Not a blog really. I thought I'd post my presentation notes in the fond hope they might be useful to someone writing on The Fountainhead.
Sorry if the pictures don't work.
Notes accompanying my visual presentation:
‘The Problem of Visual Modernity in The Fountainhead’
Rand’s hero Howard Roark and his work are clearly modelled on the champions of early 20th century Modernist architecture. But the role of visual modernity in the film’s design is problematic, and seemingly conflicts at several levels with the film’s polemics.
I am interested in whether the tokens of modernist design in the film amount to ‘cinematic modernism’ or in fact represent a kind of schizophrenic archaism that is at the root of The Fountainhead.
I’d like to touch on the design milieu the film was born into, the trends surrounding it, other examples of didactic intent in the design of films, and the seeming contradictions in promotional materials that accompanied the film’s release.
Seeen strictly as a design exercise, what does the film try to say or be? I’ll argue its an unholy pastiche using symbols of modernity whose political implications are not understood by the writer.
Slide 1: A publicity shot for The Fountainhead.
This image I feel epitomises the conflict at the heart of the film.
The Fountainhead sets out to be a manifesto for Modernist architecture. From the book: ‘They were drawings of buildings such as had never stood upon the face of the earth.’
This echoes the Bauhaus ethos of the early 20th century which advocated a new architecture inspired by new materials, methods and possibilities. They embraced the ‘machine aesthetic’ of perfect reproduction… and welcomed what Frank Lloyd Wright called ‘the steam-cleaning’ of machine civilisation. Mies Van Der Rohe expressed the Modernist social agenda: design and technology to improve the lot of mankind – ‘if we succeed, then… social, economic and technical problems… will be readily solved.’
That’s modernist architecture in a nutshell. But this frame exemplifies Rand’s problem: an actor staring at a building like he doesn’t understand it.
Rand approaches 20th century design with a 19th century mindset. Modernism was integral with a program of social improvement. She ignores this.
Howard Roark is a cartoon of an architect. The building is a cartoon of Modernism. The film is a cartoon of life: it resembles no reality. And it was an anachronism on the day it opened – see the next slide…
Slide 2: The Farnsworth House, 1945, Mies Van Der Rohe
Icon of modernism, exemplar of the ‘form follows function’ imperative.
By the time of the film’s release, the battle for the new architecture had been fought and won. America was converted to the “International Style’ and clients were queuing up for it. The Farnsworth House had its detractors but was championed by the celebrity architects of the day: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson.
This is one of the ways in which the book and film are ‘cartoonish.’ American architecture in fact was quick to embrace Modernism. Rand invents an enemy that isn’t there. The problem with the Ellsworth Tooheys who rail against all progress and advocate an architecture of endless reflexive classicism is that few such people ever existed. This is typical of Rand’s straw-man arguments.
Slide 3: The Chrysler Building, 1930
Built in the 20th century but epitomises a 19th century mindset. I’m showing this because I feel it far better represents the ideology of Rand and Roark compared to modernism. The gargoyles as shown here are modelled on the hood emblem of a 1929 Chrysler. The building is a monument to industrialism, the machine age and progress - BUT it was built with masonry covering its steel structure, which is anathema to modernism with its commitment to ‘form follows function’ and ‘honesty of materials.’
Slide 4: Falling Waters (The Kaufmann Residence), 1935, Frank Lloyd Wright
This house was celebrated and admired from the day it was built. Built for a rich and progressive businessman, just like Wynand or Enright in the book.
Wright was Rand’s architect of choice to design the buildings for the film but Warner Brothers baulked at his $250K fee, much to her disgust. The job went to a young film set designer called Edward Carrere who did a remarkable job with miniatures, matte photography and back projection. He chose Alvar Aalto furniture for the interiors – ironically the height of fashion by the time of the film’s release, instead of being controversially new.
But – Carrere was not an architect. And his designs are cartoons of modernist buildings. He captures the look of mod architecture but does not have the training to understand how to make a building work.
