Yes, it’s really me. I might update you on my life in a subsequent post, but for now, a short piece on a favorite film.

Get Out! Get Out! Get OUT of my LIFE!

One of the fleeting pleasures of living in Atlanta is the monthly screening of Tommy Wiseau’s trashy opus The Room at the Plaza Theater on Ponce de Leon Avenue. If you’re unfamiliar with the film or its cult status, I highly recommend that you check out Clark Collis’s article at Entertainment Weekly or Scott Tobias’s more recent account at The Onion before reading further (or see the film yourself if it’s available at your local indie exhibitor). In any case, rest assured that mere words cannot adequately describe the sheer giddiness that The Room elicits from me. I see Wiseau’s film as many things at once: a pleasure that (I’m somewhat ashamed to say) exceeds that of many of my favorites from classical Hollywood; a stunning, if unintentional, corollary to auteur theory; and an equally stunning affirmation of the notion of authorship itself.

In his seminal 1954 essay, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” François Truffaut wrote that the worst of Jean Renoir’s films would always be more interesting than the best of Jean Delannoy’s. The Room seems to offer this corollary: Tommy Wiseau’s worst film (so far, at least) will always be more interesting than Steven Spielberg’s best film (this holds up pretty well whether you think Spielberg’s best film is Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Schindler’s List. Trust me.). Wiseau’s film exposes (again, far from intentionally) one of the chief misinterpretations of auteur theory: that a distinctive authorial stamp immediately implies some kind of absolute aesthetic value.

<raising shields>Tommy Wiseau is unquestionably an auteur.</whew!> One of the chief appeals of The Room‘s near-camp aesthetic is Wiseau’s character Johnny, whom he portrays with a thick Austrian accent and lopsided diction that, judging by interviews with him, borders on the naturalistic. Wiseau’s continuity-defying script, baffling dialogue, and unorthodox shooting style (two cameras, one HD, one 35mm, placed side-by-side) shine through beautifully in the film–despite the anecdotally-reported warnings of fellow cast and crew members. Furthermore, his hand (or a hand, at any rate) is almost literally manifested on the film image itself, in the numerous out-of-focus shots that prompt audiences to shout “Focus!” whenever they appear. If one of the chief ideas of auteurism is that of the camera-stylo, the “camera-pen,” then Wiseau wields his with bravado, like an inebriated Douglas Sirk (that Wiseau has “chosen” the generic context of the family melodrama to do his wielding makes this connection all the more uncanny; I so desperately want “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” to have been an intentional nod to Nick Ray and Rebel Without a Cause). Wiseau’s authorial stamp permeates the The Room‘s narrative fabric as well. The entire film, such as it is, reads as a thinly-veiled autobiography; Johnny’s account to his pals (including his best friend) of his early days in San Francisco, complete with a story about being unable to cash a check from an out-of-state bank, oozes a wonderful mundanity, while his conniving, manipulative future wife Lisa is almost certainly based on a former girlfriend.

Granted, applying auteur theory to Tommy Wiseau is problematic on several levels. First, he’s only made two films (I haven’t seen his documentary Homeless in America, but it is apparently not as wholly incompetent–and thus nowhere near as pleasurable–as The Room), and thus I am necessarily defining a distinctive style in the absence of an oeuvre (no way around this, so for the purposes of this post I’m choosing to ignore that). Second, it is worth emphasizing that the Cahiers critics did not seek the mark of the camera-stylo in ostentatious formal techniques, especially when it came to the cinema of classical Hollywood (where such formalism would have gone against the classical paradigm); rather, mise-en-scene–over which individual directors had a somewhat freer rein–served as the primary site of authorship (cf. Keathley, Cinephilia and History, 14). Thus, we shouldn’t put too much stock in Wiseau’s formal mediocrity as a mark of authorship, putting aside the question of intentionality or the importance of a body of work in defining said authorship.

What really gets me about The Room, though, is that the film’s mise-en-scene is central to the pleasure many spectators derive out of it. The most frequent and literally jarring (at least for those of us sitting in the fourth row) nexus of spectatorial interaction with Wiseau’s film is a picture of a spoon on a table in Johnny’s living room – a picture which, when spotted on screen, elicits shouts of “SPOON!” from the audience and (if you’re lucky) a barrage of plastic utensils hurled toward the filmic image. This seemingly insignificant detail is in many ways the film’s “hook.” First-time viewers immediately understand what the text (as in the whole text of The Room – the film plus the communal social practice) is about. Intentional? Probably not. Other than Wiseau, however, I can think of one other director who would insert such a bizzare prop into his mise-en-scene–David Lynch–and he would make sure you noticed it. The difference is that Lynch very consciously defines and foregrounds his own authorship, while Wiseau has his defined for him by his fans. The question of intentionality then becomes moot; Wiseau’s craftsmanship, in all its forms, becomes simultaneously the butt of the joke and the object of fan appreciation. And isn’t fandom really what the phenomenon that film studies calls “auteurism” is fundamentally about?

At a more holistic textual level, however, I am always surprised at the level of character identification Wiseau is able to elicit in The Room. Despite the flatness of the characters and their undeveloped, unresolved concerns and goals (specifically, I’m thinking about the inexplicably dropped subplots of Claudette’s breast cancer and Denny’s drug problem), we genuinely care about them by the end, if in a surreal sort of way. I would argue that this is because the social practice of a screening of The Room serves to facilitate character identification in the stead of narrative. Together, the communal shouting of “spoon,” the audience re-naming of Mark (Greg Sestero) as “Sestosterone,” and all the other activities that go into watching the film (here‘s a partial list) form what Gerard Genette calls the paratext – a framing set of practices that help us understand the “original,” “real” text while simultaneously endowing it with new meaning. This is made even clearer by the difference in pleasure elicited by watching the film on DVD (a baffling experience even if the spectator is familiar with it) and watching a theatrical print with an audience who knows and constructs the paratext. Watching The Room in a theater with an audience for the first time is a magical experience; the text comes to life through a kind of real-time communal writing that, in contrast to the undeniably collaborative nature of new media, is also fleeting. No screening or viewing of The Room is the same, and the very thinness of Wiseau’s original text allows for this ephemeral paratextual superstructure to be built again and again (one of my all-time favorite Room moments occurred when one spectator, upon the appearance of Mark, bearded and jean-jacketed, shouted “Kenny Loggins, ladies and gentlemen!”). In that sense, Wiseau stands as a new kind of auteur-not one who hands down meaning upon high or has it constructed by scholarly or critical discourse, but an author built from the ground up by spectatorship.

