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Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
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201
From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 3:14pm
Subject: Re: Was: Saint Joan & Haws; now, the nature of film art
Patrick:
"This is sort of devil's advocate, since I agree that this level of form
is usually what makes a film, but I think this is ultimately too short
sighted. I mean, if we agree that greatness in form relies on how a
director frames and blocks humans (usually actors) in relation to the
set , both statically and in motion (camera and actors) I think you have
to take acting and the treatment of characters seriously as a very
important component of what directors are doing to achieve greatness.
Because I don't think many of the films we'd agree on as great would be
at all great if the actors and their acting styles were somehow made
indistinguishable while keeping all the other formal elements intact--if
you have a form as human-centered as narrative cinema, what the humans
do within that formal construction seems quite important. I don't know
if that makes sense--"
Well, I wouldn't limit it to "how a director frames and blocks humans."
"Sansho Dayu" and "Red River" and "The Tall Men" and too many others to
mention are at least in part landscape films. And "frames and blocks"
seems too limiting even when that tiny part of the cosmos that we call
"humans" is what's involved: there's the quality of light, there are
particular qualities of the space -- the entrapments of Lang, the
painterliness of Ford -- that are to me much more important. A film
director is not a theater director.
I'm not saying acting is irrelevant. I think if you could somehow manage
to transpose the acting styles of a Hawks film to a Lang, or vice versa,
doing so would interject a discordant element that would seriously harm
the whole. I gather this is what you're saying, but I don't think I'd
agree that such an artificial hybrid would not be "at all great." I'm
not sure that all the acting in "Red Line 7000" is successfully
Hawksian, for example, though this is admittedly an extreme case.
At the same time, what I'm reacting against, and you probably agree with
me here, is the movie-as-restaurant-meal metaphor that often surfaces,
and was recently on another film discussion group: all the ingredients
have to be "good" for the movie to succeed completely. This notion, at
least when applied without subtlety, doesn't take into account the fact
that a great film is not simply the sum of its parts, it's a system of
meaning and beauty in which each part is only given meaning by the
whole, which is why what might be great acting in one film would be bad
acting in another -- the elements cannot be evaluated separately, the
way they can in an anonymously mediocre film, in which there is no
overriding system, in which what one *does* notice and take pleasure
from is a good performance or great cinematography or an engaging narrative.
I don't agree with the common idea that the style of a good film can be
translated into an articulation of the emotions of the narrative. To be
sure, I write this way all the time, so I obviously think there's a
relationship there. But, as we see all the time in film, for many people
the ordinary human affections and responses, things one might also
experience in life itself -- fear, pleasure, desire, thrills -- are
mostly what one gets out of movies. And that *is*, or at least can be,
the main thing one gets out of movies that are, well, not auteurist
successes. But I don't agree the idea (not that I think you were saying
this) that great art is somehow contiguous with one's own life
experiences, yet many critics write all the time as if this were the
case. In saying elsewhere that you see a great film as somehow above you
or anything you can write about it, I'm guessing you don't mean that
this is because Brad Pitt or Cameron Diaz are so totally awesome that
you can't even imagine being in the same room with them -- which is
often what many others *do* mean -- but because there's an aesthetic
system at work that can't fully be translated and that takes you out of
yourself. This is certainly the way I would say it for myself.
The best complaint I ever got about my own writing is that I makes it
seem as if I've described the whole film, figured it out, accounted for
the all its possibilities. Hearing this, and thinking about it, made me
realize my limitations as a writer -- that tying up all the elements as
if I were constructing a mathematical proof is fundamentally false to
the experience of art, which is ecstatic and chaotic as well as formal
and controlled. And this needn't be a limitation of all film writing:
there's no illusion of completeness or of seeing a full explanation when
reading Bresson's great book.
The reason my writing is so incomplete is that I haven't figured out how
to account for the fundamentally inhuman heart at the core of any great
film. And yes, it can't be truly "inhuman" since it was created by
humans -- I mean "inhuman" in the sense of being outside of daily
experience, and operating in a realm far removed from the simple
affections. The accretion of stylistic devices that creates a vision in
a great film can't be reduced to theme or narrative, and is certainly
not homologous with quotidian encounters with others. Spending time with
Hawks's actors when watching a Hawks movie -- I'm intentionally choosing
a relatively "humanist" and actor-sensitive director here -- is almost
nothing like spending time with other people in daily life, if you are
able to see their performances as part of his whole system. There's an
abundance of writing on Hawks that shows that many cannot do this. It's
the inhuman heart, the formal qualities that add up to style, that
permits a film bring you to ecstasy, whether or not you like or dislike
John Wayne.
- Fred
202
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 4:01pm
Subject: Re: Hawks
> I guess I might say that,
> regardless of whether he's developing and shaping and refining or
> just sitting back in the world
> he's created, Hawks can get a bit too precious for my stomach to
> handle.
>
> It seems like Hawks is one of those filmmakers where one of the
> primary pleasures of watching
> his movies is to inhabit (as a viewer) the spaces he creates, to
> experience the company of his
> characters.
I think there's at least one more dimension to this. True, hanging out
with Hawks people is a lot of what the films offer. And true, it can
get precious. At a certain point most Hawks fans pull away a bit,
realizing that there's something odd and enclosed about the society in
Hawks' films.
But I think there are good reasons to immerse again after that initial
pulling back. Behavioral qualities are crucially important to Hawks,
but not just because they make the people likable. Trying to say it
quickly: Hawks sets up an opposition between background and foreground.
Background in Hawks is made to signify "genre": it includes the
lighting, the basic plotting, sometimes the minor characters - whatever
he needs to evoke a strong sense of a familiar set of movie conventions.
And foreground in Hawks is the behavior of his key actors. And that
behavior is made to play out at a different level of realism than all
the genre signifiers in the background. Things happen faster than
expected, because Hawks is playing against a drama-based concept of
time. People talk over each other or under their breath or away from
the camera, in order to play against the way information is usually
given to us in discrete packets for dramatic purposes.
You can extend this idea to the structure of the comedies. But, anyway,
the results of this shifting of levels of realism can be very striking
and very energizing.
So I think there's more to it than just experiencing these people's
company. They're part of a subtle formal play.
David Thomson's essay on Hawks in A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM was
the first, I believe, to get at this idea.