Slide 5: Sketch for the Wynand Residence (film still)
No prizes for guessing what inspired this…
Rand insisted the character of Roark was not modelled on Wright but the film signals otherwise, since the buildng would be so instantly recognizable to American audiences. Again, Rand cartoonishly distorts history: Wright in fact had many willing and admiring clients but lost many commissions and made many enemies due to his vanity and egotism – little to do with conservative resistance.
Slide 6: The Enright Building (film still)
My favourite shot from the film. The building is beautiful – and unbuildable. It’s too skinny and would fall over. This gives the scene a fantasy feel somewhat akin to 1920s sci-fi films. It’s a beautiful painting by Carrere, though.
Again, by the time the book was written and the film made, buildings in this style were springing up all over New York, Chicago and elsewhere.
Specifically, this building looks almost exactly like a portion of one of Le Corbusier’s ‘Ideal City’ designs which had a very explicit statist/social engineering agenda – the polar opposite of Rand’s philosophy. Corbusier’s approach imported a French-Socialist ideology of the kind that is pilloried in Rand’s later Atlas Shrugged (1957).
Slide 7: Enright interior (film still)
2 themes I’d like to touch on in this image:
1. The Corbusier ‘machine for living’ principle is echoed in this interior with its very clean lines and utilitarian furniture. See next slide: (8) Corbusier, Villa Savoye (1929). Once again, this was the height of fashion in the late 40s/early 50s and the style was so well known that it was lampooned by Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle (1958).
2. The appearance of the ‘German Expressionist’ influence which was well established in Hollywood by the 1930s. The heavy chiaroscuro lighting, sloping ceiling, sharp angled shadows and generally exaggerated geometry were all familiar from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari onwards. Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder among others imported this style when they escaped Germany and moved to Hollywood. The skyline here is very Lang, Metropolis/M period. Few Hollywood directors of the time were not experimenting with the G-E aesthetic which had been popularized in the noir films of the 30s and 40s.
As many film scholars have chronicled, the noir/G-E style was very strongly associated with a highly cynical and fatalistic world view that is exemplified by the films of Billy Wilder, with their dark view of human nature. Fatalism and personal weakness as the determining factors of human destiny could not be much more opposed to Rand’s values. But they sure made the furniture look nice!
Slide 8: Interior, Villa Savoye designed by Le Corbusier (1929).
Slide 9: Gary Cooper in futuristic Fountainhead interior (film still)
Gary Cooper looks suitably lost in this shot which recalls various futurist films of the 1920s/1930s, especially The Shape of Things to Come (1936, based on the H.G. Wells book) which I couldn’t find any stills from. Cooper looks like he’s wandered onto the wrong set and is looking for his horse.
Slide 10: Night of the Hunter (1955) (film still)
Extreme example of the German-Expressionist chiaroscuro look adopted wholesale by Hollywood in the 40s and 50s. This shot appears lifted almost straight from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Night of the Hunter is a film with a very scary, primitive view of humans, threat, evil, and danger which exemplifies the fatalistic style. The only film directed by Charles Laughton, it is a stunning work of cinema art and one of my favourite films.
Slide 11: Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, 1937) (film still)
I wanted to touch on other Hollywood films that use architecture in a didactic way, to support or make a point. In Lost Horizon the architecural style is integral to a Utopian vision associated with values of purity and egalitarianism. The visitors are shown how a better society would be designed. Very clear Modernist agenda to the design in this film (as opposed to idealizing a quaint primitive village, which would be the obvious alternative).
Slide 12: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) (film still)
Here we see 19th century-looking industrial architecture employed in a threatening overbearing mode that represents oppression and powerlessness. A kind of update of Dickens, it also prefigures Orwell. The left wing agenda to this film implied that wealth concentrated in powerful hands leads to oppression. Again, this is a 19th politics that was rapidly going out of fashion as prosperity and standards of living grew in the West.
In this still we also see warlike aircraft symbolizing the machines associated with the horrors of World War 1 and its industrialized slaughter.
