A Farewell To Arms

Frank Borzage - 1932 (Source material the Ernest Hemmingway novel)
This film is marvellous. Borzage's direction is restrained, elegant, affecting, above all simple. He favours two shots. His close-ups of Helen Hayes, and indeed Gary Cooper, are not there for emoting, but as a dramatic punctuation mark. In this, they are an example of the autonomy of Borzage's camera. He often tracks with cameras, in some remarkable sequences trailing unbroken for long periods. But his tracks also can leave any single character, and simply tell the story itself.
I say simple because that is what the sets, acting, and general mis-en-scene is. The story progresses at a quick quick pace. It is a simple story; a man loves a woman, but they cannot be together. The settings are there, but there is no dwelling on that, because it is not what is important. What matters is that we see the two of them together, just living with each other, for those snatched periods. We don't need it rammer home by editing; it is just there, the images tell us. And what images they are; a great range of shades, but strong blacks, indeed extremely strong shadows, hard backlighting. This film is shot in the soft style.
Along with the abovementioned autonomous camera, Borzage's style has other reasons for its rise above simple conservatism. There are some extremely high and low framings. Abstractions of shapes, especially in the sequences where we have Cooper's eye-view, and his insitent, yet not over-strained, voiceover 'where is she, where is she'? Another special scene is the original accident; a fixed camera, so dark, just a few sillouhetted shapes in the distance, and someone, and something, is hurt.
Perhaps the most remarkable is the long, silent but for music, montage sequence, where I supose there is a lot of plot. We have close-ups of parts of bodies, small actions, a story told in images, which is what narrative cinema is. Each one is just part of the world; and for that, it is everything this cinema needs.