Fejos: Lonesome (1928)

In many ways, Paul Fejos’ Lonesome is New York’s answer to the great city symphony films of the 1920s, albeit there’s little fascination with the fact of it being shot on location, as well as little in the way of what might be called establishing shots. Instead, Fejos presents the New York crowd as the city, flooding his frames with people and building a loose narrative around two young lovers who meet at Coney Island, only to be separated as the crowd reaches its holiday peak. For the most part, Fejos reserves his experimentation for when the lovers are discovering each other, as the camera mirrors their efforts to extricate themselves from the Coney Island city-crowd. That’s no small task, since his camera has such an inherent affinity for the crowd that it has to utterly transform itself to imagine anything outside it, finally turning to a series of colour and sound segments that must have been quite astounding at the time. Full of beautiful cusps where the exuberance of the crowd suddenly gives way to that peculiar loneliness than can only descend in the very midst of a crowd, the sheer mass of people – there must be at least twenty in most frames – becomes almost architectural, an object lesson in how to seek respite from the crowd in the nooks and crannies of the crowd itself. In some ways, that’s not unlike the outlook of The Crowd, released the same year, except that there’s something more optimistic and reparative here, perhaps because the protagonists are working-class, rather than the upwardly mobile professionals of Vidor’s vision – for all that it distresses and overwhelms them, they know that the crowd is also their lifeblood, what’s brought them together, the solution to any problems it might cause. And so it’s a romance with the crowd – a tried and tortured romance, but a romance nonetheless, as if falling in love in a big city were the best way to commune with the crowd at its most hopeful and its most fearful.