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The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?
Fritz Lang who directed Peter Lorre in the serial killer classic, M, ran away with it, receiving 6 of the 10 votes cast. The immortal Charlie Chaplin picked up 2 for directing City Lights and René Clair (Le Million) and Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or) received one vote each.
Tod Browning who directed Dracula had admitted last week in a interview conducted strictly between the left and right lobes of my cerebral cortex that he feared he was just in this poll to round out the field and this proved to be the case.
Raoul Walsh, William A. Wellman and Josef von Sternberg were annoyed not to be in the poll at all and called for an investigation.
After the win, Lang and his (alleged) mistress, actress Joan Bennett, shared a celebratory cigarette on the set of their current movie project, the film noir thriller Scarlet Street.
"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."
By the way, perhaps I'm telling stories out of school, but the vote for René Clair came from none other than our own beloved Katie-Bar-The-Door. She felt Clair's work on Le Million was innovative, clever and warm, not to mention it's her favorite movie of the five listed here. She's right, of course. Le Million is on the short list for most pleasant surprises I've received while working on this blog and I give it my highest recommendation. But, well, I went with Lang for the reasons I've previously stated at length.
In any event, whoever you voted for, you're right, their work was the best of the year. A good year for directors all the way around.
In 1929, as you may recall from our previous lessons, two young Spaniards, filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí, collaborated to produce Un Chien Andalou, one of the most shocking films ever committed to celluloid. The image of a razor slicing a woman's eye, once seen, is never forgotten and the 16-minute film was a sensation, both among surrealists and the public at large.
The following year, Buñuel and Dalí collaborated again, this time on a feature-length film, L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age). For audiences of the time at least, the fruit of their collaboration was even more shocking the second time around.
In general, surrealism reminds me of something Buddy Hackett once told Roger Ebert about stand-up comedy. "Ninety-nine percent is in the delivery. If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes."
And after my first cursory viewing, that's what I thought L'Âge d'Or was, another of Luis Buñuel's surrealist jokes, only instead of the shocking yet purposely meaningless images of Un Chien Andalou, here you had a series of scenes that could fit into the most mundane of Hollywood movies—a documentary about scorpions, soldiers on the eve of battle, lovers kissing, an angry crowd, a man arrested, a woman fretting about a dinner party, a reception—but instead of the payoff you're expecting, the scenes are punctuated with nonsense dialogue, cattle in the bedroom and blind beggars who get punched for no reason. Buñuel, I thought, was serving up nonsense and daring me once again not to try to make sense of it.
But in drafting this essay, I watched L'Âge d'Or again (anything for you, dear readers) and began to see that, though seemingly random, the images actually fall into one of three categories: acts of violence, stuffy clerics and aristocrats, and frustrated would-be lovers. Read together, not literally but as you would a dream, Buñuel seems to be saying that societal and religious norms are cramping his style—and he's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
Read that way, as the dream of an angry, frustrated fetishist, L'Âge d'Or is actually quite an achievement. Buñuel himself called the film "a desperate and passionate call to murder."
"For me," he said, "it was a film about passion, l'amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of their ever becoming one." No wonder he wanted to kill somebody.
L'Âge d'Or was banned as an attack on the Catholic church and after a few performances, its producer Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who had commissioned the film as a birthday present to his wife, withdrew it from circulation. The film was not seen again for nearly fifty years.
L'Âge d'Or also marked the end of the working relationship between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. To say the two had a falling out while making this movie would be an understatement—on the first day of shooting, Buñuel chased Dalí off the set with a hammer.
To me at least, L'Âge d'Or is not quite as interesting as Un Chien Andalou —once you've slashed an eyeball, it's hard to top yourself —but it does reward repeat viewing and if you're at all interested in surrealism, avant garde film or the career of Luis Buñuel, L'Âge d'Or is indispensable. And I would say any artist—be they a painter, writer, director, whatever—should see it if only to gain some insight into how to present complex ideas metaphorically. Not to mention you get to watch the lovely Lya Lys suck on a marble statue's big toe—which you have to admit is not something you see every day.
