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FILM IN OUR TIME 307
Small wonder that the body of existing films abounds in confrontations of this type. Significantly, silent film comedy, where they are used for comic effect, develops them from the technical properties of the cinema. In a ship scene of Chaplin's The Immigrant a traveler who, seen from behind, seems to go through all the motions of seasickness reveals himself to be engaged in fishing when shown from the opposite angle. A change of camera position and the truth comes out. It is a standardized gag— a shot dissolving some misconception deliberately fostered by the preceding shots.
Whether fun or censure, the principle remains the same. The first one to utilize the camera as a means of debunking was, as might be expected, D. W. Griffith. He considered it his task to "make you see";* and he was aware that this task required of him not only the rendering of our environment but the exposure of bias. Among the many prototypes he created at the time of the first World War is that scene of Broken Blossoms in which he juxtaposes the noble and unassuming face of the film's Chinese protagonist with the close-ups of two missionaries whose faces exude unctuous hypocrisy. Griffith thus confronts the belief in the white man's superiority with the reality it allegedly covers and through this confrontation denounces it as an unwarranted prejudice.
The pattern set by him has frequently been followed for the purpose of exposing social injustice and the ideology from which it stems. Bela Balazs, who knowingly points to the cinema's "innermost tendency . . . toward revealing and unmasking," extols the Eisenstein and Pudovkin films of the 'twenties as the apex of cinematic art because of their concern with confrontations along these lines.36
Need it be said that many of their seeming revelations are actually vehement propaganda messages? Yet as with public opinion, documentary film material cannot be manipulated infinitely; some truth is bound to come to light here and there. In The End of St. Petersburg, for instance, the scene with the young peasant walking past the columned palaces of the Czarist capital illumines in a flash the alliance that obtains between oppressive autocratic rule and architectural splendor.
It is not the Soviet cinema alone which favors camera exercises in social criticism. John Ford bares the plight of migratory farm workers in his The Grapes of Wrath, and Jean Vigo in A propos de Nice stigmatizes the futile life of the idle rich by depicting random moments of it. One of the most consummate achievements in this vein is Georges Franju's L'Hotel des Invalides, a documentary commissioned by the French government. On the surface, the film is nothing but a straight record of a
* See motto, p. 41.