Review: “Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood”

She lies face-down on her right side, her eyes closed. She wears all white—a white lacey dress, white pearls, and a white peacock crown crested with white feathers. She looks uncomfortable — with good reason. On her back, an adult lion stretches his paws. The lion’s eyes are also closed as he shakes his head from side to side, breathing on the starlet below him. It is the picture of unreal yet complete vulnerability.

When Gloria Swanson lay down under the paws and maw of a lion, she was on the set of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1919 silent film, Male and Female. Swanson insisted that she be photographed with a live lion. DeMille, wanting to indulge one of the industry’s up-and-coming stars, agreed, but was not taking chances. As Miss Swanson prepared for her close-up, De Mille stood to the side, rifle in hand, prepared for any eventuality. DeMille had the gun and the studio, but Karl Struss, fresh out of the New York art world and the traumas of the First World War, stood at the camera, in control of the drama in front of him.

Today, Karl Struss is more often the answer to arcane trivia questions (“Who was the first winner of the Academy Award for Cinematography for the 1927 silent film Sunrise?”) than he is a widely acknowledged part of the history of American photography and Hollywood. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s ongoing show, Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood, shows that Karl Struss is anything but trivial. Drawing from its substantial holdings of Struss’ photographs, prints, stills, cameras, camera lenses, and even his 1929 Oscar statuette, the Carter’s multimedia exhibit follows Struss from his beginnings in the New York of Alfred Stieglitz to his success in the Hollywood of the fledgling Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Struss’ photographs anchor Moving Pictures, but the show keeps true to its name with a savvy selection of film clips from Struss’ career at the apex of the silent film era and the rise of the talkies. The wealth of materials makes Moving Pictures a delight for lovers of photography and cinema alike.

The Carter’s exhibit does not allow later Hollywood success to overshadow Struss’ auspicious beginnings in the New York of the 1900s and 1910s. Born in 1880 to a prosperous German immigrant family with strong connections to the homeland, Struss grew up with an eye toward Europe. This helped to establish an affinity for American artists who lived and worked in Europe — notably Mary Cassatt and James Abbot McNeil Whistler. The affinity was not only geographical but stylistic.

         From the earliest photographs represented in the show, Struss showed a predilection for pictorialism. His photographs from his New York days show that Struss was a master of the soft-focus and subtle tones that tried to do for photography what Impressionists had done for painting. A fledgling pictorial photographer could not find a better place to refine his art than the New York of the first and second decades of the twentieth century. By 1912, Struss had entered the ambit of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) who mentored the younger man and published his photographs in his pioneering journal, Camera Works. The Carter features a letter of encouragement Stieglitz wrote to Struss in 1912, averring that “you are [one of] the only photographers of the younger generation to have anything to say.” Indeed, the visual language that Struss developed in the New York of the 1910s would transfer to Hollywood a decade later.

         One of Struss’ most moving early photographs is his Brooklyn Bridge, Nocturne of 1912-13. The photograph owes more than its title to Whistler. Under the dark, slightly curving line of the Brooklyn Bridge lie the peaks of the New York skyline at twilight, the base of the buildings and waters obscured by shadowy mistiness. Struss’ soft focus gives the photograph a chiaroscuro effect. The play of light, dark, shadow, and form is a defining feature of Struss’ pictorial style and feel for visual drama to which he would again turn when he moved west.

The Hollywood that Struss encountered in 1919 was still in the process of inventing itself. Studios fell apart; stars were born and died; those behind the scenes worked at an industrial pace to meet studio and audience demand. A New York art photographer who traveled cross-country (by way of the Grand Canyon, allowing Struss to try out his pictorial sensibility in a Western setting) could scarcely control whether he worked for a director whose name and films would endure or one whose work would be forgotten, lost, or destroyed in a mid-century conflagration. Struss had the immense good fortune to enter the employ of Famous-Players Lasky studio and its leader, Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959). Starting out as a stills photographer, Struss haunted the sets with his camera, producing a stream of photographs of dramatic and comedic moments from DeMille’s movies and his stars. His position in DeMille’s empire, gave Struss the opportunity to photograph Gloria Swanson, one of the screen queens of the silent era, whose unwavering eyes and defiant chin made her a natural fit for Struss’ chiaroscuro. 

