A Film Canon

 

 

Grand Hotel presents the most impressive microcosm of the modernist metropolis that I have seen to date, partly because it subverts the very panoptic inclusiveness implicit in the concept of a microcosm. This is clearest in the opening sequence, which not only refuses to present any exterior establishing shot, but is marked by a conspicuous paucity of wide-angle shots or long perspectives - all the more notable in that the hotel's concentric architecture would seem conducive to such an approach. If anything, the recurrent aerial shots of the telephone switchboard present the most comprehensive vantage point, connoting a cityscape that needs to be understood in technological, rather than merely spatial, terms. This fragmentation necessitates the first example of multiple narratives that I have seen to date, as well as the first genuine 'ensemble cast', including John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo. Although these characters and others initially appear to correspond to specific social positions - working-class, petit bourgeois, haute bourgeois, aristocrat - Goulding quickly complicates the drama so as to suggest that such comforting, orienting classifications are no longer tenable; or, alternatively, that the division between adjoining rooms is less concrete than might first appear. The sum total is an intensification of everything ephemeral about urban life, as if the hotel were in fact a giant hospital where the cycle of birth and death is omnipresent - explaining Goulding's choice of an elderly doctor as its only permanent inhabitant; a protective daemon, or spirit.