The forefront of achievement during the silent the late forefront of cinematic achievement during the silent era. In the late 1910s and the early 1920s, the best films of Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller and Carl Theodor Dreyer achieved an almost unequalled delicacy and naturalism. However, with the coming of sound and the growing dominance of Hollywood, the sparsely populated Nordic countries became linguistically and culturally isolated.
Victor David Sjöström
Finnish-Swedish actor Mauritz Stiller photographed by Arnold Genthe.
Carl Theodor Dreyer by Erling Mandelmann.
By the late 1940s, though, Scandinavia-especially Sweden-was again making creative films; film historian Peter Cowie has claimed: ‘Probably no other nation of the comparative population has matched the artistic success of Sweden in the cinema’. Central to that success was the photogenic beauty of its rural and urban landscapes and the contrast between its austere Lutheran traditions and its 20th-century evolution into a pacific, secular social democracy.
Two small promotional flyers for the American presentation of the film ‘Sommaren med Monika’
This is the DVD cover art of ‘Summer Interlude’. The cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher of the video or the studio which produced the video.
Death and Antonius Block choose sides for the chess game. ‘Det sjunde inseglet’
Novelist Ulla Isaksson wrote the screenplay of ‘Jungfrukällan‘, particularly interested in questions of faith.
Ingmar Bergman (L) and Victor Sjöström (R) in 1957, during production of Wild Strawberries in the studios in Solna.
These concerns found expression during the 1950s in the work of Ingmar Bergman. His finest early films, ‘Sommarlek’ and ‘Sommaren med Monika’, were melancholy romances, set against the backdrop of the Stockholm archipelago, the wild and temporary seasonal beauty of which reflected the transience of love. Such films were in a traditional Swedish vein, also typified by ‘Hon Dansade en sommar’ by Arne Mattsson. another tragic love story set against a rural backdrop. Bergman then moved towards allegory and existentialism in ‘Det sjunde inseglet’. Despite the medieval setting and fantasy premise, it addressed the very 20th-century dilemma of the man without faith seeking meaning in life. In ‘Jungfrukällan’, Bergman revisited medieval times, exploring Scandinavia’s dual heritage of paganism and Christianity. ‘Smultronstället’ was a gentler, more realistic account of an old man taking stock of his life, prefiguring the more psychological emphasis of Bergman’s 1960s work.
Alf Sjöberg has been unjustly overshadowed by the two outstanding Swedish artists with whom he was associated. His best-known film abroad, ‘Hets’, was scripted by Bergman, who has taken the credit for its bleak psychological undercurrents, although the claustrophobic atmosphere is surely down to its director. During the 1950s, Sjöberg adapted works by Sweden’s greatest playwright, August Strindberg, realizing a memorable version of ‘Fröken Julie’ and an innovative, rather playful historical film in ‘Karin Månsdotter’, based on Strindberg’s ‘Erik XIV’. Little known outside Sweden, Hasse Ekman deserves greater fame for ‘Flicka och hyacinter’, a haunting story about an investigation into a girl’s suicide. The film showed the unusual sexual frankness of post-war Swedish cinema, while subtly probing the compromises made by Sweden to remain neutral during World War II. Also notable was the work of Arne Sucksdorff who creatively melded fiction and documentary.
Denmark’s greatest director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, made only one film in the 1950s. ‘Ordet’ was, however, a masterpiece, an austere yet humane parable whose miraculous elements were beautifully undercut by the subtle realism of the performances and settings. The decade also saw the emergence of Gabriel Axel, later to achieve international fame with ‘Babettes gæstebud’. His feature debut, ‘Altid Ballade’, was a charming realist account of a working-class family.
Norway’s most talented filmmaker was Arne Skouen, whose ‘Ni liv’ won international acclaim and an Oscar nomination. It is a tense and skilfully crafted account of the wartime flight of a Resistance fighter to neutral Sweden. Debuting with the chilling ‘Døden er et kjærtegn’, Norway’s first female director, Edith Carlmar, sustained a career through the 1950s. Her final film, the rites of passage story ‘Ung flukt’, marked the first appearance of actress Liv Ullmann.
Notable Finnish works included ‘Valkoinen peura’ , a Lapp folk tale adapted for cinema by Erik Blomberg, which made impressive use of the Nordic scenery, and the war film ‘Tuntematon sotilas’ by Edvin Laine, which remains the highest-grossing Finnish film.
Wandering Musicians by Italian neorealist artist Bruno Caruso (1953).
