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LAST TANGO IN SAN SEBASTIÁN

15/12/2019

Film sound and Augusto Genina’s Prix de Beauté

Appraisal of Louise Brooks’ third European film, Prix de Beauté (aka Miss Europe, 1930) is routinely overshadowed by the towering reputation of her two G. W. Pabst directed silent films, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.

Initially planned and shot as a silent film and catapulted into the sound era, ready or not, Prix de Beauté is sometimes regarded as a flawed compromise, if not a downright failure — not least by Brooks herself who on being told, decades after the film’s completion, that its producer was planning a re-release retorted “He must be nuts”

Prix de Beauté Miss Europe Louise Brooks

THE PRICE OF LOVE: Louise Brooks in Prix de Beauté — carefree wage earner to caged housewife.

The discovery and restoration in the early 21st century of the original (and longer) silent version of the film has further dented the sound version’s reputation, particularly among silent film purists. However if we set aside the notion that one or the other version must be superior and definitive, then the sound version, far from being some ham-fisted fiasco, can be experienced positively and pleasurably in the context of the receptive possibilities enabled by sound film after it became widespread but before it became highly sophisticated. If we put aside our received expectations of both silent and sound films, perhaps what we hear in Prix de Beauté is, as the humourist Wilson Nye said of Wagner’s music, much better than it sounds

The film was conceived by Pabst and Rene Clair, Clair initially hoping to direct it. Due to production delays it was eventually directed by the Italian Augusto Genina, an experienced and well regarded director, but one who spoke no English and was thus perfectly matched with the star Louise Brooks, who spoke no Italian. The film’s dialogue, of course, was in French. Speech was thus a troublesome area on the shoot even before it was addressed in the film itself.

Fortuitously, the DP engaged was the brilliant Rudolph Maté who had worked with Karl Freund and had shot Dryer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. In spite of speaking very little Italian himself, the Polish Maté seems to have acted as unofficial interpreter between Genina and Brooks after the official translator proved both unreliable and mischievous. Genina later claimed that Brooks was drunk out of her head during the entire shoot. Though there is probably some truth in this, the integrity and precision of her performance in the finished film suggests that it is likely exaggerated.

Prix de Beauté Miss Europe George Charlia as Andre

JEALOUS GUY — George Charlia as André.

A GIRL AND A GUN

The film’s frequently analysed concluding and most famous scene takes place, appropriately, in a sound test screening room. A test of beauty queen Lucienne (Brooks) performing a popular song about jealousy and fidelity is being shown. The siren image and chanteuse warbling of Lucienne, up on screen, enchants both herself and the small audience of industry magnates. But her psychotically jealous husband André steals into the room unseen by the distracted projectionist, produces a pistol, and fatally shoots the original of the image. Lucienne lies dying in the arms of André’s aristocratic rival, the Prince, while the projector whirrs on and the song continues, a deflated André making no attempt to escape his detention by the burly projectionist.

This scene is critically celebrated because it is remarkably beautifully constructed — but also because it embodies several layers of artifice and is emblematic of both the transition to sound cinema and the ephemeral nature of celebrity, stardom, and human life itself. Besides the narrative irony intended by the film makers, we may be aware today that the American Louise Brooks, silent movie icon and supreme physical actress, is present as a radiant image throughout this film but that her voice is not only dubbed in French, but dubbed by two different women (Hélène Regelly and Hélène Caron).

“Lucienne” is thus a shape shifter. Just as the character moves between milieus, occupations, loyalties, life and death, her representation is fragmented elusively between sound and vision, movement and stillness, between Lucienne’s pain and Brooks’ reputation for hedonism and her back catalogue of damaged and exploited girls. While not quite the end of Brooks’ acting career, the heart breaking use (or preposterously arch use, take your pick) of recorded sound in this final scene supplies a triumphant full-flight exit from her short European career.

In fact Brooks had a perfectly fine speaking voice, as the handful of American sound films she made after Prix and the recorded interviews she gave in later life attest. The decline and abrupt termination of her career in America had to do with her blatant antipathy towards Hollywood and not the transition to sound.

