Film Review: Stars in My Crown
Comrade Avalyn W brings you MUG’s first film review, of the classic anti-KKK Western, Stars in My Crown
Avalyn W
Stars in My Crown poster, made by art directors Cedric Gibbons and Eddie Imazu
Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown ends as it begins, with a puzzling formal gesture. Instead of pushing the camera in on the church, it pulls it away, giving the master shot an even wider frame rather than the expected cut to a close-up. The film is a closed loop, driven by conflicts that magically seem to find their way to religious harmony, matching the rosy-eyed tone of adult John’s voiceover, tainted with the ahistorical and delusional sentimentalities of childhood memory. Whether or not we as an audience receive Walesburg as such is a separate matter, informed by that very choice to pull the camera away. As Chris Fujiwara notes in his book on Tourneur, “watching the film is not going to be a progressive enlightenment; one might even say that to begin the film with this shot precludes the possibility of progress.” And to end the film with this same shot is just a further affirmation that no great realization of either justice or plain reality is in store for these small town residents. As for us, a literal physical distance is being enlarged, abstracting whatever sympathies we might have for these characters.
This formal unity of beginning and end is paralleled in a more delicate social unity, so tenuously suggested by the film’s celebratory conclusion. Josiah Gray, after saving a black man from being lynched by hooded white laborers, has finally roped every skeptic into Sunday service. He ostensibly accomplished this through the peaceful honesty of his actions, channeling the will of God. Of course, we know that Reconstruction didn’t play out through grace notes like this. In Alabama, the home state of the film’s original author Joe David Brown, the planters and poor whites allied to place their concentrated social weight on other white people who sided with freed slaves. W. E. B. Du Bois elaborates, “Such persons were warned and attacked until they fled the state or made peace with the new masters.” It can’t be as simple and cordial as Josiah makes it out to be, or at least how John remembers it.
Nonetheless, the film does synchronize with history in other ways. It’s fitting that Lon Backett wants to deprive Uncle Famous of his land specifically for mining purposes, just as Northern capital wanted to with the help of white convict labor. Famous’ refusal to give up his land reflects a widespread understanding among freedmen that “this land hunger – this absolutely fundamental and essential thing to any real emancipation of the slaves” had to be fulfilled and protected. Unfortunately, this basic demand “was met by ridicule, by anger, and by dishonest and insincere efforts to satisfy it.” In other words, there is nothing surprising about Famous’ ultimate defenselessness, especially given his lack of a visible black community, let alone a militarized and organized one. The planter capitalists, on the other hand, could easily initiate their counterrevolution of property “by eagerness on the part of the poor whites to check the demands of the Negroes by any means, and by willingness to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties, its bitter words, upheaval and turmoil. This was the birth and being of the Ku Klux Klan.” And this upheaval and turmoil will heed no laws, as long as they remain mere words on paper. As Famous says himself after being initially accosted by Backett: “Just saying a good thing don’t make it so.”
Is this to suggest that Tourneur was half-clueless, that he failed to realize the limitations in his own material? Fujiwara’s citation of John Keats’ negative capability is a worthwhile starting point to answering this question. Following such logic, Tourneur’s images are a negation of his personality, a commitment to a certain filmed objectivity that basks in uncertainty and rejects the straightforward application of imposed reason. The role of John’s voiceover is an indication of this negative capability, since we are made privy to events far outside his individual point of view. Although nostalgia informs the film’s tone, the camera retains an autonomy beyond it, much as it does in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. And what the camera captures and shows us are details that might complicate the surface of what we immediately see.
Let us return to that final scene in the church, where Josiah is victorious in uniting the town. The second shot we get in this sequence is one of Backett, who just the night before was in a white hood ready to kill an innocent black man for his land. Now, he is singing forcefully with his head tilted up, an almost mocking faux reverence in his expression, overcompensating for the obvious sins he has committed, not unlike the dramatic gestures of Creon in Straub-Huillet’s Antigone. But Backett only occupies half the frame. Right beside him is a large window, made to look like a portal to another world by the shallow focus. Out in that other world, conveniently excluded from this joyous occasion, we see a blurry figure attending to animal duties. We can only surmise that this is Famous. Josiah’s liberal pacificism may have temporarily saved him, but it did nothing to grant him a place in this false social unity. Instead, his would-be murderer keeps his stature and his power and, by extension, his capacity to enact violence again. A powerful speech cannot defeat the demands of capital.
