‘Between Window and Frame’: Distant Intimacy and Emotional Dialectics in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Abstract

This essay analyzes Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), an adaptation of Betty Smith’s bestselling novel of the same title (published two years earlier). The central visual elements in this film are thresholds or openings, such as windows, doorways, and stairways, which together comprise a liminal space whose crossings serve as the literal inscriptions of Kazan’s dialectical project. These are sites of indeterminacy, where personal transitions and economic transactions take place. Significantly, the film’s most intense moments of emotional harmony and discord occur in front of (or through) these in-between thresholds, where softness gives way to hardness (and vice versa). The alternating pattern of harmony, contrasted with interpersonal conflict, constitutes what the authors call the ‘emotional dialectics’ of the film. Transitions from dreamy contentment to harsh realization or an awareness of the hard truth of a situation occur rapidly in these liminal spaces. Building on the work of theorists such as André Bazin, Jean Mitry, and Dudley Andrew, the essay concludes that A Tree Grow in Brooklyn not only targets the relational chasms to be crossed by its main characters but also builds a bridge between the producers of the past (including director Kazan) and viewers of the present, contemporary audiences who are asked to peer through a cinematic ‘window’ and partake in a view of the warmth and intimacy to be found in an immigrant family’s life.