Cinema as refuge: Frank Borzage and the mystical tradition.

Bilton, Alan J.

Despite its title, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) casts a long shadow over the final years of silent film. Its non-naturalistic lighting, mobile 'unchained' camera-work, and use of distorted, self-consciously artificial sets, can be seen as a direct influence on Hollywood-based directors as diverse as King Vidor and Josef Von Sternberg (not to mention anticipating film-noir and the Universal Horror cycle), its marriage of American melodrama and German expressionism providing silent film with its own cinematic Weltzerfall, the twilight of the age.

Sunrise's most striking double, however, is unquestionably Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven (1927), with whom it shares Murnau's leading lady (Janet Gaynor), studio (Fox), and even the production lot, the two films shot virtually simultaneously, with Gaynor flitting back and forth between sets (1). This "historical and metonymic proximity", as Lucy Fischer puts it, has often led critics to read the two films as complementary inversions of the same themes, one a European vision of America, the other an American dream of Europe, the two films linked in terms of an oneiric working out of the artistic possibilities of melodrama (2). Although 7th Heaven is undoubtedly Borzage's best known silent film, his subsequent work, Street Angel (1928) is, if anything, even more heavily indebted to Sunrise, Borzage figuring an indeterminate, fog-bound Naples as the same kind of extra-territorial, limnal space seen in Sunrise's unnamed 'City'. There are other noteworthy parallels: both plots pivot on a moment of attempted murder followed by a scene of intense emotional reconciliation and forgiveness, and both frame the city as alternatively a place of sanctuary and danger.

But does 7th Heaven rise to the challenge of Murnau's masterpiece? For Fischer, Borzage's film is little more than a bloodless shadow of Murnau's: a "conventional genre product", whose sentimental and moralistic treatment of "female victim-hood" lacks the "modernist, visual excess" of Murnau's "song of two humans". in this reading, Borzage's conservative religiosity is reflected not merely in terms of the film's plotting, but also in his use of "fairly standard camera positions and movements" and "established mise en scene", the film a wholesome, romanticised and commercial reworking of Sunrise's more ambivalent and demanding material (3). But what if we approach Borzage's film from outside traditional (and in some sense "Hollywood") aesthetics? We can see the achievement of 7th Heaven and Street Angel more clearly, I think, through the prism of religious visionary experience, explaining their strangeness, beauty, and narrative waywardness in terms of a cinematic haven or sanctuary--what S. Brent Plate, in Religion and Film (2008), terms a "sacred canopy"--situating Borzage inside the contemporary scholarly debate on religion and film, and issues of materiality and absence (4). This article thus draws on film writing of the period, the metaphysical tradition in art history, and on more recent theoretical treatments of "the structural parallel between cinema going and religious rituals" to argue that Borzage's work has less in common with classical Hollywood melodrama than with what Melanie J. Wright terms "the religion-film interface": "ritualistic" activities linked to the "attempt to bring people as close to the ineffable, invisible, and unknowable as words, images, and ideas can take us". (5)

Film as Portal

The film writing of Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) offers a ready window through which to approach Borzage.At first sight, of course, Kracauer's stress on the presence of physical reality appears profoundly at odds with Borzage's metaphysical space. As an American film, Murnau's Sunrise was excluded from Kracauer's magisterial survey of German Cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), but Kracauer is also sensitive to the effects of Murnau's art. Rather strikingly, for example, Kracauer comments on how Murnau's work is "surrounded by a halo of dreams" in which "a tangible person might suddenly impress the audience as a mere apparition". (6) Ironically, such phrases denote condemnation, not praise. Kracauer attacks Murnau for his "obselete theatrical poses", the "falsity of the whole", characterising Faust (1926)--the final film Murnau made in Germany before leaving for the US--as "a monumental display of artifice". (7) Such sentiments are wholly in keeping with Kracauer's disdain for the 'painterly' or 'artistic' film, whose aura of willed unreality flagrantly violates the camera's (moral) obligation to record and document the indiscriminate realm of matter. Murnau's work is thus relegated to the same level of the loathed Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), "drawings brought to life", a betrayal of the medium as well as a retrograde attempt to "cinematize ... stage illusions" (8). 'Truth', for Kracauer is rooted in the camera's democratic embrace of the ordinary, the transient, familiar, or humble. This stress on film as refuse, rather than on film as refuge, would seem to oppose everything Borzage stands for: after all, isn't the sphere of the quotidian the very thing that the visionary tradition seeks to transcend?

