is one of the most ecstatically beautiful black-and-white films ever made, and the movie's photography doesn't just find beauty in the moment; it manufactures it. Rogosin's cinematography mixes long-lensed, seemingly handheld closeups and locked-down wide shots (very French New Wave), but it's not sloppy, or even perceptibly random. In fact, the movie shows every sign of having been planned out in advance, shot-by-shot.
Characters casually walk into the frame, feed another character an obvious opener, then launch into a conversation that seems spontaneous until Rogosin cuts to a reverse shot in the middle of a sentence; he obviously didn't shoot such conversations on the fly with two cameras because if he did, the compositions would guarantee that we'd see the cameras in both shots. A conversation between a drunk and the night manager of a flophouse is framed with Orson Welles-like care, and lit in the same spirit, with a bright key light hitting the manager and making him pop out of the frame. A scene where the main character is rousted by cops and sent to the city lockup follows a line of prisoners as they shuffle along in a lateral tracking shot, moving screen right to screen left, separated from the viewer by prison bars that create a slight Zoetrope flicker as they glide past.
This isn't documentary filmmaking; it's closer to the jaggedly dynamic, high contrast black-and-white dramas that would later become di rigeur in the 1960s -- films such as John Frankenheimer's and Sidney Lumet's , which were equally influenced by the French New Wave films, live TV dramas and theatrical newsreels. Ginning up the drama was standard practice in nonfiction films from the first 60 or 70 years of movies. Until the so-called "Direct Cinema" revolution begun in the early 1960s by America documentarian Robert Drew ( ), there weren't any hard-and-fast rules pressuring filmmakers to show only events that they happened to record in the moment.
It wasn't just considered OK to light the hell out of your subjects, have them repeat themselves or recite scripted lines, and otherwise will your footage into being and then force it to fit a predetermined outcome; for a very long time, this was simply the way things were done. Until the early 1960s, the word "documentary" conjured images of a drama about real subjects that got its point across by having a narrator explicate the unspoken motivations of actors playing "typical" people, or else a restaging of actual incidents performed by people with some connection to it. This was the type of filmmaking practiced by Robert Flaherty; his Nanook of the North and highlighted the everyday struggles of marginalized subcultures by having them act out a didactic, metaphor-packed story.
In retrospect, Flaherty's films have more in common with Italian Neorealism and 1990s Iranian cinema -- both of which employed nonprofessional actors in real locales -- than with most nonfiction films and TV news pieces made after Rogosin's heyday. The Anthology Film Archives calendar entry on Rogosin's film offers two quotes endorsing the idea that this is reality caught-on-camera ("An extraordinary, agonizing document..
.filled with an overwhelming sense of veracity and an unvoiced compassion for the men who have surrendered their dignity for a drink," gushes is one of the most ecstatically beautiful black-and-white films ever made, and the movie's photography doesn't just find beauty in the moment; it manufactures it.
News RSS