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at the Tate Modern 28 May – 3 October 2010
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera surveys voyeuristic photography from the 19th Century until the present day, juxtaposing images from both famous and amateur photographers. The theme of voyeurism is covered by undercover, paparazzi and salacious photography, but also stark images of death, execution and war.
If you can’t make it to the exhibition you can still order the catalogue, available here: Amazon UK / Amazon US. Be warned that the book contains some disturbing imagery beyond what is featured in the exhibition.
Here I will be taking a brief closer look at five works found in the show.
1. Greta Garbo in the Club St. Germain, Paris (Georges Dudognon, circa 1950s) [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Members of Foto Forum, 2005.200 © Estate of Georges Dudognon]
The face in the paparazzi image above is actually The Face: Greta Garbo. One of the most famous and admired women in the world, Garbo became a New York recluse after retiring from films at the beginning of the 1940s. Sightings of her were rare, and this 1950s image captures the conflict between a movie star’s public persona and private life. Now older and with her face obscured, Garbo is unrecognisable, but once understood to be her it becomes a contrasting reference to all those images of her as an icon of beauty and stardom. It is also perfectly composed: notice how Garbo’s eye is perfectly in focus yet the hand is not, and how her eye fits perfectly between the end of the little finger and the brim of her hat. It is one of those miraculous images that appear to be both a product of chance and a skillful photographer.
2. Lovers with 3-D glasses at the Palace Theatre (Infra-red) (Weegee [aka Arthur Fellig], 1943)
Image co. of: http://www.rachelhulin.com/blog/2009/09/ten-from-weegee-and-amber-online.html
Weegee was a crime photographer who was always in the right place at the right time, stealing striking to-the-point images of violence, chaos and murder on the streets of New York. He also took shot of city life more widely, including several fascinating shots of audiences in movie theatres. These often focused on kissing couples in the crowd, oblivious to the movie on the screen. These images (some of which I believe were actually staged, with couples brought into the cinema) hint at the love-in-the-dark culture that had been prevalent in cinema-going from its earliest days. One of these images actually takes place in the midst of a 3D movie, the audience bespectacled in their green-and-red paper spectacles. Some of the audience look entertained, but the kissing couple appears to be bored. (Maybe they’re readers of The Classic Film Show.)
The above image would have required a pretty powerful flash to light the scene, surely a major distraction to the movie.
Further images by Weegee can be viewed online here. http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/weegee-collection
He also took this fascinating, candid photograph of Marilyn, skirt lifted, on the location set of The Seven Year Itch.
Image co. of: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/exposure/theme2.shtm
3. Many Are Called (Walker Evans)
Image co. of: http://visualingual.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/subway-portraits-by-walker-evans/
A famous series of images by Walker Evans shows portraits of unsuspecting travellers on the New York subway. To capture commuters unaware, Evans made these images covertly using a hidden camera stowed away in his coat, only really made possible by the greater portability and low-light capabilities of modern cameras. What resulted were unselfconscious images of daily New York life, and what is life in the city but a series of arduous journeys back and forth?
This series is available in a quality hardback by the Museum of Modern Art, (Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk) which will surely become a collector’s item pretty soon.
4. Hyères, France 1932, Henri Cartier-Bresson
Image co. of: http://loinsbongo.blog.co.uk/2009/10/28/la-vie-en-noir-et-blanc-7264520/
The exhibition contains some of the most famous images in photography, including this Cartier-Bresson image of a bicycle captured perfectly within the limited space of the composition. It is often claimed that Cartier-Bresson took the most perfect snapshot, an image that crystalised ‘the defining moment’, in Behind the Gare St. Lazare, Paris. In the above image Cartier-Bresson found his composition in the twisting lines of the bannisters but waited for something to fill the space. When a bicycle came along he clicked at the above moment. Spontaneity in photography can be a difficult effect to achieve.
5. Sophie Calle – The Shadow
Sophie Calle is a French artist who came to prominence in the 1970s with her combination of text and photography in her art-as-life narratives. She took elements of detective fiction and connected them to her real life. In one project presented by the exhibition, she asked a private detective to tail her and send her a report, in essence following herself. It’s a piece that would resonate with anyone familiar with noir movies or the nouvelle vague and is a storyline that would fit well in a postmodern noir tale.
But there are also some truly chilling and disturbing images: a body falls from a hotel window in a desperate escape from a fire; a suicidal man jumps from a bridge after the crowd below collectively encourage him; the decayed remains of a victim of the Rwandan genocide has sunk into the earth.
Elsewhere in the exhibition are works by famous photographers such as Paul Strand, Garry Winogrand and Dorothea Lange and as a whole provides an overview of the entire medium of photography.
Again the catalogue is available here (Amazon UK / Amazon US).
More information about the exhibition, which runs until 3rd October 2010, can be found at the Tate Modern website.
In an occasional series I will be publishing images of stars found in contemporary cities. Here we have an image of Marlene Dietrich in Berlin. You can see Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne and James Stewart in another city here.
