Michael Mann: Crime Auteur

My new book, Michael Mann: Crime Auteur, was released last month by Scarecrow Press. This volume is the updated version of The Cinema of Michael Mann, which came out in 2007. Unlike the earlier book, this revised, re-titled edition contains full chapters on Miami Vice and Crime Story, the television shows Mann produced in the 1980s. Additionally, it also features new chapters on Public Enemies, and his most recent foray into television, the short-lived HBO drama Luck. In addition to the new material and polishing of the prose in all chapters, I've also included frame captures (in black-and-white) to accompany my analysis of the films, as well as a new preface that addresses some of the excellent new work on Mann that has appeared in the intervening years. Although this preface frames Mann as a 'crime auteur,' I am also interested, throughout, in how his special 'touch' as an auteur takes us beyond genre categories, and in how themes and figures of crime and criminal activity circulate throughout his ostensibly 'non-crime' films.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with the editing and design job Scarecrow performed on this one. They helped me make this a better book altogether, inside and out. If you're a Mann scholar I hope it helps you think through his films in your own way. (It's available only in hardback for now; however, a less expensive paperback version should be out within a year.)

Rhythm in movies

Rhythm creates many of the most memorable moments in cinema. A temporal pattern of gestures, movements, vocal inflections, and images can quicken the pulse of the scene and thicken your affective response. A good film can take your breath away through rhythmic intelligence.

Three examples: 

1) No one on planet Earth films an SUV pulling into a Miami nightclub better than Michael Mann. And no one finds the rhythmic essence in that event better than Mann does. Miami Vice begins with a undercover sting in a nightclub. The first few images establish beats through cutting and in the accompanying music. We are dropped into the swelter of a Miami nightclub and forced, as viewers, to gather our bearings. Sonny Crockett, a recognizable character, gives us something to hold on to, flirting with a bartender. The rhythm, thus far, is fairly straightforward.

But then something extraordinary happens. A white SUV pulls up in front of the nightclub. I have never been able to get over how exciting I find this very simple event to be within the rhythmic context of the opening sequence. It has very little to do with the narrative which will unfold: the SUV itself is ultimately a MacGuffin, for the story swerves a few minutes later when Crockett takes a phone call from an informant on the run. But when that SUV appears, it generates a discrete change in the tempo and melodic quality of the music on the soundtrack. In tandem with the music, as it pulls up front, it quietly overwhelms us. Within the film's world, it is an event that happens every night and every minute this club is open for business. But for Mann it is a vehicular gesture of exquisite beauty that changes the way we move through the space. Mann is fascinated with the way things move, especially the way this particular white vehicle moves (in tandem, as in a dance, with another identical vehicle that pulls up, after a beat, right behind it):

(NBC-Universal has blocked my Miami Vice video. Drat! Here is the rhythm in pictures):

Moments of rhythmic excitement like these accumulate as Miami Vice unfolds. These rhythms immerse us in the feeling of movement and life in Mann's world.

2) Many classical Hollywood films, particularly screwball comedies, involve courtship and woo. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers boiled this down to a kind of essence, but there is no formula to understanding what they achieved together. Every dance was different, with fresh kinds of loving rhythms. 

In The Gay Divorcee Rogers wants a divorce and to get one she has to set up a situation in which her husband will discover her cheating. Astaire uses this as an excuse to woo her, and eventually take the place of the hired lothario who will be playing the role of her illicit lover. As usual, Rogers resists Astaire's initial advances. In their first dance sequence, he tries to get her involved. She resists. She tries to leave the framing of the image, escaping into the off-screen space. He pulls her back.

