On The Nature of Mann

The 1947 police procedural T-Men (lensed by the justifiably feted John Alton) is both the pinnacle of Mann’s work in the ’40s and the most illustrative example of the visual style operative in the first half of his career. From its News on the March opening montage, jet-setting investigation of a nefarious private empire (here a counterfeiting ring), and baroque visualizations that weld deep-focus composition to neo-Expressionist chiaroscuro, T-Men is nothing less than the Citizen Kane of B-pictures. Framed as a pseudo-documentary composite of several real-life Treasury investigations (awesomely named the Shanghai Paper Case), T-Men is shot through with so many subtly self-reflexive moments that it plays equally well as a meta-film about its own production.

Two Treasury agents (Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder) go undercover to infiltrate a counterfeiting ring. Like Hollywood actors, we see them doing background research on their roles, rehearsing lines together, dressing up in the natty suits they receive from the Treasury’s wardrobe department. The counterfeiting ring, like the film industry, is a vertically integrated organization with an elaborately delineated division of labor. The detectives start out working for a small-time Detroit operation, adhering counterfeited liquor labels to bottles of bootleg (the underworld equivalent of the mail room) and slowly work their way up the hierarchy, eventually crossing over to one of the “major” operations in San Francisco. The Frisco counterfeiters’ technical expert works in the processing lab of a photo studio (where John Alton began his own career); he discusses the quality of the counterfeit plates and paper stock the way a cinematographer might discuss the technical specs of a lighting set-up and film stock. “It has a certain European flavor,” he muses admiringly, in a subtle echo of the formal affinities between film noir, Weimar Expressionism and French poetic realism. The idea that Hollywood films are little more than commercial product, and thus inimical to personal authorship, is carried to its reductio ad absurdam in this analogy with counterfeit currency—it’s quite hard to think of a “craft” more venal or artistically self-effacing. And yet even here an observer with a well-trained eye can detect the evidence of a personal signature.

The analogies continue (in the film’s epilogue, the triumphant detectives are featured in a magazine spread that suggests a Photoplay styled fluff piece) but I want to turn now to the visual style. As I said above, the work of Mann and Alton builds on the photographic techniques pioneered by Orson Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane, specifically the use of deep-focus cinematography in low-key, shadow-infused scenes. Deep-focus staging has existed since the early days of cinema, but for reasons both technical and conventional was typically limited to brightly lit exteriors and moments of high-dramatic punctuation. Kane both pioneered the technical innovations that allowed for deep focus in tonally textured interiors and integrated the technique as a fundamental component of its visual idiom. T-Men follows in this vein, deploying deep focus across the film and in scenes where much of the fore- and middle-ground is striated by inky, angular shadows. This combination of deep focus and Expressionism seems almost paradoxical: deep focus captures the continuity of three-dimensional space while the impossible perspectives of Expressionism are built on overt spatial distortions. But the way Mann deploys deep focus calls attention to the plane of the screen for several reasons:

(1) the use of wide-angle lenses to register depth of field creates “fish-bowling” spatial distortions;

(2) the juxtaposition of large foreground objects and distant background objects (often achieved by the use of matte paintings) puts more planes of action into sharp focus than even the naked eye could accommodate;

(3) the camera’s monocular reproduction of deeply-staged scenes puts two kinds of visual information (relative size and stereoscopic differential) into conflict with one another, which denaturalizes the perspective.

These effects are complimented by choices in staging (using windows, mirrors and other reflective surfaces to project multiple fields of action on a single plane), editing (the generous use of superimposition in certain montage sequences, overt graphic matches between shots), and camera movement (with the exception of a few whip-pans and standard pans that follow a walking character, the camera is overwhelmingly stationary, emphasizing the compositional self-enclosure of each shot). Deployed in the narration of a story that constantly suggests analogies to its own material production, all of these decisions call attention to the graphic artificiality of the images, the screen itself.

In the Fifties Westerns Mann made with Jimmy Stewart, by contrast, there is a dramatic shift in the visual style. This is typically described in terms of simplification, a turn away from baroque pyrotechnics towards a more subtle stylization. While this account is certainly true, it tends to conceal a more fundamental shift: a turn from the pictorial to the sculptural/architectural, from monadic compositions to spatial continuity, from graphic stylization towards phenomenological realism. Mann never shoots a landscape that’s not populated by characters—the landscapes are spaces that the characters move in and through. These landscapes have the weight of gravity and the texture of materiality. They are spaces that extend beyond the edges of the frame. The noir films evoke an almost Euclidean abstraction (common motifs of that period include road maps, schematics, alienating aerial perspectives). The Stewart Westerns by contrast evoke an embodied perspective (not to be confused with optical POV): an empathetic projection into the concrete physicality of the profilmic universe. Rocks are hard, hills are steep, rain is bone-chilling and dust chokes you—the film helps us to feel these things. There is no graphic distortion (it’s apparent that the 50mm lens dominates)—the plane of the screen is as transparent as a window. Analytically explicated like this, my proposed shift in Mann’s visual epistemology may sound like a pedantic distinction, but I think it greatly affects viewers’ involvement with the film on an subconscious, emotional level.

Where critics have overemphasized the visual continuity in Mann’s work, they’ve largely ignored its thematic coherence. In Mann’s most personal films (and not all of his projects are equally personal) the protagonists are cut off from the social authority of the Law for a number of reasons: they are soldiers stranded behind enemy lines, cowboys living in the wild West, gangsters, undercover cops or “wrong men” trapped in the criminal underworld. There is no social authority to appeal to: it is a Hobbesian state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes, “the war of all against all.” (In The Furies, cattle baron T.C. Jeffords not only builds his own autocratic empire in the west, he even creates his own currency—none of that e pluribus unum nonsense!) The opening scene of Winchester ’73 visualizes the idea of the Law in a very literal way. Arriving in Dodge City for a shooting contest, everyone who comes into town is required to turn their guns over to the local Sherriff’s office. Just imagine a room filled with racks and racks of guns! It’s an exact visualization of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the state’s monopolization of violence in order to provide peace for all. Once the characters move outside of Dodge City, the state of nature takes over—Mann’s films are centrally concerned with the relationships between morality and power in such a world. By an amazing coincidence, this thematic core is allegorically embodied in the backstory of Anthony Mann’s very name, which at birth was Bundsmann. Bund is the German word for Federation, as in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (the German Federal Republic). By dropping the first half, Mann had literally separated “Man” from the “Federation.”

As his career evolves, Mann’s films become increasingly schematic in their formal and structural precision, but this does not correspond to a moral schematic. Just the opposite. His films set-up ethical paradoxes and inescapable double binds, and invite the viewer to hash out the complex moral calculus for themselves. Viewed one way, films like The Naked Spur and The Far Country are quite cerebral in their analytical abstraction; they remind me of those thought problems Philosophy 101 students love, “The Runaway Trolley” and its many corollaries. But Mann’s talent is to implicate the viewer emotionally in the proceedings through character identification, enabling us to see how emotions like revenge, jealously, and greed distort our ethical thinking. His films are phenomenological studies of power and ethics—he places man in nature in order to better understand the nature of man.

All of this suggests that the films of Anthony Mann are far from critically exhausted.

The films of Anthony Mann will be playing at Film Forum June 25-July 15.