Just a suggestion to head on over to Escape Pod X and listen to “The Man Who Stole a Planet,” a re-imagined episode of the old radio series Quiet, Please. It stars my old Midd pals Stefan Claypool and Jessie Gurd, as well as yours truly in some minor parts.

Or, even better, subscribe to the podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/EscapePodX

This is something I’ll be periodically involved in, so if you absolutely, positively must hear my voice instead of reading boring old posts about boring old movies, check it out.

I’m working on a post about Tommy Wiseau and The Room, his so-bad-its-good melodrama. I actually “finished” it before this post, but I’m not entirely happy with it so you get this plug instead. Quality over quantity, that’s my motto! <nervous laugh>

Oh, and for the fall I’ll be doing thesis research (the rise and fall of independent production in the 1930s), an authorship seminar on the great Billy Wilder, and a course on the role of gender in genre (with healthy doses of Douglas Sirk and Nick Ray!).

"You are TEARING me APART, Lisa!"

Another one of my writings, this time from my Contemporary Film Theory course. For the class, we read (Middlebury’s very own) Chris Keathley’s Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees, which offers a fascinating model for historical writing about film: the cinephiliac anecdote. The model’s power lies in its ability to move beyond the deep, metaphorical “meaning” of film texts in favor of ephemeral surface details – cinephiliac moments – that reveal unexpected insights that conventional historical discourses about film tend to dismiss. These insights often take the form of metonymic connections between separate film texts, and I attempted to use a kind of metonymic technique in writing my anecdote.

I should note that I first noticed the moment in question while taking Professor Keathley’s senior seminar in film, and that it was the subject of some discussion – the juiciest bits of which may have subconsciously influenced my writing, so I apologize to anyone who took The Surfaces of Cinema in 2007 whose comments or ideas I am unable to credit. While I am still trying to refine this particular mode of critical writing (with more of an emphasis on the critical), I have found that it can be incredibly liberating in illuminating what it is many people love about the cinema, and why they engage with it the way they do. As a theoretical approach, I am also attracted to the fact that writing a cinephiliac anecdote is a spectator-centered activity whereas many of the approaches of “Grand Theory” essentialize and totalize our viewing of films. Anyway, here’s the beef:

In Otto Preminger’s 1944 film Laura, Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), suspects the titular character (Gene Tierney) of murder and brings her down to the station for a taste of the third degree. Preminger’s mise-en-scene here is striking; Gene Tierney looks as if she’s being lit by an arc lamp from the silent era. My favorite moment in the film, however, comes as McPherson begins to move to the other side of the table where Laura is seated and awkwardly runs into a wooden chair before quickly moving it out of his way. The moment strikes me like an arrow—Dana Andrews seems genuinely surprised at the chair’s presence, as if he had not anticipated it when blocking out the scene. In many ways it’s a moment, however ephemeral, of pure realism—the kind of moment Bazin would have reveled in and that cinephilia seeks out, but made more perfect by its double significance. Dana Andrews is playing McPherson, who is in turn playing the “bad cop” in this scene within a scene, and the chair in question temporarily impedes both of them. My own pleasure here is also two-fold: first, in anticipating the chair, and second, in seeing Andrews and McPherson deal with it.

However, the moment also has a greater significance in the context of the film as a whole. Much of the criticism that has been done on Laura has suggested that the film’s second half is actually McPherson’s dream, an acting out of his desire for Laura wherein he plays an ideal masculine hero—“the man with the leg full of lead” as Clifton Webb’s character describes him. These critics point to a scene at the film’s midpoint, where McPherson falls asleep in a plush chair in Laura’s apartment, the camera dollies into her portrait on the wall (initiating McPherson’s dream), then dollies back to reveal that Laura, until now thought to be the murder victim herself, has returned. The interrogation scene, therefore, takes place completely within McPherson’s dream.

I have an odd impulse to read McPherson’s chair trouble here as a sign of some temporary disruption in his dream-state, like the sudden jolt that sometimes wakes us as we fall asleep. After all, whose ideal fantasy of themselves involves them tripping over furniture? Furniture and our interaction with it is far too mundane, far too real, for us to purposefully dwell on it in the texts, movies, and other fantasies we create. Chairs, desks, divans, and beds are rarely in the way in the classical Hollywood text, and even when they are, our heroes expertly move around them as if they had a sixth sense, a kind of “furniture sense.” If it serves any purpose, furniture tends to consume people in these texts, like the plush chair that consumes McPherson when he falls asleep earlier in the film or the desk that restrains Laura in the interrogation room. Indeed, furniture serves a similar, and central, role in our spectatorship of films; while any kind of furniture serves to comfort and numb our bodies to the stimuli of the external world, chairs in particular restrain our watching to a particular angle and, as is universally the case in theaters, make it extremely inconvenient for us to leave or move around. Chairs trap us in the text.