- Dan
203
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 4:59pm
Subject: Re: Hawks, Ulmer
> There were big changes starting with Rio Bravo. He told Peter
> Bogdanovich that after taking a few years off and hanging out in
> Europe, he saw what tv was doing when he got back and decided that
> all stories have been told a million times, so that audiences are
> bored with them - he would henceforth make films about characters.
To me, the biggest change was after RIO BRAVO succeeded. I think it's
common for director to change in subtle ways when they have a success
that ratifies themselves to themselves. It's the difference between
L'AVVENTURA and LA NOTTE, between CHOOSE ME and TROUBLE IN MIND, and, in
a way, the difference between RIO BRAVO and HATARI! In each case the
later film is quite similar to the former in many ways, and yet the
spirit is subtly different, more enclosed, more "a film by." Whereas
the earlier films look like more of a negotiation between the directors'
personalities and the subject/genre/audience. - Dan
204
From:
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 2:03pm
Subject: Re: Re: SAINT JOAN aspect ratio?
In a message dated 6/25/03 12:47:24 AM, pwc8@c... writes:
>(Yes, I need to see the other
>Preminger Seberg flick...)
"Bonjour Tristesse" is just amazing. Fred's review of it is great and says
more than I ever could.
I'm with you on "Bunny Lake," though. This one comes in one place higher
than "In Harm's Way" on my 1965 list (and people should know by now how much I
love "In Harm's Way"). Preminger's spaces here are so rich, as defined by their
absences as by what's present. Of course, that's what the whole film's
about. I seem to be full of superlatives for Preminger right now, but that's the
frame of mind I'm in; ever since seeing "The Cardinal" last February, I've
slowly be seeing or re-seeing most everything and there's very, very little that I
don't care for.
I'm sure we're driving Dan nuts here. Needless to say, I can't wait to read
what he has to say.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
205
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 6:57pm
Subject: I love what I'm hearing about Hawks
The irritating oddness of the films was being foregrounded at the
point I first started seeing them, but I did step back after a few
years, and am probably now getting set to plunge back in, via the
documents. The production and script files on Big Sky and Baby
are fascinating reading; so does Gerald Mast's intro to the
published Baby screenplay, which is full of production tid-bits
you won't see elsewhere. Here's one I found: Before the
mysteriosa Hagar Wilde came on board and stole stodgy
Dudley Nichols' heart (Pirandello time) Hawks and Nichols were
planning for Hepburn and Grant to reenact Laurel and hardy's
"auto-destruction" routine in the parking lot (kind aout of
character, I'd say). L & H were still on someone's mind when the
back of Hepburn's gown went deliciously missing in the
nightclub.
More good stuff: Richard Schickel had some interesting
personal observations when I interviewed him for the Cahiers
DVD on Baby; so did Peter Bogdanovich when interviewed him
on Male War Bride for that Locarno retrospective book. Check out
the Japanese guy Rosenbaum has been touting who has
writtten on both Hawks and Ozu, and don't miss the mad
Jungian visionary who did a whole book in a nearly unreadable
style. Then there's the Cahiers tradition, both pre-Daney and
post- (notably J-C Biette's "Trois morts," on the deaths of Hawks,
Tourneur and Chaplin). And if you're looking for non-closure,
Manny Farber's seminal article on The Man can't be beat.
Fred, Ken Mogg (of MacGuffin fame) would identify that
impersonal element as Schopenhauer's "Will." There is also no
shortage of purely esthetic theories of impersonality - sounds
like Dan has a hot (or cold) one up his sleeve.
206
From:
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 3:14pm
Subject: Re: Hawks, Ulmer
In a message dated 6/25/03 2:42:43 AM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>Repetition in late Hawks - intensified, foregrounded, but completely
>continuous with the earlier films - exemplifies what auteurism is
>about. As Daney said elsewhere, all the greats - Lang, Lubitsch,
>Hawks - were obsessed with repeating one kind of pleasure that is
>unique to each of them, and that drive to repeat underlies all the
>other repetitions - formal, thematic - that we recognize
>as "signatures."
Very well put. Though Farber wasn't an auteurist, I find his definition of
the best kind of movies - the termite ones, the ones made to please its maker
first and foremost - to intersect thrillingly with this conception of
auteurism.
Hawks pursued what gave him pleasure quite consciously (adding weight to
Truffaut's belief that he was the most intellectual filmmaker in America) and
often quite explicitly, the continuity between the Rio Trio being obvious to even
the most ardent non-auteurists. It's telling that his last major project was
to be a re-make of his first: "When It's Hot, Play It Cool" was based, as we
all know, on "A Girl In Every Port." (I wish I could read that script!) These
days, I think of Woody Allen as being in a place similar to Hawks was late in
his career, single-mindedly working on variations on his hallmark themes and
styles. Naturally, one of the biggest criticisms of him has always been that
he repeats himself. The risk might be artistic stagnation, but I honestly
don't find this to be the case at all with either Hawks or Allen: "El Dorado" has
a whole host of concerns - such as the stuff about aging that Dan and Jaime
have been talking about - which differentiate it from "Rio Bravo."
>Besides Daney, and while waiting for that translation, I'd
>recommend "Mostly About Rio Lobo" (I think that's the title) by Greg
>Ford in Focus on Hawks, about that film and the Rio Trio as a whole.
Oddly enough, I was re-reading some of McCarthy's Hawks bio a few days ago
and ran across a mention of this piece as one of the few defenses around of "Rio
Lobo." I'll definitely try to check it out while waiting for the Daney
translation to surface.
>Pete: Pirates and Strange Illusion are well worth a look. Very few
>Ulmers aren't. I'd advise skipping The Strange Woman and hunting the
>rest down fanatically. Once you've seen Pirates, try to find a book
>called The Celluloid Asylum, by Sidney Haye, the screenwriter - a
>roman a clef about the making of that film. It never came out in
>paperback, but it's around. The speeches by the Ulmer character,
>Sigfried Melmson (sp?), seem to me to be the real thing. Post-
>modernists might also want to check out an Ulmer-inspired novel
>called Flicker by Theodore Roszak, which is about the Ulmer mystique,
>but strictly a work of fiction.
Thanks for the recommendations, Bill!
Peter
...running off to the video store...
