The Crowd: when cinema meets reality and reality meets social
depression.
Rafael Henrique da [email protected]
The Crowd is an American silent movie praised for being one of
the last of its genre of silence but yet the only one to be as
realistic as the real life of an American couple and their visions
of family, everyday life and the way they deal with troubles that
normal people usually would. It brings on to the screen a sense of
reality that was never before seen if we consider the fact that no
other American Hollywood-ish movie had ever shown a toilet in a
bathroom scene before amongst other moments of the story that
basically is an essay of the normal American life without the
language of the flourishing melodrama or passion that poured
through the movies of the times. We have a man and his family
making his life and living it, not the way he wanted but in the
best way he can with the given circumstances.The Crowd meets the
American with a shove of reality within the story of its caracters,
but also brings on a language to cinema that could have been lost
or ignored because of the new ideas of sound-screening format
movies. But the uniqueness of this pelicula comes when Vidor, its
Director, chooses to hide cameras in the location where the shoots
happened bringing beyond vivid experience of film-making to viewers
combining such shoots with natural and fluid camera movements. To
analyze the contents of the movie and reactions of viewers across
America, it is important to remember, first, that Hollywood, cinema
and all media in general are made for entertainment and the best to
entertain people would be to bring them out of their realities, to
give them something to hope for, better days, or a love Huxley
said:The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found
among those who appear to be most normal."Many of them are normal
because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because
their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that
they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the
neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the
absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a
profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that
abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These
millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a
society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not
to be adjusted. The Crowd is an essay of what I am calling in this
article: The Real American Dream. The language and visual metaphors
used by Vidor enlighten the cruel and not so full of
accomplishments world that America started to paint for itself. In
clear examples, we have the character of James Murray, John Sims,
going up a staircase on a lonely walk to come to its top and find
out about a tragedy: his fathers death. That walk is a reference
for everyones climb on life and which we all find the same thing:
death. The symbolism runs through the movie in scenes, for
instance, after the death of Sims daughter where he is shown with
his hands up and trying to stop the flow of the crowd in due of his
pain to this loss and a policeman coming to tell him Life cannot
stop because of your daughters illness. The feeling not-so-hidden
in The Crowd showed America the exact actual picture of the
American Life. The work in a desk being replicated by hundreds of
people is an example of that. In a clearly difficult shot where the
camera comes from above and down, zooming in, an room with hundreds
of people replicating the same job to find the one desk where Sims
works and dehumanize the sense of such work which is shown the way
it is: no enhancement for Johns personal life but a robot work and
a replicated job, a raw endeavor. Its also important to state that
such scenes have permeated works of other directors through time
such as Billy Wilder in his movie, The apartment, from 1960, and
the renowned director Orson Welles in his movie The Trial, from
1962.To the American people, The Crowd was released in the
beginning of the Great Depression which lead to doubts and distress
over the movies ending and its message. After all, being in the
midst of a recession and going back to Huxleys quote above: the
masses need to be entertained and taken out of their boxes. Think,
would you go see a movie where your reality, brutal and shineless
as it is, was shown in it rawest form? The American crowd wouldnt,
and above that, complained to MGM studios, the producer of the
film, about its no-so-happy ending. At the time a very known movie
named Grand Hotel was the favorite of the masses, and whilst Crowd
was a naturalist movie about reality, Grand Hotel featured a happy
ending where a family makes fortune.Vidor, then, visualizing what
his movie could make, and also not wanting to have the money
invested in his work withdrawn recorded several endings in which
the family could be happier. In fact, one of those ended on screen
and movie theaters after complaints from people, as mentioned
before. But according to him, those werent real but theatrical
instead of the raw shoot in which you saw the family in a theater
laughing off of a clown acting their own lives. The shoot the zooms
out to a bigger screen showing again a crowd, a view which
permeates the entire movie.As a result, The Crowd is a raw and
cruel but also extremely realistic point of view on the life of
Americans and the faade of reality that is sold worldwide since the
20s of the American Dream. The cinematic language of the movie
flows perfectly over the movements of the camera, or it stillness,
and the actions and metaphors of the characters and locations bring
nothing more than the truth to the camera: a normal couple, not so
brilliant, not so aspirant to better things and their gains and
losses. The general audience wasnt ready for this essay on their
own lives for the simple fact of understanding that a great
reception has fallen upon them and that was not entertainment, what
they saw was real life, and real life was not pleasing.
Referncias:HUXLEY, Aldous. Brave New World.DIKS, Tim. Filmsite
http://www.filmsite.org/crow.html
Rafael Henrique da Silva aluno de graduao do curso de
Licenciatura em Lnguas Ingls pela Universidade de Pernambuco com
dupla habilitao ingls-portugus e suas literaturas e possui poemas
publicados em blogs pessoais e publicaes online como a Revista
Gerao Z. Pretende seguir na carreira literria e ensasta, assim como
o ensino em sala de aula. docente estagirio no Programa de Lnguas e
Informtica desde 2013 agosto.