One of my earliest cinephiliac memories, however, involved a complete rejection of chairs. As a kid of about 8 or 9, I remember there being a period of several weeks where, every day after school, I would be compelled to watch at least one of my collection of VHS tapes I kept in two mahogany drawers beneath our TV. No matter what I watched, I could never sit in one of the two upholstered chairs in our living room. Not that I didn’t want to be trapped or consumed by my movies; I think my parents just didn’t know how to buy kid-friendly furniture. These chairs were upright, leather-upholstered, and studded with brass tacks on the edges; the kind of chairs Edward G. Robinson might do his pipe-smoking in. Thus, I had to improvise. I had a very specific setup: two burgundy plush pillows, one of which propped the other up at a 45-degree angle, on the floor between the coffee table and the TV. The angle was perfect; I looked up at the film like it was some sort of glowing god. At that age, chairs only disrupted my dreams, like they do for McPherson; the only furniture I needed were those two pillows and our wood floor.

Or perhaps my reading of this moment as a kind of dream-jolt results from the actual jolt of the wooden chair against the floor as Dana Andrews heaves it out of his way; indeed, the sound of wood hitting wood has a kind of jolting, instantly recognizable significance. There’s a kind of density to wood, but inside it only a boring evenness; like Dana Andrews, my favorite wooden actor, what’s interesting is its surface. Allow me to digress with a quote: “Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators ([such as] Laurel and Hardy, or the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

So wrote the iconoclastic Manny Farber—a better writer than I—in his 1962 essay, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” My own pleasure in reading Farber’s writing, especially his film reviews, is not that I necessarily agree with him—he famously called The Best Years of Our Lives “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz”—but rather that his caustic opaqueness always manages to get across a sense of the immediate, preconscious sensations of art, the surfaces of cinema. What Farber means by his phrase “termite art” is a kind of unpretentiousness, a recognition that “meaning” with a capital “M” is only the beginning, and that what we actually love about cinema is beyond our ability to construct. As one character said in The Rocketeer, a film I definitely had in my VHS collection, “Acting is acting like you’re not acting”; in other words, human intent in art is at best vaguely interesting. My favorite scene in The Best Years of Our Lives is when the demobilized army air force bombardier Fred Derry, played (not coincidentally) by Dana Andrews, walks through a boneyard filled with rows upon rows of engines, propellers, and fuselages from thousands of scrapped planes. While Wyler’s camerawork in the scene is superb, I can only appreciate it, not love it. What I love is the sight of Dana Andrews simply walking past these rusting hulks of metal, the sense of their weight and material. In that sense, maybe I can almost agree with Manny Farber. The Best Years of Our Lives is, for me, “a horse-drawn truckload of aluminum.” Or wood.

I wrote this paper for my Contemporary Film Theory course…it was partly inspired by David Bordwell’s blog post on flashback structure, in which he explores the surprisingly early origins of the flashback as a narrative device and devotes a few paragraphs to The Sin of Nora Moran (the post is well worth a read, as is Maureen Turim’s book on the subject). As usual, footnote formatting is sort of troublesome. In this case, [brackets] indicate a reference to a footnote, while (parentheses) refer to the syuzhet segments listed in appendix 1. Enjoy.

For many years, received histories of the flashback in classical Hollywood cinema pointed to Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941) as a watershed film in the use of flashback-structured narration, a film that set off a cycle of flashback-obsessed noirs and melodramas during the 1940s and 1950s. More recent accounts, however, have shown that flashbacks are nearly as old as the cinema itself, and that convoluted flashback-structured narratives predate Citizen Kane by several years [1].  An oft-cited film in this regard is The Power and the Glory (Fox, 1933), a Jesse Lasky-produced melodrama written by Preston Sturges [2].  The film’s innovative narrative structure was a key selling point for the studio; Fox executives coined the term “narratage” (a portmanteau of “narrative” and “montage”) to publicize it. Specifically, the term referred to the use of voice-over narration to anchor a flashback sequence in time (usually “the past”) and to remind the viewer of the presence of a diegetic narrator “in the present.” A Maureen Turim has shown, the anchoring function of voice-over in The Power and the Glory helps to stabilize an otherwise chaotic narration that jumps continually forward and backward among three separate periods in the life of its deceased protagonist, Thomas Gardner (Spencer Tracy), while the flashback structure as a whole serves to ironically condemn his actions [3].  Citizen Kane’s similarities to The Power and the Glory are unmistakable, although Welles’s film has a more intricate narrative structure and a richer mise-en-scene. Clearly, the notion of a non-chronologically structured syuzhet (to use the Formalist term) was not at all foreign to Hollywood by 1941; Kane was simply a more baroque example of a long-standing formal tradition.

Furthermore, The Power and the Glory’s use of a relatively innovative, specifically-marketed mode of narration outside the Hollywood norm was itself not an unusual strategy. The film’s status as a relatively prestigious production headed by Jesse Lasky suggests a certain confidence on the part of Fox executives in its ability to perform at the box office. It should also be noted that other studios during this period were experimenting with new and different narrative techniques; MGM’s Strange Interlude (1932), based on the experimental play by Eugene O’Neill, employed voiceover soliloquies to narrate the inner thoughts of its characters—to critical acclaim and popular amusement. First National’s Two Seconds (1932), starring Edward G Robinson, employed a frame story wherein a man sentenced to die by the electric chair sees his crime, arrest, and conviction flash before his eyes in the two seconds it takes for him to die. Nor was narrative innovation during this period strictly a phenomenon of the major studios. Serial production, the majority of which was handled by independent companies on Poverty Row in the 30s, necessitated a narrative strategy different from studio features.  For example, in the John Wayne Mascot serial, The Shadow of the Eagle (1932), each episode begins with a brief expository segment, followed by a replay of the previous episode’s final minute. Since each episode ends with a “cliffhanger”—a precarious narrative situation left unresolved—this replay typically resolves the cliffhanger and transitions directly into the new narrative material of the current episode (which invariably sets up another cliffhanger).