And yet, for all Kracauer's antipathy toward Murnau, Borzage's other-worldly artifice offers an uncanny vision of what Kracauer seeks from the materialist tradition. As David Frisby has pointed out in his study Fragments of Modernity (1988), Kracauer's own Modernist project was predicated on a search for the manifestations of the "higher sphere"--the Biblical panting of the soul--displaced in the Twentieth Century to the realm of the trivial and the discarded, Kracauer, in Walter Benjamin's words, working like a "rag-picker", sifting through the scraps of the fallen world, seeking to redeem the pieces and thereby render them intelligible. (9) For Kracauer, the modern world inverts the profane and the sacred. Ideals are now found exclusively within the realm of the superficial and throw-away. (10) "One must confront theology in the profane", he writes, "whose holes and gaps have to be indicated, into which the truth has sunk" amongst the modest effluvia of the modern world: junk, trash, the cinema, and its "kitsch, wishful dreams" (emphasis mine). (11) Like the poet and theatre director Antonin Artaud, Kracauer is concerned with the "whole element of contingency and mystery in cinema" where "the most insignificant object takes on ... meaning and life". (12) Indeed, in his best known work, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), Kracauer muses that "perhaps our condition is such that we cannot gain access to the elusive essentials of life unless we assimilate the seemingly non-essential. Perhaps the way today leads from, and through, the corporeal to the spiritual? And perhaps the cinema helps us to move from below to above?" (13)

In this context, a significant and unexpected kinship between 7th Heaven and Kracauer can be suggested by way of Kracauer's famous essay 'Memory of a Paris Street', written just three years after Borzage's Parisian dreamscape, wherein he writes of an (unnamed) Paris street he was obsessively drawn toward, directed by "a secret smuggler's path" toward another "sphere", a labyrinth in which the concrete real seemed to fall away and the "refuse" of the world leaps into the ethereal. "While one still walks through the living streets, they are already distant", he writes, "like memories in which reality mixes with the multi-layered dream of that reality, and refuse and constellations of stars meet one another. (14) For Kracauer, this nameless Parisian passage seemed to merge with a scene he had glimpsed in a silent film he witnessed as a child: "in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house facades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the facades with the sky below began to waver. The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle--the image has never left me". (15) Film seemed able to leap from the mundane to the (nearly) metaphysical, from mere things to an "upper world" that is "trembling" like a animate being. Borzage's late silent films operate on that same principle, capturing the moment that the facade of the real begins to waver, or, in a favourite term of Kracauer's, acting like a "doorway" or "gate" to the non-mimetic, visionary tradition that the critic himself both attacked and affirmed.

S. Brent Plate draws upon similar notions of portals and apertures to argue that religious rituals are best seen as "passports between worlds, the transformation operating via performative structures". (16) For Plate, performance links cinematic to religious 'world-making': "the camera framing the world, projecting it onto a broad field in ways that invite viewers/adherents" to participate in distinctly ritualistic ways. (17) The frame, which is synecdoche for most forms of camera action and composition, is a gateway, working in both directions, "keeping the threatening forces of chaos at bay", thus demarcating the sacred and the quotidian, but then suggesting a way of bridging the two. (18) This understanding of ritual is spatial, following very familiar orthogonal traditions: one might think of believers praying toward the Kaba, the central shrine in Islam, or toward the ark housing the Torah scrolls in the synagogue facing the remains of the Great Temple in Jerusalem. Seeing structures as "performative" also blurs space and time: although the Great Temple is now absent, Jewish believers are placed in a historical continuum which overcomes this absence, connecting history, time, and place. Although Mary Douglas stresses the way in which ritual "shuts in desired themes and shuts out intruding ones", the notion of some kind of "avenue of connection" is nonetheless central (19).

One can also link this connection to the visionary tradition in religious art. Russian icons, for example, generally paintings on wood of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child, are said to 'appear' or 'open' (the Russian word conflates the two), the actual painting having been displaced. For the believer, the specific brushstrokes, when accompanied by fervent prayer, disappear, creating not a thing but an opening, a kind of gap or visual absence to be filled by the Holy Spirit. (20) Modern commentators have explored the cinematic region in terms of its womblike imagery, invoking images of the Holy mother creating a safe and consoling, maternal space. Icons have been linked to magical amulets of protection, specifically created to be portable channels of escape, a way out of the ostensible real--part bolt-hole, part escape hatch.

The point here is not that a film does or can actually generate metaphysical experience; such judgments and experiences stand outside the scope of scholarly inquiry. The point is that a filmmaker like Borzage is using the specific techniques of his craft in order to replicate--or reinvent--the techniques of mystical transformation. For Borzage and for critics like Kracauer, Plate, and Douglas, the very structure of filmmaking lends itself to this tradition of psychological and spiritual transport.