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
207
From:
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 3:18pm
Subject: Re: Hawks, Ulmer
In a message dated 6/25/03 1:43:58 PM, sallitt@p... writes:
>To me, the biggest change was after RIO BRAVO succeeded. I think it's
>common for director to change in subtle ways when they have a success
>that ratifies themselves to themselves. It's the difference between
>L'AVVENTURA and LA NOTTE, between CHOOSE ME and TROUBLE IN MIND, and, in
>a way, the difference between RIO BRAVO and HATARI! In each case the
>later film is quite similar to the former in many ways, and yet the
>spirit is subtly different, more enclosed, more "a film by." Whereas
>the earlier films look like more of a negotiation between the directors'
>personalities and the subject/genre/audience.
That's a tremendous point, Dan. I'll use Kubrick as an example since I'm a
fan: would he have made a film like "Barry Lyndon" without having been
emboldened by the huge popular, critical, and cultural impact of the
"Strangelove"-"2001"-"Clockwork Orange" trilogy? It's an unanswerable question, of course, but
my inclination is that he wouldn't have. BL raises the stakes, removes a lot
of the easy points of audience access of the previous films (the satire of
DS, the hippie appeal "2001" had, the magnetism of Alex in ACO) and assumes his
audience will be up to the challenge - an assumption based on the success of
the previous films. Interestingly, I think the relative failure of BL prompted
Kubrick to retrench and pursue a more commercial looking property, but
paradoxically "The Shining" ended up being as closed-off and termite-like of any of
his films. I think of TS as Kubrick using a huge bestseller to indulge in
some favorite visual things - and maybe he wasn't even aware of it at first, but
by the time the film came out he'd become very cagey about the value of King's
novel. Though it's far from my favorite Kubrick, it's come to personify what
he "is" for me in its cataloging of Kubrickian things.
Hitchcock was coming off the peak of his public visibility and commercial
appeal when he made radical films like "The Birds" and "Marnie." There are a
hundred other examples one could come up with.
It's something I can't particularly account for, but I fully admit that my
tastes tend to run in line with the films following a director's big success.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
208
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 8:47pm
Subject: Success and freedom
I fully admit that my
tastes tend to run in line with the films following a director's big
success.
I can think of a few counter-examples: Scorsese, Bogdanovich
(who only became the best filmmaker of his generation after the
bankruptcy), Coppola, Cimino, De Palma, Altman...
But back in the day it certainly was true. Artists need freedom,
and within the studio system, a boxoffice killing meant freedom.
These days (with the notable exception of Kubrick) it seems to
mean something else.
209
From:
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 4:58pm
Subject: Bogdanovich, success and freedom
In a message dated 6/25/03 4:52:24 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>I can think of a few counter-examples: Scorsese, Bogdanovich
>(who only became the best filmmaker of his generation after the
>bankruptcy), Coppola, Cimino, De Palma, Altman...
Well, it's great to hear someone who feels the way I do about Bogdanovich -
as most of the people who know me here can tell you, resurrecting his critical
rep has kind of become a pet cause with me.
I think Bogdanovich's case is a little curious. I would say that "Saint
Jack" was a big turning point aesthetically - made on-the-fly in Singapore for
very little money, the film was at once his most humane and reality-based to that
date - and it was enough of a critical success to encourage him to continue
down that direction, I think. This resulted in what I view as his best film,
"They All Laughed," which fused his favorite genre tropes with a new warmth and
realism (if nothing else, the latter manifested itself in his choice to shoot
in the real streets of NYC). Then came the bankruptcy and I think he's only
gotten better as a director; I'm sure he could surpass "They All Laughed" if
he could direct one of his own scripts again. But "Mask," "Texasville," "The
Cat's Meow"... these are some of my favorite movies of the past two decades,
without doubt.
I also agree with you about Altman and De Palma. Less sure about Cimino,
though I'm interested in reassessing him. I love "Heaven's Gate," but that seems
like a classic case of a big movie made by a director emboldened by a big
success. What kind of case would you make for his post-HG output?
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
210
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 6:09pm
Subject: I love what I'm hearing about Hawks
The oddness was foregrounded when I first encountered the
oeuvre, but I pulled back in the mid-70s and am probably just
getting ready to plunge back in, via the documents. The
production and script files on Big Sky and Baby make fascinating
reading. So does Gerald Mast's introuction to the published Baby
screenplay, which contains wonderful production tid-bits. Here's
one I turned up: Before the mysteriosa Hagar Wilde came on
board and stole stodgy Dudley Nichols' heart (Pirandello time...),
Hawks and Nichols were planning in their treatment to have
Grant and Hepburn re-stage Laurel and Hardy's
"auto-destruction" routine in the parking lot ( a little out of
character...). L & H were still on someone's mind, I'd say, when
the back of Hepburn's gown went deliciously missing in the
nightclub.
Fred, Ken Mogg of MacGuffin fame thinks that impersonal quality
you're talking about is Schopenhauer's "Will." More purely
esthetic concepts of impersonality aren't lacking, and it sounds
like Dan has a hot (or cold) one up his sleeve.
More good stuff: Farber (talk about lack of closure!), that
Japanese guy Rosenbaum is touting who has written on both
Ozu and Hawks, and the whole tradition of Cahiers commentary
pre-Daney - Rivette and lots of less well-known people - and
post- (most notably Biette's obituary for HH, Tourneur and
Chaplin, "Trois morts"). Then there are the mad visionaries, like
the non-negligible (and nearly unreadable) Jungian who wrote
that whole book. But there's lots still to do.
211
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 9:58pm
Subject: Bogdanovich, Cimino, Dopple-post
The SECOND bankruptcy came after They All Laughed, which
certainly is his best film, and was a direct result of buying back
TAL ($250,000) from Fox and attempting self-distribution. His
plan was working - playing at one theatre, TAL was garnering a
repeat audience via word of mouth - but went in the drink when
Columbia commandeered the theatre to open Das Boot. Then
the real hard times started, ending in bankruptcy 3. Only the
pre-Saint Jack one was esthetically beneficial.
But I love all the films you named, including Texasville, and
would go so far as to prefer the Texasville to Picture Show,
despite the latter's haunting images. You didn't mention The
Thing Called Love - love love love it. And let's not forget tv: His
pilot for the new Naked City, Killer Christmas, is minor but
interesting for its negligee attitude to the serial killer theme,
which he helped pioneer with Targets.