Although the particularities of the serial form required different strategies of exposition and (ir)resolution, The Shadow of the Eagle as a whole adhered to Hollywood’s contemporary narrative conventions. The same cannot be said of The Sin of Nora Moran (Majestic, 1933), a Poverty Row melodrama released a mere two months after The Power and the Glory. Nora Moran directly lifted Sturges’s narratage technique, but pushed it toward the very limits of 1930s standards of narrative comprehensibility. Nora Moran’s flashback structure is quite convoluted compared to that of The Power and the Glory; while a narrative “present” does frame and anchor the plot, the film’s narrative “past” is presented in a nested flashback structure that withholds crucial narrative information through ellipsis. Furthermore, the film’s narration displays a particular ambivalence between the status of the past as objective or subjective; flashbacks coded as dreams dwell within more objective flashbacks, and the film has at least three separate diegetic “narrators.” In both of these respects, the film stretches Hollywood’s paradigm of narrative coherence and comprehensibility, and contemporary reception demonstrates the film’s resultant critical failure. In this paper, I will employ various narratological strategies to delimit the extent of Nora Moran’s formal and narrative transgression, relying primarily on David Bordwell’s account of the paradigm of classical narration and Maureen Turim’s work on flashback structure.

The plotting of Nora Moran is quite complicated and I have included in Appendix 1 a listing of the film’s syuzhet segments for reference. What follows is more a synopsis of story than of plot (which I discuss in detail below), but the fabula as a whole is thrown into doubt by its very presentation. In 1917, the titular character (played as a child by Cora Sue Collins), a five-year-old orphan, is adopted by the Morans (Otis Harlan and Aggie Herring). When her adopted parents are killed in an auto accident in 1925, the now thirteen-year-old Nora (Zita Johann) uses their modest inheritance to move to New York and pay for dancing lessons. Success and employment prove elusive, however, and after months of searching Nora takes a job at a traveling circus as an assistant to the lion-tamer Paulino (John Miljan). One night, Paulino comes to Nora’s cabin and rapes her. The resultant trauma leads Nora to contemplate suicide, but her friend Sadie gives her money and convinces her to run away from the circus. Nora, now 20, finds a job as a chorus line dancer in a New York nightclub, where one night she meets Dick Crawford (Paul Cavanagh), the married governor of New York. The two begin an affair, Dick rents a cottage in the country for them, and Nora is happy for the first time in her life.

However, John Grant (Alan Dinehart), a New York district attorney and the brother of Dick’s wife, discovers the affair and threatens to expose it unless Dick leaves Nora. Dick does leave, and Grant offers Nora a one-time payment to keep quiet and stay out of Dick’s life. Nora refuses, but Grant tells her he will wait a few hours at a local hotel for her to telephone in case she changes her mind. Meanwhile, Dick has a change of heart and returns to the cottage to reconcile with Nora—only to discover that Paulino has arrived there first (the circus happens to be in town), and is threatening to blackmail Dick. A fight breaks out, and Dick, acting in self-defense, accidentally kills Paulino. Nora convinces Dick to leave the cottage and avoid any incrimination in Paulino’s death, stating that she has a plan to make it look like an accident, and that she would rather never see Dick again than have their relationship cheapened by newspaper scandal. He leaves, and Nora calls Grant to help her dispose of Paulino’s body, telling him that she murdered Paulino and gambling on Grant’s desire to keep his sister’s name out of the papers. He reluctantly agrees.

Grant drops Nora and the body off at the train tracks, near where the circus train is loading, and leaves. However, Nora and Paulino’s body are caught on the train, which heads strait to New York City and Grant’s prosecutorial jurisdiction. Resigned to her fate and wishing (again) to keep Dick’s name out of the papers, Nora is prosecuted by Grant, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. In the hours leading up to her execution, Nora dreams about the events of her life while Dick, put in a precarious situation by his role as governor, sweats in his office over whether or not to pardon her. An apparition of Nora appears to him and tells him not to worry—that she is dying “to keep the only happiness I’ve ever known…and for all the good things you’re going to do.” Dick attempts to pardon her anyway, but fails when he discovers that the telephone line to his office is dead. Nora’s apparition smiles, then disappears to signify her execution. Despondent, Dick kills himself, but not before leaving Grant a letter admitting Nora’s innocence and his role in Paulino’s death. Months later, Dick’s wife Edith (Claire DuBray) discovers anonymous love letters in his safe and goes to her brother’s office, where Grant tells her (and us) the whole story.

Released in December 1933, Nora Moran was produced and directed by Phil Goldstone, a real estate developer-turned-independent producer. Based on a Willis Maxwell Goodhue stage play, Burnt Offering, the film was a critical failure [4].  The two issues most commented on by contemporary reviewers were the film’s complicated narrative structure and overall tonal register, which many reviews found too depressing for Depression-era audiences. Mordaunt Hall called Nora Moran “a bewildering mass of scenes,” “muddled,” and “exceedingly depressing” in his New York Times review [5].  Film Daily echoed Hall’s sentiments: “This production is handicapped by a theme too full of grief. Nor is the continuity handled with much effect.”[6]  Motion Picture Herald saw “no beginning and no ending” to the film, while Harrison’s Reports called it “draggy, and all quite confusing.”[7]  Variety honed in on the central source of confusion in the film’s use of narratage:

Because the continuity often becomes involved in an attempt to bring the technique of narratage to the screen with practicability, it is frequently difficult to follow the story. The most confusing sequence is the footage which deals with the governor, who, conscience-stricken over the fact that the girl is taking the blame for murder, is finally driven to a last minute pardon. This can be taken either as a nightmare or a scene in which the governor is actually trying to do something and finally phones to order a pardon but finds he’s too late. [8]

The reviewer here refers to the film’s most ambivalent narrative conceit, an understanding of which necessitates an analysis of the film’s flashback structure.

Nora Moran’s flashbacks can be divided into three temporal planes:

1.) The film’s “present,” which takes place exclusively within Grant’s office and serves as an ultimate framing narrative. It is here that Edith Crawford serves as a stand-in for the audience; her knowledge of Nora’s life is equivalent to ours.

