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Bridging the Great Divide: Hollywood Versus the Avant-garde [Page 1]
Conversely, in Scarlet Street, the audience views Kitty’s murder directly; it is graphic, heavy-handed and obvious. The viewer sees the act itself as well as its aftermath, as characterized by the bloodied sheets. Lang originally had an expanded and more striking stabbing sequence for the murder scene perpetrated by the enraged character of Chris, but the Code censors blocked it. In transitioning to the popular system, it seems the director loses his sensibilities of subtlety; he begins to hit his audiences over the head with his intended messages. Filmic action commences to take precedence over artistic primacy. Perhaps the scene is reflective of his growing sense of frustration from being forced to create and operate in such regulated conditions. In any case, in Scarlet Street, implication is gone and overstatement has taken its place. Scarlet Street does contain some elements and scenes reminiscent or characteristic of German Expressionism, but they are muted and appear as rather hasty insertions, instead of intentional and congruous components of plot and style. The pulsing light that shatters the darkness along with Chris’s peace of mind towards the film’s close, along with Kitty’s relentless nagging whispers, are uncharacteristic of Hollywood. Combined with the Expressionist style paintings and bleak ending, Scarlet Street shows flagging signs of a once robust avant-gardist tradition. Here, however, these signs are mere palpitations of a dying art form. Additionally, the film’s narrative and look are dark in nature, but Scarlet Street comes out of the Noirist tradition. Lang’s later film is far removed from the spheres of production that created M and it shows in his adoption of a style originating in the United States. The film is substantially Noir in character, a genre which itself took inspiration from the Expressionist tradition, and this very fact works against Scarlet Street’s artistic integrity. The emergence of Noir in the 1940s says much about the socio-politic-cultural environment of the United States at the time, however all insight value aside, the genre merely commandeers certain facets of Expressionism in such a way that makes them attractive to a wide and vulgarized audience. Noir then, assumes the title of kitsch, even if it is a high-class incarnation of it, a term identified by Clement Greenberg in his essay, Avant-garde and Kitsch (41). MacDonald borrows from Greenberg the following about kitsch: “[It] predigests art for the spectator and spares him the effort, provides him with a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art” (61). Scarlet Street makes elements of the avant-garde easy and fitting to a large audience and undermines the style of the ‘art film’ with its mimicry. According to Adorno, modern culture must address both mass culture and high art. By addressing mass culture, it is impossible to maintain a level of high art because intrinsic to it is its exclusivity, its limited accessibility by a privileged few. Scarlet Street is an empty solution to the problem that can never have one. Stylistic novelty, by way of reproduction or translation, becomes kitsch. Its integrity is sacrificed to the diluting and pervasive qualities of popular convention; value that might have been retained from the film by the director’s decidedly ‘high’ and avantgardist roots are lost to the exceedingly systematized demands of Hollywood function, practice and production. The film is borne out of Hollywood and confuses audience conception and understanding with its awkward injections of Expressionist elements in perhaps an unintentionally but undeniably tired, formulaic and commodified production. Lang’s US-made feature cannot be saved from being utterly pedestrian in this exhibition of disfigured and diluted version of an art film. Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. “Work.” The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1958. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review. 6.5. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indianapolis: Indiana U Press, 1986. Lang, Fritz. M and Scarlet Street. 1931 and 1945. MacDonald, Dwight. “A Theory of Mass Culture.” Mass Culture. Rosenberg and White, eds. Glencoe: Free Press, 1957.
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