4 Cinematic Rain

Very simply, rain makes characters do something, whether finding and opening an umbrella, seeking shelter, or passionately refusing shelter. In many examples, rain manifests otherwise latent desire; the sound and image of rain accelerate the pacing and intensify the sensation of the scene. No matter the degree to which a film “makes” its rain or rejoices in atmospheric serendipity, cinematic rain actively reveals the force of gravity (water, produced by studio or atmosphere, falls, after all), the direction of wind, the hint of temperature, the sound of falling, and the transparency of water. Through a variety of examples, including Joris Ivens's Rain (introduced in chapter 1), this chapter takes up rain's unique stylizations of cinematic time and space. With regard to Ivens's Rain, Béla Balázs appreciates the ordinary phenomenon of its subject, which “is no particular rain, rain that has fallen somewhere or other. No sense of time or space holds these impressions together.” ¹ Balázs celebrates how Ivens “magnificently captures how it looks when the first drops begin to fall and the surface of the pond seems to shiver with gooseflesh, when a lone raindrop struggles to find a path down a windowpane, when the life of the town is reflected in the wet asphalt. How it looks.” ² This description bookends a poetic expansion of rain's figurative images (the shivering pond, the trickling “lone raindrop,” the mirror-like “wet asphalt”) with Ivens's documentary accomplishments (“how it looks”), and this passage establishes cinematic weather as both what happens (rain falls, and we look at it) and what makes meaning or expands perception. Balázs further describes Rain as “a thousand impressions—not an object”; he claims that “only these impressions have meaning in our eyes” but that “[t]he object—the rain itself—holds no interest for us.” ³ Akin to Kracauer's enthusiasm for cinema's revelatory potential, these images, for Balázs, show “not a state of affairs, but a particular optical impression … the image itself is the reality that we experience.” ⁴ Through Rain, Balázs makes ontological claims about film, allotting these collective impressions the status of reality itself.