Kenneth Tynan derides this final scene of Prix de Beauté , declaring sniffily --“the French infatuation with irony is fearsomely indulged” . This in 1979, a year when England was so awash with irony as to both embrace New Romantic pop music and elect Margaret Thatcher. Tynan did, though, concede that Brooks brought “her indomitable flair” to the scene.

REVOLVING — Framed by bullet-like studs on the soundproof door, a close-up of the fatal gunshot. The wheels of the film projector turn on regardless.

LEISURE, LOVE, AND LUXURY

At the beginning of Prix de Beauté we are introduced to the central working class characters — the good looking couple Lucienne and André and their friend, the kind hearted and comical but physically goofy Antonin.

Significantly, we meet them enjoying a leisure activity — a bathing excursion. As well as providing an early opportunity to show Louise Brooks changing into a bathing suit, the scene establishes their economic status. This trio belong to the emerging class of young urban working people with a small but regular surplus of disposable income to spend on consumer activities such as cinemas, bars, magazines, smart weekend clothes, day-trips and fairgrounds. They even possess a small car. They are cinematically related to the young foursome in 1929’s Menschen am Sonntag (Siodmak and Ulmer) who we also see enjoying the physical and economic freedom of a bathing trip in a scene to which the opening of Prix has some superficial resemblance.

This first scene introduces us clearly and succinctly to the protagonists’ characters: Lucienne’s carefree delight in her own body and men’s admiration of it, André’s easily triggered jealousy, and Antonin’s role as the pair’s loyal and sexually unthreatening sidekick. However, the scene also occupies itself with pointedly inserting images and sounds of technology and lifestyle into the montage — a huge pile of parked motor bikes and bicycles, and the first of a series of horn loudspeakers that punctuate the film blaring out recorded music or public announcements. As well as being a romantic melodrama, this is a film that flirts with a documentary mode, celebrating and foregrounding both the sight and the sound of the technology of the modern age and the city — typewriters, enormous printing presses, public address systems, mechanical pianos, telephones, motorised traffic, express trains, and finally sound film itself.

CITY SYMPHONY — The urban exteriors have a bustling documentary quality. In a number of shots extras can be seen to be aware of the camera as if caught in a newsreel (like the young woman in the left frame here).

Lucienne is a typist at a major newspaper, Le Globe. Her work consists of typing letters and newspaper copy which is then fired by pneumatic tube down to the print room where both André and Antonin work as compositors, serving the enormous printing machines. The three are thus figuratively tied into a chain of technology which provides them with means to aspire to the lifestyle promised by the very advertisements and features that their labour makes manifest.

The editing of Prix de Beauté and the construction of its sound track blurs the clear distinctions, which were to become standard practice as synch sound became more established, between diegetic and non-diegetic music and between non-diegetic music and sound effects. Some of the disappointment with the film, both on its release and since, complains of poor synchronisation and relatively primitive use of tacked-on diegetic sound. However, looked at another way, could these qualities not instead provide the film with a discursive dimension that, while sometimes providing an unintended Brechtian reminder that we are watching an artifice, also counterpoints the film’s visual preoccupation with documentary images of technology and consumerism, so underlining the alienated plight of its working class characters. The street and railway station scenes have a documentary quality reminiscent more of a Vertov or Richter city symphony than the formal staging of a Pabst or Murnau film.

In the opening bathing scene, images of swim-suited extras enjoying themselves in and around the water are accompanied by splashing sounds and snatches of conversation and laughter which no attempt is made to synchronise with the images. So from the start sound and image have a sometimes elastic relationship. The sound loosely complements rather than mimics the visual text.