Sacralising Space

In the Western medieval tradition, the figure of the anchorite often marks the visionary experience. Anchorites were monks or nuns (the latter being more numerous) who volunteered to be entombed in an anchorhold, a kind of cell attached to the church building. Once locked inside, they would never leave, their only openings to the outside world being a small window facing the outside world, the fenestrella, through which they would receive food and dispense advice to visiting pilgrims, and a tiny squint hole through which the anchorite could view at least a portion of the high altar. Life from that point on was carried out in a dim, occluded space, illuminated only by the odd shaft of light. The experience-but for the bacchanalia of popcorn, soft drinks, and romantic comedies-is essentially cinematic. The material world is severely contracted or obscured in order to open up a visionary excursion through a carefully structured frame, each space becoming a refuge or sanctuary in which the four walls of the cell become, in the words of Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416), "as naught", "a space not of this world". (21) Laura Saetveit Miles relates this mystical approach to cinema, first, to Gaston Bachelard's idea of a "world space," which "constitutes its own kind of inclusive universe apart from the everyday world", and, second, to Michel Foucault's idea of "heterotopia"--a space where several seemingly incompatible sites exist at the same time, a place divorced from time and narrative, at once open and closed, able to be penetrated and yet hermetically sealed off, a site of ritual and purification capable of transcending all these contradictions. (22)

For Miles, the anchorhold encapsulates Bachelard's and Foucault's notions of a utopian space, a space both public, with openings to the hustle and bustle of village life and church services, and intensely private, simultaneously sealed off from light and the world and yet somehow illuminated from within. This is a "transitional space between heaven and earth ... a private fortress which she could not leave, nor could anyone enter--except God" (23). Perhaps unsurprisingly she also compares it to a womb; indeed, in one of the most astonishing sections of Julian's text, the wound in Christ's side opens wider and wider until it becomes an opening or door from which all mankind proceed, an unimaginable image, at once fissure and womb, anticipating the image of the open "door" in Russian icons.

Gerald Laughlin emphasizes the more collective aspect to the "quasi-religious practice ... which congregates people in the dark for visions of desire". (24) "Like church," he notes, "cinema creates social bonds through the projection of other forms of life that exceed the mundane, through the production of visions that can be sustained only through their repeated attendance". (25) Drawing on the history of medieval tableau vivants and mysteres mimes, Laughlin stresses the way in which both church and cinema are "inside places where images of the outside ... are shown" (26) in order to be ritualised as simultaneously separate and connected.

In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, the principle of using a highly specialised space for symbolic projection in order to move from the material world to the sacred world guided the practice of Freemasonry, which is pertinent to this article, given Borzage's own status as Worshipful Master of the Hollywood lodge. Freemasons used "tracing boards," which were essentially painted representations of Masonic symbols (derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, Pythagoras's theorems, and the supposed blueprints of Hiram Abiff, the architect of King Solomon's Temple) as part of the initiation ceremony that would take members through the three Masonic degrees. In the early history of Freemasonry, Masonic symbols--squares, pentagrams, gauges, trowels--were chalked directly on to meeting room floors (usually in inns or members' homes) and then meticulously scrubbed away after the ceremony so as to preserve their secrets (as David Morrison has pointed out, suggesting links to older occult practices, most importantly John Dee's casting of a protective circle). (27) Later, rolled up bits of fabric--magic carpets, if you will--were employed, but even here certain elements or motifs were carefully kept hidden. Instead, these were either painted on other objects--slates or stones--which were then positioned on the carpet, or else they were substituted by other objects (ladders, compasses, skulls), which were then removed as the initiate slowly absorbed the lodge's secrets, not unlike the method of spiritual escalation described by Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. This replacement of tangible things by lines and symbols--film buffs might think of Dogville (2003)--follows the tradition of religious art just described, where the material or representational disappears, subsumed by a sense of numinous absence or transcendent space (the gradual extinguishing of the candles in the room also suggests the passing of the real, displaced by infinity). For the Masonic initiate, as for Julian of Norwich or the anonymous icon writer, the space of the art work dematerialises, replaced by a new kind of sanctuary or retreat.

In Freemasonry, notions of a sanctum sanctorum, or some kind of otherworldly fortress, are inextricably linked with King Solomon's Temple, the lodge a representation of its divine architecture, the holiest place on earth, and refuge of the Ark of the Covenant; now destroyed, the Temple lives on as a kind of architectural absence, an invisible blue print or floor-plan of something now lost. The markings of the tracing board thus denote the vanished chambers of the "Masonic Palace", the lodge an imagined rather than literal space, immaterial "holy ground", whose effacement suggests what cannot be mapped or charted. (28) As their name suggests, "tracing boards" are concerned with the trace of something untouchable, a trace inextricably linked to its erasure (in Freemasonry even the mop used to wash out the lines is sacred). All that remains are patterns, shapes --their architectural skeleton--and yet, for believers, this structure suffices. When one is safely enclosed within the Masonic pattern, the real world falls away, the magic circle protecting everything enclosed from external evil and malevolent influences: a point of perfect refuge.

By the time of Borzage's childhood in Salt Lake City, many American lodges had replaced tracing boards with optical lanterns, the lanterns (the same used in Magic Lantern shows) projecting the secret symbols either on to a screen, the floor, or even onto the furniture in the room. This link between illumination and darkness, projection and effacement, escapism and the sacred, was central to Borzage's world--and, ultimately, to his sense of the mystical potential of cinema. As a consequence, critics have sought out any evidence of Masonic symbolism in Borzage's work (the most obvious being the link between 'the line'--a hermetic symbol derived from Jacob's 'ladder set upon the earth, the top of it reaching unto heaven'--and the seven flights to Chico's apartment in 7th Heaven), but a more intriguing approach, perhaps, is to trace this motif of sanctuary and refuge through his work, not least in the sense of how this notion of transcendental absence relates to silent film.