In any event, I suspect that Buñuel couldn't have later made his masterpiece The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (which won the Oscar for best foreign film of 1972) if he hadn't first made L'Âge d'Or and for that alone it was worth making.
"All of which is well and good," you say, "but what about us Saturday night movie fans? Should we rent this?" Well, let's just say L'Âge d'Or is about as far removed from Fun-Stupid as you're going to get. It's not even the movie to start with if you want to dive into surrealism (although you'd want to get there eventually) and frankly, if you haven't already seen all the other movies I've recommended on this blog, you've got a lot of watching to do before you need put this one on your list.
Still, cows in the bedroom. You could do a lot worse on a Saturday night.
Personal Note: With this essay, I've now posted roughly as many words on this blog as I wrote in my first (unpublished) novel. I'm not sure whether that's cause for celebration or lamentation. As Tim Robbins said to Tommy the oft-imprisoned thief, "Perhaps it's time you considered a new profession." On the other hand, the poet Charles Bukowski wrote, "I've learned to feel good when I feel good" and I feel good when I write this blog. So all in all, I guess it's a good thing. In any event, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are having a happy Thanksgiving and we hope you are, too.
8:50 A.M. Postscript: I don't recommend writing about surrealism right before going to bed. I dreamed I was at a football game and I said, "The Marx Brothers always had good linebackers," which is ridiculous, of course—everybody knows Chico couldn't stop the run.
No time for blogging today. Busy doing something close to nothing. Here's a look at those who almost got a Katie nomination for 1930-31 ... but didn't.
Jackie Cooper (actor, Skippy)
Bela Lugosi (actor, Dracula) (almost forgot him—MM, 11/2/09)
Irene Dunne (actress, Cimarron)
Louise Brooks (actress, Prix de Beauté)
Mary Astor (actress, Other Men's Women)
William A. Wellman (director, The Public Enemy)
Raoul Walsh (director, The Big Trail)
Luis Buñuel (director, L'Age d'Or)
Dwight Frye (supporting actor, Dracula)
Harry Myers (right, with Charles Chaplin) (supporting actor, City Lights)
Paul Ollivier (left) (supporting actor, Le Million)
Mae Clarke (supporting actress, The Front Page)
Virginia Cherrill (supporting actress, City Lights)
Marjorie Rambeau (supporting actress, Min and Bill)
John Monk Saunders (with wife Fay Wray) (screenplay, The Dawn Patrol)
When we celebrate great directors—Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Ford—we are actually often celebrating wildly different qualities. Sometimes it's the gift of an Ingmar Bergman (remember a chess-playing grim reaper in The Seventh Seal?) to translate a deeply personal vision into an unforgettable image. At other times it's the knack of a William Wyler (who directed the most Oscar-winning performances in history) for coaxing award-winning performances from his actors. And at yet other times, it's the sheer determination of a Marcel Carné (who directed Children of Paradise during the Nazi occupation of France) to conjure a masterpiece from nothing under the most difficult of circumstances.
To turn a personal obsession into one of the greatest movies of all time, Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer had to become a combination of all three.
Dreyer was already slated to direct a movie about Joan of Arc when he discovered in a Paris library the complete transcript of the trial that led to her execution. Poring over the court's meticulous notes, Dreyer became obsessed with the Joan revealed in the give and take of the trial. Dreyer threw out Joseph Delteil's screenplay, which was a more traditional account of Joan's life, and instead wrote his own screenplay focusing the story solely on the interrogation.
The result, as the opening titles put it, is a portrait of Joan "not in armor, but simple and human." It's also one of the best movies ever made about the collision of religious faith and worldly cynicism.
Dreyer subscribed to what Ernest Hemingway later called the iceberg theory of storytelling, that if you focus on the core of the story and get the details right, then like the seventh-eights of the iceberg that's underwater, the audience will intuitively sense the parts of the story that you've left out. In directing The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer stripped away everything—subplots, politics, and especially showy, kabuki-style acting—that distracted from the emotional core of his story.
He even went so far as to bar the cast from wearing make-up, unprecedented in the Silent Era.