When Brooks appears to sing part of the song “Je n'ai qu'un amour” to André at the end of the bathing scene, what is happening diegetically? Is Lucienne joining in with the record we have just seen playing in close up (and if so why can we hear only one voice), is she playfully miming to the song, or might we mistakenly conclude that the film we have started watching is going to be a musical? The broad brush attitude to sound which drives Prix de Beauté is unconcerned with such receptive details. The sole point is that André hears this song, apparently from Lucienne’s lips, at the both the beginning and the end of the film — the first time it reassures him of Lucienne’s devotion and the second time its falsehood confirms her total betrayal and underscores his murderous impulses. It therefore equates more closely to a theme played live during a screening of the silent version of the film than to a realistic aural detail, indeed we have already heard an orchestral version over the main titles and a number of variations recur at key dramatic points. Elsewhere in the film, the sound of a cuckoo clock or the rumble of a train seem to emerge from the score rather than overlay it.

MEDIA MAN — A dissolve briefly fuses André with the print machinery that his skills serve.

The Globe newspaper, corporate employer of our threesome, is sponsoring a beauty contest to select Miss France. Despite André’s disapproval Lucienne enters and, initially unbeknown to André, wins. The selection is apparently by photograph, conveniently accelerating the plot to the point where Lucienne is hastily but lavishly outfitted at the Globe’s expense and whisked away by luxury train to San Sébastien to compete for the title of Miss Europe. After winning the title in a vast outdoor catwalk contest, she is courted at a lavish reception ball by two aristocratic suiters, a Maharajah and a Prince. But André, who has followed her to Spain, arrives. Touched by his devotion, Lucienne welcomes him joyously but he flees in a jealous rage. Lucienne follows him to the train and, lovingly reunited, they return home.

An abrupt cut next shows Lucienne living a life of domestic boredom in the couple’s claustrophobic apartment. Evidently she is now married to André and no longer goes to work at the Globe. Her days are measured out, in a heavy double dose of avian symbolism, by the melancholy cheeping of a caged canary and the relentless ticking and sounding of a cuckoo clock. Her consolation is found in playing a record of the tango that she danced with the Prince in San Sébastien and in signing fan photos of herself as Miss Europe. Discovering a pile of the latter, André rips them to pieces in a rage.

IRONY? — Lucienne considers starting some domestic chores.

While André is out at work, the Prince arrives, having tracked down Lucienne, and offers her a contract for screen tests and by implication a position as his mistress. Angrily, she initially dismisses him, but faced with the continuing boredom of her life and André’s unabated jealousy she finally abandons André and goes to the Prince, precipitating the events of the famous final scene in the screening room.

NEMESIS — Gustav Diesel in Pandora’s Box and George Charlia in Prix de Beauté. The two actors somewhat resemble one another, and both play tortured souls who murder Louise Brooks’ character. Is there a conscious reference by Genina to Pabst’s film?

Moments of silence in Prix de Beauté are few and very brief. There is music almost throughout, driving the narrative along, as there would have been at screenings of the silent version. So early distribution screenings of the film would have avoided the echoey, uncanny, crackle and hiss from the optical sound track, so characteristic of the gaps between dialogue lines in Tod Browning’s ponderous Dracula (1931) and similar soundstage-grounded fare. The dialogue in Prix, perhaps because it was added to a film conceived as a silent, augments the characters of the protagonists somewhat but is mainly inessential to understanding the plot. It would be possible for a non-French speaker watching an un-subtitled print to follow the story with a minimum of puzzlement.

In one scene André, Lucienne, and Antonin visit an urban fairground and the two men try their hand at a try-your-strength sideshow involving hurling a miniature truck on rails up a steep incline with the aim of getting it to the top. André succeeds in this task, symbolically rehearsing with this fairground toy his later desperate pursuit of Lucienne by rail. But he fails to notice that during his exertions Lucienne is distracted by her revulsion towards the rowdiness and uncouth eating habits of the working class men who are crowding around her.

Having thus confirmed his masculinity in a trial of strength, André takes Lucienne to a fusty fairground photographer whose camera and shabby arcadian backcloth, to say nothing of his posing regime, belong to the nineteenth century. Unlike the reconciled husband and wife in a similar scene in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, having their portrait taken as a couple fails to cement André and Lucienne’s affection, instead giving Lucienne further cause to doubt their compatibility.

