and formalists resembles the medieval one between Realists and Nominalists, or one might trace it back to Plato and Aristotle. In the end, surely, both and neither are correct. Struggling with these oppositions is our truth. In Eisenstein’s case, the contradictions between style and content, worked out by an individual artist operating under a murderous philistine tyranny resulted in some of the world’s most memorable movies