At a certain point in this scene, though, Rogers decides she wants to dance with Astaire. It is hard to locate the exact moment this happens, because the the dance begins slowly. She looks down at their feet moving, suddenly, in unison. They then begin one of the most quietly extraordinary dances in movies. The entire tempo of the film, as established up to this point (even-tempo classic cutting) now surrenders its authority over rhythm to the intra-frame movement of these two glorious individuals:

Usually screwball characters will throw caution to the wind in a "madcap" series of events that ensure a fast-paced tempo. They are brilliant people and their rhythm is a manifestation of that quicksilver intelligence. In this scene, though, things actually slow down. Rogers' character is still not quite yet convinced Astaire is the man for her. The dance must convince her, and this takes time. The dance is a careful consideration of his movements, and an effort to see if his will match hers. This is one of the great thoughtful dances in movies.

3) My third example involves voice. Voices have fascinating rhythms: the changing speeds at which words are delivered; the ping-pong tempo of conversations; the change in pitch over time. My example involves the various rhythms of a laugh.

In Alice Adams, Katharine Hepburn is walking down the street with Fred MacMurray. She is nervous; her family is poor and she feels she isn't worthy of her suitor, even though (or perhaps because) she is in love with him. Every time MacMurray is on her character's mind, Hepburn expresses Alice's nervous energy in various ways. Later in the movie, she will nervously fiddle with a pillow; and in another scene, she will expend this energy by arranging flowers in a vase. (The vase scene itself is a master class in how voice and gesture can work together).

The lilt in Hepburn's voice is underappreciated, generally. Critics usually make remarks about her "Bryn Mawr drawl" but say very little about how she could manipulate it in various ways. But like other greats of the immediate post-silent period (Myrna Loy, for example), Hepburn always does extraordinary things with her vocal delivery in her films. The rhythms she could create are on fine display in the street scene with MacMurray, and remind us that rhythm in cinema does not always have to involve cutting or music. Alice expresses her nervousness in this scene through a pattern of nervous laughs that work in tandem with body gestures that attempt to convey a certain confidence, even as they betray the enormous crush she has on MacMurray:

The tempo of her speech is punctuated at various points by this laughter; and the melodic detail of each laugh involves us emotionally with her character. At certain moments the laugh is a high-pitched exclamation mark, nervously bracketing what she has just said. At other points, she rushes through her sentences breathlessly, as if quickly speaking her words to her beau might more quickly lead her to her goal (his love); the laughs which punctuate these quickly delivered lines are often more like extended breaths, as if her nervousness were being channeled into the effort to work up the courage for the next sentence. And sometimes she is so breathless that the laugh we are expecting at the end of certain sentences is not always there; she's literally out of breath to produce it. (Of course, she does muster up one more great, hilarious laugh at the end of the sequence.) The character Alice may be ineptly pattering her way through the uncertain tempo of a potentially embarrassing social interaction; but the actor's carefully detailed voice is assuredly in control of the rhythmic content of the scene.

The Best Films/Actors of 2012

The Best Films of 2012 (yes, a month later, someone is still doing this list thing).

1. In the Family (Patrick Wang, U.S.)
2. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, U.S./U.K.)

3. This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran) 

4. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, U.S.)
5. Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, France/Belgium)
6. Amour (Michael Haneke, Austria) 
7. Attenberg (Giorgos Lanthimos, Greece)

8. This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/Ireland)

9. In Another Country (Sang-soo Hong, South Korea)
10. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, U.S.) 

***

Rachel Weisz 

The films of Terence Davies fondly reconstruct past eras, at a gentle distance. The gender politics of his films are undeniably progressive, in that, like Sirk, they give space for the expression of desires otherwise occluded in the world of the films; yet, in ways that might be troubling for some viewers, they also express a palpable nostalgia for eras during which such expression, particularly for women, was a difficult achievement. So even as Davies clearly finds something about the bygone London of The Deep Blue Sea intolerable, the fact is also that the post-World War II world he envisions for us is every bit as beautifully elegant as the camera pan and tilt that leads us up to Hester's window at the beginning of the film. Shutting the curtains to the outside world, Davies follows her every move: the sleeping pills, the blanket, the suicide note. If Hester is no longer for this world, Davies will savor every moment of gesture prior to her departure.

