high and low / romance and reality
by Douglas Messerli
Dudley Murphy (screenwriter and director) The
Soul of the Cypress / 1921
For
a short while, the musician debates what course to take, fearful of giving up
life but still longing for the beauty he has so briefly witnessed. But finally
realizing that he cannot live without her, he moves quickly to the highest
cliff and leaps from off to the rocks below. Once more the Dryad reappears from
the tree telling us, through the intertitle, that now the “Song of the Sea” and
the “Soul of the Cypress” are intertwined for eternity, both singing in the
waves and wind that whistles through the Cypress and along with the moon
hurries the waves to shore.
The short film, as critic David E. James reports in his 2003 Film
Quarterly essay, “Soul of the Cypress: The First Postmodernist
Film?,” premiered at the famed Rivoli Theater on Broadway as a prologue to the
feature work Conquest of Canaan. The film was evidently successful
enough that it was booked at the Rialto for another week, and received positive
reviews in four New York dailies: the New York Globe, The New York
Times, Film Daily, and Wid’s Daily. James notes that Wid’s
Daily…emphasized the excellence of the photography as “some of the best
work yet accomplished in this line,” and noted that “a great deal of attention
is given to composition and tone, and some of the lighting effects are most
beautiful.”
Today, the highly romantic short does not appeal to our tastes, but its
cinematic qualities are still apparent, and in this short work we can perceive
the talent that would flourish in his later films.
The Library Congress holds the only known surviving print of the film,
but attached to the original is another shorter piece with different actors.
James describes in full what follows, and since apparently he is one of the few
who have seen the cinematic add-on, I’ll quote him at length:
The
man rolls off the woman, though she continues to toy with his penis. Another
cut introduces a schoolboy in Victorian costume excitedly staring out of the
frame to match her eyeline, and then the title, “What—again?” articulates her
unsatiated desire. After a title, “Turning back the pages of memory,” the film
reverts to the shot of the dryad still looking down into the roiling ocean; and
as she stands, the sun sets in the sea behind the trees. A question mark fills
the screen, then more titles lead into the final credits: ‘Educational
pictures: The Spice of the Program’ and ‘FINIS: An
Ensign Picture.’ A Spanish dancer removes a
fan from her face and smiles briefly into the camera before the final title:
‘The End of The Soul of the Cypress.’”
Although no one knows the full history of the cannister owned by the
Library of Congress titled “Soul of the Cypress and Miscellaneous Sex Scenes,”
James suggests that perhaps some aficionado or enterprising exhibitor spliced
the two together, although it appears the pornographic scenes had been filmed
at the same locations, so are likely the work of Murphy himself.
What James argues is that the pornographic addendum, which relates
directly to what could not be shown in the original in the commercial venues
where it appeared—the physical attraction to the Dryad and her desire for him
which is completely represented in the metaphor of physical removal and death,
the tropes of all great romantic literature—in its raucous literalization
comments on the very culture which represses such expressions and serves,
accordingly as a far more avant-garde statement than the original
“experimental” mime. It belongs to a long underground tradition of showing an
art film in which, after the police have sniffed it out to make certain that it
meets the moral codes of the culture, the projectionist brings out the
pornographic tapes that the customers have paid to see under the code of “art
film.” And accordingly, as James’ title suggests, he finds it to serve a
similar role as post-modern “winking” and “coded commentary.”
Of
course, as I have shown in the LGBTQ films I review from that period, the
filmmakers of the day were perfectly capable at winking and coding their own
works long before there was a notion of “camp” cinema or post-modernism.
Indeed, I point to the moment in Roscoe Arbuckle’s 1917 film Coney Island when
he begins undress with the intentions of donning a drag costume he “suddenly
faces the camera and, in one marvelously post-modern instant, shyly signals the
camera and the audience to move their eyes away from his privates while he
continues to disrobe. The camera obligingly shifts up to his upper chest,
shoulders, and head.”
Similarly, in Ralph Cedar The Soilers of 1923 and in the British
director Adrian Brunel’s Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery of
1925 gay figures behave in such an exaggerated manner in their imitation of the
standard stereotypes that they rehabilitate their cinematic roles so thoroughly
that we can only describe their behavior as “camp,” in just the way we use that
word today.
But
in its use of high art and heterosexual pornography, I’d argue that the
“revised” version of Murphy’s 1921 film most recalls the French movie of 1920,
the year just previous to The Soul of the Cypress, Bernard Natan’s Le
Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, which thoroughly integrated both
heterosexual and gay pornography within its pretense of high art commentary on
Puccini’s great opera.
I
might add that I see the young boy in Victorian clothes watching this
“astounding real life event” not as James sees it, as an oedipal analogue to
the story, but as an emblem of the still basically Victorian audience who might
come across the addendum, wide-eyed with equal fascination and horror. And it
reminds us that speaking honestly about heterosexual sexual relationships was
nearly as impossible throughout the 1920s and particularly after the Hays Board
cracked down in 1934, as to speak openly about LGBTQ issues.
The
Soul of the Cypress is in no way a film related to LGBTQ issues in its
fully heterosexual depiction of the relationship between the sexes, but I have
included my discussion of it in the pages of My Queer Cinema because it
helps to reveal how directors such as Murphy—who endured his own scandals
concerning his personal sexual behavior (in this film, the Dryad was played by
his wife Chase Harringdine, a woman about whom he wrote in his memoirs he never
sexually consummated their relationship, while at the same he seemingly had few
scruples about having sex with his wife’s friend Katherine Hawley)—learned how
to deal with censorship through coding such LGBTQ-related works such as his The
Sport Parade and The Emperor Jones.
Los Angeles, February 11, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February
2023).
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