The new Peter is a farceur (one who had been hiding in the skin
of a tragedian during the 70s), and should be financed like the
national treasure he is to make two films a year in that vein from
his own screenplays. I have never laughed as hard as I - and the
rest of the audience - laughed at the "friends" screening of
Noises Off. I almost spit up my liver.
I like everything Michael Cimino has done, and some parts of
Heaven's Gate more than anything he has done, although it's an
uneven film in comparison with those that preceded it. It's one of
those cases where the risks taken lead to such sublime
achievments that it's picayune carping to complain about a few
scenes that don't work. There are lame scenes in Rebel Without
a cause, too. Take him off that list. Heaven's Gate is one of the
monuments of modern cinema.
To those who read "hotlove" posts, please ignore the evil
doppelganger of my Hawks post that I dashed off to replace one
which apparently didn't get sent, only to have it show up 3 posts
later. Downright Hitchcockian, that...
212
From:
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 2:51pm
Subject: Re: Hawks, Ulmer
In a message dated 6/25/03 1:43:58 PM, sallitt@p... writes:
>To me, the biggest change was after RIO BRAVO succeeded. I think it's
>common for director to change in subtle ways when they have a success
>that ratifies themselves to themselves. It's the difference between
>L'AVVENTURA and LA NOTTE, between CHOOSE ME and TROUBLE IN MIND, and, in
>a way, the difference between RIO BRAVO and HATARI! In each case the
>later film is quite similar to the former in many ways, and yet the
>spirit is subtly different, more enclosed, more "a film by." Whereas
>the earlier films look like more of a negotiation between the directors'
>personalities and the subject/genre/audience.
That's a tremendous point, Dan. I'll use Kubrick as an example since I'm a
fan: would he have made a film like "Barry Lyndon" without having been
emboldened by the huge popular, critical, and cultural impact of the
"Strangelove"-"2001"-"Clockwork Orange" trilogy? It's an unanswerable question, of course, but
my inclination is that he wouldn't have. BL raises the stakes, removes a lot
of the easy points of audience access of the previous films (the satire of
DS, the hippie appeal "2001" had, the magnetism of Alex in ACO) and assumes his
audience will be up to the challenge - an assumption based on the success of
the previous films. Interestingly, I think the relative failure of BL prompted
Kubrick to retrench and pursue a more commercial looking property, but
paradoxically "The Shining" ended up being as closed-off and termite-like of any of
his films. I think of TS as Kubrick using a huge bestseller to indulge in
some favorite visual things - and maybe he wasn't even aware of it at first, but
by the time the film came out he'd become very cagey about the value of King's
novel. Though it's far from my favorite Kubrick, it's come to personify what
he "is" for me in its cataloging of Kubrickian things.
Hitchcock was coming off the peak of his public visibility and commercial
appeal when he made radical films like "The Birds" and "Marnie." There are a
hundred other examples one could come up with.
It's something I can't particularly account for, but I fully admit that my
tastes tend to run in line with the films following a director's big success.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
213
From:
Date: Wed Jun 25, 2003 6:37pm
Subject: Re: Bogdanovich, Cimino, Dopple-post
In a message dated 6/25/03 6:03:04 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>The SECOND bankruptcy came after They All Laughed, which
>certainly is his best film, and was a direct result of buying back
>TAL ($250,000) from Fox and attempting self-distribution. His
>plan was working - playing at one theatre, TAL was garnering a
>repeat audience via word of mouth - but went in the drink when
>Columbia commandeered the theatre to open Das Boot.
I've never heard that before, that his plan of self-distribution was actually
working. In interviews, he tends to blame himself for its failure, which I
can understand given the fact that he was suffering an emotional breakdown
during this time. But it really heartens me to know that the film was on its way
to becoming a success via PB's plan.
I have an essay on TAL which I've been writing for about a year. It's
unquestionably one of my very favorite films and I tend to add 1,000 words to my
piece every time I re-see it.
I'm also of the opinion that "Texasville" is superior to "Picture Show," and
that "The Thing Called Love" and "Noises Off" are superb. In regards to
"Texasville," this film never ceases to move or surprise me. It's like an American
variant on Renoir. Bogdanovich has an amazing way of breaking up his
generally long takes with cross-cutting between close-ups of his characters, usually
regarding each other in silence. (Even in a farce like "Noises Off," which
depends greatly on wide shots, he manages a few exchanges like this.) In
"Texasville," there are several memorable instances of cross-cutting: the looks
between Shepherd and Potts towards the end, for example.
>And let's not forget tv: His
>pilot for the new Naked City, Killer Christmas, is minor but
>interesting for its negligee attitude to the serial killer theme,
>which he helped pioneer with Targets.
For some reason, Bogdanovich completist that I am, I've never seen this. I
do think a lot of his TV work is very underrated. There's the short he did for
Showtime, "Song of Songs," which is very sympathetic towards its middle-aged
characters' romantic longings.
>The new Peter is a farceur (one who had been hiding in the skin
>of a tragedian during the 70s), and should be financed like the
>national treasure he is to make two films a year in that vein from
>his own screenplays.
The plot summaries I've read of "Squirrels to the Nuts" make it sound like a
farce on the level of "Noises Off." I really hope he gets to make it. I
remember reading, around the time of the release of "The Cat's Meow," that there
were plans to shoot it in DV. That said, the unmade Bogdanovich project I long
for most is "Wait For Me" - 20 years in the writing, about a middle-aged
movie director bedeviled by ex-wives, up-and-coming movie people, and ghosts. I
think it could be phenomenal.
>I like everything Michael Cimino has done, and some parts of
>Heaven's Gate more than anything he has done, although it's an
>uneven film in comparison with those that preceded it. It's one of
>those cases where the risks taken lead to such sublime
>achievments that it's picayune carping to complain about a few
>scenes that don't work. There are lame scenes in Rebel Without
>a cause, too. Take him off that list. Heaven's Gate is one of the
>monuments of modern cinema.
I'm with you. I'm floored by so many whole sections whenever I see it -
Joseph Cotten's oration, the sweeping shot of the graduates dancing on the lawn to
the Blue Danube, Kristofferson and Huppert dancing in the hall, the
accumulation of utter regret (personal regret, societal regret, historical regret) that
comes to the fore in the final scene, etc., etc. - that I completely forgive
the ones which don't work. It seems to me that post-HG Cimino could be a case
study of a director trying to transform impersonal projects his own. I think
the reason he made "The Sunchaser" was so he could turn on the Aaron Copland
in the last reel. I'd love to see his cut of "Desperate Hours."
