Dudley Murphy | The Soul of the Cypress / 1921

high and low / romance and reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dudley Murphy (screenwriter and director) The Soul of the Cypress / 1921

 

Given his near life-time attempts to blend “high” art and populist works of commerce, it is not surprising that Dudley Murphy’s first film, The Soul of the Cypress made in 1921, might be classified as an art film. Just three years later, he would collaborate with Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Ezra Pound on the highly experimental piece that was meant to accompany the musical composition by George Antheil of the same name, Ballet mécanique—a work for which scholars now argue he was the central creator. And even earlier, in 1922, he would produce short films which he titled “Visual Symphonies” that were meant to accompany classical music. In 1933, he would direct a version of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, and, as I have noted elsewhere, much of his life was spent in the company of figures such as James Joyce, Pound, and other writers, artists, performers, and architects.

      The story of this first film contained elements of several Greek fables, including those centered around the Aphrodite myths and Orpheus and Eurydice. Against the backdrop of the California coastline “wind-swept Cypresses,” a young musician appears, playing his pipe. His beauty and song are so moving that a Dryad trapped within the Cypress boughs, suddenly emerges in what is generally described as a “diaphanous dress,” as she dances closer and closer to the musician seated on a cliff as he performs his song. The various cuts between the two of them are brought into a single frame when she finally nears him, he suddenly observing her presence. An intertitle, however, stops the action, declaring “Unfortunate is he, the legend tells, who falls in love with a Dryad—and more unfortunate he who tries to capture her.”

     As the two reappear, she turns away with the musician on the chase. The intertitle tells us that she longs for him but is afraid of “mortal touch,” as she quickly dissolves back into the base of the Cypress. From her safe-haven, however, she tells him that the only way they can be together is for him to give his life up to the sea so in immortality his “Song of the Sea” will serve as a lullaby for her locked away with the Cypress tree.

     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:

 

“…Rather than being concluded by an end title, the dryad’s reverie is interrupted by a rude injunction, “Explain this!” And suddenly the film cuts to a shot of a beautiful woman (not the dryad), visible from breasts to knees as she lies across the bottom of the frame. Apart from thin stockings, she is entirely naked, with her pubis centered in the image. Looking down on her, a naked man (not the musician) scrutinizes it, running his fingers through her pubic hair, shaking his head as if in disbelief or amazement. The lovers are together on a picnic rug with their clothes scattered around, clearly in some rural area. The camera pans along the woman’s body to reveal her face; she looks at the camera and then back to the man. After a title, “We’ll have time—if we hurry,” she changes her position, spreading her legs and proffering her vagina directly to the camera and the spectator in a composition that recalls the cleft in the cypress that the dryad had entered…. With a change in angle, the man climbs on top of her, and as they apparently copulate, two shots of exploding fireworks are intercut—nondiegetic metaphors that, as in countless amateur underground films in the 1960s and then in the signal crossover porn film, Deep Throat (1972), signify orgasmic pleasure.

     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).