Slide 13: Metropolis (Osamu Tezuka, 2001)
A recent anime that updates the Lang vision, making the machine/buildings brilliantly clean and remote, but with a similar message of distant authority and consequent disempowerment to the man in the street.
Anime has a basic trope of the vulnerable defenceless human versus the machines built to control him. The world’s most industrialized country, Japan’s popular culture expresses a very particular type of schizophrenic trauma: It is the only nation to have suffered nuclear holocaust (the ultimate product of industrial rationalism) in actuality, as well as the permanent abstract threat of its possibility. From Godzilla via Akira to Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Japanese film expresses a corrosive anxiety about the hard-edged modernity the nation has irreversibly embraced.
Slide 14: Publicity shot for The Fountainhead
I wanted to look at this anachronistic poster as an example of Warner Bros caution and conservatism. This picture seems to have nothing to do with the subject matter of the film but reprises Gary Cooper’s strong-silent seducer type. Patricia Neal, meanwhile is depicted in traditional submissive mode. Introduced initially as ‘headstrong’ and ‘independent’ she finds happiness and peace only after submitting to an uncommunicative but dominant male (and exposing a suitable acreage of flesh).
Nothing new about that – but my point is how anti-modern these images and personas are. Not to mention the incongruity of the 47 year old Cooper as a twenty-something architecture student!
The story goes that Warner Bros wanted Humphrey Bogart for the role but Rand insisted on Cooper because his physical type fitted the role better: tall, serious, domineering. Interestingly, the symbolism of Roark’s red hair was abandoned (either irrelevant to a black-and-white movie or simply too difficult to cast!
Slide 15: Publicity shot for The Fountainhead
Cooper and Neal as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Pre-war throwback style in an almost-1950 movie! In some ways this is consistent with Rand’s femininity; her theme of surrender to a strong man as a woman’s ultimate desire. Hardly a modernist sentiment.
Possibly a case of Warner Bros covering all bases, including images to appeal to an older audience…
Slide 16: Publicity shot for The Fountainhead
Gary Cooper doing what he does best: wrestling a woman into submission. He looks much happier here.
Slide 17: Lobby Poster for The Fountainhead
I’m interested in the way this poster uses highly traditional pre-war melodrama poses for the characters then inserts an incongruous Modernist backdrop. Again, an example of studio conservatism that was probably a great frustration to Rand.
(I’ve avoided discussion of all the phallic symbolism in the film since its been gone over so many times, but it’s kind of hard to ignore in this image! )
Cooper holds a pencil to make him look smart. Patricia Neal’s neckline plunges as it does consistently throughout the film.
Concluding remarks
The Fountainhead is a curiosity: it boldly asserts the virtues of Modernism but contains many archaisms and appears to suffer from a kind of ideological schizophrenia. It attempts to mate 20th century aesthetics with a virulently 19th century worship of industrial rationalism, producing a film that is a weird visual and ideological amalgam.
The irony of our age is that nothing is more nostalgic than modernism. Rand, Vidor and the film itself all subscribe to what Lyotard called the ‘meta-narrative of rational consistent human progress’: a Utopian narrative de-legitimized by the horrors and upheavals of the 20th Century.
The buildings and interiors of The Fountainhead, intended as emphases and exclamation marks to stun and dazzle us and ram home an inspiring vision of the future, have become as quaint and nostalgic as the film itself.
References and sources:
Jencks, Charles ‘The Language of Postmodern Architecture’ (New York, Rizzoli, 1991)
Jencks, Charles ‘The Postmodern Reader’ (London, St Martin’s Press, 1995)
Whitford, Frank ‘Bauhaus’ (London, Thames & Hudson, 1994)
Spaeth, David ‘Mies Van Der Rohe’ (New York, Rizzoli, 1988)
Dickens, Homer ‘The Films of Gary Cooper’ (Chicago, Citadel, 1983)
Senses of Cinema: King Vidor by Dan Callahan at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/great-directors/vidor/
cinemastyle.blogspot.com/FountainheadStyle
noir.net
Wikipedia
imdb.com
youtube.com
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