Sacralising Technique

Borzage's best known silent film, the 1927 7th Heaven--a love story between a Parisian sewer worker and a homeless waif, played against the backdrop of the First World War--is set up according to two very distinct camera movements, vertical and horizontal, one spiritual, the other worldly. The film opens with a title card drawing our attention to "a ladder leading from the depths to the heights", the first incarnation of Jacob's Ladder in the movie, but more prosaically the ladder beneath the man-hole cover where Chico (Charles Farrell), the film's hero, toils. The sewer space is, inevitably, connected with notions of the bodily, not just in terms of waste, but also of sex, with low-angle shots where Chico's co-worker, Rat, stares up the skirts of girls passing over head. A circle of sunlight in the darkness (celestial discs are a motif in Borzage's films) suggests the way up. Moreover, the "hole" of the sewer is linked to the hovel (a title card describes it as 'The Hole in the sock') where the film's heroine, Diane (Janet Gaynor), lives. The dark, prison-like apartment where Diane is kept as a virtual prisoner by her absinthe-soaked sister (Gladys Brockwell) is thus staged as a visual echo of the sewer scene, reasserting the need to transcend the earthly and physical. When visiting, the first question their long-lost Uncle asks them is "Have you kept yourselves clean and decent?" Diane's gloomy abode is, like Chico's sewer, illuminated by a halo of celestial light, non-naturalistically positioned as if on an Italian alter piece; both Diane and Chico constantly gaze upwards into the light whenever they are at their most threatened or besieged. For example, Diane stares up at the streetlight just before Nana attempts to kill her, the light, literally but also metonymically linked to the light of the movie theatre's projector, offering a channel of escape.

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Borzage's epistemological model is hierophanic: answers from above are delivered and interpreted through the cinematic medium. In The Sacred and the Profane (1961), Mircea Eliade stresses the vertical dimension of the sacred, in which the divine descends to earth by means of an axis mundi, a connecting shaft between the heavens above and the earth below. (29) By contrast, Lesley Northrop (amongst others) has brought attention to the possibly gendered spatiality of this model (true of virtually all sacred architecture): the vertical suggests hierarchical organisation, the individually phallic mode of acquiring knowledge, whilst the horizontal suggests the egalitarian, communal, and feminine mode of knowledge. (30) S. Brent Plate has shown that religious rituals are often linked to orthogonal boundaries and enclosed spaces, "arranged alongside X and Y axes". (31) Plate's study of film stresses, in fact, the "ways in which camera movements replicate existing cosmological structures. The choice between tilting a camera up or down or setting up a horizontal tracking shot to create a scene is a choice that defines the space of the filmic image". (32)

In this sense, Borzage's film rejects the collaborative and (for some theorists) feminine axis of sacred knowledge. Movement up is coded as good in the film, while tracking shots along the horizontal axis suggest danger. The movie's first tracking shot follows Diane as she wanders the crooked, expressionistic streets to beg for alcohol at a weirdly wall-less bar; the second shot comes when she flees her sister, who then pursues her, whip in hand, along the same twisted, distorted alleys. Whilst not quite as experimental as Murnau's work on Sunrise, Borzage's Paris is still strikingly non-naturalistic, peculiarly in terms of its one-dimensional mix of studio facade, model work, and painted backdrop. There is an odd lack of horizontal visual depth to Borzage's work, as if the real world isn't all that real, or at least all that substantial, closer to the Devil's trickery than made up of weighty things. As John Belton has noted, the lighting is blurred and imprecise, foreground and background collapsed into one another as a consequence of the hazy but even tone of the cinematography. (33)

These horizontal tracking shots are also connected with time and narrative, but again, in a negative fashion. The two tracking shots linked to Chico involve, first, the mobilization of the troops during World War One, and then a movement from right to left across the battlefield, ending with the shelling that apparently takes Chico's life. Horizontal movement portends the temporal and the mortal, change and loss. Vertical tracking shots, however, transport the film's hero to a site removed from the world's transience and danger, a place of stasis outside of the film's narrative. Here, time is transformed into sacred refuge: a peculiar, holy kind of space, immune to the world's mutability.

In 7th Heaven, these ideas are linked to Chico's apartment, which is a magic space, despite being merely a sewer worker's rented hovel. The spiral upwards rescues Diane from the city streets. "It's Heaven!" she exclaims, and indeed the stage set collapses space so that one can climb out onto the roof (the backdrop is obviously painted), the character now able, as another title card reads, to "reach out and touch a star". The total geometry of the scene, including the plank that transports Chico (and Diane, after she gains courage) to the rooftop, is perhaps closest in spirit to the Freemason's tracing boards, the composition of the image being made up of windows, squares, blocks and straight lines. What is most striking about the metteur-en-scene is its rebuttal of perspective or spatial co-ordinates: Paris, Sacre-Coeur, stars, neighbouring apartments: all seem to occupy the same elevated (and yet oddly flat, almost cubist) sphere of unreality. "Never look down. Always look up", Chico tells Diane, even as the cinematography now places "up" on the same spatial co-ordinates as Chico's apartment.

