Meeting and mating

My library-borrowed copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1947) looks like it’s been abandoned in a muddy gutter during a particularly vicious storm, mauled by wild rabid dogs, and then kicked around by a bunch of rowdy pre-teenage boys. Then put through a washing machine. And stamped on for good measure. It’s ‘well loved’, you could say; the falling-apart cover and yellowed pages have a weary, embattled sort of charm. I guess this is fitting since, if you believe the hype, The Fountainhead is one of the most popular novels ever written in the English language. Certainly the novel’s broad popular success is plastered in unequivocal terms across the cover of my 1994 paperback edition: THE WORLDWIDE BESTSELLER.


And then the blurb:

“The Fountainhead is one of the greatest books of its time. In it you will meet, head-on, the brilliant young architect Howard Roark. You will witness the beauty, desirability and dangerous ambition of Dominique Francon. You will reel, stunned, like the millions of other readers who have assured this book a place in the century’s history, at the meeting and mating of these two most powerful creatures in modern America.”

Wow. I found myself ‘reeling, stunned’ at the trashy hyperbole of our audacious blurb-writer.

But I enjoyed Rand’s novel, and King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation too. And despite its heady theatricality – actually, probably because of it – the blurb had more to say than I’d thought. In promising a “head-on”, ‘stunning’ encounter, it ascribes to reading a heightened affective engagement that is the particular freight of Vidor’s bold, stylised film. Also, its declarative “you will witness” foregrounds the novel and the film’s common orientation towards ‘witnessing’, a kind of visceral preoccupation with surfaces.


Rand’s characters are painterly studies, their appearance and actions invested with an absurdly heightened profundity. They are nose-deep in meaning, vessels bubbling over with showy symbolism. But this isn’t to say that they’re particularly complicated. Instead, they’re emblems, stereotypes – but stereotypes filled out and up and over-the-top. This is especially true of Dominique Francon:

“A young woman stood before the railing…Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her…She had grey eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale-gold hair, her suit seemed to have no colour, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of colour, making the full reality seem vulgar.”

Dominique is ‘catalogued’ within a stubbornly visual, even pictorial frame. She is reduced to the surfaces, lines, shapes, colours of her body and face, her extra-ordinary beauty explicitly equated with a “stylized drawing”. She’s “out of scale” with humanity, more human than human: her aesthetic presence makes other figures “appear heavy and awkward” and full colours “seem vulgar”. Peter Keating perceives her as a vision, a spectacle, and inserts her into the tradition of (inanimate) paintings and sculptures. Frozen by a supposed ‘revelation’ of “what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty”, Keating’s unmoving body parodies his and the narrator’s open objectification of Dominique’s form – the observer mimicking the observed.

I don’t usually get any definite picture of a character in my head when I’m reading a novel. It’s more like a vague, unbridled ‘feeling’ or concept of a character, which tends to spiral out from textual descriptions of their appearance while also abstractly conflating aspects of their physicality and personality. The luxury of this nebulous ‘idea’ of character is denied in film, which contains characters in actors’ bodies, crystallising them into discrete physicalities. So for me, the Dominique of Vidor’s film isn’t ‘perfect’ enough (this isn't anything against Patricia Neal in particular - no actress would be, given the impossible beauty bequeathed Dominique by Rand), and I found the film’s Gail Wynand to be oddly sort of comical. These subjective judgements reveal the limits of film’s visual and aural surfaces when placed in tandem with the free-for-all of the imagination.


Yet Rand’s The Fountainhead is exceptionally suited to on-screen adaptation. Her description of Dominique’s ‘monumental’, scale-shifting womanhood is strikingly cinematic, and in Vidor’s film Dominique and Howard are twinned aesthetic objects, connected through the high glamour of the sustained close-ups of their faces at the quarry. This is the transition from novel to film: from sexual tension given form in words in orderly lines across Rand’s 650+ pages and housed in the head of the reader, to sexual tension shown in facial expressions, gestures, movements and observed by the viewer. Rand’s privileging of philosophical positioning over psychological phenomena, through her representative characters, reflects her preoccupation with surface over depth. This fits with cinema: since the camera eye can’t invade the heads of characters, feelings and thoughts must be articulated visually or aurally; the internal must be externalised and brought to light, or more literally, brought under the lights of the movie set. Such is Vidor’s task. So, to display Howard Roark’s ‘haunting’ of Dominique, Vidor superimposes Roark’s face – ghostly, disembodied – onto the right side of the mirror into which Dominique gazes, isolating the area as psychic space.