I’d love to see any of your images of stars in the city, send them over and I’ll add them to the site: classicfilmshow@gmail.com.
photograph by Christian Hayes.
By looking at early and silent cinema you are investigating primal questions about cinema. What is cinema, where did it come from and how does it actually function? Your understanding of silent cinema will adjust your understanding of cinema right up to the present day. So if you want to study, write or talk about cinema, you’d better get reading.
Here are five books I highly recommend that will give you a foundation for understanding where cinema came from, and frameworks with which to think about early and silent film.
The Emergence of Cinema by Charles Musser
Charles Musser is a leading authority on early American film. This was the first volume of the excellent History of American Cinema series and takes a definitive look at the origins of cinema and its development. Musser makes an important distinction that cinema emerged out of existing traditions rather than being invented in an ‘Eureka’ moment. Essential for an understanding of cinema as a whole.
Read more on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
The Dream That Kicks by Michael Chanan
In this book Michael Chanan rethinks everything. All our assumptions about cinema are questioned and reassessed. He provides an insightful account of the emergence of cinema, deconstructs the myths that have surrounded ‘persistence of vision’ and provides an excellent account of how celluloid came to be cinema’s medium. A thought-provoking and exciting book.
Read more on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, vols 1-5 by John Barnes
This ambitious five-volume masterwork investigates the cinema in England from 1904 to 1901. Written by revered film historian John Barnes, this was the most complete survey of early film in Britain at the time of publication in the 1970s (reprinted in the 90s) and it remains an authority on the subject to this day. To collect all five volumes will set you back £250, so if you ever find a bargain on one of the volumes, don’t think twice.
Read more on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative edited by Thomas Elsaesser
Published in 1990, this key collection of essays gathered groundbreaking research on early film from the 1980s. This new wave of early film study was a direct result of the annual conference of the International Federation of Film Archives held in Brighton in 1978, in which over 200 early films were studied and reassessed. What scholars found was that pre-conceived notions of early film as ‘primitive’ and ‘unsophisticated’ had to be rethought. This inspired new research methodologies, theoretical frameworks and a reassessment of the work of the Lumières, Méliès, and the Brighton school. This book acts as an important overview of early film scholarship after 12 years of research.
Read more on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
The Parade’s Gone By by Kevin Brownlow
The book that rekindled an interest in silent film. Today’s enthusiasm and preservation for silent film owes a lot to Kevin Brownlow who has tirelessly championed, preserved and documented silent film throughout his life. The Parade’s Gone By was the end product of a series of pioneering interviews that Brownlow undertook with forgotten filmmakers during the 1960s. The place to start for an understanding of the silent film in Hollywood.
Read more on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
still from Les Palais Des Mille et une Nuits (Georges Méliès, 1905) available in the Five Volume DVD Set Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913)
My post on Why 3D Doesn’t Work has proved to be both popular and contentious, so I thought I’d follow it up by making it clear that 3D is not the sole domain of multi-million dollar movies. 3D imagery is in fact a 19th Century technology.
Stereoscopic photography emerged around the late 1830s, soon after the development of photography itself. But the stereograph boom really occurred in the 1850s after its success at the 1851 Great Exhibition.
There is something endlessly fascinating about early stereoscopic views and they work in a far more delicate and beguiling way than the latest wave of 3D cinema. I urge you to seek out a stereoscopic viewer, whether in a museum or even seeking out your own online, or even make your own.
For more details about stereography take a listen to this episode of Jeff Curto’s brilliant History of Photography podcast or visit these comprehensive links to stereoscopic photographs.
I leave you with a few interesting views:
Co. of Japan-in-America.
Co. of Wikipedia.
Co. of Stereoviews.com.
Louise Brooks in Overland Stage Raiders (1938)
The only thing tragic about Louise Brooks’s appearance in Overland Stage Raiders (1938) is that it was her final film. No longer the icon of the silent screen, here she is unrecognisable. Her exoticism has turned to homeliness and her famous Pandora’s Box (1929) bob has been replaced with a shoulder length cut as Lulu meets rising star, John Wayne:
Available on a cheap 20-disc John Wayne DVD set.
Veronica Lake in Flesh Feast (1970)
The beautiful Veronica Lake starred in now-classic noirs such as This Gun For Hire (1942), The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahlia (1946), and also sparkled in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), one of the finest films of the 1940s. Yet she went on to have a tragic life. Dropped from Paramount at the end of the 1940s, she failed to continue her career independent of a studio contract. Washed up, she wound up working in bars and turned to drink and eventually died at the age of 53. Her final acting appearance was in the cheap Flesh Feast (1970), a world away from her films of the forties.
Available on a schlocky DVD release.