The idea of the apartment as an all-encompassing space is reinforced in the justly famous scene where Diane wraps herself in Chico's overcoat whilst he is out; the home represents both a wish-fulfilment of safety and a holy space, as suggested by the scene in which the couple marry themselves there and then: the ceremony has been sanctified by the apartment's sacralised space. Both the action of the camera and the film's narrative momentum, as mundane phenomena, are kept in abeyance as long as the filming rests within this cell. All is quiet mystery. Disruption--a fall back to the mundane--then comes, tellingly for a film made in 1927, in the form of sound. The start of the First World War is signalled by a series of cries, cheers, and bugles from the Paris streets below, as if, out there, history and narrative go on, noisily threatening the static refuge of the lovers' embrace. When Chico is conscripted, the lovers agree to pray to each other at eleven o clock each day, the ritual framed as a static close up. Borzage presents the moment as if plucked from time and space. Just as with the Russian icon--or indeed the famous shot in Sunrise where the lovers embrace in the middle of a busy street and the traffic and trappings of the modern world seem to dissolve under the force of the movie's desire--the representational "realism" of the film gives way to pure devotion or veneration, the trappings of conventional narrative cinema no more important than the icon painter's brush strokes.

This anti-realist notion is made explicit at the end of the film, after Diane has been informed of Chico's death. Receiving the news, she is at first distraught, but, as eleven o clock chimes, Chico is first spotted (without any dramatic fanfare) in the streets below and then miraculously climbs the stairs, complete with the same vertical tracking shot employed before, blind but alive in a way that defies narrative explanation. Chico's blindness, as in myth, is associated with wisdom; he is no longer distracted by the world. "Now [that] I am blind I can see", he tells her; "I'll never die!" As they embrace, they return to the static moment outside and above conventional narrative continuity or mimesis. (34)

This devotional mode of art has been anticipated by the scene in which Father Chevillion, the film's earthly representative of le Bon Dieu, hands Chico religious medals. Chico begins the movie as an atheist, having already shelled out for two candles--one to pray for a job as a street cleaner, the other to pray for a blonde wife. God owes him ten francs for non-delivery. The avuncular priest, however, insists that Chico accept the medals, saying that "they may help you someday. Who knows?" As Molly Haskell has pointed out, Borzage's use of an inserted close-up (the only one in the movie) marks the medals as "privileged signifiers ... the place where the power to answer prayer resides". (35) Their first manifestation is comic (Chico painfully sits on them after stating "I am an atheist ...! walk alone"); the second, romantic (the lovers drape the medals around each other's necks in their private wedding ceremony). But their subsequent appearances are increasingly linked to the mystical. Chico and Diane stare at the icons in order to commune with each other when apart, whilst the end of the film suggests that the medals have acted as protective amulets, rescuing Chico from death itself. (36) Like the Russian icons or the Masonic circle, the medals act as material signifiers of otherworldly powers; the fact that the medals appear to be blank in Borzage's close-up only reinforces their numinous significance. (37) They are "as naught", yet full.

Love and Mystery

The connection between cinema and religious art is made even more explicit in the film which followed 7th Heaven: Street Angel, released in 1928, with the same lead actors, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. Here the setting is Naples rather than Paris, but if anything the site of Borzage's follow-up is even more geographically disconnected; space is collapsed by the omnipresent fog and smoke (the film takes place under "smoking Vesuvius", a title card tells us), creating a vague, spectral city of fleeting shadows and uncertain interiors, the camera able to float in and out of murky bars, dark alleyways, and strangely foreshortened squares, objects and inhabitants alike reduced by extreme low-key lighting to silhouettes and shadow puppets. Stairs, rooms, sewers, odd blank walls--Ernst Palmer's mobile camera is able to drift effortlessly through them all, at times without seeming to cut. Everything is open and accessible, but insubstantial; one feels as if one could stumble straight through a paper-thin wall at any time, the world of Caligari relocated to the Fox studio-lot but obscure and half-erased, a floating water-colour rather than an angular labyrinth.