Of course, the novel’s very subject matter is intensely visual. Film is able to ‘picture’ Roark’s architectural career, giving visual shape to both the (paper) designs and (physical) structures of his gas station, his residential homes, the Enright Building – and to the disfigurement of Cortland Homes. The buildings rise on screen; they are shown, not told.


The Fountainhead is a cinematic novel, then. I thinkthis is most obvious in Rand’s ending, a soaring depiction of Roark as the conquering modern hero – the impudent achievement of a Tower of Babel-esque fantasy. It’s such a cinematic moment. As follows, I found it to be the most affecting scene of Vidor’s film – the exhilarated dizziness it elicited reminded me of what the viewers of the first actuality films must have felt (for example James White's 1900 depiction of the Eiffel Tower). But the relation isn't one way, because Vidor's The Fountainhead is a decidedly novelistic film. Performed within a stilted, non-naturalistic, sometimes ponderous dialectic mode, Vidor’s film is very much about words. It bears fidelity not only to Rand’s words but to the novelistic form itself, because characters seem to be there to speak – and to speak written words.

So there’s another way in which the blurb to my edition of The Fountainhead is surprisingly illuminating. What it terms the “meeting and mating” of Howard and Dominique sums up the remediative hybridity of Rand’s and Vidor’s The Fountainhead: the meeting and mating of the novelistic and filmic mediums.

Movement, drama and the modern metropolis

We travelled the globe this week. From London’s entertainment hub Piccadilly Circus, with its faithful devotees – a congregation of traffic and bodies swelling and circulating under garish electric lights. To Berlin, another nodal point of modernity, another (albeit broader, wider) intersection. We entered Walter Ruttman’s Berlin (1927) as train-bound strangers, slowing up as we breached the fringe of the billboard-embellished city. We were here to see the site/sights, to consume the drama of the urban.

In the film’s opening sequence, there’s a chiaroscuro portrait of the coal-coloured face of the approaching train, framed by billowing white smoke like a curly-haired halo. From then on, smoke seeps through the cracks between the scenes and rises from the chimneys of the stout square factories and hovers in the background of the cityscape. It’s the residue of mechanical society; a motif. Billy Stevenson rightly calls the railway lines – along with the tram, its surrogate – the “syntax of the film”. The railway is the exemplar of the networks and systems that dizzily map the city. Berlin is a spider-web of railway lines, telephone wires, roads, alleyways.


Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is an ode to movement. The city is Ford’s production line writ large, a monument to mechanised industry. With one hand movement, the factories’ automata lurch into life. Fragile glass wares pile up in one factory, newspapers are spat out in another; a growing, overflowing stack. It’s frenzied, overwhelming, and poetic. Meanwhile, (production) lines of pedestrians snake through the city, tracking public spaces with constant cross-overs. Dwarfed by brick buildings and broad cobble streets, anonymous people scurry across the surface of the city and animate Ruttman’s deliberate, sober long takes and low angles. Sweeping and cleaning and opening doors and raising blinds and carrying parcels and crossing streets and riding bikes and walking, walking and more walking.


This human activity is parodied by the recurrent mannequins that stare blindly from shopfront windows. They inculcate and mock the ceaseless hustle and bustle of their surrounds, inanimate objects enacting mindless movement: the skirt adorning a rock-solid fashion mannequin floats oddly in a breeze, and the mechanised legs of a toy man on a bicycle turn feverishly while his frozen face grins away.

Human figures in Berlin are located upon inescapable trajectories detached from destinations, always moving and never arriving. Unstoppable bodies, and clumps of bodies, are often accelerated, making their movements choppy and frantic. There’s an air of absurdity to the sped-up eating and drinking of workers at their one o’clock lunch hour. Later, inter-cut images of children ice-skating, women dancing and men sweeping snow become a sort of disjointed dance. This is Ruttman heightening the lyrical, performative aspect of city life. The film’s momentum peaks with a visceral, chaotic, spiralling sequence that elucidates the transformation of urban life into spectacle. A rollercoaster ride plunges, a woman tries to jump from a bridge, a fire engine rushes through the city, and the skies gather to storm the city – while the newspaper industry churns out the daily headlines.