2.) The film’s “past,” in which the details of Nora’s life leading up to her imprisonment are narrated. Covering 15 years and numerous locations, most of the film’s 65-minute running time is devoted to this plane, but the reliability of the narration here is problematic due to constant revelations in the other two planes.

3.) The “recent past,” spanning just the few hours leading up to Nora’s execution. This plane is by far the most surreal and unstable; the notion that the past temporal plane might be Nora’s dream is introduced and constantly reiterated for us here. Furthermore, the plane itself is too poetic—that is, too signifier-intensive—for us to easily treat it as a reliable account of Nora’s actual past. Rather, it exists more as a kind of psychological plane or dream – an oneiric state. Nora and other characters are fully aware of the past, present, and future in this plane.

The film’s flashback structure jumps constantly between these three temporal planes, and narratage is used to anchor this structure, at least on the surface, through voiceover and a specific stylistic device: a diagonal veil-wipe, similar to a device used in The Power and the Glory, that accompanies voiceover narration from a different temporal plane. To be clear, narratage does not serve a transitional function in the film—in other words, it does not move us from one temporal plane to another (Nora Moran tends to use lap dissolves for this, though not exclusively). Rather, it serves a clarifying function, reminding us of the narrated status of what we are seeing before returning to a more invisible style of narration. A typical example comes nearly eight minutes into the film. A dissolve transitions us from Grant’s introductory framing narrative in the present to a montage of the preparations for Nora’s execution in the recent past. At this point in the film the recent past’s ambiguous status has not yet been revealed to us, and we assume what we are seeing is a simple flashback, albeit in montage form. We are eventually given a close-up of a knife, which dissolves to a close-up of a syringe in a graphic match.

The shot of the syringe is then slightly darkened by a diagonal veil, which descends from the upper right to the lower left corner of the frame in the same manner as a wipe. Grant, speaking to Edith in the present, is heard in a voiceover: “Her suffering had been so mute and pitiful that they tried to relieve her.” The veil lifts, and we are introduced to Nora. A longer example of narratage occurs just a few moments later, and through its suggestion of Nora’s delirium hints that the extended sequence to follow, which narrates Nora’s past, exists purely in her mind:

Gradually, the opiate quieted her body, but her mind was too disordered. And in her confused state, everything became grotesque and unreal. We’ve all experienced it, and in our helplessness, we call on the one who means protection to us. For Nora, it was Father Ryan, now as when she was a child…

The veil-wipe device acts as a sort of signifier of narrative soliloquy, distancing viewers from the filmic image and calling attention to the pertinent narrative information located in the voiceover. During this soliloquy, two temporal planes temporarily coexist, but the narration of one (the present) is privileged over the other (the past), which in this case becomes a kind of visual poetic, signifying very little in its own right. In this sense, narratage was an attempt to distinguish intra-flashback sequences from the narrative as a whole through style—a distinction, it should be noted, that at this point in film history was not frequently made.

As mentioned above, flashbacks in one form or another were at least twenty years old by the release of Nora Moran, and possibly older. The flashback was especially common in melodrama, which by the early thirties had acquired a well-codified set of conventions. Nora Moran exhibits many of them: a “kept woman” plot, tragic realizations that come too late to be acted upon, a woman’s self-sacrifice for those she loves (however problematic), and implausible coincidences that suture the plot together and heighten the tragedy. The Sin of Madelon Claudet (MGM, 1931), one of the more successful melodramas of the early thirties, also featured a flashback structure (though a much simpler one) and was almost certainly an influence on Nora Moran, the similarity of the titles notwithstanding. Furthermore, Turim has demonstrated the preponderance of subjective flashbacks in melodramas with trial testimonies during the late silent period, and their typical form highlights the norm against which The Power and the Glory and Nora Moran distinguished themselves:

Once these trial flashbacks are underway, the imagery is presented contradictorily, as both narrated testimony and objective account. Although different witnesses may narrate different parts of the story, there is little questioning of subjectivity or faulty memories or development of overlapping and contradictory versions as each unfolds—although later trial testimony flashbacks will exploit these alternatives. The emphasis in the twenties is rather on the reconstruction of past events viewed by a witness with a clarity characteristic of the present. Like many flashbacks, once the trial flashback is under way, it is impossible to distinguish sequences within that flashback from other sequences occurring in the present on formal levels of filmic style. [9]

Narratage served to make the distinction refused in the silent era by distinguishing separate temporal planes in the narrative through the use of sound; in that sense it was part of an impulse for greater narrative clarity, if at the expense of stylistic obtrusiveness. This helps to explain contemporary critical reaction to Nora Moran; The Power and The Glory had used narratage to great effect in coherently structuring a non-linear syuzhet, while Goldstone’s film managed to confuse its viewers despite the structure offered by narratage. Why was this the case? One answer may lie in the fact that the narratage in Nora Moran is extremely dense; there are no less than twelve veil-wipes in the film. Indeed, the film packs an incredible amount of narrative information into its 65 minutes; the fabula covers sixteen years of Nora’s life, compressed into a relatively detailed three through six separate montage sequences (compiled using footage from other films, according to Bordwell) [10].  Furthermore, the film jumps temporally an astounding twenty times, or an average of about once every three minutes (Cf. Appendix 1). Though the film is perfectly comprehensible on multiple viewings, it is not surprising that a 1930s audience, living in a time when film was more ephemeral and narrative clarity was the norm above all else, would be confounded by Nora Moran’s lack of “continuity.”