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
214
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:02am
Subject: Re: Losey
I'm currently fuzzy on much of Losey, but speaking of THE PROWLER ("Radio D=
ays" for real, by the way), my recollection is that you could hardly see a f=
ilm like this without wanting to rush to any other examples of the director'=
s early work that came your way. (A few of them have never come my way.) I=
n other words, I'd think that seeing THE PROWLER would be enough to incline =
any half-sentient viewer toward at least a provisional embrace of "auteurism=
."
I suppose it goes without saying, but a lot of the principled resistance to=
same over on the mothership (sorry dear Web readers, but you really don't w=
ant to know) strikes me as merely perverse. For anyone with the merest inkl=
ing of "what the director does," how can auteurism seem anything but a natur=
al response? The whole "filter" argument -- "what we've objected to isn't a=
uteurism per se, but the adoption of a system through which one filters movi=
es" -- is just a diversion, since presumably no one would consider it "filte=
ring" to hunt down books by a writer they loved, for example. So it must st=
ill come down to the old disinclination to see the director as principal aut=
hor -- or to give such authorship any importance. C'est la vie.
I thought I'd mention that FINGER OF GUILT (THE INTIMATE STRANGER), from th=
e blacklist period, is kind of interesting in that it's actually about an Am=
erican film director (Basehart) obliged to work in England, though not for p=
olitical reasons as I recall. "Blackmail" stands in for "blacklist," I thin=
k. It's probably a bit of a film a clef, although one that apparently the a=
uthor was initially unable to sign.
215
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:07am
Subject: Re: Losey
Sorry about the typographical ch=a=os. I think I have an idea what's causing it - maybe I'll delete that and try again later.
216
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:46am
Subject: Re: Re: Losey
jess_l_amortell wrote:
>Sorry about the typographical ch=a=os.
>
Typographical chaos can be fun, and I like your _)(#*$)_(*%&(#$&
...oops, I mean, I like your point about the "mothership," that closed
Web discussion group from which some of us are refugees (though we still
belong) and whose moderator has asked us not to name it.
It strikes me that the non-auteurists there are much more upset by
auteurists than vice versa. I've only read a small fraction of the posts
there, but I have yet to see anyone object to one of those "which
actress would you rather fuck" questions by saying, "No, no, it's the
DIRECTOR that matters." Maybe it's just something one learns from being
in a minority group: don't question the majority. I mean, homosexuals
grow up hearing about how "sick" their desires are, but I'm not sure
I've ever heard a gay man tell a heterosexual that there was anything
wrong about straight sex.
The mothership majority seems really threatened by auteurists,
especially hard-line auteurists. I don't mind Mike's sarcasm to me,
because it doesn't feel like an attack, and I don't think it is, but my
position(s) seem to bother him. And Victor is really over the top: to my
long careful explanation that auteurs have made some very bad films but
I still find those films worth seeing and thinking about, he offers
repeatedly the translation that auteurists think their faves don't make
bad films.
I think one think that bothers more mainstream viewers about auteurists
is their seriousness. Movies are not all fun, auteurists sayeth, but
rather actually have ideas, styles, visions.
I wanted to engage with this just to prevent people from having the
wrong idea about us and our group, and it's interesting to see the same
old battles of forty years ago refought again and again -- but, it's not
THAT interesting.
To cut the non-auteurists some slack, I think auteurism *can* seem, to
an outsider, a bit like a religion. And for auteurists, it's just not
all that interesting to hear the same things over and over. I'm an
atheist, but if I were Catholic, while I hope I'd do my part in trying
to convert the heathen, I'm aslo very sure that I'd want to spend some
time in the company of my fellow Catholics, where I didn't have to hear
the same old cracks about flesh eating and who really shtupped Mary
again and again.
I think what the non-auteurists don't get is that most auteurists
arrived at their position empircally. Bogdanovich said it early on
(though I disagree with what he values): for him, auteurism was noticing
that the films he loved tended to be made by the same directors. I think
John Alton is an amazing cinematographer, and I've enjoyed his work even
in films by non-auteurs (aka "bad diretors" in my lingo), but ultimately
I think "Border Incident" and "The Big Combo" have their greatest
meanings as Mann and Lewis films. And there was a period when I was
discovering Alton when I really *wanted* him to be an auteur, his images
were so amazing.
- Fred
217
From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:54am
Subject: Re: Uh, a screenwriter?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ciccone" wrote:
> Has anyone seen DESERT FURY, from 1947, directed by Lewis Allen?
>This is showing up at MoMA soon, and I ask since the screenplay is
> by A. I.Bezzerides, writer of the screenplays of two of my ery
> favorite films, ON DANGEROUS GROUND and KISS ME DEADLY. While the
> former'sscript is perhaps unremarkable, the Aldrich pic has
> arguably one of the best screen plays ever--I'm curious if the
> other pics he worked on were anywhere as remotely interesting...
I watched Desert Fury last night. Fascinating movie. Interesting
that the issue of ambiguity (as it pertains or doesn't pertain
to Preminger) has been discussed here recently, because the
characters in Desert Fury go beyond ambiguous and cross into the
almost-schizophrenic.
It's a film of extreme emotionalism, with almost everyone acting
out on the edge of hysteria and then pulling back to a return
to "normalcy." This pertains to the type of behavior itself
and the manifestation of that behavior. (Mary Astor is particularly
memorable in somehow negotiating her character through both types
of "dame": a tough broad of the crime world and a society
swell.)
Quicksilver changes in personality abound throughout, so much so that
the film often plays like absurdist comedy. The relationship
between shady gambler John Hodiak and his right-hand-man Wendell
Corey is particularly bizarre (and certainly does have homoerotic
overtones). If Ingmar Bergman were the sort to enjoy termite films,
then I might even have hazarded a guess that he saw Desert Fury
before embarking upon Persona. The Hodiak/Corey relationship also
has some Pirandellian elements, which I can't get into without
spoilers, but suffice it to say they play upon the phlegmatic non-
movie star qualities Wendell Corey exuded on screen.
