If the term metaliterature exists to refer to those narratives that have literature itself as their theme, we could propose the neologism metacinema to refer to the many films that have cinema itself as its main theme: its history, its language, its myths. Now three proposals are coming to our screens that, from different angles, deal with the seventh art: the already released Babylon by Damien Chazelle and Los Fabelmans by Spielberg and The Empire of Light by Sam Mendes, which will be released soon.
When the cinema was still silent, it already generated the first works that looked into its bowels. In 1924 Buster Keaton had the genius (and technical expertise, because the special effects were in their infancy) to make a dreamy projectionist in The Modern Sherlock Holmes get into the film he was projecting and jump from scene to scene (Woody Allen raised the reverse path in The Purple Rose of Cairo when an actor decides to leave the screen). In 1928 the British Anthony Asquith set Shooting Star in a filming in which jealousy leads to changing a blank bullet for a real one, producing a cross between fiction and reality. That same year, Emil Jannings played in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Order a Russian general who fled from the Soviet revolution who ended up in Hollywood and ended up playing the role of a Russian general in a film who lived a situation very similar to his own.
The myth of silent Hollywood, with its excesses on and off the screen, and the leap to sound is reconstructed in Babylon, in which fictional characters –a movie diva, an aspiring actress and a waiter who will end up as a producer– meet mixed with other real ones. With more than three hours of excessive duration, it once again shows that Chazelle is a better director than a screenwriter and it is surprising that some kind soul has not suggested that he apply the scissors to several endless, dispensable or downright ridiculous scenes, such as the almost literal descent into hell from the end part. A pity, because despite an inordinate fondness for the scatological (already in the first scene a guy ends up covered in elephant excrement) and the inconsistency of the dramatic arc of his characters, it contains extraordinary moments. For example, the chaotic filming of an epic film in the desert, the first sound shoot that ends in macabre surprise, the harsh truths that a gossip journalist explains to the character of Brad Pitt (a transcript of Douglas Fairbanks) or the ending, with a tribute to the seventh art that includes a precious nod to Singing in the rain. Film that, by the way, also portrayed, in a comedy tone, that disruptive moment of the transition from silent to sound, which took a few races along the way.
Among them those of the diva Gloria Swanson and the filmmaker Erich von Stroheim, who sank together in the chaotic filming of Queen Kelly, one of the last outrageous productions of the silent period. The two met again two decades later in one of the most acid portraits of the dream factory: Twilight of the Gods, by the vitriolic Billy Wilder, in which they played characters very similar to themselves. Swanson will always be remembered as Norma Desmond, the crazed star who showed her old movies – actually a scene from Queen Kelly – in her mansion in a fascinating game of mirrors between fiction and reality.
Bogdanovich, the film buff director, paid homage to the pioneers in This is how Hollywood began and Hazanavicius did with The Artist the pirouette of shooting a silent film about silent cinema. The ins and outs and shadows of later Hollywood have been captured in titles such as Captives of Evil and Two Weeks in Another City by Vincente Minnelli, In a Lonely Place by Nicholas Ray, A Star Is Born in George Cukor’s Glorious Version or Like a Plague of Locusts from Schlesinger. The latter is an adaptation of the novel by the late Nathanael West, a writer and screenwriter who mercilessly portrayed the Mecca of cinema, like Fitzgerald in his posthumous and incomplete novel The Last Tycoon, inspired by the legendary producer Irving Thalberg (who, by the way, , appears as a character in Babylon). The Coens have also paid homage to Hollywood, first in the tone of a Kafkaesque tragedy – Barton Fink – and after a comedy full of winks in Hail, Caesar! , and Tarantino, who reflected a convulsive moment in Once upon a time in Hollywood. Paul Thomas Anderson portrayed the other Hollywood, that of the neighboring San Fernando Valley porn industry in Boogie Nights. For her part, Visconti portrayed the Roman Cinecittà in Bellísima with neorealist harshness, with Ana Magnani as a mother obsessed with turning her daughter into a child actress.
As the 20th century progressed, cinema became an important part of the sentimental education of successive generations and now Steven Spielberg has decided to tell in Los Fabelmans his own story of fascination with moving images and the reasons that led him to become director. Despite the character’s name being Sam Fabelman, it’s a clear portrait of him (you can check it out in Susan Lacy’s excellent documentary Spielberg on HBO). The story it tells is double and very well sewn in the script co-written with Tony Kushner, the playwright of Angels in America and a regular Spielberg collaborator from the masterful Munich. Intertwined with the spell of cinema is the episode that the filmmaker has always said marked his childhood: the divorce of his parents, to which is added the anti-Semitic bullying he suffered in high school when the family moved to California. .
It begins with the impact that the scene of the train crash in De Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, the first film they take him to see, creates for the child. From then on he starts shooting with his father’s super 8 camera and cinema becomes a way of trying to understand and control the world. He films horror and adventure tapes with his sisters and friends, and when reviewing the shots he has taken at a family camping trip, he discovers a secret about his mother; cinema shows reality and sometimes the truth hurts. In the next step, the film that he makes about the end of the year at the institute helps him to disarm his abusers; cinema becomes a powerful, transforming weapon, through the fictions it constructs. And as the final station of this doubly initiatory proposal (in the pain of the adult world and in the cinema as a way of trying to dominate it) comes the apotheosis: when he is taking his first steps in the industry, the boy who had been fascinated by El hombre who killed Liberty Valance meets his idol John Ford, played by another legendary director, David Lynch. The scene, as unlikely as it may seem, happened as it is in reality.
The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s most personal and intimate work and his homage to the trade to which he has dedicated his life. Other filmmakers have portrayed that passion in films on set: Fellini in 8 ½ and Interview, Truffaut in The American Night, Godard in Contempt (with Fritz Lang as the director), Wenders in The State of Things, Mamet in State and Main, Kiarostami in Through the Olive Trees. Dennis Hopper brought the influence of cinema to reality in The Last Picture (the making of which became legendary for the chaos and excesses that nearly ended his career). Other works have reflected real filming: Intolerance in Good Morning, Babylon, Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire, The African Queen in White Hunter, Black Heart or The Prince and the Showgirl in My Week with Marilyn , while the bowels of the world of cinema appear very well portrayed in titles such as Ed Wood, Trumbo or Mank.
After filming, the films reach movie theaters, which in their heyday were veritable temples. One of them, on the English coast, is one of the most important settings in The Empire of Light by Sam Mendes, which, like Los Fabelmans, has a notable autobiographical content. The central character, played by Olivia Colman, is based on the director’s mother and through her themes such as impossible love, mental illness and the racism of Thatcherism England are conveyed, while the reverie and seduction of celluloid is omnipresent in the lavish room that lived through times of splendor and faces an uncertain future. Also Bogdanovich’s Last Film, Terence Davies’ The Long Day Has Ended and Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso paid tribute to rooms steeped in history and the magic of cinema.