UNDERSTANDING THE LANGUAGE OF STORYTELLING IN HOLLYWOOD: STREET ANGEL & THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK (PART-I)

Hello Friends,

May the blessings of Easter usher peace, love and joy in your lives today and always! God bless you all.

Alright,coming to this month's blog post, I thought I'd share with you all some wonderful insights on how the grammar of storytelling in films unfolded progressively with the advancement of technologies - right from the silent era to sound and finally with the coming of color. Now, if you have been reading my tweets and facebook posts more carefully, you'd have known that recently I completed a five weeks e-course on "The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color" conducted by Professor Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University. In this post, I'd like to acknowledge Prof. Higgins who so brilliantly explained to us the finer nuances of how Hollywood films whether in silence or sound, in black and white or color conveyed emotions and highlighted turning points through visual/ sound motifs,color palette and temperature to engage viewers attention towards details of characters and their surroundings. 

Truly, Professor Higgins opened the window of my perspective and approach towards viewing and appreciating cinema and I am indeed very grateful to him for that!

And today, I thought I'd share some of my notes on the lectures and the ten films we watched during this course so that along the way some of you could benefit from it, just as I did and together we could partake and grow in our knowledge on cinema.  I shall take up two films every month so that you also could watch them along and write in too!

Observe the soft focus on the faces of the actors 

The first film of the course that we watched was Frank Borzage's, Street Angel (1928) which was a silent film starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in leading roles playing the characters of Angela and Gino respectively. 

Now, here's something you might like to know about the director first so as to understand his 'signature style' towards storytelling. 

1) Melodrama rules the roost- Emotions take charge of Borzage's story, so we have simple stories but with powerful situations and externalized emotions where you observe transcendence of emotions between the lead characters and a redemption through embrace that  culminate the climax of the film. There is a poetry in Borzage's melodrama, it gives you an 'operatic' experience as you watch this simple yet beautiful film unfold right from the first frame till the last.

2) Borzage is known as Hollywood's greatest romantic, thus he believed in telling stories visually - so not surprising his images were embellished while at the same time he effectively used light and shadow to highlight a scene or to express it abstractly.

Observe Borzage's composition of frame 

3) Visual and Poetic motifs are 'the' most important things to watch out for in Borzage's film. Motifs are those objects which are repeated elements that gain resonance as the film progresses. Motifs could be in the form of objects, sound or even lighting. And that is what you have to watch out for on how one motif interprets differently across different situations in the film. The two prominent motifs in the film was the 'window' and the 'painting' - now as you watch the film, try to observe them more carefully and try interpreting them according to the given situation in which they appear to understand the larger picture and purpose the director chose to put it there. And of course as you gradually train your eyes more carefully (just as Prof Higgins does), you'd observe that composition of shot (one character high and the other low in the frame), fog, whistling etc are few other motifs that you'd come across in the film.

Borzage's films have simple plots with lots of melodrama

4) Some other things you'd observe in Borzage's world is that films have a strong character arc i.e. small woman and big man, artificial and abstract spaces that depict the unreal world and technically you'd observe soft focus and shimmer in his film.

Here are my notes of Street Angel which I made as I watched the film and some moments that I observed in the film which conveyed contrasting emotions to the melodramatic treatment of the film - 

1) When Angela is whisked by the police as she is taken to jail and becomes a fallen angel simultaneously the viewers witness a painter drawing a halo at her painting where she is deified.

2) Angela whistles in jail as she happily tells an inmate that what keeps her happy is that the man she loves is doing some fine job of painting and the next moment we see Gino losing his job

The painting - a prominent motif in the film

3) When Angela is reminded by an inmate that she too is a Street Angel simultaneously we see her painting is unveiled as a priceless piece of art.

4) Another instance in the film is when a hungry Angela looking for left-overs of food and has no money, across the street we see women soliciting with customers for money.

And of course the use of shadow, light and poetic motifs (like the painting in particular which symbolically stands out and has different interpretations in different instances of the film) are seen to convey emotions that take the narrative forward.

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Observe the lighting and silhouettes

Now coming to the next film, we have Josef von Sternberg's silent film, The Docks of New York released in the same year as Street Angel. It stars George Bancroft and Betty Compson playing the lead characters of Bill and Mae respectively. And you're going to love comparing both the films as you watch them in terms of treatment of the subject.Unlike Frank Borzage, Josef von Sternberg's films are very grounded and realistic with a definite span of time (in the film it's one day). 

In Sternberg's film 'The Docks of New York' you'll not find much of melodrama (in fact I'd say there's none of it), it is so real that emotions play on a different level altogether as it'd happen in real life - you have the hero who works as a stoker, his dull and boring life, his emotions are raw as is expected of a rustic man and considering the profession he's in, then you have the beautiful heroine who is a damsel in distress, there's no transcendent romance nor do you have an embrace at the climax but there's a redemption track to show reconciliation between the two lovers. Now how Sternberg decides to show you redemption, is something you must watch out for!

Sternberg uses hard shadows & then beautiful lighting balance to draw contrast in a scene

Here are my notes on The Docks of New York -

1) I find the story structure of the film quite similar to Street Angel but different in approach.

2) I found that in this film the director takes up more time to establish the surroundings/the people/ the professions  and less emphasis on the chemistry of the leading characters which is quite unlike Street Angel.

3) In Street Angel you come to feel for the lead characters in the film- their pain, their separation etc, but in Docks of New York it looks all too sudden when towards the end Bill confesses his feelings to her. 

Sternberg gives us an actual account of time and space

The two characters don't share a chemistry that move you, it appears only one sided (from the girl's side) and then all of a sudden after that swim in the sea once she has insulted and bad-mouthed him, he comes to make amends. Perhaps like Prof. Scott Higgins was saying in his lecture that director Josef von Sternberg, gives us an actual account of time (in this case Bill Jackson who is a stoker by profession has one day off shore to have a good time!) so this leave little room for the audience to be moved by the lead characters pain and separation.

4) Even the sudden charges of her arrest which is at the back-burner of the viewers thought is suddenly thrown into the narrative, perhaps to bring in the redemption track reserved for the end. But in Street Angel it gels with the track as we see Angela's perspective and the fear of her past looming large in front of her each time she sees the police, thus the audience is anticipating the eventuality of her arrest at some point in time and of course after all this the redemption is imminent.

5) I visualize that if this film was made today, the woman would have walked off from Bill's life forever and perhaps have taken up a new vocation or at the cross-roads of doing something different. 
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So, we now come to the end of this month's post. Next month I shall take up two more films for discussion. I do hope you get a chance to watch the two films - Street Angel and The Docks of New York as I eagerly look forward to reading your notes on them!

Love,
Sonyaa