If 7th Heaven is set up in terms of an opposition between the vertical and the horizontal, Street Angel is defined by the spiral: the astonishing circular pan of the camera in the first scene, moving dispassionately from figure to figure as it swirls across Naples, to the spiral staircase leading to Angela's apartment, to the round hiding places like the drum inside which Angela is smuggled past the police, to the circular light above her mother's bed, to the circus ring itself, a charmed circle free from the laws and punishments operating elsewhere. Borzage even provides a reprise of the hideaway of Chico's apartment (albeit in a more vulnerable sense) when a relatively benign policeman allows Angela one more hour with her lover before arresting her. Angela solemnly closes all the windows and draws the curtains, "to shut our happiness in", but here the holy aura of sanctuary is only transitory; just as Angela fell to earth from her circus stilts earlier, so reality (and imprisonment in reality) can only be kept at bay for a single, magical, hour. (38)

The most interesting facet of Street Angel, however, might be its attitude toward art. Farrell plays Gino, a struggling artist who paints the portrait of circus artiste Angela. When she complains that the saintly picture looks nothing like her, Gino explains that her usual expression--generally angry or sulky at this point in the narrative--is in fact the false one: "You wear a mask to hide the soul that is in you", he tells her. The religious connotations are made explicit when Chico and Diane are forced to sell the painting to an unscrupulous art forger, who transforms the portrait into a fake Old Master of, perhaps inevitably, the Virgin Mary. As the story progresses, the film constantly cuts back to its transformation, as first Diane's modern dress is replaced, then the domestic background, before finally a halo and unnatural light is added to complete her spiritual transfiguration. Borzage also shoots scenes that stress the blank space in the couple's apartment where the painting used to hang: like the Russian icon, the image itself disappears, replaced by a luminous absence charged with unearthly powers. Diane's transformation into Madonna occurs at the two-thirds point in the film, when she is arrested and imprisoned for prostitution; disillusioned, Gino comes to believe that all his previous art is a lie, naive self-deception. So, when they meet again upon her release, he attempts to strangle her, only for her to flee through the fog to seek sanctuary--that most Borzagian of motifs--in a church (the debt to Sunrise is obvious here). As Gino finally catches up with her, his eyes are inexplicably drawn upwards, and there, above the altar, resides his transformed painting--the sacred truth that the film has all along privileged above crude circumstance or outward appearance. Reconciled, the two lovers head out into the fog, which then envelops them entirely. Their etherealised love has cocooned them against the world (far more effectively than Gino's apartment earlier); the studio set has been erased, as in the Masonic ritual.

Borzage's dissolve from the painting to the lovers is mirrored by the slow dissolution of their two figures in the mist, the technique alluding to the erasure of Chico and Diane in the celestial beam of light at the end of 7th Heaven. Transcendence implies something beyond the visual (or narrative) itself. Love creates--literally--its own miniature universe in Borzage's cinema. As Frederick Lamster has observed, in his book-length study of Borzage, "the major characters exist outside the actual or material world and within their own spatial and emotional sphere, which even physical separation and death cannot destroy". (39) For Geoffrey-Nowell Smith, this "repudiation of ... reality in favour of an emotional and spiritual inner world" is the cornerstone of Borzage's cinema, a cinema which redeploys melodrama as "secularised religious allegory". (40) But it is not merely a fictional sphere or an allegory for Borzage, who is tapping in to a sense of "transcendence" of the real. In its disregard for material actuality in favour of a different kind of space, Borzage's work represents a submerged idealist strain already present within Hollywood melodrama, a belief (shared with the icon-makers) that the real is accidental, provisional, and temporary, at least when viewed alongside the eternal. But this mysticism is, on its surface, profoundly at odds within the materialist tradition of film criticism that has developed from Kracauer to Bazin, who emphasise cinema's engagement with and organisation of the presence (and transience) of actual things--from physical bodies to city streets--leaving mystical experience to the merely possible collateral effect, not to a director's salutary calculation and the audience's predictable reward.

The Essential Thing

And yet, as I suggested at the start of this essay, Kracauer's theory of cinematic redemption in many ways represents the attempt to relocate the visionary tradition of religious art in terms of the very matter that his critical mode vows to repudiate. Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, Kracauer's Theory of Film, and Borzage's 7th Heaven and Street Angel are concerned with the same "manifestation of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world" but which is nevertheless paradoxically manifested "in objects that are an integral part of our natural "'profane' world". (41) For Kracauer, film is continually engaged with what is unseen, unnoticed--too small, too familiar, too ugly, too broken--precisely because "it never occurs [to the viewer] to look that way". (42) Seeing those things--and seeing them in just the way the artist has framed them--is a means to higher knowledge. As Henri Angel puts it, film sees matter as "present in its very absence, graspable in its ungraspability, appearing in its disappearing". (43) Borzage's proletarian dreams--those sewer workers, street cleaners, prostitutes, cabbies--provide a material corollary to the world trudging below, yearning to look up.

If Northrop critiques "top-down" models of spirituality because of their exclusion of the feminine principles of communalism, Borzage uses that vertical model to place the emergence of the transcendent vision at the most humble and plebeian level, a cinematic beatitude not that far removed from Andre Bazin's notion of the "revelation" emerging from the real. As one of Bazin's disciples, Amedee Ayfre, wrote in a 1961 article on Bresson, film, and the sacred, "film must transcend the everyday precisely through the everyday". (44) Likewise (and paradoxically), "the image must deliver something other than itself by no means other than itself". (45) In this sense, the thing below already contains the potential to ascend. Objects, places, people--they are not complete at the level of simple seeing. Film sees more, sees higher, sees light in the dark. The strange ritualised spaces of Borzage's films, "arabesques in space and time" (the phrase is Artaud's), might at first seem to exist at the opposite pole of, say, Robert Bresson's austere, orphaned world, but the broken objects and people within them denote the poor who are always with us, a site of spatialised possibility.