The question remains who is Desert Fury A Film By. Director Lewis
Allen is best remembered for The Uninvited, which is one of my
favorite non-auteur movies. He also made the suspense thriller, The
Unseen, which, in fact has gone unseen since the mid-70s because of
litigation over rights, but I adored the film as kid. Allen's
talent seems to me to best with light material, such as Our Hearts
Were Young And Gay and romance, which is what, despite its
supernatural elements, The Uninvited essentially is. When he did a
straight gothic film, So Evil, My Love, Allen seemed incapable of
transcending stock situations and characterizations or of molding any
sense of dread into a palpable character in itself, something that is
pretty much essential for this genre; his direction comes across as
fairly indifferent and the movie is mopey rather than suspenseful.
Sealed Verdict is pretty dull, as well, at least in my vague memory
of it.
So from what I've seen, the intensity and psychological
flamboyance of Desert Fury seem like an aberration in Allen's
work. As for producer Hal Wallis, it certainly has the cast and the
feel of a Wallis in his Paramount period, but the film is certainly
less "dignified" and "tasteful" than say, The File On Thelma Jordan
or Strange Love of Martha Ivers.
The script is credited to Robert Rossen and A.I. Bezzerides. All I
can say is that the characters are more nuanced and less self-
consciously declaratory than some other scripts Rossen worked on,
including A Walk In The Sun, Marked Woman and All The King's Men.
The neuroticism and moodiness of the characters, though, does bring
to mind Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Mind and the Aldrich/Bezzerides
reappraisal of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. (I don't recall
any characters in Thieves Highway being particularly interesting, at
least not after Jules Dassin got ahold of them.) A scene in Desert
Fury where Hodiak pours hot coffee down the back of an annoyingly
chatty bus driver at a roadside diner is just as marvelously nasty a
bit of uncalled-for-sadism as when Ralph Meeker closes the drawer on
Percy Helton's hand in Kiss Me Deadly, written by A.I. Bezzerides
In any case, a terrific film, well-worth checking out.
--Damien
218
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 2:48am
Subject: The Thing Called Love
> You didn't mention The
> Thing Called Love - love love love it.
I'm actually fond of this one too, though I have more reservations about
Mr. B. than some of you. Question: there's a point in THE THING CALLED
LOVE where Samantha Mathis is removing some makeup from Sandra Bullock
(who is wonderful in this film, by the way) and repeatedly interrupts
her speech by telling Bullock to "Spit!" so that she can get some saliva
on her handkerchief to remove the makeup with. (There's a possibility
that I've got it mixed up about which actress is doing what in this
scene - my memory is vague.) This scene is a direct lift from some old
Hollywood film - but I can't place the homage/theft, though I think it's
from a film I know pretty well. Can anyone help me? - Dan
219
From:
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 2:16pm
Subject: Silent auteurs, Jarmusch, Losey
Mike Grost - an enthusiastic lurker at a_film_by, but unable to post - asked
me to pass along his insightful comments about a few recent topics:
Peter
Silent Auteurs
We should look to reclaim silent directors who (so far) are mainly names in
reference books, not living presences in film history. Turner Classic Movies
fairly recently showed fine films by William Desmond Taylor - Tom Sawyer
(1917), Marshall Neilan - Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), Ray C. Smallwood - Camille
(1921), Chester M. Franklin - The Toll of the Sea (1922), which is the first
all-color feature; Rex Ingram - Scaramouche (1923), Eddie Sedgwick - West
Point (1928). These all look like possible candidates for auteurist support.
What do other people think about them?
Most of these directors are better known, if at all, for brief bits of
biography. William Desmond Taylor was murdered - killer still much debated.
Marshall Neilan was a charming playboy who hit the skids, but who was
admired by Howard Hawks. His films do not seem much like Hawks. Chester
Franklin was Sidney Franklin's brother. Rex Ingram had his own unit within
Metro, and made Valentino and Ramon Novarro stars. Eddie Sedgwick made a lot
of Keaton's later films; Keaton and Sedgwick later helped train Lucille Ball
as a comedian.
Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch films seem visually beautiful, with a complex, highly personal
sense of composition and color. His exteriors are especially important. He
has the ability to convert urban locales into visual beauty. Watching his
images unfold can have a hypnotic effect. Ghost Dog is visually rich.
Mystery Train and Night On Earth also are visually striking.
Do other people consider him an auteur?
On Losey:
Time Without Pity. This is a crime thriller. It is photographed in an
elaborate film noir style, full of mirror shots, exotic camera angles, and
other complex imagery and compositions. Its style reminds one in general
terms of such visually spectacular noir films as The Killers (Robert
Siodmak), Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich) and Touch of Evil (Orson Welles).
Presumably Andrew Sarris was thinking of Losey films like this, when he
wrote that Losey films were baroque and expressionistic.
The Lawless. Saw this melodrama a long time ago. It slowly builds and builds
and builds. It seemed like a very impressive piece of story telling. Have no
memory now of what sort of visual style this film had, although it had a
good deal of location photography in the semi-documentary traditions of its
time.
A Doll's House. Well made version of the Ibsen play. Chamber drama. Good
acting, careful development of feelings and ideas.
220
From:
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 2:26pm
Subject: Re: Re: Losey
In a message dated 6/25/03 9:49:08 PM, f@f... writes:
>I think what the non-auteurists don't get is that most auteurists
>arrived at their position empircally.
I know it. One of the things I'm most insistent about in these debates is
that my taste for, say, late works is just that: a taste. Sure, I have all
sorts of ideas about why I'm attracted to late works, but the attraction came
first, not the explanations.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
221
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 6:50pm
Subject: Neilan, Hawks, Bogdanovich, Jarmusch
I've never seen Bits of Life, but apparently Hawks was trying to
solve a formal problem - maintaining interest in several
storytlines - which his mentor had failed to solve in that film
when he made Red Line. He then told Peter Bogdanovich that he
had failed, too. Bogdanovich, who told a friend of mine when he
was teaching at UCLA that Red Line was "a dangerous film for a
young filmmaker to admire," admitted to Olivier Assayas and me
in 1982 that when he was editing They All Laughed he
remembered what Hawks said, and felt he had finally licked the
problem.
He was referring to the version that was released theatrically.
Later he went back and moved a group scene up to serve as
prologue so that audience members would understand the
detective agency conceit and not be confused about what was
going on - that's the version now available.