         The photographs Struss made of Swanson from the sets of Male and Female (1919) and Something to Think About (1920) mark a clear departure in subject matter from the urban modernism of Brooklyn Bridge, Nocturne. Nonetheless, Swanson offered the chance for Struss to deploy his dramatic flair. His photographs of Swanson in an exotic costume for a Babylonian dream sequence in Male and Female—a de rigeur feature of Hollywood of the period — are virtuoso. Moving Pictures makes these photographs a wonder to behold in person. The prints themselves are small: the image of the lion straddling Gloria Swanson is a little less than 7 by 9 inches. In consequence, Moving Pictures offers a splendid paradox: intimate viewing of images taken out of a big-screen context. 

         Struss’ 1919 connection with DeMille made his career. His work in silent films from 1921 to 1925 is well-documented in the exhibit: a visual feast of dramatic tableaux. On Saturday Night (1922) and Poisoned Paradise: The Forbidden Story of Monte Carlo (1925), Struss continued to work as a photographer, a freelance habitué of sets. It was only with Ben-Hur (1925) that Struss took on a cinematographic role: Moving Pictures permits us to see Struss standing behind the camera on the built-up set. 

The blockbuster success of Ben-Hur put Struss in good stead. The immediate fruit of his success was Sunrise: A Story of Two Humans—a testament to the style and power of the silent era. Together with Charles Rosher, Karl Struss was one of the two credited cinematographers on Sunrise, making for a fruitful collaboration with the German director F.W. Murnau (1888-1931), whose expressionism (honed by Nosferatu) found an ally in Struss’ camera. The two created moments of impressionistic loveliness with a misty moonlight encounter between the story’s protagonists (portrayed by Janet Cagnor and George O’Brien), full of chiaroscuro that recalls that of Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne. Dramatic close-ups of the protagonist’s switchblade and Janet Cagnor’s bright eyes and emotive face share more than a passing resemblance with Struss’ marvelous photographs of Gloria Swanson from eight years before.

         To the great credit of the curators of Moving Pictures, Sunrise runs on a loop right in the middle of the gallery space — replete with ample seating. Surrounded by photographs of Cagnor, stills, set photographs, and, of course, the golden Oscar statuette, there can be little doubt that Sunrise marked a high point not only for the silent era but also for Struss’ career.

The exhibit emphasizes the point by abridging Struss’ post-Sunrise career—more than a half-century — into one gallery. A deeper exploration of Struss’ cinematographic work on such Golden Age classics as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) — which immortalized in celluloid a melodramatic Nero plucking at the lyre while Rome burned, and Struss’ collaboration with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) could have represented Struss in a more active role as sole cinematographer in the talkies era. Be this as it may, the exhibition’s comparatively reduced attention to Struss’ post-Sunrise career shows a crucial truth: Struss did not successfully cross over to the era of talking films. Indeed, after The Great Dictator, Struss never again worked on a film that belongs in the Hollywood pantheon — instead, a smattering of Westerns and sci-fi pictures that only buffs and scholars remember. 

         In this respect, Struss shared the fate of many of the silent era, including the actress he brilliantly photographed in 1919: Gloria Swanson. Indeed, Swanson and Struss both had DeMille to thank for their career success in the twenties and thirties. Both had careers that stagnated in the forties. But unlike Swanson, Struss never found his Billy Wilder to return him to the inner circle once again.

         Yet for the Wilder who trained his sights on the Hollywood of the silent era in Sunset Boulevard (1950), restoring Struss would have been redundant. Wilder’s phenomenal post-war success stood on Struss’ shoulders. The chiaroscuro with which Struss played in New York of the 1910s found its match in the German expressionism that took Hollywood over by storm after the fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933. Struss’ own German origins and bilingual facility which helped to ease cultural and linguistic differences with F.W. Murnau in the making of Sunrise, would similarly ease the transition of Weimar filmmakers, including Wilder, into thirties Hollywood. Wilder’s career success and artistic merits would not have been possible without Karl Struss making Hollywood a welcome place for German filmmakers and German filmmaking.

         Moving Pictures surprises and illuminates, demonstrating a stylistic continuity from the pictorial movement at the dawn of the twentieth century to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Alfred Stieglitz’s 1912 letter to Struss had an ironic prescience. Karl Struss indeed had “something to say” as a photographer — it is what became the pictorial language of Hollywood, helping transform cinema from a vulgar and venal pastime to an art. At the Amon Carter, Karl Struss is ready for his close-up.