Collaboration

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Collaboration

PARTNERSHIPS IN EARLY CINEMA
AND THE STUDIO ERA
FROM AUTEURS TO AMATEURS
FURTHER READING

A Hollywood myth has it that the composer Arnold Schoenberg once wrote a film score on the mistaken presumption that a motion picture would subsequently be made to match his music. The story suggests that misconceptions about the nature of the collaborative process have quite likely always cropped up among the creative forces involved in filmmaking. With rare exceptions, such as the work of fiercely independent experimentalists like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas, filmmaking is decidedly not, as the popular director Frank Capra (1897–1991) once put it and the auteurs of the French New Wave insisted, a "one man/one film" proposition. Even Capra's own best work in the 1930s involved a fruitful collaboration with the producer Harry Cohn, the playwright-screenwriter Robert Riskin, and the lovable stars and character actors, including James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and James Gleason, with whom he was long associated. Then of course there was Capra's audience, whose tastes and expectations were always crucial factors in the "creative" process. By contrast, the writer-director Preston Sturges (1898–1959), Capra's contemporary, openly celebrated his partnerships with cast and crew in his notable series of comic masterpieces from the 1940s.

Collaboration is the very essence of the art of filmmaking. The challenge of uniting word and image involves close collaboration between the writer, director, and cinematographer. Beyond this, the production of motion pictures involves ongoing collaboration among producers, directors, actors, writers, cameramen, editors, composers, sound technicians, art directors, and production designers. A presiding vision is needed, of course, but it takes an army of creative and technical specialists to produce the end result, whether a work of art or an entertaining commodity. Subsequent distribution and exhibition, moreover, involves a highly complex partnership of publicists, marketing analysts, and theater owners. The studio period in "classical" Hollywood, roughly from 1925 to 1960, affords the clearest demonstration of this collaborative process. Counterbalancing the auteurist notion of the creative individual is the collective aspect of Hollywood filmmaking—what the film critic André Bazin (1918–1958) in 1957 termed "the genius of the system."

PARTNERSHIPS IN EARLY CINEMA
AND THE STUDIO ERA

From the very inception of the film industry, from the ranks of relatively anonymous individuals plying their respective trades, certain creative collectives emerged that represent film history's most exemplary partnerships. Beginning in the mid-1890s, groundbreaking entrepreneurial inventors—Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) in France, and William K. L. Dickson (1860–1935) and Thomas Edison (1847–1931) in America—formed partnerships to develop and exploit a system for photographing and exhibiting motion pictures. The Vitagraph Company, the most important of the pre-1910 American studios, was the first to build up a stock company of players and directors, including Florence Turner, Maurice Costello, and John Bunny. In 1911 Gaston Méliès (1843–1915) emigrated from France to Texas to form his Star Ranch stock company for the production of westerns, including The Immortal Alamo (1911), the first film ever made on that subject. D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) formed his own stock company of actors and technicians for the more than four hundred one- and two-reelers he directed for the Biograph Studio from 1909 to 1913. Late in 1911 in Los Angeles, Thomas Ince (1882–1924) established Inceville, a self-contained facility for the production of westerns and dramas that systematized standard studio working procedures under one roof, featuring backlots, stages, dressing rooms, prop storage, a power house, and administration offices. The founders of United Artists, Mary Pickford (1892–1979), Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), and Griffith, worked throughout the 1920s with their own respective production companies, each a collective consisting of hand-picked artists and craftsmen. In the 1920s and 1930s producers such as Adolph Zukor (1873–1976) established factory systems that manufactured, distributed, and exhibited films in the assembly-line fashion pioneered by the automobile industrialist Henry Ford and which was soon to become the dominant production paradigm throughout the world. The so-called Big Five studios—RKO, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM—were small cities, combining soundstages, backlots, carpentry shops, and administrative offices.