PB is not averse to recutting. He felt Columbia rushed him on
Texasville, so he went back and recut it to achieve a better
balance between comic and dramatic elements. Finished only
on tape, that version was broadcast by Showtime with the
unexpurgated Picture Show. It hasn't been shown theatrically
because it doesn't exist on film.
I have never gotten the point about Jarmusch, but I'm somewhat
prejudiced because I find him such an appalling person.
222
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 7:08pm
Subject: TCM Recommendations?
Every month I scan the TCM schedule for whatever directors and film
titles catch my eye - generally with these filters installed: [1]
director's name, since I may not necessarily know all of their
movies, [2] film titles, given recommendations from friends and
critics, titles I know I want to see, &c., and [3] sometimes, just
sometimes, plots that sound interesting and/or juicy.
The only filter I don't have *at the ready* when scanning these lists
is a more complete set of recommendations from colleagues, friends,
critics, etc. What I would like to do is to ask the a_film_by board,
as I had asked Dan a few months ago (very grateful, again, Dan, for
your recommendations), to look over the July TCM schedule and point
out which films are must-sees or of *particular* interest, and that
are perhaps not obvious to casual cineastes. By that last part I
mean, one may assume that everyone concerned already knows that
VERTIGO and CITIZEN KANE are "must-see" films.
Here is the web address for the printer-friendly TCM monthly schedule
for July:
http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/Schedule/Print/0,,07-
2003|0|,00.html
If that doesn't work, just go to the TCM main page and follow the
directions to the printer-friendly July schedule. Should be easy.
For starters, my own contribution is a list of films I'm going to try
to tape - some are more urgent than others:
1 Tuesday - 7:30 AM Glory Alley (1952)
2 Wednesday - 6:00 AM The Finger Points (1931)
2 Wednesday - 7:30 AM Sporting Blood (1931)
2 Wednesday - 9:00 AM Hell Divers (1932)
2 Wednesday - 11:00 AM China Seas (1935)
2 Wednesday - 2:01 PM Sons and Lovers (1960) Fox Movie Channel
(letterboxed)
3 Thursday - 8:00 PM Test Pilot (1938)
4 Friday - 7:30 AM Immortal Battalion (1944)
5 Saturday - 10:00 AM The Shanghai Gesture (1941)
6 Sunday - 6:00 PM Pillow Talk (1959)
6 Sunday - 2:30 AM The Miracle Woman (1931)
7 Monday - 7:30 AM Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (1956)
8 Tuesday - 3:00 PM Terror In A Texas Town (1958)
9 Wednesday - 9:00 AM Five Star Final (1931)
9 Wednesday - 10:30 AM The Hatchet Man (1932)
9 Wednesday - 12:00 PM Two Seconds (1932)
10 Thursday - 9:30 AM Downstairs (1932)
11 Friday - 2:00 AM Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
12 Saturday - 12:01 PM Hell and High Water (1954) Fox Movie Channel
(letterboxed; also at 2am)
13 Sunday - 6:00 PM A Star Is Born (1954)
13 Sunday - 1:30 AM The Raven (1935)
14 Monday - 10:00 AM They Drive by Night (1940)
14 Monday - 4:00 AM The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
15 Tuesday - 5:00 AM Queen Christina (1933)
19 Saturday - 2:00 PM The Long, Long Trailer (1954)
22 Tuesday - 6:00 PM Born To Be Bad (1950) (I really like this Nick
Ray movie)
23 Wednesday - 10:00 PM Comanche Station (1960)
26 Saturday - 6:00 AM Mary of Scotland (1936)
26 Saturday - 12:00 PM The Three Godfathers (1948)
27 Sunday - 10:15 PM Car Wash (1976)
28 Monday - 3:00 AM The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse (1962)
30 Wednesday - 6:15 AM Song Of Russia (1943)
Thanks everyone!
Jaime
223
From:
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 3:48pm
Subject: Bogdanovich
In a message dated 6/26/03 2:56:16 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>He was referring to the version that was released theatrically.
>Later he went back and moved a group scene up to serve as
>prologue so that audience members would understand the
>detective agency conceit and not be confused about what was
>going on - that's the version now available.
That's really interesting to hear that PB was conscious of "Red Line 7000"
while cutting "They All Laughed." I'd be curious to see his original version,
but the one now in circulation largely achieves the desired effect just as much
as the Hawks did (if not more so): effectively balancing several different,
though related, story lines while maintaining audience interest. I think PB
once described the film as "sweet and sour" - the Ritter/Stratten story being
sweet and the Gazzara/Hepburn story being sour, or sad. The combination of the
two threads adds an extra bit of resonance neither might have on their own and
leaves the viewer with a sense of optimism and good cheer: even though the
final shot is of Hepburn departing, our spirits aren't diminished. It's really
an amazing movie.
>PB is not averse to recutting. He felt Columbia rushed him on
>Texasville, so he went back and recut it to achieve a better
>balance between comic and dramatic elements. Finished only
>on tape, that version was broadcast by Showtime with the
>unexpurgated Picture Show. It hasn't been shown theatrically
>because it doesn't exist on film.
And, of course, he's done several versions of "The Last Picture Show" over
the years. I think he first added some scenes in a 1974 re-release, then added
some more for the Criterion laserdisc in the early '90s, and finally produced
a "definitive" version for DVD.
I've been wanting to find a copy of the longer cut of "Texasville" for years.
I was hoping it would be included on the DVD, but MGM decided to release the
theatrical version only and with no supplements to speak of.
"Mask" is also forthcoming in a new DVD edition. I'm not holding my breath
that the Springstreen songs will be reinstated, but it does appear to contain
the deleted scenes. I've always admired the way Bogdanovich so thoroughly
committed himself to this project, a project which was in some ways the first "for
hire" job he ever took. But it's thoroughly his film: full of his signature
visual tendencies, anecdotal in its first half (much like "The Last Picture
Show" or even "They All Laughed" are), and with the earmarks of a tragedy by the
final image (which recalls the last shot of "Daisy Miller.)
I'm racking my brain on Dan's "Thing Called Love" query, but I can't come up
with anything.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
224
From: Greg Dunlap
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 7:56pm
Subject: Re: TCM Recommendations?
>What I would like to do is to ask the a_film_by board,
> as I had asked Dan a few months ago (very grateful, again, Dan, for
> your recommendations), to look over the July TCM schedule and point
> out which films are must-sees or of *particular* interest, and that
> are perhaps not obvious to casual cineastes.