In his incessant parade of scenarios and scenes, his inexhaustible variety of images, Ruttman renders city life theatrical. Or, more accurately, cinematic. He offers up the mundane, transitory intricacies of urban activity as entertainment, insisting on the spectacle of the city street. The lighthouse with which Berlin ends is a metaphor explaining the film: Ruttman casts a sweeping spotlight across the modern city, a panoramic eye exacting from it fleeting, everyday dramas. Thus Siegfried Kracauer argues that cinema foregrounds the subjects we habitually overlook:

“Many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way. Most people turn their backs on garbage cans, the dirt underfoot, the waste they leave behind. Films have no such inhibitions; on the contrary, what we ordinarily prefer to ignore remains attractive to them precisely because of this common neglect. Ruttman’s Berlin includes a wealth of sewer grates, gutters and streets lined with rubbish…”

Speaking of contemplating waste…Andrew O’Hagan published a fantastic feature in the London Review of Books a couple of years ago performing this exact rhetorical move: literally and figuratively laying out trash, making an inventory of debris. He draws us into a strange world peopled with Freegans and trash collectors, bringing the garbage dump, the landfill and the incinerator both to our attention and into the realm of the everyday. Perhaps it’s not only a cinematic function, then – investigative journalism can also bring the refuse of society, the overlooked ‘outside’ of perception into focus?

Papers and screens

As Melissa points out, Ewald André Dupont’s smoky, dreamy Piccadilly (1929) has a special interest in tactile penmanship and acts of witnessing, establishing “a special link between the written word and the cinematic”. But slouched in front of a squat 1970s television set with bulky headphones strapped to my ears (read: the undeniably strange experience of watching a film, alone, in the reserve section of Fisher library), a slightly different mapping of words onto the cinematic frame caught my attention.


Newspapers…the written word rendered mechanical, marking the fickleness of fame and the ceaseless ebb and flow of popular trends. They’re paraded by vendors on street corners; they infiltrate both the exclusive backstage of the Piccadilly Club and the modest, patchwork rooms in Limehouse; they fall in and out of the characters’ hands.

Newspapers are implicated in the spectacle of public communication – transitory, momentary, capricious. There’s a metaphoric intersection between the unstoppable overturning of the public news cycle, the spinning film reel, and the plot of Piccadilly. Sure, Piccadilly bears a certain permanence. On the one hand, it’s practically ‘captured’, inscribed fixedly upon the surface of Dupont’s film reel; on the other, it gives an impression of stagnation because it is fairly dirge-like, moving lethargically through the storyline. But film is always an experience on-the-run, in time; it flits and dances across the screen, keeping us in our seats for a prescribed two-or-so hours. And Piccadilly is textually and extratextually poised at a moment of indelible shift: from the clumsy conventionality of Mabel’s dancing to the exotic, erotic fluidity of Shosho, from Gilda Gray to Anna May Wong, from the Silver Screen to the cutting-edge talkie. It’s a study in flux.

Piccadilly looks at itself squarely in the mirror, perceives its status as an ephemeral visual fragment, and stubbornly, stoically, refuses to make any claims to immortality. The film stages itself as a daily news story, a sensational event that culminates in a courtroom scene – which is in turn just another public performance, a crude negotiation of narrative in the tragic mode. The film’s ultimate ‘testimony’? It bears witness to public indifference, a type of careless forgetfulness – wilful, collective amnesia. “Life goes on!” declares the newspaper placard that ends the film. There’s always a new star with a new show, waiting in the wings of a new neon-lit venue. The film gleefully destroys its own mythology, denying its own significance.


Something I find particularly interesting is Piccadilly’s use of newspapers to screen, to conceal. Newspapers are co-opted as props in the rehearsing of narratives of romance and courtship and power. Mabel coyly peers out at scorned suitor Vic from beneath the crowded textual surface of The Stage, and Shosho impulsively kisses Jimmy under the ‘cover’ of the morning edition. This latter act of shielding is caught up not only in the short-lived romance of Shosho and Jimmy, but the equally short-lived romance of Shosho and her public. The kiss is predicated on the newspaper itself, or more particularly the news in the paper: Shosho’s elation stems from the announcement, enactment and (temporary) securing of her public success on the front-page spread. Shrouding the action in secrecy, shutting out the other characters along with the cinematic audience, and yet serving as a token of publication and display, of exposure/disclosure – this is a nuanced figuration of the revealing and concealing functions of newspapers in the scheme of Piccadilly.

