"Howard Hawks, Storyteller", Gerald Mast
In his films, nothing is more important than the friendship between two men and the professionalism with which they carry their work. They are films made with great camera modesty, filmed essentially at the eye level, and with outstanding efficiency in the narrative, unified in spatial and temporal terms. None of his characters make explicit their feelings, and it is by their behaviors that the audience perceives the relationships they establish between them (e.g., when Bogart throws his matches to Bacall in To Have and Have Not). If Hawks invested so much in his characters (less shaped by the screenplay than by the actors' personalities who incarnated them), it was because he believed that they were more important than the story that contained them. Hawks was an intelligent pragmatist ("Evidence is the mark of Hawks' genius" as Rivette once wrote), and so he never saw what he did as art, but only as business. He was like his heroes: his concern, regardless of the circumstances, was to get the job done. A job, as Andrew Sarris wrote, where is expressed "his personal creed that man is the measurer of all things." [1]
Gerald Mast (1940-1988) was a writer, film historian and chairman of the English department at the University of Chicago, who helped to establish cinema as a serious academic discipline. His book Howard Hawks, Storyteller is a detailed study of the filmmaker, paying much attention to the stylish aspects of his oeuvre, like camera movements and the use of sound, as well as narrative construction and elements that go from film to film that characterize the universe of the filmmaker.
Excerpts:
"To take another example, when Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russel) strides into the newspaper office where she formerly worked as a star reporter, at the beginning of His Girl Friday, the camera tracks along with her as she stalks through that space. Again the simultaneous motion of character and camera establishes how she feels about that space (it is her domain, her milieu - she "owns" it), how the others in that space feel about her (they agree that the space belongs to her), and how the storyteller feels about her in that space (he also agrees - which casts severe doubt on her stated intention to leave that world in which she so perfectly belongs)."
"Multiple photographic objects, human or otherwise, within the same shot necessarily acquire a meaningful relationship to one another simply by their common enclosue. Hawks's favorite framing device is to enclose multiple objects and actions within the same frame, allowing the viewer's eye to collect the individual pieces of visual data that generate inferences about the sense or meaning that arises from this particular juxtaposition. In shot after shot of Bringing Up Baby, Baby the leopard or George the terrier occupies the same frame with Susan (Katharine Hepburn) and/or David (Cary Grant), implying the attempted communication between humans and animals, and their attempt to get in touch with the animal impulses within themselves. In shot after shot shot of His Girl Friday, Hildy (Rosalind Russel) and Walter (grant) occupy the same frame in perfectly balanced symmetrical compositions, implying the essential harmony and complementarity of the two regardless of their verbal warfare."
"(...) the frame of Only Angels Have Wings is perpetually invaded by the sounds of airplane motors, usually revving up for the next flight that will take the flier away from the communal, social, relaxing world of conversation with others to his private world of dangerous solo flight. The counterpoint of on-frame society and off-frame motor is itself a metaphor for the film's contrast of communal and solitary human experience."
Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VRzMYnv_he0eX3jxY-0nN-r5hkHpiiyZ/view?usp=sharing
[1] Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors And Directions 1929-1968 (Da Capo Press, 1968)
Gerald Mast (1940-1988) was a writer, film historian and chairman of the English department at the University of Chicago, who helped to establish cinema as a serious academic discipline. His book Howard Hawks, Storyteller is a detailed study of the filmmaker, paying much attention to the stylish aspects of his oeuvre, like camera movements and the use of sound, as well as narrative construction and elements that go from film to film that characterize the universe of the filmmaker.
Excerpts:
"To take another example, when Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russel) strides into the newspaper office where she formerly worked as a star reporter, at the beginning of His Girl Friday, the camera tracks along with her as she stalks through that space. Again the simultaneous motion of character and camera establishes how she feels about that space (it is her domain, her milieu - she "owns" it), how the others in that space feel about her (they agree that the space belongs to her), and how the storyteller feels about her in that space (he also agrees - which casts severe doubt on her stated intention to leave that world in which she so perfectly belongs)."
"Multiple photographic objects, human or otherwise, within the same shot necessarily acquire a meaningful relationship to one another simply by their common enclosue. Hawks's favorite framing device is to enclose multiple objects and actions within the same frame, allowing the viewer's eye to collect the individual pieces of visual data that generate inferences about the sense or meaning that arises from this particular juxtaposition. In shot after shot of Bringing Up Baby, Baby the leopard or George the terrier occupies the same frame with Susan (Katharine Hepburn) and/or David (Cary Grant), implying the attempted communication between humans and animals, and their attempt to get in touch with the animal impulses within themselves. In shot after shot shot of His Girl Friday, Hildy (Rosalind Russel) and Walter (grant) occupy the same frame in perfectly balanced symmetrical compositions, implying the essential harmony and complementarity of the two regardless of their verbal warfare."
"(...) the frame of Only Angels Have Wings is perpetually invaded by the sounds of airplane motors, usually revving up for the next flight that will take the flier away from the communal, social, relaxing world of conversation with others to his private world of dangerous solo flight. The counterpoint of on-frame society and off-frame motor is itself a metaphor for the film's contrast of communal and solitary human experience."
Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VRzMYnv_he0eX3jxY-0nN-r5hkHpiiyZ/view?usp=sharing
[1] Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors And Directions 1929-1968 (Da Capo Press, 1968)
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