The term ‘Neo-Realism’ (Italian: Neorealismo) was first coined by Italian critics in the early 1940s, Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini was one of the key writers of the Neo-Realist movement and one of its main theorists. He called on filmmakers to take to the streets, get on to buses and trams and to ‘steal’ their stories from every day, writing in his wartime diary, Sequences from a Cinematic Life: Set up a camera in the street, in a room, see with insatiable patience, train ourselves in the contemplation of our fellow man in his elementary actions. Zavattini went on to script such films as ‘Ladri di biciclette’, ‘Umberto D’, and ‘Miracolo a Milano’, all of which focus on the hardships ordinary people encounter in contemporary Italy. Italian cinema of the Neo-Realist period is full of stories of people trying to solve everyday problems. This was a reaction to the style of the ‘Telefono Bianco’ movies of the 1930s that emulated Hollywood films and focused on bourgeois society. Neo-Realist films often used non-professional actors and were filmed on location in poor areas, depicting people performing mundane daily activities, with the emphasis on gritty realism and a sense of rough energy.
Cesare Zavattini (photo by Paolo Monti, 1975)
‘Ossessione’, directed by Luchino Visconti, is sometimes cited as the first Neo-Realist film, although it is a movie with strong noirish elements. Its screenplay is based on James M. Cain’s crime novel ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’. Visconti worked on it with fellow writers and filmmakers from the magazine Cinema, among them Giuseppe De Santis. It is a seamy tale set in provincial Italy about a tramp who has an affair with the wife of a restaurant owner; the lovers plot to kill the husband. Visconti faced censorship problems with the film, which was banned in Fascist Italy.
Neo-Realist protagonists range from the very young to the very old. ‘Umberto D‘, directed by Vittorio De Sica is about an elderly man (Carlo Battisti) reduced to poverty but clinging desperately to his dignity. He potters around Rome with his one loyal companion, his dog. By contrast, children have prominent roles in ‘Ladri di biciclette’ and ‘Miracolo a Milano’. However, Neo-Realist directors did not always take a documentary-style approach to the material. For example, De Sica’s ‘Miracolo a Milano’, concerning a homeless group in a shantytown on the outskirts of post-war Milan, might well be described as ‘magical realist. Alongside its digs at greedy landowners and venal squatters, the film has a strong fantasy element. Nor did all Neo-Realist films use non-professional actors. ‘Roma, città aperta’ , by Roberto Rossellini, features Anna Magnani, one of Italian cinema’s biggest post-war stars, and the actor, writer and director Aldo Fabrizi. ‘Roma, città aperta’ won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and had an immediate impact. Movie myth suggests that the director made it with ‘short ends’-scraps of film stock given to him by camera-wielding US soldiers who had liberated Rome in World War II. His shooting style was determined by the constraints under which he was working. Scenes were shot rapidly with abrupt cutting. Rossellini was inspired by his own experiences hiding from Nazi patrols out to press-gang young Italians into fighting for the Fascists. The idea that he made the movie on the hoof is exaggerated. Nonetheless, it has a roughness and energy that have come to be seen as Neo-Realist hallmarks.
Anna Magnani as Pina in a famous scene from the film.
A plaque in Rome commemorating the film’s production.
Rossellini went on to make ‘Paisà’, a sprawling war film about the end of the war in Italy. This was followed by the brutal ‘Germania anno zero’ set in rubble-strewn, burnt-out Berlin and detailing the plight of a boy struggling to survive in the wake of the Nazi defeat.
There is a big difference between the films in Rossellini’s war trilogy and his work with Ingrid Bergman in ‘Stromboli’. This is a strange and eerie story about a young Lithuanian emigrée who marries an Italian fisherman to escape a displaced person’s camp at the end of the war. She goes to live with him on a remote island and finds herself bewildered and oppressed by the patriarchal society she encounters.
By the early 1950s, Neo-Realist cinema in Italy no longer had the urgency that characterized the movement in the immediate post-war years. Conditions had changed; Italian society was more affluent and filmmakers were less concerned about portraying those on the margins. Yet Neo-Realism’s influence was wide, and Cinema Novo in Brazil, Free Cinema in Britain, the French Nouvelle Vague and the cinema-vérité movement in documentary were all indebted to the work of directors such as De Sica and Rossellini in the 1940s.
Two silhouetted figures in ‘The Big Combo’. The film’s cinematographer was John Alton, the creator of many of film noir’s stylized images.