The brutal demands Dreyer made on his star, Maria Fal- conetti, were legendary. To get the performance he wanted from Falconetti, a stage actress known for light comedy, Dreyer had her kneel on the stone floor of the set for weeks on end, blank all emotion from her face and do take after endless take. In addition to cropping her long hair, Dreyer insisted over Falconetti's objection that in a key scene where the judges cut her hair in preparation for her execution, her head be shaved for real. And when a doctor is brought in to bleed the ailing Joan, Dreyer took a knife to Falconetti's arm and opened a vein.
Reportedly, the suffering etched in every line of her face was genuine, the tears well-earned.
Dreyer was as demanding of every performer in the movie, from his star to the extras. For the duration of shooting which ran from May to November 1927, he required that his performers stay in character as much as possible and keep their heads shaved in monkish tonsure-style haircuts. As Gary Morris pointed out in an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, this included even those actors whose characters wore caps that entirely covered their heads.
Likewise Dreyer built an elaborate, three- dim- ensional set and then never showed it, shooting nearly the entire movie in a series of close-ups, possibly using more close-ups than any other movie in history. Yet following the iceberg principle again, the reality is there in the background so that without drawing attention to the set or stopping to pat himself on the back for the effort, you never question that what you're seeing is real.
Can you image a director now who would blow a substantial chunk of his budget to create such an elaborate set and then not shove it in your face every minute to the detriment of the final product?
Because it stripped away every ex- traneous detail, Dreyer's version of the Joan story doesn't delve into the political or military conflict that drove the trial, nor does it directly answer the question of whether Joan was a saint (the Catholic church declared her to be so in 1920; my own religious background makes no allowance for such a possibility). Dreyer made clear, however, where his sympathies lay. As Roger Ebert noted in his review of the movie, the judges are photographed in a harsh white light that exposes every wrinkle and blemish that "seem to reflect a diseased inner life. Falconetti, by contrast, is shot in softer grays." Joan looks like a saint, bedeviled by corrupt, venal men with a worldly axe to grind.
In many ways, The Passion of Joan of Arc is the opposite of what I usually I like in a silent movie. It's a heavy drama, laden with dialogue (which of course must be read on intertitle cards that appear between scenes). Except at the end, it features little of the visual lyricism that can eliminate the need for pages of exposition. And yet, Dreyer, who along with Marguerite Beaugé edited the movie, found an effective rhythm as he cut between close-ups of Joan, her inquisitors and the intertitle cards, a rhythm that steadily increases the tension until it explodes, like screwing a lid tightly onto a pot of boiling water.
Dreyer's approach to filmmaking was idiosyncratic, wholly at odds with, say, F.W. Murnau's, who was aiming to make movies a purely visual experience. And yet because he did make it work, Dreyer managed a nearly unique achievement, a movie so modern in its look and its pared-down approach to storytelling, that if I didn't know better, I would have assumed it was made forty years later.
That we can see this movie at all almost qualifies as a miracle in itself. Censors went to work on the movie soon after Dreyer completed it and then the film was lost to fire—twice. The negative was destroyed soon after its premiere and Dreyer cobbled together another print out of scraps from the cutting room floor only to see that print destroyed in a fire too. Dreyer died in 1968 believing that his finest achievement was lost forever.
Then in 1981, while cleaning out a janitor's closet in an insane asylum in Oslo of all places, workers discovered a complete copy of the original print, apparently ordered by a forgotten doctor to show to his patients fifty years before. Often these rediscovered lost films prove to be a disappointment that cannot live up to idealized memories; The Passion of Joan of Arc proved to be even better. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece, a word too casually tossed around, but for once they were right.Of my three nominees for best director, Luis Buñuel made the most influential movie, the sixteen-minute surrealist experiment Un Chien Andalou, possibly the best example of experimental film ever created. Victor Sjöström (credited here as Victor Seastrom) is better known now for his performance as an aging professor in Ingmar Bergman's classic Wild Strawberries, but in his native Sweden he is remembered as the father of Swedish cinema and he directed fifty-five movies in his career. Hand-picked by star Lillian Gish for The Wind, he directed a near textbook example of a silent movie that sheds the need for dialogue and he did it under grueling conditions in the Mojave Desert.