The real root of the film’s narrative transgression, however, lay in the trustworthiness of the narration itself. As described above, dreamlike character subjectivity—focalized particularly around Nora but also around Grant and Dick—is a central conceit of the film’s narration of the past and of the hours leading up to Nora’s execution. Extended sequences of the film are coded ambivalently through narration as memory, dreams, or objective truth—and the stability of this coding breaks down as the film progresses. Our first hint that something is amiss in the narration arrives concurrently with the film’s first use of narratage, in the transition from sequence 2 to sequence 3 (Cf. Appendix 1). In this transition, we enter the film’s first nested flashback as Nora, “in her confused state,” calls on Father Ryan for spiritual strength in the hours leading up to her execution. The sequences that follow (3-10) are essentially biographical, and we learn about Nora’s backstory up to the point that she was raped by Paulino. Crucially, however, Grant continues to narrate the sequence in voiceover—both during moments of narratage and during some non-narratage sequences such as the montage (6) where Nora seeks work in New York. This narration codes the past being presented to us as objectively true, despite the fact that we transitioned to this particular temporal plane through Nora’s delirious memory. Yet the film also transitions out of this sequence after Nora’s rape (11a) with a brief dissolve to Nora’s tossing and turning in bed, suggesting that she is recalling the trauma she suffered, before dissolving again back to Grant’s office in the present. Grant’s voiceover narration over this first dissolve (“Paulino’s brutality and her fear of him were things that she could never forget”) further suggests his ultimate omniscience; not only does he know exactly what happened to Nora, he knows exactly how Nora remembers what happened to her.

The next two sequences (11b and 12) are crucial in understanding the ambiguity of the film’s narrative logic. After the dissolve back to Grant’s office, Grant explains to Edith (and us) the film’s narration of the past, explicitly characterizing it as both Nora’s dream and objective truth:

When things happen in our lives, we’re conscious of them as events. But later, subconsciously, we see our lives as a pattern, and it’s easy to recall the events that form that pattern. And so it was with Nora…[dissolve to Nora in her cell, with Mrs. Watts looking on] she was in a cell waiting to die, and yet she was in the circus. She was dreaming, but yet in her subconscious mind, she was reliving the events that formed the pattern of her life.

By this point in the film, Nora’s “reliving” of the events of her life has consisted simply of recalling those events, allowing them to be presented to us; there is something of a double focalization here (Grant and Nora), but Grant’s voiceover narration and omniscience tend to privilege the objective truth of Nora’s dream, despite its status as a subjective imagining. However, the double-exposure wipe that occurs immediately upon the conclusion of this narration commences a scene (12) that throws this assertion into question. The previous image of the sleeping Nora in her cell is replaced by a similar image of her wearing her circus clothes. Nora wakes and asks for Mrs. Watts, her cell nurse, but finds a different woman sitting by her side:

Woman: No, I’m Sadie. Don’t you remember me?
Nora: No, I don’t…everything seems strange.
Sadie: That’s because you’re dreaming. And so far you’ve dreamt things exactly as they’ve happened, but I thought when you got to me, I would change the dream if you wanted me to.

Sadie goes on to explain that as things actually happened, she found Nora ready to commit suicide but gave her a hundred dollars and convinced her to run away from the circus. “If I hadn’t given you the money, you might not be here in jail, waiting to be electrocuted,” she says. By this point, however, Nora’s clothing and the homey mise-en-scene have indicated that she is definitely not in her cell, and she expresses our confusion: “But I’m not in jail! I’m here!” The film refuses to tell us where “here” is exactly, but it becomes clear that the space in question, while definitely oneiric, also existed at one point in Nora’s past. Sadie reveals that if she gives Nora the money, it is likely that history will repeat itself and she will end up killing a man (which we later know will not happen, but more on that later); however, Nora seems to know that leaving the circus and moving to New York will bring her some form of happiness, and she takes the money anyway. At this point the film’s narration shifts back into an expository past, this time devoid of Grant’s narration (13 and 14). From this point forward, the film’s narration of the past shifts between registers of simple exposition and meta-reflection, wherein Nora explicitly comments on—and even interacts with other characters about—the choices she made in the past.

As if Nora Moran’s metaoneiric narration of the past weren’t complicated enough, the film also shifts narrative focalization within the temporal planes of the past and recent past, or abandons it altogether. In one scene (19), Dick and Grant stand eerily over Nora’s open casket, presumably after her execution.

Grant: …come to the execution tonight—they’re going to kill her again. The warden wasn’t pleased with the way she died.
Dick: I won’t have it! They can’t do that!
Grant: But they’ve done it. Don’t you understand? She’s dead.

Clearly, many viewers and critics didn’t understand. We are unable to locate this moment in time or space; although a dissolve…

suggests that it is another of Nora’s dreams as she lies in her cell awaiting execution, our uncertainty by this point in the film as to who is narrating it leads us to expect a range of focalization possibilities normally not available in classical narration. This range, coupled with the nearly black mise-en-scene and opaque dialogue, catapult the scene into full-blown surrealism. Indeed, by the last few minutes of the film, where Dick finds himself talking to Nora’s disembodied floating head,

it seems likely that many audiences had simply given up.

Writing about Le Silence (1920) and Fievre (1921), two films by the French filmmaker and critic Louis Delluc, Turim has argued that

In these Delluc films the manipulation of temporality as an element of composition throws into question the status of the narrative event. Events in the past are available only through the filter of a troubled or ambiguous memory; events in the present are subject to the intrusive associations of the past which determine their shape. The kind of subjectivity this implies is not simply a unitary individual’s perspective; focalization, while always marked, is itself disordered, impulsive, charged with the forces of desire. Subjectivity here is of a different order then it is in fictions in which a character is assigned a more singular and unified subjective reality and in which conflicts between the characters’ perspectives are systematically worked out. Here, instead, filmic narrative becomes the scene in which this tension within the imaginary reality of the fictive individual can be played out [11].