Film Noir is a slippery concept to define. Is it a genre, a style, an atmosphere, a mood or a look? Must a Film Noir be shot in black and white? Film historians have argued about these and related issues for years without ever arriving at a consensus, which may be diluting the concept beyond reason. Most critics, however, would accept that noir western (Pursued), noir costume dramas (The Black Book), and even the occasional British noir film (Night and the City), can be legitimately admitted to the canon.
Deciding when Hollywood noir started is equally problematic. Its origins are traced back to the shadowy, angled, paranoid world of German Expressionism. and certainly such refugees from Nazism as Fritz Lang, Karl Freund and Robert Siodmak brought with them visual and thematic elements that fed into and darkened, the Hollywood mainstream. This generation of European filmmakers recognized the medium’s potential to create complex psychological effects while exploiting controversial subject matter – something already intrinsic to the work of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, who produced his debut noir, ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ in 1943. Fritz Lang’s ‘M’, about serial child killer, is among one of the earliest crime films to marry a noirish visual style with a noir-type plot. The German thriller starred the archetypal noir actor Peter Lorre in an insidiously disturbing performance; it also featured a voice-over narration, a device that was to become a hallmark of the genre. Another of Lang’s films, ‘You Only Live Once’, with its doomed young couple (Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney) on the run from fate and the law, also seems to prefigure aspects of Film Noir. Yet neither of these works conveys the sense of existential claustrophobia, of all-enveloping duplicity that distinguishes the quintessential noir.
Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, gazing into a shop window. Fritz Lang uses glass and reflections throughout the film for expressive purposes.
Another candidate sometimes proposed as the first Hollywood Film Noir is ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’, a twisty, atmospheric thriller, again starring the European exile Peter Lorre. Yet ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’ was only a 64-minute B-movie, directed by the little-known Boris Ingster, despite being photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, one of noir’s finest cinematographers, it exerted little influence at the time. The film with the strongest claim to have kicked off the Hollywood noir cycle is the crime thriller ‘The Maltese Falcon’, although its makers had no intention of starting a trend, let alone inaugurating one of the most analyzed. admired and influential cycles in the history of cinema.
‘Stranger on the Third Floor‘ is often cited as the first “true” film noir of the classic period (1940–1959), though other films that fit the genre such as ‘Rebecca’ and ‘They Drive by Night‘ were released earlier. Nonetheless, it has many of the hallmarks of film noir: an urban setting, heavy shadows, diagonal lines, voice-over narration, a dream sequence, low camera angles shooting up multi-story staircases, and an innocent protagonist desperate to clear himself after being falsely accused of a crime.
The film premiered in New York City on October 3, 1941, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. Considered one of the greatest films of all time, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It is a part of Roger Ebert’s series The Great Movies and was cited by Panorama du Film Noir Américain as the first major film noir.
The elusiveness of the genre can be traced partly to the fact that it became known as noir only after the event. The concept is an ex-post-facto historical construct, akin to expressions such as the ‘Middle Ages’. Filmmakers who created Westerns, or swashbucklers, or biopics knew exactly what conventions they were working in; few, if any, of the people who made noir films would have referred to their work as such The concept ‘Film Noir’ was devised by French movie critics who, noting a new trend emerging in the US movies that reached France en masse after the German occupation in World War II, named it after the popular policier imprint known as ‘Serie Noire’. The term was coined to denote a dark and downbeat underworld of crime and corruption: French Critic Nino Frank first used the term in 1946. However outside France, the words ‘Film Noir’ did not enter popular parlance until the 1960s.
The classic period of Hollywood Film Noir coincides with the war years and the post-war anti-Communist witch-hunt. Noir, with its pervasive atmosphere of fear and paranoia and sense of hopeless fatalism, presents an oblique response to the political climate of the time. In many noir films, it is possible to detect anxiety about the conflict engulfing Europe, which would eventually draw in the United States-or, in later years, about the Cold War claustrophobia choking the whole country as well as the threat of nuclear annihilation. John Huston made ‘The Maltese Falcon’ before the United States entered World War II; yet within it can be detected, submerged beneath the private eye conventions, an apprehension of events in Europe. ‘The Third Man’, directed by Carol Reed and set and filmed in post-war Vienna, is steeped in the messy aftermath of World War II and reflects the prevailing ambience of anxiety, pessimism and suspicion. Occupied Vienna is ruled by four different military powers, while a black market drugs racket plagues the devastated city Urban landscapes often provided the setting for Film Noir. The shadowy wet streets of the metropolis provided the perfect setting for the nightmarish events and uneasy atmosphere of noir.