In other years, either of these nominees would have been an excellent choice for a Katie Award.
In the case of The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer made neither an influential movie nor a textbook example of anything. He simply made the best movie of the year and without his determination, it wouldn't have been made at all.
Dreyer followed The Passion of Joan of Arc with an atmospheric foray into the horror genre, Vampyr. Although some now believe it rivals Murnau's Nosferatu as the best vampire movie ever made, Vampyr flopped so miserably at its premiere in Berlin that Dreyer fell into a deep depression and didn't direct another movie for ten years.
In his career, Dreyer directed a total of twenty-three movies, including Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955); he wrote forty-nine others. He directed his last movie in 1964, just four years before his death at the age of 79.
You know, nobody tries to make sense of a music video (or almost nobody), they just watch, listen and have a gut reaction. And they're perfectly content to do so.
But stick a piece of experimental film in front of some film critics and even if the guy who directed the movie, in this case Luis Buñuel, says it doesn't mean anything, the critic will still insist it must have some meaning. And everybody else just scratches their head, says, "I don't get it," and gives up on experimental film forever.
Well, I'm here to tell you, I believe Luis Buñuel. Un Chien Andalou doesn't mean anything. But it will provoke a reaction.
Un Chien Andalou was the best of the surrealist films but it wasn't the first—although what exactly was the first is hard to say. I mentioned that René Clare's Entr'acte with its runaway coffin came along in 1924 but some film historians argue that it's more Dada than surreal and who am I to disagree (especially since I wouldn't know how).
But one thing is certain. By 1928, the attempt to break away from the traditional narrative form as a way of conveying the human experience on film was in full swing.
Well, I say traditional.
The narrative structure of movies we today know and love was all of fourteen years old at this point, hardly established enough to qualify as a tradition. Let's say "trend" then, a trend toward making movies resemble the narrative structure of theater and literature. And not everyone was ready to concede that this particular trend made fullest use of film's potential to convey the human experience.
But anyway.
In addition to Entr'acte, a trio of highly-regarded films displaying surrealist influences beat Un Chien Andalou into the theaters.
La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) premiered in Paris in February 1928, sixteen months before Buñuel's classic. Directed by Germaine Dulac, a leading radical feminist and one of the first women to direct movies in the French film industry, La Coquille et le Clergyman is the story (if there is a story) of a clergyman who becomes erotically obsessed with a general's mistress. Although this struggle is shown in symbolic terms—the priest's slowly fragmenting face, for example—and British censors banned La Coquille et le Clergyman on the basis that the "film is so obscure as to have no apparent meaning. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable," which no doubt thrilled Madame Dulac, there's nothing on screen that has the power of Buñuel's razor and its reputation has justly faded over the years.
A superior exercise was Jean Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher, an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Luis Buñuel worked as Epstein's assistant director and it shows. The movie combines the abstract, exaggerated sets common to German Expressionism with images of surrealism, particularly of a portrait central to the story that is at times a painting and at times a live woman, that are pure Buñuel.
Epstein did not set out to make a surrealist movie, but instead an adaptation of the novel that was faithful to the spirit of Poe, but the use of surrealism here keeps the audience off-balance in a way that heightens the sense of horror.
Maybe the best of the surrealist experiments that doesn't have Luis Buñuel's name on it is L'Étoile de Mer, one of six movies directed by Man Ray, better known for his photographs and paintings. There's no story, just a mood, a man and woman photographed through a pane of glass, juxtaposed with the poetry of Robert Desnos. The effect is as lyrical as Un Chien Andalou is brutal.
You might also take a look at Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète (The Blood Of A Poet), a mock- doc- umentary or as Cocteau put it "a realistic documentary of unreal events." Surrealists at the time weren't sure Cocteau qualified as one of their own, and I'm not going to wade into the argument. I'll just say that Cocteau, who here included such sequences as a painted portrait that begins to speak, was clearly influenced by surrealism and probably couldn't have made his beautiful and bizarre version of Beauty and the Beast in 1946 without first making The Blood Of A Poet. For that reason alone, I thought it was worth tracking down and you might, too.