Joan Crawford in Trog (1970)
By the 1940s Joan Crawford was giving some of the most stylised and unique performances of classic cinema. It felt like films such as Mildred Pierce (1945), Humoresque (1946) and Possessed (1947) were constructed around her image of a fragile yet powerful woman. Kicked out of the studio system and into the world of low budget horror, Crawford still attempts to hold some control through the mannered nature of her performance. But then again she was starring in films such as Straight-Jacket (1964) and Berserk (1967). Once an icon of refinement, here we see the surreal sight of the great Joan Crawford on the quest to discover a frozen monkey…. thing, in her final theatrically-released film, Trog (1970).
Amazingly this one was respectably released by Warner Bros. in the DVD boxset Cult Camp Classics vol. 2: Women in Peril.
Mae West in Sextette (1978)
Mae West, one of the true comediennes of the studio era, famously returned to the screen in the 1970s after a 30-year hiatus for the films Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978). As the name would suggest West continued to play a sex-kitten even though she was in her eighties.
Available on a now-expensive out-of-print DVD.
Bette Davis in Wicked Stepmother (1989)
Of course Bette Davis continued to work non-stop from the 1930s to the 1980s, eventually featuring in over 100 movies. Her final film was Wicked Stepmother (1980), an eighties ‘comedy’ that has come to be widely reviled, partly for its sense of exploiting a once-great star. Rumour has it that she even walked off the picture mid-production. Most shocking, however, is how frail Davis looks at the very end of her life. Yet even though she looks impossibly skeletal, she still seems tough as ever.
This one is currently unavailable and DVD, but can be found on an old VHS release.
If you know of any other final films as tragic, surreal or as shocking as these, please let me know.
Here’s a secret: I watch new movies. I even like some new movies. But truthfully it’s becoming more and more difficult to care about any new releases.
With all the recent Top 10 lists of the films of 2009 and indeed the decade, it was interesting to see how dull a lot of the choices were. Of course there were some great movies over the past 10 years, but I was surprised how many of the choices were movies I didn’t like. There also seemed to be a desperation to pin down the ‘important’ films of the last ten years, but I can’t help feeling that it’s all been done before.
I can’t help thinking that you’d have a far better time watching an old film.
So as an antidote to those lists, here’s my Top 10 of 1939, 70 years prior. It’s almost too easy a selection in this case, as many have commented on how this was perhaps the ‘golden’ year of classical Hollywood.
Could any movie from 2009 beat any of these?
My favourite performer, Jimmy Stewart, in his first western. Dietrich characteristically appears out of place, but wait in particular for the moving ending.
The best kind of epic: spectacular and passionate, yet with a tight focus on its central character. It features both one of the greatest performances and one of the greatest characters of the era, Vivien Leigh as Scarlet O’Hara, a character surely based on Becky Sharp.
I find this movie pretty serious, but it’s atmospheric and exciting, and Cary Grant makes a great adventure hero.
A funny, delicate and complex ensemble drama directed by and featuring Jean Renoir. Worth seeing a few times.
The definitive film about prohibition and the rise of the gangster with Cagney continuing to mark his territory as the performer who revolutionised film acting in the sound era.
The movie that defined James Stewart’s star persona as the naive outsider who brings about law, order and decency. It’s funny and light-hearted in places, but also as political as you want it to be.
The film that galvanised the western genre and created John Wayne’s mighty star image.
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums
This famous Japanese drama directed by Kenji Mizoguchi is vivid, delicate and moving, with long takes that give it a naturalistic and gentle pace. See this one on the big screen if possible as it’s not currently available on disc.
The film that sums up the Hollywood film experience with its escapist theme and Technicolor technology. See the new Blu Ray transfer if you can, it’s so detailed that it’s practically a new film.
My favourite of these? The Wizard of Oz
Surely I haven’t missed any?
The Ultimate Film Archive is a hand-picked chronology of films from each decade (starting with the 1940s), all of which I highly recommend you seeking out. Not an exhaustive list but it’s a start as further films are added.
How many of these have you seen? Either leave a comment or email me at classicfilmshow@gmail.com.
Have I missed any out? Any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
It starts…
1940s
1940 The Grapes Of Wrath (USA, John Ford)
1940 Fantasia (USA, Walt Disney Productions)
1940 The Great Dictator (USA, Charlie Chaplin) … See all here…
The Classic Film Show 
5 Reasons Why 3D Really Does Not Work
January 23, 2010 in Art, Film Criticism, Film History | Tags: 3D, commentary, editorial, Film History | 16 comments
I’ve received a lot of emails on my post about Why 3D Does Not Work. Many agree, but some others seem to have problems with it.
For those left scratching their heads, here are five simple points:
In 3D individual, isolated spectacles are most effective, for example a bubble leaving the screen and heading towards you, a fish swimming out from the ocean or a secret passageway extending deep into the screen.
3D is most effective as a novelty, not as a sustained visual system throughout a feature film. And there has not yet been a film to prove otherwise.
Photograph (US, J. R. Eyerman, 1952) of an audience at Bwana Devil. Originally published in Life Magazine, hosted by and co. of Google.