Orson Welles in The Third Man: ‘dominates the film both by his presence and his absence’.
Favorite noir techniques included low-key chiaroscuro lighting. odd camera angles, the use of flashbacks, first-person voice-over narration, sharp wisecracking dialogue and non-linear plotlines, Cinematographers of the era such as Nicholas Musuraca John F Seitz and John Alton, used expressionist lighting to create mood and heighten tension Arthur Edeson in particular is credited with creating the classic noir look. He shot his first feature in 9i4 and went on to film several of Douglas Fairbanks’s swashbucklers and the early sound movie ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. Also in the 1930s he photographed classic Universal horror films directed by James Whale, ‘The Old Dark House’ and ‘The Invisible Man’, whose combination of German Expressionism with shadowy got mood and tongue-in-cheek melodrama was to establish the template for horror movies In 1941, Edeson was director of photography on ‘The Maltese Falcon’.
The plots and themes of Film Noir have their pulp novels and crime fiction of the period, whose tone carried over to resulting dialogue ‘Double Indemnity’, another noir classic was adapted by director Billy Wilder and author Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain. Chandler’s writing inspired several mar noirs, including ‘The Big Sleep’.
This is the front cover art for the book ‘The Big Sleep’ written by Raymond Chandler. The book cover art copyright is believed to belong to the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, or the cover artist.
In ‘Double Indemnity’, Walter Nerfed (Fred MacMurray) opens his narration with the line “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” Neff becomes embroiled in a murder plot by the scheming Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Noir females are archetypes: either dutiful loving women or femmes fatales-gorgeous, mysterious, double-crossing and ready to do anything to stay on top.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the tone of Film Noir deepened. The shadows grew gloomier and more encroaching, the highlights brasher and more hysterical, and the camera angles more vertiginous, while the sense of fatalism intensified and became ever more internalized. ‘Fate or some mysterious force’ muses the hero of ‘Detour’, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all other traumas of the period clouded the texture anti-Communist paranoia, disorientation and the post-war mood of emptiness. ‘Crossfire’ flags up the potential for violence in de-mobbed veterans, the lingering specter of Nazism emerges in ‘Notorious’; a nagging worry about what wives and girlfriends got up to on the home front festers in ‘The Blue Dahlia’; and alcoholism, an increasing problem in post-war America, all but wipes out the hero of ‘The Lost Weekend’.
The audacious ‘Touch of Evil’ by Orson Welles marks the end of the US Film-Noir cycle. A lurid tale of corruption in a sleazy border town, it features Charlton Heston as an honorable Mexican narcotics agent, Marlene Dietrich as a cigar-smoking bordello madam and Welles as a degenerate US cop. The film is famed for its 3-minute unbroken opening shot and its final chase, featuring extravagant visual and experimental sound effects.
As the United States slipped deeper into the neuroses of the Cold War, noir’s downbeat, doom-laden visions seemed like a riposte, a disenchanted flipside to the optimism and flag-waving piety of much of Hollywood’s output Those patriotic parades on Main Street had their sardonic counterpart in the mean streets, the brighter the lights and the louder the drums, the darker the shadows and the more hollow the echoes. As film historian Colin McArthur commented, “The meanings spoken by Film Noir are not social relating to the problems of a particular society, but metaphysical, having to do with angst and loneliness as essential elements of the human condition”.
U.S. Navy Douglas SBD-3 “Dauntless” dive bombers from scouting squadron VS-8 from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) approaching the burning Japanese heavy cruiser Mikuma to make the third set of attacks on her, during the Battle of Midway, 6 June 1942.
In June 1942 Lieutenant Commander John Ford USNR was wounded by shrapnel while standing on an atoll in the Pacific with a 16mm hand-held camera filming Japanese planes attacking. His footage became part of the documentary short ‘The Battle of Midway’. Ford claimed that his role was to bring news of the war to the home front: ‘It’s for the mothers of America, it is to let them know that we’re in this war and that we’ve been getting the shit kicked out of us for five months and now we’re starting to hit back.’
The Battle of Midway
The Battle of Midway is a 1942 American short documentary film directed by John Ford. It is a montage of color footage of the Battle of Midway with voice overs of various narrators, including Johnny Governali, Donald Crisp, Henry Fonda, and Jane Darwell.
