E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly

Anna May Wong’s confident, exotic, sexually-charged, hypnotic Shosho may outshine Gilda Gray’s fawning, snobbish, ‘shimmying,’ hysterical Mabel in E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly but the real scene-stealer for me would have to be Jameson Thomas’s Valentine or, more correctly, his left eyebrow which is capable of conveying everything from fury when he prepares to punch Victor to revelation when noticing Shosho’s nodding Buddha inspires him to rehire the scullery maid as his new attraction. Given that Piccadilly’s conventional love-triangle/whodunit plot is nothing spectacular; its the visual details and nuances like these that make the film unique.

We are made particularly well aware of this fact by the deliberate exclusion of a large portion of the inter-titles that would normally accompany onscreen verbal exchanges in silent films so as to force us to rely upon cinematic forms of narration rather than dialogue; a telling, even defiant move considering that this silent film was made on the brink of the sound cinema era which would begin to embrace theatre conventions at the expense of filmic ones (and also, of course, the rise and rise of Hollywood and the relegation of cinema to the primary status of entertainment rather than art. With this is in mind, what is the significance of Piccadilly being a multi-national production with German director, cinematographers etc, British setting and actors, Chinese and American actors etc?).

For instance, when Victor professes his love for Mabel in her change room, a close-up of Victor’s hand reaching for and achingly hovering millimeters from Mabel’s exposed arm better reveals the extent of his affection than any monologue. We also see Mabel’s haughty, smirking dismissal of Victor’s claim that ‘Valentine only wants you because he thinks you are a success’ transform into profound self-doubt thanks to attention drawn to her anxious hand-wringing and shoulder stroking and the shadow artfully cast over her lower-face highlighting her fearful eyes. Dupont also draws attention to the expressivity of film by juxtaposing straightforward, two-dimensional written English with the cinematic qualities of Chinese characters which, as the article we were given by Ernest Fenollosa observed, are each self-contained visual ‘thought-pictures’ in addition to being mere words in a sentence, much like film shots.*

Piccadilly’s nightclub setting is a further element of interest that demands a visually perceptive viewing stance. We are introduced to the film by a panning shot of disembodied neon signs suspended in the darkness, cultivating a sense of excitement with a hint of subversion given the lateness, the promise of alcohol, courting and entertainment and the confusion of public and private realms that comes from being in a crowd yet still part of something desirably exclusive: ‘But is it a club? Do clubs have electric signs?’ asks one patron. ‘Of course it isn’t a club,’ another answers. ‘They call it a club and so everybody wants to come into it.’ Arguably, it is the nightclub’s profoundly liminal space that allows Valentine, like the distracted, swaying scullery maids, to become hypnotised by Shosho, challenging employee/employer, Chinese/English, poor/wealthy distinctions. This recalls artist Piet Mondrian’s observation, from same period, that the nightclub with its jazz music already demonstred elements of the progressive, utopian, conflict-free reorganisation of living according to pure rhythm rather than form that he advocated under his Neo-Plasticism movement:

There is no emptiness, no boredom: rhythm fills everything without creating new oppression - it does not become form. No link with the old remains, for in the bar only the Charleston is seen and heard. The structure, the lighting, the advertisements - even in their disequilibrium - serve to complete the jazz rhythm. All ugliness is transcended by jazz and by light.**

* The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1936), pp. 8-9.
** ‘Jazz and the Neo-Plastic’ (1927) in The New Art - The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 221.

Image above: Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50" (127 x 127 cm).