The Russian director Dziga Vertov wasn't a surrealist but his Man With The Movie Camera is definitely another example from early 1929 of a film trying to subvert traditional expectations of narrative. Urban Cinefile calls it three films in one, a documentary of Russian life, a documentary of the making of the documentary and a documentary of the audience watching the documentary. These images—of Russian factories, trolley cars, women in undergarments, etc.—are served up as a collage that is not so much an experiment in film making as an experiment in film editing.
I have read that Vertov intended this collage to be either a sly com- mentary on life in the Soviet Union, interesting and busy but a bit soulless, or an equally sly commentary on our insistence that even a random jumble of images must have meaning. The fact that he spent so much time in the editing room suggests Vertov meant something by it but if he did, the finished product resolutely keeps the secret safe from us. In the end any given image is well-made but overall most of Man With The Movie Camera is no more interesting than the random images you'd find in any tourist's camera.
Finally, while I'm writing about movies without a narrative that aren't necessarily surrealist, maybe I should mention People On Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), directed by brothers Curt and Robert Siodmak with assists from Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, and written by Billy Wilder. It's actually the opposite of surrealism, an exercise in early neo-realism—just following five young Berliners around on a lazy Sunday afternoon—but it is yet another attempt to tell a story without resorting to narrative.
In the case of all involved it was not an experiment they were much interested in repeating when their careers took off. Wilder, who wrote the script on pieces of scratch paper, dismissed it as not much more than a newsreel. "I would not see it. I don't know—I think it was just a freelance experiment of a picture. It never quite got into much depth."
That might be a pretty good epitaph for most of these movies.
In any event, the surrealist movement began to crack up within a few years, torpedoed by incessant bickering and internal strife as even its practitioners couldn't agree on what they meant as they endeavored to mean nothing. The founder of the surrealist movement, André Breton, bitterly denounced those who he felt had strayed from the party line, Buñuel and Epstein fell out during the filming of La Chute de la Maison Usher, and writer Antonin Arnaud was so incensed by how director Germaine Dulac had interpreted his screenplay La Coquille et le Clergyman, he called her a "cow" at the film's premiere.
Apparently there are a lot of very strict rules involved in doing anything you want.
In late 1928, Buster Keaton spoofed surrealism in his last great film, The Cameraman. In that one the experimental-looking collage was the result of a cameraman (Keaton) incorrectly loading film into the camera and a documentary on the Tong War in Chinatown was actually filmed by an organ grinder's monkey (don't ask). It's a very funny movie, certainly funnier than a razor blade slicing an eyeball.
As a means of artistic ex- pression, sur- realism was a smashing success and remains influential to this day, although perhaps not in the way its founders envisioned. You'll find examples of it in animation (e.g., Tex Avery cartoons, Yellow Submarine), music videos, advertizing. Personally, I think surrealism works best as comedy, Monty Python, for example, and although even the most surreal imagery in Monty Python isn't quite surrealism as its early practitioners understood it since a joke is a form of comprehensible narrative, you have to admit there is always something unexpected about, say, the Spanish Inquisition.
On the other hand, as a political movement, surrealism was a complete bust. While the actions of our world's leaders often seem surreal, it turns out that no matter what system of government you adopt, war and oppression still occur—which shouldn't come as a surprise since governments are made up of people and on a fundamental level, people never change.
So should you bother tracking down Un Chien Andalou or any of the other movies I've mentioned? Well, that depends.
I'm warning you up front, a little bit of this stuff goes a very long way. As with any new medium or technology, early users experimented for a while, eventually hit upon what worked, what didn't. The experiments were useful but definitely of more interest to a budding film student than to a middle-aged working man at the end of a hard week. Which is ironic because the surrealists hoped their films would lead the working man to reject the simplistic answers and bourgeois values that the surrealists felt had led to World War I and the excesses of the post-war bull market. Instead, they wound up preaching to a choir of fellow surrealists and after a while, not even them.