When the United States Navy sent director John Ford to Midway Island in 1942, he believed that the military wanted him to make a documentary on life at a small, isolated military base, and filmed casual footage of the sailors and marines there working and having fun. Two days before the battle, he learned that the Japanese planned to attack the base and that it was preparing to defend itself. Ford’s handheld, 16mm footage of the battle was captured impromptu. He had been in transit on the island, roused from his bunk by the sounds of the battle, and started filming. Ford was wounded by enemy fire while filming the battle. Acclaimed as a hero when he returned home because of the footage and the minor wound, Ford decades later incorrectly claimed to Peter Bogdanovich that he was the only cameraman; however, Jack Mackenzie Jr. and Kenneth Pier assisted Ford in filming.
During World War II many of cinema’s talents were involved in the war effort, and the best films raised wartime propaganda to the level of popular art. In Britain Humphrey Jennings brought poetry to the documentary with his vision of life on the home front, ‘Listen to Britain’. The debut feature ‘In Which We Serve’ by David Lean and co-directed with Noel Coward, is the fictionalized account of a ship told through the memories of its shipwrecked crew. ‘Went the Day Well?’ by Alberto Cavalcanti shows a sleepy English hamlet transformed into a bloodbath when its villagers take up arms and turn on their Nazi captors.
British Soldiers singing, a scene from the sort ‘Listen to Britian’.
A scene from ‘In which we serve’.
A scene from ‘Went the Day Well?’
In Germany, much of the propaganda meant demonization. ‘Jud Suss’ (left) commissioned by Joseph Goebbels and directed by Veit Harlan, took Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel of 1925 and Wilhelm Hauft’s novella of 1827 and twisted them into virulent anti-Semitic propaganda ‘Feldzug in Polen’(below left) by Fritz Hippler, a documentary made after the invasion of Poland, was designed to show Poles as aggressors against Germany.
‘Triumph of the Will’(below center) is a Nazi propaganda film directed, produced, edited, and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl(below right, seen with Hitler). It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress, including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and Julius Streicher, interspersed with footage of massed Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel troops and public reaction.
With the Axis forces approaching Moscow, Eisenstein was one of many Moscow-based filmmakers who were evacuated to Alma Ata, in the Kazakh SSR. There, Eisenstein first considered the idea of making a film about Tsar Ivan IV, aka ‘Ivan the Terrible’. Aware of Eisenstein’s interest in a project about Ivan, Stalin ordered the making of the film with Eisenstein as author-director. It was Eisenstein’s last film, commissioned by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who admired and identified with Ivan. Part I was released in 1944 while Part II was not released until 1958, as it was banned on the order of Stalin, who became incensed over the depiction of Ivan therein. Eisenstein had developed the scenario to require the third party to finish the story but, with the banning of Part II, filming of Part III was stopped after Eisenstein’s death in 1948, what had been completed of Part III was destroyed.
In 1940 Italy and Spain co-produced ‘Lassedio dell Alcazar’,(left) directed by Augusto Genina, a feature created to show the heroism of Francisco Franco’s soldiers through a fictionalized account of the siege of Alcazar by Republican forces. The great exponent of post-war Neo-Realism. Roberto Rossellini made a trilogy to help the Italian war effort between 1941 and 1943: ‘La nave bianca’ (below left)a drama sponsored by the propaganda arm of the Italian Navy. ‘Un pilota ritorna’(below center) about an Italian pilot interned in a British prison, and ‘L’uomo dalla croce’(below right), about Italy’s efforts on the Eastern Front in 1942.
The United States joined the war in 1941, but many films prior to that criticized isolationism, and ‘Foreign Correspondent’ by Alfred Hitchcock sent an emotional message from bombed London to the then neutral United States. After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood waded into the Axis powers with gusto in such films as ‘Hangmen Also Die’ and ‘Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo’. Frank Capra made ‘Why We Fight’, a series of documentaries explaining war policy to the troops that were also released to the public. The documentary short about the Italian campaign ‘San Pietro’ by John Huston was so realistic that initially, the authorities blocked its release. When Russia became an ally against the powers, Hollywood was pressure to make pro-Soviet movies. ‘Mission to Moscow’ is notorious for its sympathetic depiction of Joseph Stalin. ‘The North Star’ directed by Lewis Milestone features Russian partisans singing lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Yet, by the end of the war Russia was the enemy and both films came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Joel McCrea as “John Jones,” ‘Foreign correspondent’
Theatrical release poster. ‘The North Star’
1943 half-height theatrical poster for ‘Hangmen Also Die’
Joseph Stalin (Manart Kippen) greets U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies (Walter Huston) in ‘Mission to Moscow’.
“The Ruptured Duck” flies over a burning target in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.
Prelude to War depicts the Nazi propaganda machine.
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