Hell's Angels · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man rides in a wicker car at the end of a cable, hanging a few hundred feet below the cloud deck with London underneath him. He is the Zeppelin's eye. The airship is up above the weather where the searchlights cannot reach it, which also means it cannot see the city it has come to bomb, so it has lowered a person out of the cloud and into the visible and asked him to describe what is down there.

Hold that image. It is the best thing in Hell's Angels and one of the strangest things in American cinema, and what it shows is a machine that has taken perception and action apart and hung the gap between them on a wire.

Gilles Deleuze, writing about movies half a century later, borrowed a term from Bergson for that gap: the interval, or the centre of indetermination. His claim is simple once you strip the vocabulary off it. A living thing is a hesitation. Movement comes in on one side as perception, goes out the other as action, and the delay between them is what we call having a mind. Almost every movie ever made runs on that circuit: a man sees a situation and does something about it. Hughes's Zeppelin sequence pulls the circuit apart and distributes it vertically. The eye is under the cloud. The hands are above it. Nothing connects them but steel cable and a voice. And then comes the sequence's ugliest beat, which follows with a machinist's logic: to gain altitude, the crew begin throwing men overboard. A machine that has already put its eye on a wire will treat the rest of its crew as ballast.

Then the film cuts to a drawing room and dies.

That split is not a failure of talent, and reading it as one wastes the film. There are two ways of getting movement into a picture. The old way picks the instant that sums the whole motion up — the pose, the held peak, the discus-thrower. Deleuze calls those privileged instants, and they are how sculpture and theatre and melodrama do it. Cinema does something else: it samples motion at equal intervals, mechanically, indifferent to whether any single frame is meaningful. He calls that the any-instant-whatever, and he argues it is what made film modern — movement thought as continuous, rather than as a chain of significant poses.

Hell's Angels contains both, spliced into one reel. The ground half is privileged instants all the way down: proscenium framings, long masters, a blimped camera waiting for the sentence to finish, actors aimed at a fixed microphone, character externalized into moral position — the honorable brother, the cad, the faithless woman, each holding a shape. The air half is any-instants: cameras bolted where nobody composed anything, in the slipstream, behind the pilot, looking down the length of a diving fuselage. The gap between the halves is roughly two thousand years, and the reason both ended up in one picture is material rather than artistic. The aerial reels were shot silent and freely mobile, then post-scored by the method Sunrise had demonstrated: music and effects laid over footage that had never been tied to a microphone. The dialogue was reshot later, under the new sound regime, nailed to the floor.

The picture's real discovery is a cloud. From Wings, Hughes inherited the grammar he meant to beat — cameras strapped to fuselage and wing struts, dogfights staged against open sky rather than process plates. Shooting it himself, he found the open sky doesn't work. A plane against a blank field sits still. So he waited: weeks of paid idleness under Southern California's uselessly clear weather, crews relocated to go find some cumulus.

Deleuze's formulation is that a shot is a mobile section of duration — that movement in a shot expresses a change in a whole that stays open. A plane in an empty sky has no whole to be in relation to, so it registers as nothing. Put cloud in the frame and speed appears, because now there is something for the speed to be relative to. Hughes's cameramen bought that piece of philosophy at retail, in flight hours, and it is why their air still looks like a substance rather than a backdrop: aircraft entering from quadrants you weren't watching, dive angles that tip the horizon onto the diagonal or lose it, the Zeppelin's bulk emerging through cloud so gradually that your eye has to keep revising its estimate of how big the thing is. In the air, the space outside the frame is spherical. There is no offstage left. The frame stops being a stage opening and becomes an aperture cut into a continuous world.

The dogfights themselves are assembled, not captured. That method came from Ben-Hur: blanket multi-camera coverage of an event you can only stage once, so that the same pass exists from three or four vantages and the cut can be motivated by geography instead of by mere energy — hence the cutaways to pilots' faces, which are there to tell you where you are. The consequence is worth sitting with. The dogfight as an event exists in no single shot. It exists in the cut. And yet the Bazinian charge is fully intact: these are real aircraft in real air, and men died flying for this picture. What the film delivers is a documentary guarantee assembled out of pieces, which was the only way to get the thing on a screen at all.

The ground half is second-hand and knows it. What Price Glory had already codified two comrades and one woman inside a service unit as the load-bearing armature of the war film, and Roy, Monte, and Helen are bolted straight onto it; The Big Parade supplied the shape, a long romantic first movement and then a metrical slowing into fire, which Hughes reproduces as a visible seam. One thing on that side of the film is alive, and it isn't acting. Harlow's line readings are flat and her timing unformed. What she has is a casualness about wanting what she wants, and the melodrama's moral arithmetic has no column to put it in. She registers as pure quality, presented before anyone acts on it. The film's single color sequence makes this physical: two-strip Technicolor cannot record blue, which is exactly why the color reel is a ballroom and not a sky, and why — following the design discipline The Black Pirate had worked out — everything is tuned to what red and green can hold. Skin and a gown. The color isn't describing a world. It's a quality that soaks up the scene.

Structurally, the war material runs the machinery Deleuze calls the large form: a situation so encompassing that it presses on everyone until an act is required that will transform it. The munitions raid is that act. It succeeds, and nothing follows from it. The final movement — capture, the demand that the brothers inform, what they resolve — matters only to them. Audiences in 1930 knew the register; All Quiet on the Western Front came out the same year, and Whale had arrived straight from Journey's End. The large form's whole promise is that the decisive act moves the world. Here the mechanism turns over and the world doesn't move. This is not yet the collapse Deleuze dates to the rubble of 1945, but you can hear a bearing starting to knock.

So what did it do? Almost nothing to narrative. Nearly everything to the conditions of production. Hughes proved that capital sitting outside studio discipline could buy a physical event no production chief would ever authorize, and could then afford to wait years for weather that made it photographable. The genre's response was to stop competing: Hawks's The Dawn Patrol, released the same year, is a chamber piece about attrition with functional flying, and it is the better film. The craft went sideways instead of forward. Elmer Dyer and his cohort carried the aerial idiom into Test Pilot and Air Force, and the footage itself was recycled into aviation pictures for decades, which is the most literal influence a film can have. Harlow's contract went to MGM and became the wisecracking blonde. Whale went to Frankenstein. And the bargain Hughes struck went everywhere: Cleopatra, Apocalypse Now, Heaven's Gate, Titanic — the runaway production redeemed by one sequence, the making becoming a larger story than the thing made. Scorsese built the first act of The Aviator out of this shoot and its premiere, so most people now meet Hell's Angels as an anecdote about somebody else.

Watch it for one cut: drawing room to sky. On one side, people holding poses while a boxed camera waits for the line to end. On the other, a lens in the slipstream taking instants nobody arranged. Two incompatible ideas of what movement even is, in the same reel, put there by a man with no theory who simply refused to believe the sky was empty.

Which leaves the question the industry has never answered. The twenty best minutes in American cinema in 1930 have no author. Operators, mechanics, and stunt pilots made them, under a patron whose contribution was mostly buying airplanes and refusing to stop. We know what to do with a masterpiece by an artist. Nobody has ever known what to do with this.