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| Anna May Wong in Piccadilly, 1929 |
In 1889 Kodak produced the first silver-nitrate film stock. In the early hand-cranked pictures of Griffith et al, faces flickered and shifted with variances in the crude machinery and the unstable material. You had to squint and concentrate to get a lock on what an actor looked like.
By the mid-twenties Kodak had worked out how to make the film ‘pan-chromatic’: no matter what you exposed it to, everything looked black and white. Even, consistent, predictable. With the new film came a new screen creature: floating, luminous, spectrally lit, lovingly and lingeringly photographed. The monochrome queen of the silver screen.
(Modern movies are all in colour. The superficial ‘naturalism’ suggested by colour helps obscure the utter artificiality of all movies. That’s why black and white is a truer cinema. Truer to what Barthes called ‘this festival of effects we call a film.’ Consistent with the dream-state of the theatre: a thing made of silver, captured on whirring plastic, the alien screen’s metallic inhabitant.)
Anna May Wong’s luminous face framed with its simple bob is the burning centre of Piccadilly and is the avatar that gives the film, with its cluttered archaisms of top hats and gas lights and ‘motor carriages,’ its firm claim to modernity. Her sleek form, her lithe body so present on screen - unobscured by daft furs and feathers a la Mabel – is the locus of desire for the film’s twitching males, their hollow-eyed faces leering from shadows as she performs in mocking ‘yellow yellowface.’ When she rides the bus among London’s huddled woollen masses, her bored feline gaze on the teeming street, she looks slightly like a junior Star Trek cadet who’s landed on the planet Hogarth.
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A number of Piccadilly’s exterior sequences (foggy streets, railway arches, hunched figures in cloth caps) would quite literally intercut with G.W. Pabst’s Die Buchse der Pandora which also came out in 1929. Louise Brooks as Lulu is another silvery desire machine with a matching black bob and impish screen presence. Both actresses fled Hollywood to escape typecasting and find meaningful work; both were reputedly formidable intellects (Brooks was once spotted reading Schopenhauer in her trailer); both were pilloried for their liberal sexuality. Wong was accused of being Leni Riefenstahl’s lover; wonderful, horrible. Brooks really did sleep with Greta Garbo (perhaps the ultimate silver screen siren) and pronounced the encounter disappointing.
Wong in Piccadilly and Brooks in Pandora both ‘cinematize’ (is that a word?) the literary trope of lethal female beauty. By this I don’t just mean they update it: I mean that their animated silver masks, the sly glance that both women perfected, the almost drunken lust of the camera for their elusive forms, the shockingly modern contrast of their compact metallic bodies against the fin-de-siecle clutter that furnished the films of the twenties – that this represented a fearsome new creature of the cinema. The femme fatale, perfect, beautiful, destructive. Brooks in her memoir remarked of G.W. Pabst: ‘(He) was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth. It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.’
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| Michelle Reis (Li Jia Xin) in Fallen Angels (Duo Luo Tian Shi), 1995. |
Piccadilly incorporates 19th century style Orientalism to add ambivalence and fascination; Wong subverted that Orientalism via mockery while riding the Exotica train. There is a silver thread to be drawn from her to what became the cinema of Hong Kong: the ultimate liminal space of Orientalism, a theme park colonised by the West both literally and aesthetically, with its unique bastard film culture the glorious result. Its champion Wong Kar Wai, his Fallen Angels (1995) his hymn of male submission to feminine lethality. Wong deliberately cast non-actors (a pop singer, a model) chosen purely for their extreme beauty. When the diffident advances of the Agent (Michelle Reis, Miss Hong Kong 1988) are rejected by the Hitman (heart throb Leon Lai), she engineers his destruction. But plot is the last thing on Wong’s mind. This is not just a story with beautiful actors. Their beauty is the story. What ‘happens’ disappears, is obliterated by the sheer psychic force of the film’s lingering, dreamlike closeups of people doing nothing. This is the endpoint of the femme fatale evolution: film comes to a standstill, transfixed by the glory of the ineffable creature it has created. A.O. Scott could have been speaking of Sho Sho or of Lulu when he said of Wong Kar Wai: ‘Forget plot, forget story. The image is where all emotion, all memory, lies.’
(with apologies to Nirvana for stealing their cool song title.)
The idea that black and white cinema is a truer cinema is really interesting. I find though that I am always more conscious of black and white as exaggerating the artifice of film, which is I guess exactly what makes it truer. I also really liked your comparison of Anna May Wong, and Piccadilly, with Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box respectively. I'd forgotten how convoluted the plot of that film is; a device signalling its own artificiality, rendered all the more starkly in that luminescent black and white.
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