Nitrate Film: Gabriel Over the White House

The 1933 Hollywood film Gabriel Over the White House was released just as Adolf Hilter, promising to be the strongman who’d restore Germany’s battered economy and culture, was appointed Chancellor. This may have been a coincidence, yet history cast Gregory La Cava’s political drama, which follows the conversion of an uncaring, party-line president into a man of the people, differently.

Political hack Jude Hammond, elected to the highest office in Depression-era turmoil, is emblematic of a turgid glad-handing bureaucracy that all but ignores the desperation of the citizenry. After he miraculously survives a car crash, Hammond experiences an epiphany — one portrayed in the film as a mix of divine Christian intervention and spiritual possession by a venerated figure such as Lincoln. 

In the wake of this experience, Hammond becomes a benign dictator, his politics far exceeding the historically contemporary FDR’s acts of executive order, going as far as  political executions. 

Gabriel Over the White House is exemplary of a pre-WW2 liberal fascination with fascism, its plot oddly incongruent with the liberal American doctrine as we understand it today. This US Government is allowed to gun down domestic enemies with impunity in the name of unionisation and labour solidarity. The film is thus an artefact of a time when even centre-left populist ideology fantasised of violence — in contrast to, or similarity with, its successors today.

Gabriel Over the White House, 1933

dir Gregory La Cava
86′

Nitrate Film

Nitrate Film is a series of screenings selected by the film programmer Kit Ramsay, accompanied by discussions led by friends of Verdurin. The events animate live, public critique, bringing attention to filmic artefacts deserving perdurance. 

The series reconstitutes a critical audience, from camera to projector. The flammable Nitrate Film disrupts cinema’s proximity to reality that, in turns, breeds passivity in judgement. Where cinema’s rhetoric — or even propaganda — looks measured and life-size, the discussions separate them from the larger-than-life gestures of theatre.