Chelsea the Cinéaste

Billy Wilder, by way of dubious compliment, says of the master of early humane comedy: “Ernst Lubitsch, who could do more with a closed door than most of today’s directors can do with an open fly, would have had big problems in this market.” [i] The time was 1975 and Wilder’s observation betrays his concealed repugnance at the contemporary film scene. As is natural to the law of history, the past decays and whatever that has been salvaged from complete obliteration is bound to seem a little peculiar to the posterity. Wilder in the 1970s was coming to terms - although not without certain resentment - with the expected depletion of creative ideas brought on by old age and a growing sense of alienation from the prevailing cultural climate. Lubitsch, on the other hand, had his name and legacy established but his films in a steady process of obsolescence.  There is a misplaced tendency nowadays to view those films, which enjoy a resurgence of interest, as lighthearted and slightly whims...

  In general, screwball comedies epitomise Bergson’s definition of the comical: a certain “materiality that succeeds in fixing the movement of the soul”, that is opposed to grace and manifestly out of sync with the prevailing order of society and the normal functioning of human body. A typical example for this is the slipping on a banana peel, which occasions a disturbance of a flexible and continuous body movement and its harmony with the environment. Once repeated, this incidental moment of hilarity persists, but insofar as its oddity comes to be asserted as the new order, the laughter may more or less cease. It is thus an imperative with screwball comedy to negotiate and maintain a balance between surprise and repetition, although, admittedly, in terms of the genre’s distinction from other forms of comedy, what makes its “screwball” is also its capacity for and inclination towards overemphatic effects, which are less calculated to elicit laughter than to censure or survey the ab...