Tourneur Quandaries

Tourneur

Unlike other directors of suspense, Tourneur’s suspense wasn’t supposed to excite, because if Hitchcock’s special talent was to not reveal the secret until ‘just the right moment’, Tourneur’s was to identify the moment, exceed it by an half an hour or some and make the revelation profoundly meaningless – in some films, such curious disregard for the pleasures of suspense (while simultaneously high regard for human tragedy) could result in tediously conducted dreary masterpieces; in others, it merely resulted in dreary films; conspiracy theories that weren’t conspiratorial enough. Night of the Demon (1957) is Tourneur’s best for entirely different reasons – for one, it is emblematic of his work as a film director with the usual permeating feeling of casual enigma (except for one ‘thrilling’ sequence where the lead protagonist is chased through the forest by special effects), an exotic location, a lead protagonist obliged to choose between the spectacular and the rational, the bizarre and the scientific, the supernatural and the logical (much like a Tim Burton film; but therein, Burton himself makes the choice, and chooses always, as results show, the former). This dilemma is not one of science itself, it is not about the progress of mankind, but one of morality; a grander choice – one between compassion and steady cynicism, or one between the fundamental human ability to believe and the other ability to reject it. Much like Cat People (1942), it bases itself in/on a completely disconcerting myth – the speculation of a peculiar paranormal existence; in this, the titular demon, in that, a cult of human-feline tribals; but unlike Cat People, Night of the Demon has a stronger moral quandary that it embroils its viewers in – the moral choice is not of the lead character alone anymore, but also of the viewer – for the protagonist that we may conventionally identify with is a cocky, cynical, unbelieving, cold, scientific bastard – while our villain is a passionate, enigmatic, committed young occult-enthusiast. The question is – who do we side with? Quite obviously, the studio found the question too difficult, too burdensome: ‘how can a B-film raise a doubt so profound and pertinent’, they would have asked, and in a savior-act, decided to answer it for the audience by inserting a insipid end that not only undoes the great work done by the director in the preceding hour and a half in building up an unsolvable myth, but also declares loudly who the hero and the villain of the film are. Severed from this end and perhaps from the entire climax in the train, Night of the Demon is Tourneur’s beautiful masterpiece.

American Soviets

 

  
Notes on Days of Glory (1943) by Jacques Tourneur:

• In a war film, the Nazis are always a fuzzy abstraction – there is no enemy to ‘see’ or to ‘speak of’, no single individual we can lay our entire moral blame on, and no one to condemn – because it is to be understood that it the protagonists’ war is a noble one if it is against ‘them Nazis!’. A film, however, may go a step ahead and actually show the only Nazi in the world we actually know – Hitler.
• Much like Inglorious Basterds, the alignment of our empathy is guided through spoken language – we are to side with whoever speaks a language from ‘closer home’. Therefore, the Soviet soldiers speak in English (a linguistic anomaly) and the Nazis speak in German (a linguistic gambit) because while the former is a move to endear, the latter is a move to alienate. Notwithstanding ofcourse that the Soviets speak English in a Kentucky accent; it doesn’t matter.
• Days of Glory is a rather American film about a group of Soviet soldiers. A war film is a marketplace of ideas – an Indian war film is about selfless, almost lunatic nationalism, the European war film is absurdist theatre, the Soviet war film is a statement about loss of innocence – the American war-film is, buoyed by imaginary victories in all wars they fought, glorious propaganda. By the halfway mark, the Soviet soldiers get rid of their particularly Communist virtue: a lifeless and almost militant devotion to an intangible ideal, and embrace the American idea: one says to another, ‘You have taught me how to live again!’, thereby restoring humanity in the human. There are also the stout comic sideys who keep pulling off visual gags now and then. 
• The end of the film, however, restores far-leftist insanity in the film – the merry band of soldiers begin delirious sneering and sloganeering and oath-taking as a Nazi tank approaches their stronghold. Such madcap adherence to meaningless ideas (Tourneur makes the sound of the approaching tank so loud that we cannot even hear what the soldiers are saying) in the face of imminent death suddenly converts a dreary, boring, messy American war film into a vital, thriving, animated European war-satire. The heroes are converted into total yuppie-idiots who ride the nuclear warhead while ‘yippie-ki-yaying’ their way to death.
• There is also one of the strangest shots in all of cinema - almost serene and definitely surreal - as Vladimir looks in the far distance from within the foliage, a Nazi plane is engulfed by anti-aircraft fire. Small dark-grey ruptures around the distant plane suggest misfired projectiles, until one gets the plane – it explodes in the sky and out of it, supported under a neon-white parachute, a pilot descends to safety, until ofcourse, as soon as a hysterical Vladimir wishes it – a projectile gets the pilot too. It is a picture of incredible devastation – and yet, we do not know either the pilot, or the man who fired at him from the ground. Our investment is purely sensual; much like Vladimir's. In the next scene, a comrade admonishes himfor beginning to enjoy 'violence', much like we just did.