In many ways, Turim might have been writing about Nora Moran. While I am not suggesting a direct or even an indirect influence on the film by French Impressionist filmmaking of the early twenties, I do argue that the film has something of an artistic sensibility in its manipulation of temporality, using Nora’s dream as the device of that manipulation. While Nora’s memory is never questioned and is in fact anchored as more or less objective truth by Grant’s narration, the past does intrude onto the present in the sense that Nora is given a kind of false choice—in her dreams, it is suggested many times that she can change the outcome of events, yet both Grant’s narration and numerous oneiric characters remind us constantly that she is already dead, a fact established five minutes into the film. The unambiguous narrative truth of the present is constantly set up to be undermined by the ambiguity of the past, only to be just as constantly reaffirmed in the end.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of Nora Moran is that it shares affinities with the much later films noir of the 40s and early 50s. In terms of its dominant tonal register, the film is unquestionably a melodrama, but the moral ambiguity of its characters (especially its male characters), its convoluted plot, and its interest in a kind of pop psychoanalysis are all features that pre-figure noir in some fashion. I would argue that the most suggestive element in this regard is the film’s elliptical hermeneutic structure. I am using the term “hermeneutic” in the Barthesian sense of “an enigma […] distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed”; Bordwell in The Classical Hollywood Cinema calls it “hypothesis-forming.” [12] At any rate, I mean the central questions that propel a narrative, and I would suggest that Nora Moran’s narration is structured around answering one question while at the same time withholding and even deliberately deceiving us about another. Regarding the difference between narration in melodrama and that of the detective story, Bordwell writes:

Narration [in the melodrama] will be highly communicative about fabula information—specifically, information pertaining to characters’ emotional states. There will be fewer focused gaps in fabula information. The narration will also be quite unrestricted in range, closer to an omniscient survey, so that the film can engender pity, irony, and other “dissociated” emotions. Whereas the detective story emphasizes the act of unearthing what has already occurred, the melodrama typically relies on a firm primacy effect, plays down curiosity about the past, and maximizes our urge to know what will happen next—and, especially, how any given character will react to what has happened. Viewer interest is maintained by retardation and carefully timed coincidences that produce surprise. [13]

Nora Moran is an atypical melodrama in that it privileges a certain curiosity about the past, and the film’s flashback structure ensures an interest in both unearthing what has already occurred and what will happen next. There are two central hermeneutics in the film, and (perhaps not surprisingly) they both have to do with Nora. The first hermeneutic/question/enigma is posed indirectly by the title of the film and diegetically when Grant asks Edith (Appendix 1, 1) whether she has ever heard of Nora Moran and reveals to her that Dick was having an affair with Nora; one half the central question here—“Who is Nora Moran?”—is answered by the more or less biographical account that is the film’s first act (1-10), while the second half—“Why was Nora executed?”—is partially answered by Sadie in (12); she killed a man. (13) through (24) detail the circumstances that lead up to the murder, answering several smaller hermeneutics (Who did Nora kill? – Paulino. Where did the murder take place? – The cottage Nora and Dick have been renting.) However, in answering the first hermeneutic, the film deliberately withholds the presence of a second. Sadie’s statement that Nora killed a man, the presence of Paulino’s body in the cottage, and Nora’s admission of guilt all contribute to the overwhelming impression by the end of the second act (around 25) that Nora is guilty of the murder, though Paulino’s past act of rape suggests that she may have acted in self-defense. However, the film soon poses a second hermeneutic—“Is Nora guilty?”—in the scene (28) where Grant highlights the sheer miscarriage of justice that was Nora’s trial and conviction, regardless of her guilt; as he begins to read Edith another letter, we begin to suspect that a crucial part of the story has been elided from us. The film’s final act confirms these suspicions in its depiction of Dick’s role in the murder. By withholding from us until the end the crucial narrative detail that Dick killed Paulino in self-defense, the film’s narrative structure hews closer to the detective story—and hence film noir—than to the traditional melodrama.

Ultimately, The Sin of Nora Moran offers an example of the structural possibilities of narrative open to Hollywood, and especially to Poverty Row, during the early thirties. Though something of a limit case, the film demonstrates certain precocious proclivities for intricate storytelling, psychological complexity, and moral ambiguity that would only begin to come to the surface in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking a decade later. It should be emphasized that The Sin of Nora Moran is by no means a revolutionary film; it still has a fundamental interest in a certain kind of narrative causality and character motivation. However, the film does stretch the Hollywood paradigm toward its extremes—even its concluding lines seem to question the basic Hollywood model of beginning-middle-end: “It ends there. Or does it begin?” For the reviewers of the 1930s, the ambiguity of this question, and the complex exploration of time and space it entailed, was unacceptable. For at least two modern cinephiles, however, The Sin of Nora Moran remains “the nuttiest”—and best—“B-film of the 1930s.” [14]

Appendix 1 – Syuzhet Segments (Format: Cf. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 195-196). Numbers correspond to sequence order in the syuzhet.

Present – Grant’s Office
1. Grant tells Edith about Nora
(FIRST HERMENEUTIC – WHO IS NORA MORAN AND WHY WAS SHE SENTENCED TO DIE?)
11b. The “past” revealed as Nora’s dream
15. “Before you judge that girl…”
21. “When Dick left that night, I stayed to settle with Nora”
26. “I won’t ask you to believe what happened next”
28. Grant: “I want to read you a letter…”
(SECOND HERMENEUTIC – IS NORA GUILY?)
36. Grant: “It ends there. Or does it begin?” Burns letters, THE END.

