The Life of Emile Zola

Feb 20, 2009 16:56

Unfortunately I managed to sleep through portions of 1937's Academy Award winning (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay) biopic The Life of Emile Zola a couple days ago on TCM...

Larger portions than I'd thought, as reading online synopses just now indicate I missed whole sections I wasn't aware I'd lost. Although the actual length of the film itself seems to be somewhat variable in any case--I've seen listings of 114, 116, 123, and 128 minutes--so perhaps I just created my own extremely shortened version... Like a version that's pretty much missing the entire J'accuse trial that's apparently the centerpiece of the less somnambulic versions.

However, I've taken keyboard to LJ not to praise Life nor to bury it, but to highlight a couple of what I suspect were older techniques I noticed when I managed to stay awake.

First was some interesting use of the narrative use of onscreen diagetic text in place of spoken remarks or intertitle information. Although the title may be The Life of Emile Zola it's an awfully compressed life, as the primary focus of the film is Zola's efforts on behalf of the falsely accused Alfred Dreyfus.

The Dreyfus Affair was a major event in the life of modern European Judaism, yet nowhere in the film is Dreyfus's religion ever mentioned... nowhere is it mentioned but, when going through a list of staff officers who were the potential source of the information leak, the French generals stop at a page containing Dreyfus's personnel information and one literally runs his finger beneath the entry for "Jewish" on Dreyfus's dossier.

Similarly, when Zola makes his major decision to take on the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, you learn of his decision by reading over his shoulder the letter of nomination to the "French Academy" (in English, of course, it is a 1930's Hollywood movie) and then you see Zola tearing the nomination into little pieces. Zola knows his decision to publicly support Dreyfus will have a deleterious effect on his reputation and social standing, but it's a decision he feels he has to take anyway. A knowledge that's conveyed solely through the tearing up of the letter the audience has been allowed to read.

I was struck in watching that this seemed unusual even for a contemporary film intended for what is presumed to be a visually and cinematically sophisticated audience. Almost always these extremely important turning points will have some sort of verbal highlighting in the script, yet they weren't present in this movie.

My thought: 1937 was only eight or nine years after the triumph of talkies over silent film, and both these scenes could easily have been done in exactly the same non-verbal fashion in a silent movie. Silents and silent technique were doubtless common currency of all those working on this picture: did they simply assume that these techniques were still equally accessible to their intended audience? Furthermore, did these silent-adept filmmakers assume that conveying these important pieces of information purely visually would cause the audience to focus on, and thus highlight, these important plot points?

Secondly, in the first portions of the film--the compressed potted history of Zola's life--the passage of time isn't indicated so much by the usual visual techniques of using dissolves or fades to black to indicate the ellipses of long passages of time... Rather, it's done via lead actor Paul Muni's facial hair, which changes in style and heightens in grayness as the different eras tumble one upon the other. (The toll of time is also indicated via Muni's expanding waistline, but that's not so obvious in his "younger" years.)

Again, is this the use of a silent technique, assuming the audience will just "get it" without the need for dated title cards or the classical cinematic signifiers?

Note: IMDB claims that the film was shot in reverse chronological order in order to start Muni with a larger beard at his oldest characterization and then cutting the beard and grayness back as he got "younger". IMDB also claims that Muni spent 3.5 hours in makeup before the start of every day of shooting. With that much time in the makeup chair every day, I'm sure Hollywood studio makeup artists would have had no problem giving Muni a very believable face and graying beard... in fact, if that isn't what they were doing, what was taking all those hours every day? Plus, Muni's beard doesn't "end" large and bushy and get shorter earlier in the film, the shape actually changes significantly over "time" (until he begins with only a mustache when the film opens with Zola sharing a garret with Cezanne). I rather suspect that piece of trivia is either an oversimplification of the actual shooting schedule (it's extraordinarily rare for any film to be shot in chronological sequence) or simply made up out of whole cloth by a studio publicist.

All Too Modern Addendum: One would have thought the Dreyfus Affair was a product of 19th Century European anti-semitism... or one would have hoped it was until one read today of a very similar case that's currently in litigation in the contemporary US army, as Orthodox Jewish Army Engineer David Tenenbaum was accused of being a spy solely because of his religion and his job required contact with Israeli engineers:

An Orthodox Jewish Army engineer who was cleared of spying for Israel sued the U.S. Defense and Justice departments Thursday, saying they made false security claims to prevent him from seeking compensation.

David Tenenbaum and his wife, Madeline, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Detroit, calling the secrecy claim "frivolous" and an "abuse of power."...

The Pentagon put Tenenbaum on paid leave in 1997 while it investigated whether he was supplying secrets to Israel. Investigators cleared him, and he still works at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren.

Tenenbaum, 51, is the son of a Holocaust survivor and speaks Hebrew. One of his primary duties at the tank command was to design and develop safer combat vehicles, and he was in frequent contact with military engineers from other nations, including Israelis.

Though he kept his job, Tenenbaum lost his security clearance for a time and said the case hurt his career...

In the suit filed Thursday, Tenenbaum's lawyers said those who instigated the 1997 probe "falsely accused Tenenbaum of being an Israeli spy on the sole basis that Tenenbaum is Jewish."

"To avoid losing at trial and facing a substantial judgment," the suit alleged, the defendants claimed their case "required the use of state secret information, which could not be presented in a public trial."...

In March 2006, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked the Pentagon inspector general's office for a review.

The inspector general's report, released in July, concluded that Tenenbaum was "subjected to unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith and ethnic background, a practice that would undoubtedly fit a definition of discrimination."

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/20/america/Spy-Investigation.php

So I guess the Dreyfus Affair really isn't so far behind us after all.

silent film, film

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