The Deep Blue Sea is probably best understood not as a love letter to a less enlightened time but rather as a documentation of one woman's complex response to the options available to her during that time. What Davies cherishes is ultimately not a time period but a certain quality of response, the sheer classiness with which Rachel Weisz conveys how Hester works through what she wants in life. Think of her quiet indignation, at an insufferably repressed breakfast table with an insufferably repressive mother-in-law; her aching dissatisfaction with but genuine human love for a perfectly respectable but passionless husband (played admirably by Simon Russell Beale), who cannot possibly understand what Hester might be feeling; her look of sheer, child-like love as she gazes upon a brave war veteran (Tom Hiddleston) whose masculinity is every bit a part of its time and place just as Hester's desire for him is timeless. The best performance I saw last year won't be honored at these noisy award shows, but that is okay: there's something right about an actor in a Davies film flying, relatively speaking, under the radar, waiting for dignified moments to make her character felt.

***
Jafar Panahi

There is a stunning moment in This is Not a Film. I believe it is a moment every teacher of film acting (either of its realization or its expressive appreciation) should keep in their back pocket. In it, Jafar Panahi, house-bound by the Iranian authorities and legally barred from making another film, stands in front of a large flat screen playing a DVD of his masterpiece Crimson Gold. (He is playing the American DVD of the film, intriguingly: cinema as global boomerang.) After watching a scene from the movie, starring the amateur actor Hossain Emadeddin, he reminds the viewer of This is Not a Film that the details of gesture, expression, vibration, and movement generated by this amateur actor in front of a film camera are not predictable at all, are not mere illustrations of a character already articulated on the screenplay page. In fact, the presence of an amateur actor on location essentially re-writes the contents of the screenplay in front of the camera. "He does the directing on you," Panahi says of Hossain. "How could I explain before making the film, that Hossain should lean against the wall, do the thing that he did with his eyes, and that I had never seen before?" Of course, in telling us this, Panahi - a master reduced to his own role as house-bound amateur - is reminding us of the strange amateurism that cinema generates in all actors: no matter how closely the script is studied, no matter how perfectly the role cast, the camera will capture those fleeting details of human existence that cannot be shaped in advance.

***
Marion Cotillard

And so we go to Rust and Bone to see Marion Cotillard without legs. That is a strange sentence, for many reasons. It declares that our intentions behind watching Rust and Bone will be quite different than our viewings of other Marion Cotillard films (in which, presumably, the intact quality of all of her appendages was one of the attractions on offer); it reminds us that watching Cotillard here is part of our ongoing discovery of what it means to watch an actor during the transition of cinema in the digital era, for what we see of her here is actually quite different from what actually existed in front of the camera at the time of filming (Cotillard wore green, knee-high socks so that her the lower part of her legs could be digitally removed after the tragic accident suffered by her character in the film); and it reminds us that our intentions in watching this film are perhaps somewhat different than our appreciation of Jacques Audiard's masterful 2009 crime drama A Prophet, which did not feature any international stars of quite the same caliber as Cotillard. However, none of the strangeness of that first sentence, nor the presence of this marvelous leading lady, would be interesting if Audiard wasn't so good at the basic things: fractured family melodrama; the evocative, rhythmic and emotional use of pop music (Lykke Li, Bon Iver); and a compelling narrative that also includes the involving story of a father struggling to come to terms with the fact of his son. But, still, I cannot shake the feeling that Cotillard, with or without legs (and she has them, actually, for the first act of the film), is at the heart of Audiard's efforts, and that this would have been a far worse film without her. It's a great melodramatic bit of acting.


