"Cecil B. DeMille par Michel Mourlet"

Mais uma da cinefilia espanhola

Antes de mais nada, conforme prometido ao Liam Kenny: o blog do Tavernier e o do pessoal da Zoom arrière (e dois encontros da equipe: um sobre Herzog, outro sobre Vecchiali, o qual deve ser de interesse para o pessoal da Narrow Margin).

Via Cartonet (agradecimentos eternos), o scan do livro do Mourlet sobre DeMille, obra fundamental do Mac Mahonismo, lançada alguns meses após a última edição da Présence du cinéma (nº 24-25, dedicada justamente ao DeMille), e dois anos antes do livro do Michel Marmin sobre Walsh (o outro livro Mac Mahoniano dessa coleção da Seghers).

Abaixo, uma tradução para o inglês do texto do Marmin para o livro do Mourlet, que já traduzimos para o português na edição 6-7 da Foco, e da “Nota liminar” do Mourlet que já foi traduzida para o português.

PRELIMINARY NOTE

If there could be any beauty or usefulness in the thankless task of criticism, it would be on the condition of awakening in others, through a form of poetic communication, the feeling that a work has aroused in us. Ultimately, one could just as easily talk about something else entirely, such as a sunrise over Vesuvius or a cat’s fur, to describe a novel by Stendhal or Beethoven’s quartets. In the end, I could almost see a rather Mallarméan poem, where the subtle sounds and the combination of words would evoke, by accumulating them in their parallel language, the overall impression we feel when faced with a particular movement in art.

Let’s stop dreaming. Certain critical exercises I practiced in the past have convinced me that everything that needs to be said about an artist should be said in four pages, at worst. One page is better. And even then, it might be more appropriate to say nothing at all.

Knowledge only has meaning in terms of its usefulness, whether immediate or distant: useless knowledge is not only useless, but harmful, because the effort to acquire it takes the place of an action or a pleasure. I believe it is better to go out and have fun or watch the grass grow in the Luxembourg Gardens than to learn something that will be of no use.

I understand that there is pleasure in knowledge, and that honest men find a kind of complementary delight in analyzing their sensations or verifying their ideas. But this is a different activity, almost unrelated to my purpose, which is to help people discover. I am speaking here in terms of action, of dynamic criticism.

Furthermore, although I understand the relative interest of consumer criticism, I cannot help but be a little alarmed by the abundance of this literature, which nowadays tends to replace the other, the real one, and proliferates like parasitic vegetation on an increasingly bloodless creation. When a work needs a commentator to be received, it is clear that it lacks something that is precisely essential: the embodiment of its purpose in its material.

It is the work itself, and not its subsequent explanation, that must create the decisive impact, determining the yes or no. Analysis merely confirms the consumer’s acceptance or rejection, and if it shakes them, it is to the detriment of their sincerity. As for truly teaching, this can only happen in a few rare cases of young, unformed but well-born sensibilities. This, one might say, justifies analysis: that is why it is done from time to time.

Fine. But it must be brief, and synthesis rather than analysis, in order to attempt to recreate the emotional conditions of the shock. Knowing how many times Balzac uses the adjective “white” in La comédie humaine, and using electronics and punch cards to do so, seems to me to be in line with the medieval taste for pseudo-sciences, once denounced by Rabelais and Molière. We want to imitate physicists in their infinitesimal exploration of matter, without seeing that their discoveries have effects and uses, whereas no literary dissection can lead to either of the two sole justifications for the undertaking: increased admiration for Balzac or possession of the secrets of his genius. The same goes for explaining a work through its themes and the themes of its themes: smoke, nothingness, lost time. Instead of obsessively dissecting the works of others, create your own works, or paper airplanes. But here we touch on the real reason for the proliferation of criticism: the creative impotence of our era. We cannot both speak and act. A choice must be made. We have chosen to speak.

Speaking for the sake of speaking, I decided to tell a story. And Cecil B. DeMille’s life is a beautiful story. It is even, I sincerely believe, much more interesting than any judgments I might be led to make about his work. And besides, it’s fun to tell a story, to show that a man’s life has a beginning, a middle, an end, twists and turns, motives, roots, a certain meaning; it’s much more fun and true than trying not to tell a story, like today’s novelists. To this end, I drew extensively from the filmmaker’s autobiography, most often contenting myself with narrowing down the events to better highlight their relationship.

