To what extent did Hollywood absorb the European avant-garde?

Modernist America by Richard Pells – review

US art and music may have embraced the European avant garde, but how big was its impact on Hollywood?

Christopher Bray The Observer, Sunday 5 June 2011


Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront.

On the cover of Richard Pells's Modernist America are pictures of George Gershwin, Marlon Brando, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building – a Dadaist litany that quite fails to do justice to the book's capacious grasp. Everyone from Bardot to Bartók, from Le Corbusier to Le Carré, from Tennessee Williams to Indiana Jones is crammed into its pages. Not even the kitchen sink is missing. Having discussed the neo-realism of Fellini and Bertolucci, Pells moves straight on to analysing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and other kitchen-sink classics of half a century ago.

The book's thesis is that fears of US cultural imperialism are overblown. If the modern world has been taken over by American art, then that is only because American artists have taken so much from modernists around the world. What was Andy Warhol but Duchamp for the leisured class? Jazz might be the definitive American sound, but its roots are all over the place – in Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. Tin Pan Alley is a mash-up, too – a harmonic hybrid of Gilbert and Sullivan, Dixie dance and the melancholy chords of the Jewish scale. Without The Rite of Spring there'd have been no Appalachian Spring. Without Hitler, who exiled so much European talent, there'd have been no Hollywood.

And without Hollywood, Pells wouldn't have a book. Fully half his text is given over to what he calls "the most important… form of art and entertainment in the modern world". Art, he is adamant, the movies most certainly are. Film editing, he tells us, owes debts to cubism, futurism and surrealism. Cutting from one shot to another enables the cinema to "create a feeling of movement as well as a sometimes fractured sense of time and reality. The fragments of experience, captured in a single shot and then juxtaposed with other shots to produce a multiplicity of perspectives, are the cornerstones of the cinema, and they are also central to the modernist view of the world."

Undeniably true, though Pells fails to see that the movies' formal modernity is more often than not undercut by a preachy, moralising conventionality wholly at odds with the insurrectionary impulse of the avant garde. Only in the late 1960s and early 70s – the subject of Pells's best chapter – did Hollywood stray into ideologically challenging terrain. Nor do movies play havoc with the surface of the recognisable world – as every important painter at work since the invention of the camera has done. Life as seen through the lens of Michelangelo Antonioni takes place in a spooked-out arena – compressed, closed off, dislocated, alienating. But even at his most Brechtian, Antonioni makes images of a verifiable, empirical world. Like it or not, the cinema defaults to realism.

Pells, though, can see the self-conscious aesthetics of modernism everywhere. Groucho wisecracking straight at the camera, Busby Berkeley making abstract patterns of his dancing girls by filming them from on high, John Ford's repeated vistas of Monument Valley – all draw attention to themselves and away from the stories their movies are ostensibly telling. Even the inventor of the method was an unwitting avant gardist. Constantin Stanislavski might have believed his techniques would help actors attain such naturalistic transparency they would disappear into the drama, but Pells is having none of it. The method, like all forms of modernism, calls "attention to the charisma of the creator". Fair enough if you're talking about Brando, but what about TS Eliot, who believed that art was less the expression of a personality than an escape from it?

The problem is that Pells, a recently retired history professor from the University of Texas, seems to believe that a work of art is modernist merely by dint of its having been made in the era of modernity. An evening in front of the box should convince him that this is far from being the case. The medium itself may be a cubist-style cut-up job, but the main reason for the popularity of shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men is that they offer the pre-modernist delights of the Victorian novel – solid, rounded characters, unpredictable yet understandable plots, invisible narration.

Miraculously, though, Modernist America isn't crippled by its historicist blunder. While Pells's big argument doesn't hold up, most of his smaller ones do. No one who thinks Cyd Charisse a lesser dancer than Ginger Rogers is entirely to be trusted, but otherwise Pells makes for a fine guide to the 20th century. His book is worth reading for the section on Hemingway alone – and for the blinding insight that the tics and twitches of Travis Bickle and Clyde Barrow and the other crazies of the American new wave owe a lot to Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois. Now that's what I call modernist talk.

Christopher Bray is working on a book about 60s politics and culture

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