The cutting room experience?

1936: Hollywood jungle adventure film East of Borneo is pillaged and deformed in the cutting room of artist Joseph Cornell, celluloid fragments commandeered and repurposed into the 19-minute Rose Hobart. It’s an act of filmic breaking-and-entering, a breaching of borders and a violation of order, sense, sequence. East of Borneo is stripped of narrative line, muted and slowed in its transformation into a quasi-silent film, and tinged with a dreamy, nocturnal blue.

That all sounds a little violent…but after all, we do call it a cutting room.

Cornell’s film is a homage to Rose Hobart’s image and a meditation on the screen-bound female form, referencing adoration, fixation, obsession. The film expels distractions of character and plot development in illuminating the erotic function of the actress – projected upon the cinema screen, suspended above the audience, objectified under the gaze of popcorn-crunching spectators. She’s viewable, and vulnerable.

For me, watching the film felt unsettlingly voyeuristic. The camera’s eye dwells on the movements and contours of Rose’s body and face. It doggedly stalks her image, as if magnetised by it. It languishes. Occasionally other bodies float on and off the screen, apparitions appearing at the edges of the camera’s attention. They are merely brief and uninteresting interludes to the main attraction, like television ad breaks only half-watched.


Did I feel lost in reverie? Entrapped by the power of the image? Transfixed? I definitely felt numbed by the monotony of Cornell’s montage. But rather than an experience of wilful enrapture, the film produced in me a heightened sense of spectatorship – a self-conscious consideration of the affective pull of the image, not necessarily an experience of that pull.

Rose Hobart’s aleatoric, throw-of-the-dice aesthetics perform a revelatory function. I felt distanced from the film, never forgetfully immersed in the fantasy of the screen. I was always aware of the film as a film and of myself as a spectator, never becoming whisked away from our darkened classroom with its plush chairs and full bookshelves. I was outside the film, looking in at its strange bluish world with a sort of detached, bemused interest. And so hitherto hidden under the warm, familiar cloak of narrative, film seemed uncovered and exposed: a series of stills, (moving) snapshots cobbled together.

There’s a transparency of form; not only an acknowledgement of artifice but a revelry in it. The soundtrack has a lot to answer for in this regard. It is literally a soundtrack, no more than a track of sound attached temporally, not thematically, to the images of Rose. The upbeat Brazilian music chases after itself in the background, energetic and nonsensical. There’s no emotional range, nuances of tone, or swelling climaxes – it simply charges on absurdly behind the images. This sharp incongruence between aural and visual effects isolates the surfaces of the film, foregrounding the image. It permits the ascendance of the ocular.

The pure surfaces of Rose Hobart remind me of David Lynch’s 2006 INLAND EMPIRE, a tedious three-hour cinematic romp preoccupied with production, not plot; form, not substance. Particularly, Nikki’s refrain: “Sometimes I forget whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow”. Markers of time, the means by which we organise experience, collapse – hours and days are swallowed into a perpetual present, a slippery celluloid momentum without forward movement. INLAND EMPIRE, like Rose Hobart, refuses to streamline material according to a 1-2-3 chronological timeline or a linear narrative structure.

There’s a bigger question at the margins of Cornell’s film. Are narrative and film inseparable, destined lovers pledged til death do us part? Roland Barthes is confident of the essentiality of narrative constructions, in general:

"narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting…stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation…narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; narrative in international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself."

But there are those (Lev Manovich, Thomas Elsaesser) who suggest that the moving image lent itself to the culture of telling stories for only a short while, and that narrative-driven form is an exception and not a rule. For them, the end of the narrative film is heralded by the malleability and plasticity of the image achieved by digital technology. They think we’re heading to aesthetic terrain in which films are habitually extended ‘beyond narrative’. Personally, I’m not sure I buy it: for one thing, the popularity of the Hollywood film continues unabated. Not to mention that they may be overstating the revolutionary capabilities of digital technology, since non-narrative film isn’t exactly a new thing…Cornell’s Rose Hobart, anyone?

Having said that, I can’t help but recall Joan Didion writing at the point of epistemological break, a type of intellectual mid-life crisis:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself...I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience...experience as rather more electrical than ethical."

Sufficiently awkward introductory entry

Hopefully I will write some brilliant posts on here about the films we see and hear and feel.

Unfortunately this is not one of those brilliant posts.