The whole fairground sequence is accompanied by a montage of thumping fairground organ music and raucous crowd walla, underlining Lucienne’s growing realisation that André’s unambitious and unsophisticated tastes offer her a constrained future. The volume drops slightly, a concession to realism, as the couple enter the photographer’s booth and are obliged to wait their turn, watching while the simple and unprepossessing couple before them are subjected to the photographer’s banal patter as he fusses with his cumbersome apparatus.

ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR — Antonin tests his muscles. The fairground photographer poses the happy couple.

The small restaurant where Lucienne, André, and Antonin habitually spend their lunchbreaks is aurally coded by the sound of a mechanical piano. In keeping with the film’s documentary fascination with, and celebration of, technology and automation, Genina several times shows us the piano keys moving independently and the hammers striking the strings. There is more to this than simply the director of an early sound film saying “Look, this is the real sound of what you are seeing.” It is part of a sound montage about machines and automation running through the film that complements, and slips in and out of unison with, its visual counterpart.

A key scene in this restaurant occurs when André has purchased an engagement ring and is proudly showing it to Antonin. The absent Lucienne has just been awarded the Miss France title and is at that very moment being feted at the train station by the press as she boards the sleeper to San Sébastien. Antonin knows this, because he was earlier given the job of typesetting the story. André does not.

A group of other diners approach André to teasingly congratulate him, he initially assumes, on his engagement to the beautiful Lucienne. But on being shown the Miss France news story in the newspaper he learns the truth that the kindly Antonin has endeavoured to shield him from. The group of diners standing over André start to laugh at him. Here the dubbed, loosely synchronised, slightly forced laughter serves to heighten André’s angry humiliation. It is the aural equivalent of laughter in upper case and in quotation marks. As with Lucienne’s song in the opening scene, the sound demonstrates rather than closely mimicking the visual narrative.

HAVING A LAUGH — Lunch room acquaintances mock André.

DON'T YOU WONDER SOMETIMES, ABOUT SOUND AND VISION

Refuting the widespread notion that “the story of early cinema was one of a gradual progression toward ‘The Jazz Singer’”, Norman King writes of the use of live sound in the silent era:

“Essentially it produced effects in the cinema that recorded sound could not, a sense of immediacy and participation. Live sound actualised the image and, merging with it, emphasised the presentness of the performance and of the audience.”

A witty demonstration of precisely the draining away of this sense of immediacy and participation upon the arrival of talkies occurs in Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) when several the characters go to the cinema. Having enjoyed the pit band’s lively exertions accompanying a silent comedy, the audience are variously perplexed, bored, or irritated when the talkie starts and the musicians leave their instruments and get out the playing cards and sandwiches.

In the sound version of Prix de Beauté this “presentness of the performance” may indeed have been absent in 1930. But Genina’s insistence on foregrounding the sights and sounds of the new technologies and the faces and figures of the public facilitated and emphasised the original audience’s participation in the screen world, even if today we are several removes from steam trains and gramophones.

By 1933 the critic Rudolf Arnheim ruefully concluded that the coming of sound had all but annihilated the art of film just as it was finally getting into its stride. And watching some early sound offerings it’s difficult not to concede that he had a point.

But to imaginative directors such as Carl Theodor Dryer, Fritz Lang, and Alfred Hitchcock sound offered new ways to conjure passion or invoke menace or transcendence or to build suspense. Additionally, there could now be consistency. Yes, the presentness was lost, but audiences, particularly in the outer reaches of the distribution chain, could now hear the original sound of a song or a dance tune rather than having to rely on a local pianist or pit band’s best guess or interpretation of sheet music. It should be remembered that the normally excellent quality of accompaniment we experience from today’s dedicated specialists was not the universal experience of 1920s picturegoers. There had been film sound experiments using discs since the 1890s, culminating in the cumbersome Vitaphone system used for The Jazz Singer. But experiments they largely remained, until the development of optical sound tracks which literally embedded the sound data within the same ribbon as the image.

