The Films of Samuel Fuller. Lisa Dombrowski
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solutions might effectively mask the mistake, they can glaringly violate the continuity of the diegetic world—the world of the film’s story.
Fuller’s editors also used close-ups and optical process shots to create visual variety in scenes recorded primarily in one long take with little or no camera movement. Static long takes could significantly slow the pace of a scene and offer fewer means of directing the viewer’s attention to important narrative information. One strategy seen over and over again in Fuller’s films is the use of the close-up and optically processed blow-up or zoom to vary the scale of the image and emphasize significant emotional moments. Gene Fowler, Jr., explained in an interview how he worked with Twentieth Century–Fox’s optical department to produce a zoom that looked like a dolly in postproduction in order that he might have the freedom to move into a close-up and back out to a long shot during extended single takes in China Gate.38 Optical process shots are also used in I Shot Jesse James, Park Row, Run of the Arrow, The Crimson Kimono, Underworld, U.S.A., and Verboten! While optically processed close-ups and zooms draw attention to themselves due to a slight increase in the grain of the image, they enabled Fuller and his editors to stretch the expressive boundaries of the master-shot long take in the absence of character blocking and camera movement.
Fuller’s preference for shooting master-shot long takes rather than complete coverage was not unique in postwar Hollywood filmmaking. The films of directors such as Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger typically display much greater average shot lengths than those of Fuller, as they contain more scenes shot in one long take and a generally more uniform use of the long take throughout. Fuller, on the other hand, only produced two pictures with average shot lengths in excess of the era’s norm: Park Row and House of Bamboo.39 While Fuller often uses the master shot as the foundation of a scene, the editing strategies discussed above, as well as the juxtaposition of long takes with heavily edited scenes, tend to reduce the average shot length of his films. What makes Fuller’s interest in shooting with little coverage and few takes notable is how it contributes to his dominant stylistic strategies. Long takes with rapid camera movement heighten the kineticism of scenes; when juxtaposed with a montage sequence, long takes can produce startling shifts in tone; and master shots intercut with close-ups, optical process shots, or extraneous footage can disorient the viewer.
In addition to staging scenes around long-take master shots, Fuller also builds more heavily edited sequences around quick takes of medium shots and close-ups. Fuller’s montage-based scenes typically employ constructive editing. Instead of cutting into a detail from a wide master shot as is common in analytical editing, constructive editing eliminates establishing shots and suggests space through the juxtaposition of images. Movement and screen direction connect action from one shot to the next. The viewer then constructs the entire action mentally by uniting the parts of the action seen in separate shots. Fuller frequently draws on constructive editing to suggest spatial relations through eyeline matches—when the shot of a character’s glance is juxtaposed with a shot of the object that is being seen—as in the openings of I Shot Jesse James and Pickup on South Street. He also utilizes constructive editing for more explosive purposes, repeating a series of compositions multiple times to create a percussive rhythm.
One memorable example of constructive editing in Underworld, U.S.A. illustrates how this technique contributes to Fuller’s desired emotional effects. Gus, an assassin, has been ordered to kill the daughter of a crime witness, so he runs the girl over with his car while she is out riding her bike. The scene is organized through ellipses, as medium shots of the girl’s head and shoulders on the bike, Gus’s head and shoulders in the car, the girl’s legs and bike wheel, and Gus’s car wheel are intercut ever more rapidly to suggest her pursuit. Increasingly tighter shots of the girl’s mother in the window watching her daughter’s race for life occasionally interrupt the chase, until the mother screams and closes her eyes. The last shot shows the girl sprawled on the concrete with her mangled bike beside her, the victim of a moment of impact the viewer is led to imagine but never actually sees. The rhythm and pacing of the editing in the scene, as well as the need for viewers to link the shots together mentally, heighten our visceral response and multiply our horror.
One of the most distinctive aspects of Fuller’s aesthetic signature is his propensity for “weirdness.” This was actually a technical term for him. As he tells Jim Jarmusch in the documentary Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made (1994), any time his cameraman or assistant director came across a “W” in the margin of the script, he knew to ask Fuller what to do. The “W” stood for weirdness: an aggressive disregard for classical conventions governing the presentation of space, time, and movement. Weirdness creeps into Fuller’s pictures beginning in the Globe era and escalates from there, appearing most frequently—but not exclusively—during subjective sequences. Even relatively stylistically tame sequences can be defined as weird if narrative and stylistic logic fly out the window. Explosions of weirdness are one of the defining aspects of what makes a film a Fuller.
Frame enlargements of the final shots from a murder sequence in Underworld, U.S.A. joined together via constructive editing. Constructive editing relies on the viewer to piece together the spatial relationships between each shot. This technique was often used by Fuller to involve the viewer in acts of extreme violence.
Because the visceral effects Fuller sought could be realized in a swift and inexpensive manner—as they relied on a minimum of camera setups and necessitated only the most basic production design—his stylistic preferences were not entirely out of step with the efficiency championed by the classical system. By adapting his interest in conflict and kineticism to the available resources and production circumstances of each film, Fuller could produce original storytelling in an expedient manner, thereby helping to make his stylistically unusual films more acceptable to the studios and major distributors. Nevertheless, his willingness to draw attention to stylistic choices in a manner not widely embraced in Hollywood made Fuller’s visual style somewhat problematic, especially when exercised in less action-oriented genres that do not inherently strive to shake up the viewer. The varied expression of Fuller’s stylistic preferences reflects his journey into and out of big-budget studio productions in the mid-1950s, his heightened creative control after becoming an independent producer, his progression toward increasing sensationalism, and the eclectic experimentation of his final films.
All too often critics highlight the rough, occasionally crude construction of Fuller’s work and its various excesses without fully considering the range of his aesthetic choices and their intended effect on the viewer. Luc Moullet’s attitude toward Fuller typifies that of many who consider him a “primitive” genius: “Perhaps no other director has ever gone so far in the art of throwing a film together. Whatever the extent of his negligence, one cannot but be fascinated by the spontaneity it brings with it.”40 Yet as we have seen, Fuller was hardly one to “throw a film together.” His working process was detailed and deliberate, and he was consistently disposed toward narrative and stylistic strategies that aroused and provoked the viewer. The following chapters describe how production conditions, studio and regulatory oversight, and market trends shape the articulation of Fuller’s artistic impulses, beginning with his early years at the low-budget studio Lippert Productions. While his first two pictures flirt with unconventional narrative and stylistic choices, in-depth analysis of The Steel Helmet reveals the blossoming of Fuller’s personal aesthetic and its roots in movement and conflict.
CHAPTER ONE
The Lippert Years, 1948–1951
Fuller began directing films at the end of the 1940s, when the structure of the studio system underwent a seismic shift. After 1946, decreasing theater attendance and skyrocketing production costs eroded profits for the studios, while the 1948 Paramount antitrust decision altered distribution practices and divorced the exhibition arms of the major studios from their production and distribution wings. In an effort to cut costs, the major and minor studios made fewer films, shedding their low-budget B units and funneling available money into high-profile blockbusters, a trend already underway from the early 1940s. The reduction in the number