In the studio era, genre films, in particular, demanded systematic efficiency. In the 1930s no studio surpassed Warner Bros. in its flood of Depression-era gangster and social-problem films, crafted with machinelike efficiency by a stable of producers, contract directors, technicians, and performers, including the producer Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–1979), director Michael Curtiz, and actors James Cagney and Bette Davis. At MGM the producer Arthur Freed worked systematically with directors (Vincente Minnelli, George Sidney, and Stanley Donen), choreographers (Hermes Pan), and performers (Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Donald O'Connor) in a celebrated series of musical comedies. RKO made use of the talents of the set designer Van Nest Polglase, the storyboard artist Perry Ferguson, and the directors George Stevens and Lloyd Bacon for the elegant Astaire-Rogers musicals. At Fox, Zanuck gathered around him a team of writers (including Dudley Nichols), directors (Henry King, H. Bruce Humberstone), and a stable of "Fox Blondes" (Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and June Haver) for a series of literary adaptations (such as The Grapes of Wrath in 1940) and splashily nostalgic backstage Technicolor musicals (Down Argentine Way in 1940 and Hello Frisco, Hello in 1943). Meanwhile, maverick Orson Welles (1915–1985) brought his Mercury Theatre team from Broadway to Hollywood and produced a masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941); but when the creative lights were no longer able to work harmoniously with RKO executives, the partnership deteriorated, and what followed was the unfinished The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and a host of flawed (albeit memorable) productions. Significantly, Welles's later work without his Mercury colleagues was never as productive. The same might be said about Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) in the 1970s and later. Kubrick enjoyed a much-vaunted independence with Warner Bros., but his idiosyncratic Barry Lyndon (1975) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) hardly matched the standards set by Paths of Glory (1957) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

Within the studio system, headlining actors like Mary Pickford and Frances Marion depended on collaborations with writers to obtain scripts tailored to their special talents. Comedians such as Chaplin did their best work when cameramen such as Rollie Totheroh adapted their techniques appropriately. Directors leaned on the talents of sympathetic scenarists, as Billy Wilder did with Charles Brackett; on composers (Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Michael Curtiz and Max Steiner); on editors (Orson Welles and Robert Wise); and on stars (John Ford and John Wayne, Clarence Brown and Greta Garbo, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton). Animators such as Walt Disney (1901–1966) and the Fleischer Brothers (Max [1883–1972] and Dave [1894–1979]) relied on a creative stable of artists, story men, inkers, and sound technicians. Despite the appearance of Walt Disney's name above the title of every product released from his studio, he practiced what he called "committee" art, dependent on the contributions of his associates, particularly those top animation producers affectionately known as the Nine Old Men.

Meanwhile, foreign filmmakers were making similar collaborative advances. In Sweden the directors Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) and Victor Sjöström (1879–1960) worked closely with the Svenska Filmindustri entrepreneur Charles Magnusson and with cinematographers such as Julius Jaenzon and writers such as the novelist Selma Lagerlöf to produce notable comedies and dramas before 1925, including Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru (The Outlaw and His Wife, Sjöström, 1918), Erotikon (Stiller, 1920), and Gösta Berlings saga (The Saga of Gosta Berling, Stiller, 1924). Sweden again came into prominence after World War II, when the existentialist director Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) turned from theater to cinema. Bergman's allegorical fable of faith, Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957), for example, perfectly captured the concerns of what has been called the postwar Age of Anxiety. Bergman's governing conception begins with the image of a knight returning from the Crusades, surviving by his wits in a plague-ridden country. Creating the black-and-white starkness of his vision required an effective collaboration between the director and his gifted cameraman Gunnar Fischer, who worked on many early Bergman films (Sven Nykvist shot most of the later ones).