Indeed, both 7th Heaven and Street Angel take place in dilapidated, run-down locales closer in spirit to Chaplin than Murnau, Borzage establishing the blue-collar sensibility that represents a necessary corrective to over-earnest religious yearning. In interviews from the period, Borzage defined his work in terms of Naturalism rather than Expressionism. As he explained to Motion Picture Classic, "I intend to do stories about the people ...! know the folk who go to motion pictures are interested most of all in the problems, the joys and the sorrows of their own daily lives, and I hope to bring to the films a reflection of all this". (46) Echoing Kracauer's sentiments, he concluded that "the photoplay has been too far from the realities of life... [F]ilm experiences have been false and artificial adventures" (47). Lea Jacobs argues that 7th Heaven reaches back to the proletarian comedies of Borzage's silent period--immigrant comedies such as Humoresque (1920), The Nth Commandment (1923), and The First Year (1926)--whilst simultaneously embracing the experimental camerawork and Modernist sets instigated by Murnau. (48) In an era when religious pictures were seen, in Variety's words, only to succeed "outside of metropolitan districts", the commercial success of 7th Heaven demonstrated that cinematic spirituality could be made accessible and acceptable through working-class settings and characters: or, as the film papers of the time put it, this was a "red blooded" picture for every "man, woman and child", a "love story told in a straight-to-the-shoulder way". (49) As Jacobs admits, 7th Heaven "doesn't fit readily into any of the categories current in the critical discourse of the period", but this juxtaposition between the earthly and the transcendent is central to the film's unique form, (50) and it all hinges on keeping the lowest, dirtiest, smallest parts of our lives visible long enough--carefully enough--to see what hasn't yet been seen in them.

Borzage's universe is not at all, as Lucy Fischer contends it is, passionless, displacing the erotic with the domestic. True, physical consummation between the lovers tends to be prevented by external events, but its proximity produces frisson, whether in the scene in 7th Heaven where the unmarried Chico and Diane must spend their first night in the apartment together, pretending to be husband and wife--a scene involving both stars in various states of undress--or in the sequence in The River (1928) where Rosalee (Mary Duncan) brings the fallen (and naked) Allen John (Farrell) back to life via her sensual caress. The space in which Borzage's figures move may be flattened and cubist, a Masonic assemblage of squares, ladders, and shadowy shapes, but the actors themselves remain stubbornly physical, bodies, things of weight and heat and skin. (51) In Lucky Star (1929), Charles Farrell's crippled war hero staggers across an impossibly empty, virtually invisible snowscape, but his stumbling progress is portrayed in all its intractable, stoical pain; likewise, in the opening scene of The River, Farrell's floating figure is positioned within a whirlpool but also as a thing of weight itself, corporeal debris floating at the very lip of the void. Will it sink to nothingness or rise to something more? (Significantly both films reach their climax in a snowstorm that obliterates all landmarks.)

By Kracauer's rigorously materialist standards, 7th Heaven and Street Angel do seem stage-bound and artificial, the imposition of false religious categories upon the inscrutable objectivity of the camera, or, as Kracauer would put it, "fantasy's pretension to the same aesthetic legitimacy as actuality". (52) But Borzage's Paris and Kracauer's 'lost street' are parallels, spaces in which "refuse and constellations of stars [might] meet". (53) The notion that a lost street or a silent, black-and-white puddle might suddenly open up a gate between the material and the spiritual takes us back to ancient icon-makers and to anchorites' visions, a contingent world of physical bodies rooted in the darkness, yet staring up at the immaterial light--which is to say, the world of cinema itself. By drawing attention to the creation of filmic strongholds or retreats, specific sites of protection or cover, 7th Heaven and Street Angel embody an inescapable aspect of popular cinema's infantile promise as a shield against the outside, but they also strive, in form and content, to open a channel between the incarnational and the transcendent. Borzage's films situate the beggarly real within a cosmological, ritualised space. His vision of Europe is that of a working-class American, looking at the meagre and fortuneless as an ontologically troubling presence and absence, both of which are lurking in the cinematic image itself.

Alan J. Bilton

Swansea University

Notes

(1) This strange linkage, or 'doubling', between the work can even be followed to the very first Academy Award ceremony, in 1929, when Borzage received the inaugural Best Director, Murnau's Sunrise received a special award for 'Overall Artistic achievement', and Gaynor received the Best Actress nod for her body of work across all three films.

(2) Lucy Fischer, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, London: BFI, 1998, p.59.

(3) Fischer, 62.

(4) S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Recreation of the World, London: Wallflower, 2008, p.4.

