the crowd
Matt, Charles and I went to the NFT last night for an audacious double bill of The Crowd, a 1928 silent film directed by King Vidor, and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane was glorious on the big screen, as ever, but I was also really impressed by The Crowd, which I'd never heard of before. The initial period of adjustment to the conventions of silent films was very short for this one - I was quickly able to look past the overexcitable acting and heavy makeup to the glory of an incredibly astute observation of modern American city life. The film is about an average office worker everyman trying to make it with his wife in a stylised big city and finding that life is rather more boring and unexceptional than he thought it would be as an ambitious child.
Much of the film is shot in New York, and I don't think I've ever seen the exciting bustle of the streets and the thrilling, looming buildings of the city captured so well on film. The camera whirls around through the crowded pavements and zooms high above the thoroughfare, everything feels immense and solid, everything is so new and modern - and it was filmed in the 1920s!
There is this incredible opening sequence in which the camera tracks up the side of a huge skyscraper, before zooming into a single window and into a massive room filled with hundreds of rows of identical office desks and workers, moving down towards one of the obedient clerks, the hero of the film.
The metaphor of the crowd is evoked throughout the film. John, the hero, struggles with it, trying to become part of it, and to rise above it, but is always thwarted by his ordinariness. At the point in the film when he and his family are beset by tragedy, he loses ambition and quits his job as a clerk and strikes out alone. There is a great line printed on screen at this point: "We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is...until we get out of step with it."
The film conveys really well how being part of the crowd dooms you to anonymity, yet being excluded from the crowd takes away your support.
It is only when John is able to scrabble his way back on to the job ladder that he is able to cope and rebuild his life. At the end he takes his wife and son to a show and they are a reunited happy family. There is this amazing closing scene where you see the three of them laughing together and the camera pulls back above them, away from their row in the centre of the theatre, up and up until they are lost in a sea of laughing faces, safe in the comfort of the crowd again.
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