The received view that developments in sound, like innovations in film photography, are part of a linear trajectory towards realistic perfection can skew our appreciation of a film such as Prix de Beauté. Realism and surface polish are aesthetic choices, not defaults. To contemporary film makers such as Guy Maddin and Bill Morrison and their audiences, degraded nitrate footage is not a catastrophe but a cornucopia of opportunities. In making the Cornwall set film Bait (2019) the director Mark Jenkin devised a kind of social anti-realism by shooting silent using a clockwork 16mm camera, deliberately contaminating the processing chemicals, and dubbing the entire film in post-production.

One person’s convincing realism is another’s irritating gimmick. It’s not an unreasonable perception that today's surround sound, far from completing the illusion that we are immersed in the screen space, merely alerts us to the presence of multiple speakers in the auditorium (or worse, makes us wonder why a barking dog has been shut in the toilets). To paraphrase Mark Kermode’s remarks about 3D, no-one ever complained that the problem with Gaslight is that you can’t hear Anton Walbrook pacing about in the auditorium ceiling.

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU — The older generation appraise the talent at the Miss Europe ball

LAST TANGO IN SAN SEBASTIÁN

Having gained the title of Miss Europe at the San Sebastian contest, Lucienne is feted at a lavish ball in the palatial hotel. She does not know it, but André is hurtling through the night by train to confront her, huddled on a wooden third class bench.

The tango, of all dances, typically evokes both enchantment and betrayal, arousal and loss, the rose and the thorn. Unsurprisingly it has often been used by filmmakers to signal exactly these eternal contradictions.

At the Miss Europe celebration ball we initially see bright young couples dancing a foxtrot while the elderly rich in their old fashioned evening clothes and conspicuous jewels look on voyeuristically. Lucienne is sitting out the foxtrot, lounging in a comfortable chair, radiant, holding court to her two rival suitors, the Prince and the Maharaja.

A drum roll is supplied by the dance band drummer (naturally, Genina gives us a close-up of this). An elderly dignitary makes a short announcement during which the dance band is replaced by a tango orchestra and singer. The Prince asks Lucienne to dance. The music starts.

In long shot, young couples take the floor. We can’t see the Prince and Lucienne, and won’t see them just yet for a while. The lighting has switched to strong low angle backlight streaming across the dancefloor, haloing the glamorous young tango dancers and making a vivid shadow dance on the floor.

Genina and Maté concentrate first on the feet and lower legs of the dancers — a montage of light and shade and tone, almost abstract shapes moving erotically under the music. Then they move to upper bodies and heads, occasionally cutting away to the tango singer. Maté’s camera lingers alternately on two beautiful, eternally modern looking couples — nobody we know, not characters in the film — presumably extras, dancers chosen for their looks and movement. We wonder who these characters are, what their love stories are, in the fictional world of Prix de Beauté, these lovely nobodies privileged with the same close-up framing and attention which we’ve seen devoted to Lucienne and André in earlier scenes.

Then at last the camera finds the Prince and Lucienne. And of course she has completely fallen for him and he is seducing her in extreme close up. Here we definitely don’t need the brief snatches of dubbed dialogue to assist our comprehension.

This exquisite scene of less than three minutes is the powerful pivot point of the film. Although familiarity and compassion do temporarily reunite Lucienne and André as a domestic couple, the die is cast here that inexorably leads to the fatal screening room. There is no escape from the tango.

REFERENCES
Arnheim, Rudolph. 1957. Film as Art
Brooks, Louise. 1982. Lulu in Hollywood
King, Norman. 1984. The Sound of Silents. From Screen 25.3 (In Abel, Richard (Ed).1996. Silent Film)
Metz, Christian. 1975. Aural Objects (In Mast, Cohen, & Baudry. 1992. Film Theory and Criticism)
Paris, Barry. 1989. Louise Brooks, A Biography
Spadoni, Robert. 2007. Uncanny Bodies.
Tynan, Kenneth. 1979. The Girl in the Black Helmet. (Intro to Brooks, Louise. 1982. Lulu in Hollywood)