Using the full resources of the German studio combine known as UFA, Fritz Lang (1890–1976) worked with his wife, the scenarist Thea von Harbou, on his spectacular 1920s successes, Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929). Jean Renoir (1894–1979) and Marcel Carné (1909–1996) reached the full flowering of their careers in the 1930s in their collaborations with Popular Front and "poetic realist" artists like the writer and actor Jacques Prévert, the designer Eugène Lourié, and actors Jean Gabin and Arletty. In Russia in the 1920s the triumvirate of director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), cinematographer Eduard Tisse, and scenarist Grigori Aleksandrov produced several of Soviet Russia's most esteemed films, including Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925), Oktyabr (Ten Days That Shook the World and October, 1927), and Staroye i novoye (Old and New, 1929). The Japanese master Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) was associated with the performances of Toshiro Mifune, a director-actor pairing no less significant than the John Ford–John Wayne association. Moreover, Kurosawa consistently worked with the cinematographer Asakazu Nakai and composer Fumio Hayasaka within a studio system that enforced ensemble collaboration. The postwar Italian cinema came to global prominence in the collaboration of the neorealist director Vittorio De Sica (1902–1975) with scenarist Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989) on Ladridibiciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and Umberto D (1952). De Sica translated the economic desolation of postwar Europe into human terms through his work with Zavattini, who laid out the groundwork for neorealist cinema, the purpose of which was to find significance in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.

FROM AUTEURS TO AMATEURS

In the late twentieth century, traditional concepts and practices in the collaborative nature of filmmaking began to be challenged. On the one hand, the proliferation of camcorder and digital technologies has taken filmmaking out of the studio and away from its cadres of artists and craftspeople, placing the whole endeavor in the hands of amateurs. As if to fulfill the prophecy of Alexandre Astruc's 1946 theoretical formulation of the caméra-stylo, or "camera pen," even the most unpracticed among them can now capture image and sound with mobility and ease, working in relative solitude, relieved of the need for sound engineers, camera operators, focus pullers, editors, special effects technicians, and most of the rest of the elaborate apparatus of the film studio (Astruc in Graham). First-time filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (b. 1968), for example, made El Mariachi (1992) for a comparative pittance and with minimal dependence on a technical crew. At first glance, such a film and such wide-open filmmaking possibilities seem to bear out the auteur theory, which grew out of Astruc's pronouncements and subsequent writings by Bazin in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, and which was imported to the United States in the early 1960s by the critic Andrew Sarris (b. 1928). Over time, the auteurist position that the director is the prime creative force has been counter-manded by assertions that the true auteur is, variously, the writer, screenwriter, producer, editor, or cameraman. All of which proves, ironically, that not just one but all the participants in the filmmaking process deserve a measure of responsibility for the final product.

Filmmakers from the Danish movement known as Dogma 95 have in fact affirmed the primacy not of the director or any other individual but of the collaborative. The first Dogma Manifesto, delivered by Lars von Trier (b. 1956) in 1995, proclaimed that no credit for "Director" would be permitted on their films. Their movies were the result of partnership and interchange among cast and crew. The semi-improvised, location-shot films of the period from 1995 to 2000, including Festen (The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg, 1998), Mifunes sidste sang (Mifune, Søren Kragh-Jacobson, 1999), Idioterne (The Idiots, Lars von Trier, 1998), and The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, 2000), stand as testaments to Dogma's collective ideals.

After a century of cinema, the Dogma collective seems to have turned the wheel of film history full circle. The idea of abolishing the identity of the director hark back to the days of the silents, when viewers were kept guessing about the identities of the personnel behind and on the screen. Viewers of The Great Train Robbery in 1903, for example, were not told (and perhaps did not care to know) the identities of its director, players, and cinematographer. This film became famous for what it was, not for who was in it or who made it. The idea that individual authorship should be subordinated to the work has a long and vibrant history. In Elizabethan theater, as performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men or at London's Royal Court Theatre, the play was the thing (according to no less an authority than Shakespeare). The primacy of the work itself was also a hallmark of the ensembles of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold's Moscow Art Theatre and of Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble. Like the theater, cinema is an arena for both individual and collaborative genius.