***
Chris Pratt 

Some viewers will know Chris Pratt as Andy on Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler's great sitcom about small-town government. Andy is possibly the stupidest character in American comedy since the silent era's comedic heavies. But Pratt gives an everyday likability to Andy that is necessary in episodic television. In Zero Dark Thirty, Pratt shows up near the end, playing one of the bros who will execute Bin Laden. Unlike Andy, of course, there is no sign that Pratt's Navy Seal is stupid, in any sense that might be seen to matter to his job. If anything, Kathryn Bigelow admires his tactical skill in the same way Howard Hawks would have in the 1930s. However, he is instantly understandable in a way Jessica Chastain's Maya is not. Maya lives, works, is herself through screens and data; her enemy in Zero Dark Thirty is a figure in a file, a glimpse on a surveillance screen, that drives both her and the relentless work of the film itself. And this work is not to kill Bin Laden, exactly. It is work meant to allow her the chance to first calculate and then turn over a statistical probability to a military equipped with the means to transform her math into an event of flesh and blood. In turn, just as Maya is already something of an abstraction to her male higher-ups, Pratt and his fellow military men are the necessary instrument through which her workplace ambition might be fulfilled. But Pratt, in a shorthand way typical of television, reminds us of the humanity lingering behind all this data. His fleeting presence, anyway, is most welcome at the two-hour mark of this exhausting dirge of a film.

Stanley Cavell once said (of Irene Dunne, in his case) that to follow your favorite actor closely, moment-by-moment, gesture-by-gesture, in a film, is to lose your identity to her. But the pleasures of watching a supporting player like Pratt is that he lets you keep yours. This can sometimes be a relief. Maya is a character you can lose your identity to, sure; but watch her lose hers in the process.

 

Django Unchained

Every story Quentin Tarantino has told since Kill Bill has centered, in one form or another, on the desire for revenge. At times, cinematic revenge can open up complex reflection, and my favorite Tarantino movie after Jackie Brown, Inglourious Basterds, certainly compels thoughts about the power the movies themselves have to fantasize acts of revenge. But with Django Unchained, Tarantino is less interested in reflection and more in the sheer energy of cathartic violence. For two hours Jamie Foxx does very little in this film but then he explodes in a torrent of bullets that Tarantino imagines as a vision of black male empowerment. But is empowerment genuinely Tarantino's concern? The form of his film is too set on duration for its affects, too interested in lingering around and in the details of American slavery for it to ever really convince us that it wants to escape the milieu caught in its fetishistic gaze. And even if a certain authentic desire for enabling black power does fuel Django, the form it takes in this film equates agency with gunplay, a deeply dangerous political gesture at this moment in American social history.

Beyond this, the movie is frequently boring, full of sequences that dwell, variously, on a group of ineffectual clansmen struggling to see through the holes in their masks; or on DiCaprio's slave owner presenting a lecture on phrenology. Most disturbingly, these passages, which serve a minimal function in the causal structure of the film, suggest that Tarantino is fascinated rather than repelled by slavery ephemera. The subject of slavery has not received adequate examination in American cinema; but fascination is not examination, and although I admire Tarantino's boundless energy and love for cinema, I found it hard to get my bearings with this film.

Poster Personas

In "Movie Poster of the Week" at Mubi, Adrian Curry has a fascinating discussion of poster art for In a Lonely Place, the Nicholas Ray film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. Curry discovers that none of these posters quite gets Grahame's facial features right. I agree; I would argue that in some of them her image recalls either Lauren Bacall or Joan Crawford rather than Grahame herself. (The former makes sense, since the distributors would have wanted to remind audiences in 1950 of Bogart's recent popular cycle of films with his wife; the latter less so, since Bogart and Crawford were never paired on film).