Since it was necessary to say a few words about his films, I asked Michel Marmin, author of an excellent study on Raoul Walsh, to write an introduction to this simple and clear art. I believe, and this is a great compliment, that he has succeeded in not complicating or obscuring a body of work which, from The Squaw Man to The Ten Commandments, possesses sufficient force of evidence.

Finally, a significant part of this book, consisting of various documents, texts by DeMille, testimonials from his collaborators, excerpts from storyboards, and press kits, will objectively complete the image of DeMille that may have formed in the reader’s mind once they have finished reading. As for ideas, it is undoubtedly more fruitful and healthy for everyone to find them within themselves by going to see the films of this great, little-known filmmaker.

M. M.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
OF CECIL B. DeMILLE

by Michel Marmin

If I were asked to choose the most beautiful shot in religious cinema, I would disregard Dreyer, Bresson, and Rossellini, and propose this one, which the viewer experiences as an unbearable dazzling: a woman’s leg emerges from the luxurious mask of a screen and stretches out like a snake as two perfect hands appear to adorn it with silk, or the one where we see another half-naked woman intoxicated by the caress of the flow of gold and jewels she spreads over her body.

The images I have just tried to describe are not by Mizoguchi, but appear in two films by the only great Christian filmmaker, Cecil Blount DeMille. They’re from The Affairs of Anatol and Samson and Delilah, which, with a gap of about thirty years, impose the exemplary rectitude of an art that is always young and sure, and of a soul that is never inflected.

Cecil B. DeMille is a blessed filmmaker. His films were offered to the greatest number of people and called on people to exercise their simple, honest hearts and sound judgment: we know how much DeMille was rewarded for this approach. And the hateful attacks from clerics and intellectuals were obviously unable to undermine his magnificent and insolent success.

My literature teacher commented ironically on The Ten Commandments, saying, “They talk like in the Bible...” I agree with him that the dialogues in Cecil B. DeMille’s films and Roland Barthes’ style are not similar. But behind the teacher’s spiteful tone lies a naive truth worthy of Andersen’s child: Cecil B. DeMille’s work is indeed on a par with the Bible, and without meaning to, my teacher was awarding it a certificate of greatness and beauty.

DeMille’s religious work is incarnate and, as such, is specifically cinematic and Christian. He does not stifle the tremors of the flesh and the beating of the heart like Robert Bresson, nor does he resort excessively to symbols like Roberto Rossellini. His faith draws its richness from life, and his films, laden with flesh, gold, and blood, deliver the sometimes epic confrontations of grace and disgrace, without any intention of demonstration. I don’t know if Cecil B. DeMille is an auteur. I don’t know of any themes or inner universe for him. The Christians in the cathedrals carved stone without worrying about their copyright. DeMille’s mise en scène cuts deep into reality, and the unity of his work is the only thing that matters, namely an implacable fidelity to the sources of emotion when the life of a man or woman is transfigured into happiness and suffering.

Let us not mock the biblical themes of some of his films. The criticism is absurd in itself. DeMille, the Christian DeMille, acts with loyalty, and I don’t see why European intellectuals deny him what they grant to Veronese or Poussin. But let the intellectuals opine and let us try to acquire the undisturbed serenity of our director.

Cecil B. DeMille is no moderate. The extravagant luxury in Samson and Delilah, the terrifying orgies in Dynamite, or the cruelties in The Godless Girl make an icy irruption onto the screen. Kay Johnson’s fabulous Duesenberg in Dynamite or Hedy Lamarr’s jewels in Samson and Delilah are merely the eternal backdrop for sin. DeMille utters no anathemas, preferring to show rather than tell, presenting vices and perdition in stark relief through a severe and uncompromising mise en scène, guaranteed by the profound innocence of its author.