Seen in the broader context of Tourneur’s filmmaking, “Famous’s appearance in the window is related to those unaccountable moments, like the hand on the balustrade in Night of the Demon, that turn Tourneur’s films inside out and open them to an alternate reality.” In this instance, that alternate reality is simply the reality of how Reconstruction failed to bring an industrial democracy and dictatorship of labor not only to freed slaves but all American citizens, a reality so damning and potent that it continues to haunt us even in moments of success and celebration. Take the immediate aftermath of Josiah reading out Famous’ phantom will. What exactly can be discerned from faces cloaked in white cloth is at best enigmatic. Are they holding their head down out of shame or frustration? Have they really changed their minds or do they only feel temporarily embarrassed? The Klansman carrying a rope throws it down like a petulant child and storms off, instigating the others to quietly leave as well. It’s easy enough to make our enemies look pathetic like this. Actually defeating them and ending their terror permanently is a separate matter. Maybe Famous understands this. It’s why he keeps his head down and shakes Josiah’s hand with a blank expression. Josiah is the one who gets the self-satisfied quip, not Famous. Bear in mind, Josiah is the same man who established his presence in Walesburg by pulling two guns on a bar full of men and who later punishes a bully by physically humiliating him. He grasps the value of violence and power, how it can set things definitively. How is it not justified in the face of a lynch mob?
With these ambiguities, Stars in My Crown poses an important question to its audience: are such ambiguities generative or are they an act of ethical negligence? Phrased more directly, does negative capability actually apply to such politically explicit material? In the concluding chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson uses the final two lines of “To Celia” by Ben Jonson as an example of an ambiguity that has no real critical relevance. They say the opposite of what they mean because it is lyrical to do so, not so they can create further contradictions in thought, an aesthetic choice for aesthetic purposes. Empson clarifies, “This is not to say that the last two lines are an accident, and should be altered; you may feel it gives a touching completeness to his fervor that he feels so sure no one will misunderstand him.” To then reverse this criteria and reapply it to Stars in My Crown is to determine whether or not the film’s ending is merely an outpouring of sentimentality owing to the tonal fervor of the rest of the film or if a more deliberate complication is at play. Without delving into autobiographical information or gaining access to behind-the-scenes material, we can only make this determination based on the film and its choices. The interpretative responsibility of criticism thus reasserts itself against the handwaving of negative capability.
That isn’t to say that a certain openness shouldn’t remain in how we engage with films, especially in our initial viewings, where we can be overtaken by the emotional force of what we’re experiencing. But we must permit our critical faculties to gradually make their intervention, to question why it is that we respond certain images and scenes in the ways that we do. Empson lays out this procedure, saying, “When you have made a quotation, you must first show the reader how you feel about it, by metaphor, implication, devices of sound, or anything else that will work; on the other hand, when you wish to make a critical remark, to explain why your quotation takes effect as it does, you must state your result as plainly (in as transferable, intellectually handy terms) as you can.” At a certain point, the mysticism should drop and give way to something more concrete and grounded. Films are constructed with discernible reasoning, sophisticated as they might be, just as history unfolds as a consequence of discrete causes and actions.
The uniting of these two tendencies within criticism brings to mind a similar issue that Jacques Rancière contended with, specifically the problem of “how to engineer an equivalence between the pleasure derived from shadows projected on a screen and the intelligence proper to an art or a worldview.” Placing this problem within the explicit realm of cinema and its relationship to Marxist politics, he elaborates that in order “to bring them together one needed to postulate a mysterious equivalence between the historical materialism underlying the workers’ struggle and the implicit materialism of the cinematic relation of bodies to their environment.” Mysterious is the key word here since such an equivalence is not something that can be taken as a given. The literal materiality of mise en scène doesn’t necessarily entail a grasp of historical materialism and its application to a particular narrative. If the connection is to be drawn, it must be explained.
In that shot of Backett singing, there is a physical relation established between him and Famous, one in the foreground and the other in the background, separated on set by a window and in-camera by shallow focus. The man with economic and political power dominates the far more visible plane of this shot on virtually all axes, while the man with little of either is obscure enough to be unnoticeable even with multiple viewings. In an almost straightforward manner, the craft of cinema has embodied the relations of production of this period of counterrevolution and reaction. At least with this one shot, Tourneur is able to bridge the gaps posited by Rancière. And yet, it remains tethered to a scene of seemingly uncritical celebration, foreclosing a historical trajectory that hasn’t ended at all.
The sobering limitations of cinema start to present itself, not least of all in a Hollywood production from 1950. A Marxist film critic naturally demands from cinema “that it should reveal at the same time all the ambiguity of the world and how to deal with that ambiguity. The obscurity of the relationship assumed to exist between clarity of vision and the energies of action is projected onto it. Cinema can illuminate action, but perhaps only by casting doubt on the obviousness of that relation.”And so I follow the path of Stars in My Crown, looping back around to where I started. The camera pulls away from the church just as we will move away from the film, walking out of the theater or out of our homes into the world. We gain this distance not just to look back on the film with clearer eyes but to look elsewhere, the revolutions betrayed and incomplete, the actions that our present situation demands of us. Cinema has its truths, its capacity to clarify and rouse. The rest is still up to us.