This got me thinking about examples of poster art in which a star is represented in ways that depart markedly from his or her actual appearance in the advertised film. There are, of course, examples of willful abstraction, such as the great tradition of Polish movie posters, which often take key iconographic elements and distill them into simple lines and forms. For example, Bogart again, in Casablanca, for a 2009 re-release:

Is this Bogie, or Don Draper? As if Bogart's face were that sharp! This sort of abstraction replaces the iconic features of the star with a key narrative object - in the case of Casablanca, Bogie's iconic cigarette. These posters sometimes even replace the human figure's presence entirely with these objects, as in this utterly bizarre 1970s Polish poster art for Terrence Malick's first film:

But like Curry, what I'm mostly interested in are attempts at more or less realistic representation that nevertheless diverge from the star's appearance in the advertised film. Katharine Hepburn's image in poster art in the 1930s and 1940s is an interesting case study. This poster for The Philadelphia Story (1940), for example, softens her angularity just a bit, which seems appropriate given the film's own narrative containment of the challenging and often subversive personality she created in her earlier 1930s films:

But even so, this is way too generic for Hepburn -- the blank expression of the figure in the poster is light years away from the sharp inner life she projects on film. By contrast, the earlier 1936 American poster for Quality Street (1936) captured the angularity...

...but it's still not quite right. That chin is a bit too much, and the fawning upward glance doesn't really capture the strength with which Hepburn's characters gazed at their objects of desire in these films.

The French came up with a better representation of the energy Hepburn brought to her madcap 30s comedies. This art for Bringing Up Baby (1938) captures the spirit of her character even as it channels the specificity of her features into caricature. What results is a whirlwind of screwball movement:

Sometimes, though, the posters offer weird contrasts. The photo of Grant and Hepburn in this RKO poster (below) for Bringing Up Baby is certainly great, but there is no steamy romance in the movie as depicted here. Clearly, it's just a staged production photo. The illustration in the bottom left corner does a better job of capturing the comic spirit of the movie, even as it abstracts the iconic features of its stars in cartoon fashion: 

Upon viewing her early 30s films, such as A Bill of Divorcement (1932) and Morning Glory (1933), Hepburn's first critics often compared her to Garbo and Crawford. This is a strange comparison now, but one the poster art played up in an attempt to sell this unfamiliar woman in familiar ways. Hepburn was styled a little softer in these earlier movies, but the poster art for them actually makes her a little more gaunt than she actually was in the films. For all her sharpness, there is a real vulnerability to her character in Morning Glory, a quality this poster fails to capture:

This sharp-edged, Garbo-inflected Hepburn image lingered into the mid-1930s, even as the films themselves, such as Alice Adams (1935) departed from it. The image on the left of this American poster for Alice Adams looks like an outtake from A Bill of Divorcement or Christopher Strong (1933) and nothing like the mousy, uncertain woman Hepburn plays in the film adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel:

The idea that Hepburn could play a "mousy, uncertain" character seems odd if all you know of her is her later, retrospective status as a figure of independent womanhood. But it reminds us how varied her 1930s characters were - and that same variation is at play in all of these posters, even as the parallels between a given poster and the film it is supposed to represent don't always make sense. By the time Hepburn became something of an American institution in the 1950s, her well-established iconic features encouraged abstraction, as in this art for 1956's The Iron Petticoat, with Bob Hope (a counter-intuitive pairing, if there ever was one. "Hilariously together for the first time," the poster says; it would be the only time!):

But even before the iconic qualities of her on-screen persona began to take more or less permanent shape, the playful unpredictability of Hepburn's poster persona itself seems to give way to a conservative consistency. The poster for Woman of the Year (1942), for example, is just right for the film, but it lacks the strange playfulness of the earlier posters, a playfulness that echoed, in the 1930s, the remarkable variation of her on-screen presence from film-to-film. Which goes to show that trying to find a single poster image that might boil down your favorite movie star to her essential qualities is ultimately impossible, for all the forgotten, contingent variations are as interesting as the timeless iconic qualities.

Killing Them Softly

There is a camera movement near the beginning of Killing Them Softly that tracks across the wide screen, from left-to-right, as two goons smash Ray Liotta through a window. Despite appearances, though, it is not a character-motivated camera movement. The camera moves in advance of the goons, arriving on the other side of the house before they emerge from it; and it centers the window in the frame before Liotta is smashed through it. Most Hollywood films shape their worlds around the movements and desires of their characters, but this one assumes a stylistic posture from which to observe its hapless gangsters and small-time criminals, as if they were dead insects pinned to a dartboard in a seedy urban bar. Or as if they are violent men in a dead-end economy - which they are. It's the antithesis of the long tracking shot following the same Liotta through the nightclub in Goodfellas (1990): the camera in the Scorsese film wants to share the energy of its wise guys. But Andrew Dominik, the smart stylist behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and the helmer of this new film, is all too aware that the gangster's violent energy ends only in economic and personal burnout, and so keeps his distance.

