Rene Clair: The Top-Down (Patreon)

When asked to write about a work from a director whom I am largely unfamiliar with, I usually feel uncomfortable in writing my typical diatribes and rants, more than I used to at any rate, because it is hard to not admit to the reader that I know basically nothing about a filmmaker without seeing at least three-to-five of their works -- I am a slave to rooting my reflections in some sort of context, because I know all too well the idiocy I've displayed in the past by presuming to say this or that unilateral statement about a director as if I had any right to do so without putting in the work myself.

So, I will limit myself here to only saying particular observations about Rene Clair's 'Le Million', and if any of them can be extrapolated to encompass his larger body of films, then I'll consider myself either lucky or more observant than I suspect. If not, then I plead ignorance based on a lack of empirical data.

1. The Half-Way Junction

There is a certain period of the cinema, from 1927 to about 1933 or so, where the mixture of silents and talkies gave rise to conservative awkwardness, faltering attempts at integration, and daring experiments in technique. Le Million is right in the middle of this zone, having something of the musical brinkmanship of Rouben Mamoulian or Busby Berkeley, yet at the same time having no essential necessity for music as an isolated unit or segment -- music is treated as an element which is added on top of what is clear silent film comedic grammar, and so there is a decorative quality that makes the proceedings appear livelier than a closer inspection might grant us, with bodies chained together in playground unison, daisy-chaining their way through these half-Caligarian sets of blank walls affixed with the most basic trappings of needed detail.

Clair's camera pushes more than it flows, it emphasizes specific movements of performers without pushing for its own autonomy, and the overwhelming mood of the film is... nice. Sleek. Stylized, which in this Half-Way range of 20s/30s suffices for substance in many ways, as it resists the prevalent ineptitude that many filmmakers faced as to how incorporate this new aspect of the medium -- Clair simply treats sound like frosting on his cake, and Le Million benefits from his willingness to be as literalist as possible. If Le Million does not take advantage of sound in a meaningful way, it is not at all encumbered by it either -- the idea here is that the film will carry you away, but the destination is already foreclosed by the beginning segment, and so Le Million never breaches the charmed circle of its script, looping back to answer a question that it poses on our behalf, a bare self-sufficiency that is easy on the eyes and not much else.

2. The Barrier

In the first few scenes we are shown what becomes the abiding motif for Clair's film: a wall which screens out the proceedings and is not pierced or explored, we are poised on its edge, seeing through its transparency while remaining blocked. The artist who cuddles with the female object of his painting from behind the canvas, two tramps peering down at a party from a skylight window as the partygoers narrate the purpose of the celebration, the indebted man conversing with his creditor via the safety of a door dividing their regard for each other: the visual space of Le Million is interrupted and segregated by blockages where we as viewers can see both sides of the separation, yet the characters do not have the power to easily cross these boundaries, there is a constipated stutter to how the film relates its immanent qualities, and these artificial barriers exist to them on behalf of the viewer and the director, to create drama where there might otherwise be none in this aforementioned roundabout, a tale gussied-up with an inflation of obstacles that do not in themselves possess much meaning other than the mechanical marriage of plot and production design. This is not the morally-charged obscurity of Von Sternberg's sets, with their foliage and streamers and chiaroscuro participating in the occlusion of his protagonist's soul -- Clair's Le Million is a cardboard town with a story erected on the basis of toll-roads, and you only pass once the lap has been completed.

3.  The Social Mechanism

On the farthest end of the spectrum from our hyper-individuated 21st century cinema, where the archetypal image is of a bokeh-filled close-up in Nowhereland, the early cinema of the first few decades of the 20th century had more room in it for large masses of people than their component parts: the early works of documentarians and city symphonists emphasized traversal, wide-shots of bodies moving like waves over cobblestone streets, the thrumming workers exiting factories and trams sightseeing the cavalcade of bourgeois dandies, immigrants, horse carriages, etc. -- the camera bore witness to the total image of society, wherever and however it could capture it, it had a huge appetite for anything it could see and record no matter the lack of focus or context.

In the 1920s, you see an attitude shift underway across many national and personal styles. The 'mass film' becomes Eisenstein's worker-elegies, King Vidor's Big Parade of soldiers marching inevitably to their deaths, Fritz Lang's robotic dystopia of Moloch servants, and Cecil B. Demille's historical pageantry which necessitated thousands of pliant extras to stand at attention -- now 'the masses' were put to work to tell a story, they no longer existed in their own unity to be beheld by the camera.

And then in the 1930s, you see a further transition away from the figure of the mass body -- the studios built vast sets that could stand-in for real places, and movie stars and their unique voices seemed more profitable than the spectacle aroused by seeing the people's phalanx of Californians try their hands at portraying Roman legionaries. To be sure, there still were variants of 'mass filmmaking' -- but more and more it is devised as an inhuman image, or at least one which threatens to sweep away the edifices of personality.

Le Million is one of these films caught in this flux: in theory it is about one man, the artist, who gets lucky enough to win a lottery ticket that will solve his crushing debts, then becomes unlucky enough to lose it as he is swamped by those who he owes. But the work ends with a mass dance, as his personal success at finding the ticket again means that all these people will get paid -- the struggle in question here is how to reconcile the singular disruptor with the collective spirit, the 'superfluous' painter with the credit that sustains his rarefied existence above the throng of ordinary laborers -- Clair's story evidences an anxiety of whether or not this situation of culture can exist on top of the working class that is now beginning to participate in it via printed literature, news media, radio, and yes, even cinema -- when a movie ticket was as cheap as magazine rack dime novels, suddenly the artist is compelled to consider in real-time the reactions and expectations of his public, he is subject to the whims of people whom he will never meet but whose participation in the entertainment economy allows for his subsistence -- in short, a cinema which began with the masses, but now is attempting to corral their attention and direct their desires, a situation of barely disguised power relations.

With Le Million, Clair chooses to address all these points not from inside his picture, but from a top-down perspective: the auteur addresses his musical, but does not address it to us, it exists as a half-experiment in isolated coherence. Whatever these points may say about his larger body of work, I do not yet know, but based off this one film, Clair was choosing to make a movie which was an attempt to try and set firm rules and regulations to a medium which still carried a half-anarchic stink of ill-repute and petty novelty -- no longer that, but a cinema treated with the authorial tastefulness and bloodless refinement of the bourgeois novel, is what we receive here.