 

Essential Phoniness

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)/ Jacques Tourneur

It is only by the time one may reach the half-way point of a Tourneur film, trying, up till then, to ‘follow’ the narrative (narrative as the sermon, as in a Wilder film), or to coalesce various fragments of a supposed ‘story’ together (narrative as debris, as in a Tarantino film); that one realizes that there is no narrative at all, but only a façade of it – a vague notion that something absolutely relevant is happening. But actually, if anything is at all relevant in a Tourneur film, it is in its assortment of fleeting sensations. Tourneur’s ability was invested best not in the direction of a grander narrative, but in transient moments of cathartic drama – grotesque moments of singular scandal. Such moments were as effective as they were affected, particularly because they were placed aptly at points when the audience’s interest in the presumed ‘story’ was at its peak – and therefore, they would become easy victims to the Tourneur-absurdity. In I Walked with a Zombie, set in West Indies, the first half an hour is devoted to Betsy’s (the new-nurse-in-town) discovery of the underlying conflict between two brothers, one of whose comatose wife she is there to attend to, as well as that of a secret familial past (the ‘past’ is Tourneur’s muse; it is always an element without being a force.) It is an interesting enough premise, with enough suspense (how did the wife become comatose?, what is the family secret?), and horror (the wife is a ghoul) to keep one going for its short 68 minute duration, and yet, as the second half of the film reveals, Tourneur could not be less interested in the pursuit of such interrogation. Instead, the film attends to these questions only sparingly, and though there are answers to all of them – they are answered not in the manner of revelations, but in the form of ‘givens’ with bored sighs from all the characters who give them. Tourneur’s major interest in lieu of the narrative, of course, is the setting itself – West Indies, and the various exotic oddities that he could employ in concocting his own brand of tourist-paranoia and voodoo-speculation. 

As a result, the second half of I Walked with a Zombie is perhaps the most potent instance of Tourneur’s cinema – formless, but replete with moments of outrage – there is an infamous extra-bug-eyed zombie, occult ceremonies, voodoo chanting and an atmosphere saturated with ceremonial drums used by the occultists to summon the comatose wife – none of it makes much sense, and there is no greater debate at hand; Tourneur’s only interest is immediate impression.   

The larger guise of a ‘fictional’ film, or a ‘tale’, and its utilization as a hook to lure unsuspecting audiences in what is essentially a world devoid of any coherent pattern is emulated perfectly by David Lynch in his films – who offers a ‘story’ only so that he can remain assured of an audience for repulsive shots of fried chicken bleeding in plates they are meant to be eaten in. And yet, this method is not as callous as Hitchcock’s, who, unlike Tourneur or Lynch, does not pull the carpet of a narrative from his audience’s feet unknowingly and often, helplessly – but only for cheap thrills.

Tourneur's Scope

Days of Glory (1944)/ Jacques Tourneur

Academic interest : one of the first instances in cinema in which the bullet being fired and subsequently locating its target, i.e. the entire trajectory of the projectile, is featured in one continuous shot.

Cultural interest : the victim; the sniper in the crosshairs is aiming at someone off-screen, someone we will never know. He does not intend any harm whatsoever to the person who eventually shoots him. Such pandering of an ironic circumstance, and the foreboding sense of being 'caught unawares' are typical Tourneur tics.