Partly Preminger
Films by Otto Preminger and others
February 12 to March 3, 2016
„Two things are magnificent here: the unique beauty of this country and the unbelievable organization of film production – the consummate silent interlocking of a thousand cogs and gears, technical perfection down to the smallest detail, and all of this without clamor or pathos. The artistic side is more dubious. Only a few here can truly make the films they want. Whether I will belong to them is still to be determined.“ (Otto Preminger, letter to Ferdinand Bruckner, April 23, 1936)
Among the numerous Austrian exiles and émigrés who made film history in Hollywood, Otto Preminger (1905–1986) was one of the best-known – a trademark of sorts. Beginning with the film noir classic Laura (1944), he established himself at 20th Century Fox as a director of complex crime films (Fallen Angel, Whirlpool) and modernist melodramas such as Daisy Kenyon, an astonishing Joan Crawford vehicle, before forming his own independent production company in 1953. This decisive step launched another fruitful phase in his work. Preminger's open opposition to Hollywood's production code led him to search for "relevant", up-to-date topics prone to creating a stir: "I believe strongly that people must have the courage to live in their own period."
Between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, An Otto Preminger Production was a guarantee of epic ambitions (often based on bestsellers of impressive length). With captivating richness of detail and much-quoted Premingerian "objectivity", Anatomy of a Murder (1959) plumbs the depths of a complicated rape trial (questioning the nature of truth and justice in the background), while Exodus examines the founding of the State of Israel, and Advise & Consent delves into the intrigue-laden inner workings of U.S. politics.
The producer-director of these films conducted himself as an image-conscious impresario, taking centre stage as a popular figure whose effect in the media was similar to that of Alfred Hitchcock: both were so famous that they acted as personal guides in the trailers for their films. As his role model, however, Preminger – an anti-Nazi Jewish émigré – chose the Teutonic "man you love to hate" á la Erich von Stroheim: marked by a striking bald head and notorious for his tyrannical traits. With the help of Saul Bass' brilliant title sequences and film posters, Preminger put together meticulously designed production and publicity packages. At the same time, as a self-proclaimed figurehead of the “new artistic autonomy” in Hollywood, he was a perfect fit for the politique des auteurs, which had begun to change the terms of film critical debate by 1960. The Parisian MacMahonists, for example, declared him one of the "Four Aces" of cinema alongside Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang and Joseph Losey.
With this film series, the Film Museum proposes another perspective on Preminger's work, reaching beyond the mythical concept of the director-as-auteur – always unmistakably shaping each of "his" industrial products. As with all myths, this is a case of “partly truth and partly fiction.” Instead, we invite viewers to a tour of a house in Hollywood. Some rooms give away more about their owner than others (often literally: the paintings in his films are evidence of Preminger's art collector‘s eye), but all of them are equally characterized by other elements, influences and artistic collaborators. The 15 selected films directed by Otto Preminger cover the time he spent as a studio employee as well as his later period as an independent producer. River of No Return (1954), his last Fox-commissioned film after the founding of his production company, serves as a hinge between the two.
These films are molded not just by their director but by certain actors (the most Premingerian being Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney) and recurring crew members as well as pop cultural contexts, studio styles and current genre motifs. Preminger's penchant for complicated long takes and the balanced composition of figures in space (converging on an almost programmatic level in Anatomy of a Murder) is often viewed as a major case of life and art intersecting in auteurist ways: the distanced, objective worldview of a trained lawyer going hand in hand with the artful handling of an ensemble, acquired during his time as a successful stage director and manager of Vienna’s Josefstadt theater. But the development of this aesthetic can also be traced back to cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, Preminger’s important partner on the noirs he made at 20th Century Fox. In the post-classical era, Sam Leavitt's (widescreen) camerawork and Wendell Mayes' scripts proved to be similarly vital contributions.
Akin to looking through the windows of the Preminger house into the neighboring apartments, the program provides each of Preminger's 15 films with a "vis-à-vis", calling for a reappraisal of their qualities not only along the lines of unequivocal "authorship", but also through numerous other familial ties and relationships. From the simple case of remakes (The 13th Letter and Le Corbeau) through production connections (RKO noirs of 1952: Angel Face and The Narrow Margin) to questions of historiography (Exodus and Israel's pioneer production Hill 24 Doesn't Answer). From narrative motifs (the "homme fatal" in Fallen Angel and Raw Deal) through the signature of an actress (Joan Crawford, the “mature, independent woman" of 1945, in Mildred Pierce and Daisy Kenyon, or Jean Seberg, the emerging youth of 1960, in Bonjour Tristesse and À bout de souffle, the work of early Preminger admirer Jean-Luc Godard) to the self-reinvention of aging Hollywood greats with small, agile films made in England during the Sixties (Bunny Lake Is Missing and The Collector).