If you do choose to try some of these movies, my advice is "Don't think, you'll only hurt the ballclub." They were not meant to be understood literally, but emotionally, so don't try to figure them out; just watch them and react.
I'm not sure when we look back on the 1920s—which gave us jazz, flappers, Fitzgerald, Babe Ruth, bathtub gin and both the most lavish spree and the costliest comeuppance in history—that we quite realize that for millions of people around the world, it was a time of unprecedented political, social and economic upheaval, a decade that at times made the more celebrated '60s feel like a sleepy Sunday afternoon sipping lemonade on your Aunt Tilly's porch.
While many survivors of the bloodiest conflict in human history (at that time) wished for nothing more than a return to what President Warren G. Harding called "normalcy," just as many were determined not to accept a status quo ante that had oppressed millions and destroyed the flower of an entire generation. Women won the right to vote, workers migrated en masse from the farms to the factories, breakthroughs in aviation and communications made the world smaller than ever.
Complex problems spawned simplistic solutions. Italy embraced fascism, Russia communism, America isolationism. A dangerous, resentment-fueled nationalism was on the march everywhere. And all the while Adolf Hitler bided his time in a cell refining his bitter, twisted blueprint for a new order that gave us the Holocaust, another world war and our clearest glimpse ever into the post-apocalyptic abyss.
Artists and intellectuals struggled to make sense of the confusion, failed, threw up their hands and concluded that the only rational response was to reject rationality and embrace nonsense. Thus was born Dadaism, a philosophy based on acts of deliberate irrationality, and its offspring surrealism, which proposed to bypass the rational mind and describe the world strictly in terms of images from the subconscious.
The first attempt at translating this philosophy into film may have been René Clare's 1924 exercise in Dadaism, Entr'acte, which includes jumbled documentary footage of Paris and a coffin that runs wild on its way to a funeral. But cinema's first true masterpiece of surrealism wouldn't arrive in theaters for another five years, not until two of surrealism's greatest practitioners, director Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí, met for lunch in a Paris café and began talking about their dreams—or perhaps more accurately, their nightmares.
Born in Spain at the turn of the century, Luis Buñuel was working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein when he mentioned to Dalí over lunch that he had had a dream of a cloud slicing across the moon "like a razor blade slicing through an eye."
Dali, who was already emerging as the art world's greatest surrealist painter, responded by describing a recent dream of his own where he'd had a vision of ants crawling out of a wound in the palm of his hand.
Thus was born the greatest surrealist film ever created, Un Chien Andalou, sixteen minutes of bizarre imagery that once seen is never forgotten. Buñuel and Dalí carried rocks in their pockets to defend themselves at the film's premiere and were disappointed when the audience loved what they saw. Their fellow surrealists immediately hailed the movie as a masterpiece and Un Chien Andalou ran for eight months in Paris.
There's no plot to Un Chien Andalou (which translated means "An Andalusian Dog"), nor in the opinion of Buñuel and Dalí could there be if they wanted to remain true to the ideals of surrealism. The two men dreamed up images (literally, in their sleep) and used them in their film only if they agreed between themselves that the images didn't mean anything. The point was to remind the audience that the expectation of finding meaning where there is none is a bad habit we humans get into—leads to lawyers suing deep pockets for random acts of chance or tracts with titles like "Why Bad Things Happen To Good People."
Un Chien Andalou has been cited as the inspiration for everything from music videos to independent filmmaking. Premiere magazine recently listed the opening scene as one of the top ten most shocking moments in movie history.
After the success of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel and Dalí collaborated on one more surrealist film, L'Age d'Or, a feature-length movie I will write about in more detail when I reach the movies of 1930. Although I disagree, many critics believe it's even better than its predecessor.
After that Buñuel and Dalí went their separate ways. Dalí would paint his most famous canvas, "The Persistence of Memory," in 1931, and would go on to achieve world-wide acclaim. Buñuel on the other hand fled Spain after its civil war and wouldn't regain his footing as a director until 1950 when he directed Los Olvidados. He became one of the greatest directors in history and was twice nominated for Academy Awards. His movies never lost the dream-like quality that made Un Chien Andalou so unforgettable.
The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?
"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."