In Belluaires et porchers, we can read Léon Bloy’s admirable response to Barbey d’Aurevilly’s judges. “He sees better than anything else the human soul in the snubs and twists of its Fall. He is a master imager of Disobedience and he is very reminiscent of those great unknown sculptors of the Middle Ages who innocently depicted all the shames of the damned on the walls of their cathedrals.” I am tempted to appropriate this definitive judgment and offer it to Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille indeed belongs to the flamboyant race of great violent and sexual Christians, the great aristocrats of faith, fine slayers of the self-righteous and the happy medium.

And DeMille is strong enough not to subtract from these images the terrible pageantry of seduction. What fascinates in Samson and Delilah is certainly not so much Victor Mature as the arrogant splendor of Hedy Lamarr and, above all, that peak of cynicism and indifference when the palace collapses on the King of Gaza (George Sanders) as he raises his farewell cup, his face lit up by the smile of a libertine.

For Cecil B. DeMille, a generous director, loves what lives and what suffers too much to hate his characters, even if they are the most detestable in the Old Testament[1]: DeMille does not judge. He shows. And his gaze combines compassion with lucidity. DeMille is not a prisoner of any religious or aesthetic system. In his work, emotion is a wonderful means of knowledge, because emotion is free and simple, not distorted by the oppressive opportunities of ideology or formalism.

DeMille, a Christian filmmaker, is also a free man. While his faith brooks no compromise, his freedom of spirit has never tolerated any compromise. His fierce individualism therefore leads me to finally say that Cecil B. DeMille is a great American filmmaker, akin to the greatest.

In The Ten Commandments, a people groan under the whip, children and old people succumb under the weight of the stone: tortured innocence inspires Cecil B. DeMille to create some of the most beautiful yet harshest scenes ever seen in cinema (see also The Sign of the Cross). This lover of freedom has a singular fondness for misfortune, and yet no complacency tarnishes these grandiose scenes of slavery and oppression that are the inevitable corollary of sin: the mad light of burning sulfur still illuminates the proud liturgy of Evil. In this respect, The Godless Girl offers the most terrifying vision of Satan’s works, where children and adolescents are subjected to monstrous tortures meticulously organized for them in a reformatory in the United States. This hellish spectacle of young boys being beaten or thrown into a pig pen is both horrifying and astonishing: The Godless Girl possesses a density of savagery and brutality that only the great despisers of Evil have approached. However, I would refrain from describing this film as fantasy, because its tragic lucidity and religious knowledge are in fact combined with a simple and terrible realism devoid of any polemical or demonstrative intent. Only a new and loyal society, American society, could have engendered a cinema so clear, so clean and so unafraid.

I will not dwell unduly on Cecil B. DeMille’s hellscapes, and I will show elsewhere how the Knight of the Holy Sepulcher had a diametrically opposed vision of Eden, and that this great poet of misfortune and violence is above all a poet of joy and gentleness.

DeMille is first and foremost an American filmmaker in his religious character. His films display a desire for dramatic simplicity and somewhat brutal clarity that surprises only Europeans steeped in the delights of Capua and only too happy to see themselves justified by ecclesiastical horse-trading[2]. However, American cinema, that of Ince and Porter, then Walsh and DeMille, was the fruit of a virgin civilization where churches did not auction off the Cross, but where men and women purified by exile built a nation with the Bible in hand. It takes a courageous effort of imagination to share the faith of these men of the New World, pioneers, writers, or filmmakers, who drew on the Scriptures as the exclusive basis for their thoughts and actions. The European craze for Westerns resembles a confused nostalgia for a quasi-mythological age, whereas these films were born in the era they illustrate.

Michel Mourlet’s biography of DeMille is very enlightening because it closely mirrors the history of American cinema, which itself is measured against America itself: it is the life of a pioneer and founder, but also the synthesis and symbol of a great collective achievement.

