Agee at 100: Centennial Essays on the Works of James Agee

The Makers of In the Street and The Quiet One

the makers of iN the street and the QUiet oNe John wranoVICs Let me say that changing one’s identity and acting like a spy or a private eye are more a part of the American make-up than I’d ever imagined before seeing [In the Street]. This not only holds true for Levitt, Inc. who had to disguise their role of film-makers to get the naked truth, but also goes for the slum people who are being photographed. —Manny Farber Blame it on the Leica. For it was the invention in 1925, by the E. Leitz Company of the compact, portable 35-mm Leica camera that first made it practical for stealth-minded photographers to deploy a pocketable instrument , one far less likely to distract and influence their subject’s attention than did the larger, boxy cameras that preceded it. In the introduction he wrote for a collection of Helen Levitt’s photos, James Agee considered the pre-Leica limits that prevailed before the advent of what he called “small, quick, foolproof cameras.”1 According to Agee “for a long time the camera was too slow, large and conspicuous to work in the fleeting and half-secret world which is most abundant in lyrical qualities.”2 It’s not by accident that in the long stream of “anglosaxon monosyllables” Agee pours out like a freestyle prayer in the penultimate section of Let Us Now John wranovics ~ 202 ~ Praise Famous Men, the word “leica” is immediately followed by the word “candid,” and those are followed soon after by “surrealism, photography, photographer, documentary, work” and “minicam.”3 To capture the halfsecret world’s lyrical qualities Agee and Levitt hunted would require the attitude and tools of a spy. For photo-spies like Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Helen Levitt, the Leica was the concealed weapon of choice. Or perhaps more accurately, the Leica was their Royal typewriter, for all three shared the belief that what they were striving for in photography was an alternative to literature. Levitt, interviewed for National Public Radio, was shown one of her own photos and prodded by the interviewer for a reaction : “What’s going on there, do you think? What did you capture in that picture?” Levitt replied, with her typical directness, “Just what you see.” Pressing further, the interviewer asked, “Why do you think it is hard to talk about?” and Levitt explained, “If it were easy to talk about I’d be a writer. Since I’m inarticulate I can express myself with images.”4 Similarly, Evans, while teaching at Yale in his later career, would tell his students, “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”5 And Cartier-Bresson claimed that “Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant tale. . . . there is a whole world inside it.”6 In synch with the photo-spies, James Agee, a poet in love with cinema and enthralled by the possibilities of cutting-edge photojournalism, dreamed in 1937 of “a new form of movie short roughly equivalent to the lyric poem. . . . each image, (like each word in poetry) must have more than common intensity and related tension.”7 Together with Helen Levitt and a small band of compatriots, Agee participated in the creation of two films, In the Street and The Quiet One, that stand today as milestone experiments in the attempt to bring the lyrical literary qualities sought by the photo-spies in their still photography to the realm of the documentary film. In 1962, Jonas Mekas considered the legacy of In the Street and The Quiet One in an issue of Film Culture: “Stylistically and thematically, In the Street and The Quiet One seemed to indicate the proper direction for . . . new experiments. They perfectly complied with the proposition of James Agee, the man who contributed much to the formulation of an aesthetic basis for the New York film school: ‘The films I most eagerly look forward the maKers of iN the street anD the QUiet oNe ~ 203 ~ to will not be documentaries but works of fiction, played against and into and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.’”8 The intertwined relationships, personal and professional, that led to the development of these films spotlight the overlapping influences of surrealism and Soviet documentary art that inspired much of Agee’s early work. In the communist newspaper New Masses, Agee wrote that “in general the Left artist...