The Big Screen by David Thomson Page B

take care of them. Is that the abiding commercial cheerfulness in American film, the urge to spend money on a ticket and be with strangers in a shared mood, or is there some glow in the American screen, the sheen of burned emulsion, the wash of natural light, the promise of summer, the unforced imprint of a modest but habitual optimism? Who had heard (then) of the “inner disquiet” of the United States? But now that that despondency has set in, who can forget the influence of Germany on the light show? Imagine a book about Hollywood in the 1920s called The Haunted Screen .
    The German army was the most efficient force fighting in the First World War, so the collapse of the country at the end of that war struck at the nation’s confidence. There was the dismay of an army that believed it had never been defeated. There were the actual losses of the war and the inroads of influenza in 1918–19. There was the severity of the terms of the Versailles peace—including loss of territories, the reduction of the army to a hundred thousand, and then the crippling reparations meant to rebuke culpability in the war. There was the political chaos of 1919 and 1920, with attempts at Communist insurrection, rightist retaliation, the uncertain role of the mob, and the execution of figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. There was hyperinflation whereby in four years in the early 1920s the value of a gold mark went from one paper mark to a trillion. Instead of wallets, you needed sacks. And there was the determined exploration of decadence that set in, the seething variety of sexual behavior, the public performances verging on the indecent, and the attraction of Berlin as a residence for so many of Europe’s young avant-garde. Plus the sense of violence coming.
    The arts flourished, even if much of what was done frightened middlebrow tastes. In the ten years that followed the war, Berlin was probably the most exciting city in the world, a place where the crises were being enacted—whereas Los Angeles was a tranquil watering hole in a benevolent climate amid great natural beauty. That’s one of the reasons, after Europe turned so cold, that creative refugees and Berliners such as Christopher Isherwood went to California.
    This is the period and the mood associated with Isherwood’s observations of Berlin made more famous in the musical Cabaret , which in turn is based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera , by John Van Druten. At the start of his 1939 novel, Goodbye to Berlin , Isherwood promises, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” That the sentence was so taken up suggests it met many needs. For Isherwood, it was a lesson in staying wide-eyed, in seeing everything, without being judgmental, the sort of cry that rings through the first decades of cinema and attests to the way people and societies were struck by so many things, outward and inward, that they had not noticed before.
    Surely there was reason for being less judgmental—though the 1930s in Berlin would end in that very decisive, moralistic decision to have a war. But Isherwood’s words announce something more chilling: a time has come for the passivity that has abandoned thought. It is the detachment and the helplessness of the camera as a neutral machine that seem alluring and persuasive. Is that like a camera photographing the business of the concentration camps? Isherwood would have never wanted that. Nor would anyone—except for those cameramen who did record much of what went on in the camps, and who would say they were only following orders. Or were they helpless adjuncts of the camera? In fact, Isherwood had one thing wrong: you can’t leave the shutter open; it has to open and close; decision and choice have to intervene. But his insight about our willful self-denial and our urge to be like a camera is vital.
    Not to burden this point with the concentration camps.