This elegant aesthetic distance is why the televisions and radios scattered throughout the movie, all playing snippets of speeches made by Obama, McCain, and Bush II during the 2008 campaign, feel like transmissions from another planet; Dominik's achievement is to make a recent moment in American history strange and unfamiliar, even though we are still living through its consequences. Killing Them Softly's losers are mere footnotes to the recent dismal history of the American economy none of them are fit to change, and which only one of them, a wearily philosophical hitman named Jackie, and played by Brad Pitt, comments upon. The movie is full of interesting moments and longueurs that suggest the glamor of the gangster as a genre figure is as exhausted as the economy which once fetishized him. How else to explain the wheezing, palpably unappealing presence of a disgusting character named Mickey, an alcoholic colleague of Jackie's played by an actor, James Gandolfini, who only ten years ago was this genre's undisputed icon of violent cool in The Sopranos?

Whatever the movie's genre revisionism, its star is still one of its central interests. Pitt has built - perhaps not quietly, but without the salient critical acclaim one might suspect he deserves - one of the most interesting filmographies of any beautiful male star in the history of Hollywood movies, and this audience-displeaser is a fascinating addition to his resume. He is lucky and smart enough to star in American films directed by filmmakers (Dominik, Fincher, Malick, Soderbergh) who demand more of his presence than mere presence, and that ask questions. Do gangsters steal because of tough economic times, or do tough economic times merely provide a new kind of excuse for lowlifes with guns? This is the question Killing Them Softly poses, without answering. I do not know the answer, either, but these times have provided an intriguing context in which to contemplate the lives of men who know the other only through the barrel of a gun. 

Douglas Sirk's All I Desire

Douglas Sirk's All I Desire (1952) arrived just before the German-Danish director helmed several key 1950s women's pics in Hollywood: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959). It shares with those films a concern for a similar central figure, a heterosexual, middle-class woman with repressed desires; but it locates this interest in a turn-of-the-century character who prefigures the more modern figures played by Jane Wyman and Lauren Bacall in the later movies. Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck) was a wife, a mother of three, and a lover, illicitly; however, when Sirk joins her, she is living a fiction of her own creation. Having left her former life upon the community's discovery of her affair with another man, Naomi is at the tail end of a failed acting career. But in her letters back home to daughter Lily (Lori Nelson), herself an aspiring actress, Naomi claims she has found success as a Shakespearean player in Europe. In contrast to the later Sirk films, in which women are often isolated from each other (think of Wyman staring into her reflection in the TV set in Heaven, or Bacall suffering alone through a miscarriage in Wind), Naomi's bond with Lily is the chief emotional interest in All I Desire. But this bond slowly unravels when Naomi returns home, after years away, to see Lily's earnest performance in an amateurish high-school theater production.

There is every indication that Sirk wanted to shoot this film in color. (He lost out on that, and on the ending, too, a ridiculous bit of tacked-on happy business reconciling the wife and husband in an uncomplicated and unconvincing manner). His 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal is shot in sumptuous Technicolor; by contrast, the shadowy silver sheet of All I Desire must find other strategies to locate the emotions that find their signature expression in his color films. For a viewer who looks at this after the later Sirk melodramas, in fact, it's hard to believe that All I Desire is not in color. Some subjects demand color: the unbridled passion expressed through Dorothy Malone's feverish bedroom dance in Written on the Wind is unimaginable in black-and-white (at least, who would want to imagine Malone's ridiculous jitterbug in anything other than its vibrant reds and pinks?), just as the melancholy blues that color All that Heaven Allows ground the the film's enabling soap-opera conventions in a painterly style.