(5) Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film, London: I.B. Taurus, 2007, p.14.

(6) Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947, p.78.

(7) Kracauer, 1947, 148.

(8) Kracauer, 1947, 84.

(9) David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988, p.186.

(10) Frisby, 184.

(11) Frisby, 124, 110.

(12) Antonin Artuad, 'Sorcery and Cinema' in Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds.), The Religion and Film Reader, New York: Routledge, 2007, p.54.

(13) Kracauer, 1997, ii.

(14) Frisby, 139.

(15) Kracauer, 1997, ii.

(16) Plate, 41.

(17) Plate, vi.

(18) Plate, 4.

(19) Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London: Routledge, 1992, p.78.

(20) In common with virtually all modes of self-consciously devotional art, Russian iconography privileges the universal and the eternal, relegating 'realism' to the realm of the transient, provisional and accidental, post-Renaissance mimesis at best blind, at worst a diabolic illusion.

(21) Miles, Laura Saetveit, 'Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love', in Liz Herbert McAvoy (ed.), A Companion to Julian of Norwich, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008, p.155.

(22) Miles, 156, 158.

(23) Miles, 155.

(24) Gerald Loughlin, 'Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Technology', in Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds.), The Religion and Film Reader, New York: Routledge, 2007, p.337.

(25) Gerald Loughlin, 337.

(26) Loughlin, 340.

(27) David Harrison, The Genius of Freemasonry, Hersham, Surrey: Lewis Masonic, 2009, p.50.

(28) Bernard E. Jones, Bernard E., Freemason's Guide and Compendium, London: George G. Harrap and Company, 1950, p.316.

(29) Plate, 48.

(30) Plate, 48.

(31) Plate, 42.

(32) Plate, 42.

(33) John Belton, The Hollywood Professionals: Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer', New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974, p.124.

(34) Miracles occur throughout Borzage's work, especially in scenes of supernatural or inexplicable healing. Thus the dead Allen John is 'cured' by Rosalee's love in The River (1928), whilst the crippled Tim casts aside his crutches at the end of Lucky Star (1929). Interestingly both these scenes take place against a backdrop of blindingly white and featureless snow: images of unrepresentable mysteries, perhaps.

(35) Haskell, quoted by Frank Lamster, Frank Lamster, Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity: The Film Work of Frank Borzage, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981, p. 98.

(36) Jean Epstein compares close ups to "charms and amulets, the ominous, tabooed objects of certain primitive religions". For Epstein, cinema is polytheistic and animist, bestowing life--and a soul--onto things. See his famous essay 'On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie' in Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds.), The Religion and Film Reader, New York: Routledge, 2007, p52.

(37) One could plausibly associate the end of 7th Heaven with the end of silent film--its mute projection of desire, floating above the din of the world. Borzage tempts us toward that reading by turning sound effects (bells, yells, trumpets) into threats from below. But, in more sociological terms, one could also associate the idea of cinema as refuge with the sheer number of movie palaces called 'The Haven' or 'The Sanctuary' in the Twenties (the most famous being on Broadway)--suggesting not just how close Borzage's cinema comes to the modes of religious art but also how attractive an alternative hierophany was to an increasingly secular public. But perhaps both the x and y axes of the sacred space are present as an inexorable social pressure, despite Borzage's intimations of immortality in strictly vertical terms. As Timothy K. Beal writes, in the cinema, "we gather together, seated in rows, necks craned, silently facing the screen of light and revelation... [Afterwards] we file out in silence, crossing back over into the monotony and homogeneity of the ordinary world." See Timothy K. Beal, 'Behold the behemoth' in S. Brent Plate and David Jasper (eds.), Imag(in)ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of Living Together, Atlanta: Scholastic, 1999, p.198.

(38) Belton stresses the recurrent idea of 'building one's own world, insulated against external evil' (Belton, 81).

(39) Frank Lamster, Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity: The Film Work of Frank Borzage, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981, p.7

(40) Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, The Oxford History of World Cinema, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p.65.

(41) See Michael Bird, Religion in Film: Film as Hierophany' in Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds.), The Religion and Film Reader, New York: Routledge, 2007, p391.

(42) Kracauer, 1997, 54.

(43) Quoted by Bird, 394.

(44) Quoted by Bird, 393.

(45) Bird, 393.

(46) Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American Film of the 1920s, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p.264.

(47) Jacobs, 264.

(48) Jacobs, 265.

(49) Jacobs, 268.

(50) Jacobs, 268.

(51) Borzage's last two silent films (although both were partially re-shot for sound), The River (1928) and Lucky Star (1929) both take place on strikingly odd studio sets. The River's vertiginous Escher-like construction site and dam, made up of enormous (real) ladders and walkways, a fake mountainside, and model railways, create a very Murnau-like use of distorted perspective. Likewise, Lucky Star's fairy-tale village, in which Old Ma Tucker's cottage squats, inevitably makes one think of the Old Lady who lived in a shoe.

(52) Kracauer, 1997, 84.

(53) Frisby, 139.