Paul Morand wrote: “Roads are the expression of a nation’s intelligence, culture, and freedom.” I transcribe this beautiful sentence, which allows me to introduce an original taste of DeMille without detracting from its importance. Union Pacific, a magnificent western, is thus, if I dare say, a great railway love story. Building roads, establishing great lines of communication: by telling the story of a railway line, Cecil B. DeMille elevates his art to the heart of a young, free, and conquering America. The marvelous energy of this joyful and muscular film, where the rail and the locomotive shine with power, glorifies the spirit of a nation. DeMille loves travel, means of transport, and especially railroads – because railroads, more than roads, are on the scale of the new community, because they justify the ambition and conscience of an essentially willful and confident civilization. Cecil B. DeMille is probably the “most American” of the great American filmmakers. Let me be clear: I do not think that his work equals the universality and richness of that of Raoul Walsh. But if future generations were to preserve only one testimony to American civilization, perhaps Union Pacific should be saved. To a large extent, Cecil B. DeMille built American cinema. It will come as no surprise that his favorite heroes are “empire builders” and that, while they do not exactly fade into the background behind the community, they are its champions: the hero of Union Pacific has no other concern than to serve.

This noble blood, which brings DeMille’s entire body of work to life with such force and brilliance, and finally this perfect talent for being American, triumph in an enchanting masterpiece, The Greatest Show on Earth. Young children, whose taste for life and freedom of love has not yet been killed by academic slavery, were the best accomplices to the worldwide success of this film. The circus! When the giant canvas rises, inflates, unfurls, and stretches superbly around the masts, when the priest blesses the locomotive that will carry the circus across America and the connecting rods move to the grandiose breath of steam, the heart leaps as if at the birth of a world and an art combined. The Greatest Show on Earth brings together the exemplary conditions for the blossoming of a lucid and totally mastered genius: each shot brings life to light, and the narrative and the journey lead it to the ambulatory rhythm of the great intercontinental expresses. Cendrars would have been delighted by this film, in which passions, joys, and sorrows intertwine and unravel in the skillful interweaving of circus acts, their intensity varying according to the difficulty of a trapeze, the whims of an elephant, and the number of kilometers of track. I feel singularly helpless to even suggest the prodigious vitality of this mise en scène, its complexity and its subtlety. The energy I spoke of in connection with Union Pacific increases in The Greatest Show on Earth; it runs everywhere backstage, on the track, among the spectators. It reaches its apotheosis at the end of the film, after the train accident, when DeMille shows in an extraordinary long shot the improvised cavalcade of the survivors leading the delirious crowd to a makeshift theater and the marvelous Betty Hutton on an elephant singing about love, the love of the circus, the love of life.

Barrès named one of his heroines “Notre-Dame du sleeping-car” (Trois stations de psychothérapie): the train is perhaps the object that has most fascinated certain civilized people with a penchant for modernity (Cendrars, Morand, Honegger), and since its inception, American cinema has devoted its most beautiful sequences to it – Edwin S. Porter: The Great Train Robbery; Raoul Walsh: Colorado Territory, White Heat; Fritz Lang: Human Desire; and finally Cecil B. DeMille. Just as the princesses of Louis XVI’s court allowed themselves to be intoxicated by Montgolfier’s hot air balloons, these princes of the spirit do not disdain the pleasure of speed and a new cadence, the beauty of steel and horsepower. If DeMille loves railways so much, it is because the virtues of a Crampton or a Pacific 231 are also those of his mise en scène: powerful, fast, nervous, violent, elliptical, solid in all circumstances, but monumental and noisy. A new art is invented to work with new materials and energies: the art of Cecil B. DeMille is essentially modern. Maurice Barrès was the first to understand that feelings no longer wandered to the rhythm of stagecoaches, that it was no longer possible to write Adolphe or Le lys dans la vallée, and that the French language had to seek within itself a new classicism, a lesson learned by Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, Roger Vailland or Jacques Laurent.

Thus, the best shots in DeMille’s films truly dazzle with their surprising ellipsis, the violence and singularity of the subject matter, the synthesis and conciseness of the mise en scène, and the sharpness of the framing. I have already mentioned several of them and will not list all of these precious objects that make the narrative explode like certain verses by Racine and to which one would readily attribute the qualities of a rare metal. I will note three, however, whose sudden obviousness takes the place of audacity. First, two in The Greatest Show on Earth: the first where Cornel Wilde falls from the trapeze and crashes onto the track, brutally thrown to the ground by an irresistible downward movement of the camera, the second where Charlton Heston, intrigued by the resignation of a smiling Cornel Wilde who has returned from the hospital and appears to have recovered, rips off the raincoat that hides his left arm and suddenly discovers a horrible stump. The only scene that rivals them in intensity is the night shot in Union Pacific where, facing the camera fixed on a moving train, we see a horseman (Joel McCrea) catch up with the train and jump into a carriage while his horse keeps pace with the engine!