But Sirk's methods in 1953 still manage to suggest the emotional undercurrents that the color of the later melodramas would amplify. In the first shots of All I Desire, his camera placement (in a high angle, looking down at the small town below) prefigures a camera position that would become the opening signature of All That Heaven Allows:

These sort of high-angle shots imply an omniscient view, a knowing figure outside the film who can frame, cut, and color the repressed emotional undercurrents of the fiction but is not subject to those same undercurrents himself. In Vincente Minnelli movies, there is a push-and-pull between the director's and the characters' control over mise en scene, exemplified by the glorious widescreen palette of The Cobweb (1955), which conveys the characters' dueling wills to control the color of curtains in a mental institution. In Sirk melodramas, by contrast, the mise en scene is often established, almost entirely, by forces beyond the control of the figures in the film.

There is a brief exception to this rule of Sirk's cinema in All I Desire, however, and it's an exception manifest in the film's play with black-and-white shadows and light. All I Desire, like the later Imitation of Life, is about an actress, so it is telling that its most salient emotional revelations arrive when characters are self-consciously performing for others. At a dinner party, Lily implores her mother to perform a reading of an Elizabeth Browning sonnet, one of her ex-husband's favorites. Immediately Naomi controls the mise en scene, turning down the lights for her reading and taking the "stage" at the top of a staircase. Cloaked in low-key lighting, Naomi seems to have designed her stage presence in this domestic space in order to avoid being seen, even as the servants spy her performance from the "wings" of this makeshift theater, and just as her daughter and family watch her reading from below:

Naomi later moves down the steps, and addresses her "audience" in what is surely the best bit of acting in her career (if not Stanwyck's): 

As narrative, this scene works to bring Naomi closer to her husband. Interestingly, this narrative push gradually erases the control Naomi wielded over the environment just a moment before: as Sirk begins cutting to more conventional close-up shots, the low-key lighting Naomi has insisted on for her reading is replaced by relatively even illumination:

These moments are not "written" by the character, ultimately. Although she begins by expressing herself through the control of light, the words on the page are not her own (they are written by another author, and they signify, in this context, a bond with a husband responsible for the repression of her desires). What is ostensibly a moment of emotional fullness achieved by a character (a connection established between Naomi-as-actress as her family, and specifically her husband) is subsequently re-framed as a loss of control and agency, one that prefigures the forced ending in which Naomi is thrown (not by Sirk, but by the film's producers) into the arms of her husband, who will bring her no closer to the successful acting career she desires. (An aging actress herself at the time this film was made, All I Desire's disappointing ending is content to suggest that Naomi/Stanwyck's best years are behind her).

If this sequence in All I Desire effectively encapsulates the loss of agency which is a recurring motif in Sirk's melodramas, it is also quite different in its assumption that this woman has some control over her social world in the first place; in the later Sirk movies there is no pretense for such control, and no other Sirk woman after All I Desire is able to fully control environment in the way Stanwyck, at least initially, does in the above shots. In Written on the Wind Lauren Bacall is a Madison Avenue advertising secretary (with a lot of control over the images she produces within the mise en scene)...

...but this is not when the film actually joins her. In All I Desire we first meet Stanwyck as her character explains the relative control she has over the fictional life she leads as an "actress," but the plot joins Written on the Wind at the end of its story, with Bacall colored in humid, warm colors which anticipate her fainting spell:

What I am suggesting here (and it is a hypothesis in need of testing via more re-viewings of Sirk's films, particularly Imitation of Life, which is also about an actress) is that as Sirk's authorial identity was fulfilled as the 1950s progress, the identity of his characters-as-authors was thoroughly effaced. The auteur's color gives us emotional plenitude and satisfaction as viewers, and it helps create his signature; but it carves out emotions from the women on the screen, leaving them empty and without agency.