Recent Past / Oneiric State
2. Montage: Preparing for Nora’s execution
11a. Dissolve to Nora, dreaming
12. Nora’s cell: Nora’s metadream, Sadie (FIRST H. PARTIALLY ANSWERED)
17. Nora’s cell: Nora’s hair cut – “she seemed to know”
19. Nora’s wake (after execution): “they’re going to kill her again”
20. Nora’s cell: “I’m not dead, I’m dreaming!”
29. Montage: Newspapers, Moran To Die at 8
30. Dick’s office, secretaries haven’t hooked telephone lines up
31. Dick’s office: VO from Dick, Montage: thinking of their relationship
34. Dick’s office: Nora’s apparition appears
35. Dick’s office: Nora executed, Dick writes the letter to Grant, kills himself

Past
3. Orphanage: Nora, 5 years old, is adopted
4. 8 years later: Nora’s parents killed
5. Father Ryan’s Office: Nora decides to learn to dance
6. Montage: Nora looks for work
7. Employment office: Nora gets a job at the circus
8. Circus: Paulino wrestles a lion
9. Nora is made Paulino’s assistant
10. Train: Paulino rapes Nora
13. Montage: Nora goes to New York
14. Montage: Dick and Nora’s romance
16. Cottage: Nora happy with Dick – faints
18. Cottage: Nora hears circus music – talks with Dick about it – John Grant enters, Crawford leaves Nora – “Did I do it better that time?”
22. Cottage: Nora leaving on next train
23. Grant in Hotel Room
24. Cottage: Nora reveals Paulino’s body
25. Staging a suicide, Grant drives home (FIRST H. ANSWERED – WE THINK)
27. Police HQ: Nora caught, admits guilt
32. Driving Away, Cottage: Dick killed Paulino in self-defense (SECOND H. ANSWERED – NO.)
33. Nora convinces Dick to go

Notes
[1] Maureen Turim, in her book Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History (New York: Routledge, 1989), places the origin of the technique in the 1910s (21-59).
[2] David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 194; David Bordwell, “Grandmaster Flashback,” David Bordwll’s Website on Cinema (posted 27 January 2009), URL: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=3253
[3] Turim, 110-111.
[4] Michael R. Pitts, Poverty Row Studios, 1929-1940 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1997), 224, 233.
[5] Mordaunt Hall, “A Tale of Woe,” New York Times review of The Sin of Nora Moran, 13 December 1933, 29.
[6] Film Daily, 14 December 1933, 6.
[7] Motion Picture Herald, 30 December 1933, 34; Harrison’s Reports, 23 December 1933, 202.
[8] Variety, 19 December 1933, 19, 37.
[9] Turim, 54.
[10] Bordwell, “Grandmaster Flashback.”
[11] Turim, 74.
[12] Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), 19; David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 39.
[13] Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 70.
[14] Bordwell, “Grandmaster flashback.” Yours truly would be the other.

Also, it has come to my attention that my mom now reads my blog on occasion. Hi, mom. I’ll try not to embarass you in front of the ether-cloud. Happy early Mother’s Day.

In the meantime, I urge everyone to check out Battlestar‘s final episode, which promises to be epic, as well as Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, which is shaping up to be quite a series (in my humble opinion). I can’t help but wonder if one day the ’00s will be known as the Golden (Silver?) Age of Television.

Fun!

First up, my screenings so far from my Contemporary Theory class:

Blowup [Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1966]

Just as good the third time around, but not much to say that hasn’t already been said. Antonioni’s opus is famous for killing the already anemic Production Code, and is still one of the best films ever made about subjectivity and the act of spectatorship. I mean…nothing. It’s not about anything. Sorry. Actually, it is. But not really.

Seriously though, take a good look at the famous frame above. At first glance, the diagonal arrangement of the fashion models, combined with the lines of the room’s walls, floor, and ceiling, give the shot a strong sense of depth. However, Antonioni’s real project here is to expose the artifice of this depth as an act of “framing.” An extended look reveals the forced perspective of the space, and the glass panes separating the models expose our sense of depth as a simply a discontinuous series of flat planes. Furthermore, while the shot as a whole is obviously framed extradiegetically (even art films like Blowup tend to be projected in standardized rectangular aspect ratios), inside the story world, the act of framing here is a two-fold phenomenon. David Hemmings, the figure in the foreground who plays the film’s protagonist (Thomas, a fashion photographer), is framing a shot of the models using the viewfinder in his camera. Mentally erase his figure from the shot for a moment, and it is almost as if we are looking through his viewfinder at the intended shot. We thus retain a sense of both the objective scene and Thomas’s subjective point of view (as mediated by a camera), and Antonioni exposes an ambivalence about the act of spectatorship itself.

In any case, Blowup is one of those films worth a frame-by-frame analysis – and such an analysis would only begin to scratch the surface.

The Thin Blue Line [Errol Morris, 1988]

A superb documentary (although Morris apparently prefers the term “nonfiction film”) about the murder of a policeman and the wrongful conviction of the accused killer, Randall Dale Adams. Adams was eventually exonerated as a result of this film (and then sued Errol Morris for “stealing” his life story, but that’s a tale for another day). Visually stunning and morally exasperating.

As I’ve said, I’m normally going to try to avoid overt politics in this blog, but I know of few people who could watch this film and sill believe afterward that capital punishment is ever defensible, not to mention in a modern, democratic society.

There you go…short pieces on some of my other screenings to follow. Also, I am working on a theory project for my Horror class on highway safety films of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s (Signal 30, Mechanized Death, Wheels of Tragedy, Death on the Highway, The Last Prom). I have already viewed Bret Woods’s excellent documentary on the subject, Hell’s Highway, but if anyone knows of any pertinent academic work, particularly on the relationship between safety or educational films and the horror genre, please do let me know.

Also, I have become rabidly addicted to the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack.

Well, the semester’s finally over, and I survived…I think. Here’s the paper I wrote for my film theory class. In it, I hypothesize about what Hugo Muensterberg, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) film theorists, would have thought of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr (Metro Pictures, 1924). Enjoy.

Muensterberg, Liminality, and the Slapstick Photoplay: The Case for Buster Keaton

I have decided to take a quick break from my furious writing spree to share my term paper for my Fritz Lang Authorship class. It’s about Lang’s use of diegetic sound in M (1931), Fury (1936), and You Only Live Once (1937). Enjoy.

Crossing the Atlantic, Hearing Other Voices