Silver Witness

Rating: Null/10 (16 December 2007)

I am deeply thankful that Gregg Toland walked the planet and found himself to me in multiple projects. Its somewhat easy to pocket his presence when in the company of a great director. Its why you need to see something like this where his influence is so obvious it is hard to ignore.
Ford isn't a BAD director, so much. He's actually something of a genius in taking life and simplifying it into one or two tosses of simple objects, then framing those simplifications in an effective way. His films work, pure and simple. But that's what they are, pure without challenging ambiguities. And simple in the sense that so-called conservatives politicians mime.
Once you escape the pull of those simplified values you see that his films are a huge waste, fake values manufactured only to support a story strategy; values that have since taken on their own selfish lives.
And here. The story is vapid. The acting trite (excluding Carradine) and offensively staged. Its actually demeaning as if these people suffered not in vain because they can "teach" us something. Suffering is suffering, not lessons.
But you won't see the frustrating reduced, artificial here, even with all the obsolete stagecraft. Its because Toland has rendered this so with such remarkable richness that the art of photography overcomes the thing. He captures nuance that Ford cannot see. His documentation surpasses the fact that it is film extras and constructed sets in front of the lens; the lens sees beyond that and gives us genuine pathos, disconnect. Its never in the parts manipulated by Ford in the foreground, but the background elements, the world in which our little play is staged.
There's something about the quality of the film that I think we will never see again. Even the Coens, when trying to reproduce the textures in "Man Who Wasn't There" Had to shoot it in color and print it in black and white. In a few years, it will all be digital. It may even look like this sometimes.
But what was happening then, in Kane, here, was that there were chemical memories being formed in catalyzed emulsions in a device, while a master of that device had similar chemical processes working in his brain, and he was able to coordinate the two. Cognition controlled and preserved past death in smoky traces of silver.
Bless you Gregg.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.