Cecil B. DeMille, modern filmmaker... I was also tempted to write that this American, this Christian, was deeply anti-modern, like Raoul Walsh or Allan Dwan, in the sense understood by Péguy. Along with a serene desire to build the New World, DeMille inherited from old America and Fenimore Cooper a distrust of urban civilization, which is revealed in his delightful satirical comedies from the silent era, the most successful of which remains The Affairs of Anatol, a refined and scathing chronicle of New York’s upper middle class. But DeMille is too straightforward and too proud to sustain a paradox: in fact, when I say that Cecil B. DeMille’s art is essentially modern, I am affirming that DeMille practiced a mise en scène that elevated his era by giving it a soul.

Paul Morand is undoubtedly the only writer who has been able to describe a Bugatti (Bouddha vivant) to us; but the author of De la vitesse also taught us to appreciate slowness, the charm of a lazy river, and the pleasures of horse riding: Milady. Giraudoux was not mistaken—these crazy drivers are in love with their village. DeMille’s work converges on a need for balance, a desire for calm and rest, a softer light and less tormented landscapes. The Squaw Man (1931), a beautiful, modest film, tells the story of the unhappy search for marital happiness. Infinite tenderness and a wounded smile cannot stop the devastating destruction of an intimate peace that DeMille describes with admirable tact. This masterpiece of emotion and delicacy reaches heights of nobility: when the Indian woman gives her child the little wooden horse she has made for him and the little mestizo boy abandons it for the toy train his father has brought him, the unfortunate woman, motionless, frozen, her eyes misty with tears, suddenly feels the cruelty and weight of misfortune, the excruciating pain of a happiness that is now gone.

Cecil B. DeMille’s films often feature, amid the cries of the damned, the tears of victims, and the rumblings of machines, rustic oases of silence and freshness where fragile idylls seem to unfold. We encounter them in Samson and Delilah, in The Ten Commandments, and especially in The Godless Girl, and these radiant moments, where nature, heroes, and feelings are cleansed of all impurity, come together like a miracle of divine candor: fabulous incursions into the dreams of a Christian who has not found consolation for the Fall.

Meadows visited by saints, a little peasant girl designated by Grace, a poor Lorraine home that Georges de La Tour would have recognized: Cecil B. DeMille’s secret villages clearly resemble Paradise. Joan the Woman reveals the filmmaker’s absolute intimacy with his dream in his complicit adoration of the young Saint of the people. The life of Joan of Arc has inspired many films, but I know of none that is animated by such certain faith, such exemplary fidelity and humility. This triumphant holiness, which illuminates the angelic scenes of childhood and the supernatural joys of battle, reconciles in the reality of God’s works the two aspirations of a director thirsting for peace and driven to action.

Joan the Woman: classicism already evident in a nascent art form, spontaneous fullness of gaze and a mise en scène so accurate that Louis Delluc could see in the American’s Joan of Arc a great “French work.”

[1] In The Ten Commandments, Rameses is actually much more moving than Moses, who is merely God’s instrument, and the desperate struggle he wages against his Creator gives him a grandeur that places the film in an essentially tragic perspective.

[2] The Ten Commandments, perhaps the most sober film in the history of cinema, drives the tragedy forward with exemplary simplicity, rigorously rejecting anything that is not essential to it – hence the almost abstract purity of the sets and costumes, the theatrical condensation of the mise en scène, and the hieratic sobriety of the direction of the actors (Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, both admirable), which irresistibly recall Poussin.

I would like to take this opportunity to answer a question from Adrian Martin here, so that as many course participants as possible can read it: the idea is to set up at least one Google Meet meeting with the people currently enrolled, on a date and at a time that is most convenient for everyone, preferably after the six classes have all been made available in their English subtitled versions.

Therefore, to all of you out there: SUBSCRIBE/INSCREVAM-SE.