Perhaps this would be a good use for the group's calendar feature.
People can add interesting showings as they discover them and post them
to the calendar with some comentary.
=====
--------------------
Greg Dunlap
heyrocker@y...
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com
225
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Jun 26, 2003 8:42pm
Subject:
I'm sure your auteur radar caught these, but if not...
Glory Alley - Unmissably weird Walsh
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt - The subject of the most intense
reflection provoked by any Lang film: Rivette's "The Hand"
(translated in the now-out-of-print "Rivette" by J. Rosenbaum)
The Miracle Woman - rare (when I was your age) Capra
Three Godfathers - John Wayne's best performance, and one of
Ford's best films
I won't insult you by poiinting out the other auteur gems on the
list. In my pre-auteur days (when I was 12) I quite enjoyed The
Raven.
Lost cause time: Even though English (mis)usage has
consecrated "cineaste" as meaning "film buff," it means
"filmmaker" in French. The French word for "film buff" is
"cinephile." No offense - everybody does it. It just throws me
every time I see it.
226
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 3:41am
Subject: Re: Silent auteurs, Jarmusch, Losey
> We should look to reclaim silent directors who (so far) are mainly names in
> reference books, not living presences in film history. Turner Classic Movies
> fairly recently showed fine films by William Desmond Taylor - Tom Sawyer
> (1917), Marshall Neilan - Daddy-Long-Legs (1919), Ray C. Smallwood - Camille
> (1921), Chester M. Franklin - The Toll of the Sea (1922), which is the first
> all-color feature; Rex Ingram - Scaramouche (1923), Eddie Sedgwick - West
> Point (1928). These all look like possible candidates for auteurist support.
>
> What do other people think about them?
Neilan isn't bad. I've seen three of his teens silents (REBECCA OF
SUNNYBROOK FARM, STELLA MARIS, AMARILLY OF CLOTHES-LINE ALLEY) and the
early talking VAGABOND LOVER, which isn't nearly as good. I don't see
him as a breakthrough artist, but he had a nice breezy quality and the
desire to impose himself on his material.
Ingram is one of Sarris' Subjects for Further Research. I must say I
was disappointed by his FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE, his official
classic. But many have spoken well of him.
Sedgwick was the credited director of many of Keaton's MGM films,
including some good ones (THE CAMERAMAN; SPITE MARRIAGE; PARLOR, BEDROOM
AND BATH). I must say that I don't know much about his other work.
> Jim Jarmusch
> Do other people consider him an auteur?
He's certainly a distinctive director. I'm interested in him, but I
still think his best work is STRANGER THAN PARADISE - nothing since then
has worked perfectly for me.
> Time Without Pity. This is a crime thriller. It is photographed in an
> elaborate film noir style, full of mirror shots, exotic camera angles, and
> other complex imagery and compositions. Its style reminds one in general
> terms of such visually spectacular noir films as The Killers (Robert
> Siodmak), Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich) and Touch of Evil (Orson Welles).
> Presumably Andrew Sarris was thinking of Losey films like this, when he
> wrote that Losey films were baroque and expressionistic.
This is my favorite Losey. To me its style is very personal and not
much like anyone else's. Actually, I'd say Losey's camera got
considerably trickier in years to come. But this film is full of
gray-on-gray spaces in which the characters' anguish seems to echo
without response. Finally the lead character self-destructs, and Losey
withdraws to a geometrical high angle of the vacated space. The action
proceeds, but the camera's involvement is over.
> The Lawless. Saw this melodrama a long time ago.
To me, this is the weakest of the five American Loseys - not without
value, but a little bit too direct and even preachy.
> A Doll's House. Well made version of the Ibsen play. Chamber drama. Good
> acting, careful development of feelings and ideas.
Remember that two DOLL'S HOUSEs were released in 1973? Weird. I can't
say that this is a favorite of mine. - Dan
227
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 3:44am
Subject: Re: (unknown)
> The Miracle Woman - rare (when I was your age) Capra
This is a really good film. Early thirties Capra is generally
excellent. Wish he and Riskin hadn't gone in that populist
rabble-rousing direction.
> Three Godfathers - John Wayne's best performance, and one of
> Ford's best films
This actually has a poor rep among Ford fans. But I really like it too.
- Dan
228
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 3:56am
Subject: Re: (unknown)
Anything else this month, Dan and hot love? My list was only a
partial selection - movies I'm already interested in seeing.
Jaime
229
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 4:17am
Subject: Re: (unknown)
Is IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE part of this awful "populist rabble-rousing"?
I haven't seen it since I was maybe 13 (9 years ago for you guys
keeping count) but in the clips I've seen since there does appear to
be some rather accomplished stuff going on (e.g. that POV shot down at
the water with snow falling)--am I alone here on this? Maybe reseeing
it would change my mind, but it is on (auteurist? definitely not
Cahier-teurist) Michel Ciment's all-time top 10. Also, is this the
first psychotic role for Jimmy Stewart? That seems to be all he
played for the next decade and half.
But whither DIRIBLE?
pwc
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > The Miracle Woman - rare (when I was your age) Capra
>
> This is a really good film. Early thirties Capra is generally
> excellent. Wish he and Riskin hadn't gone in that populist
> rabble-rousing direction.
>
> > Three Godfathers - John Wayne's best performance, and one of
> > Ford's best films
>
> This actually has a poor rep among Ford fans. But I really like it
too.
> - Dan
230
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 4:20am
Subject: Re: TCM Recommendations?
> 1 Tuesday - 7:30 AM Glory Alley (1952)
I like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Ivory gets a bad rap - I think he's a
good director, and sometimes more. But he works in a genre that's not
reputable among auteurists, the Masterpiece Theatre-type period drama.
> 2 Wednesday - 6:00 AM The Finger Points (1931)
> 2 Wednesday - 7:30 AM Sporting Blood (1931)
> 2 Wednesday - 9:00 AM Hell Divers (1932)
> 2 Wednesday - 11:00 AM China Seas (1935)
>
> 2 Wednesday - 2:01 PM Sons and Lovers (1960) Fox Movie Channel
> (letterboxed)
Seen THE MIRACLE WORKER? It's good.
> 3 Thursday - 8:00 PM Test Pilot (1938)
One of the most Hawksian films that Hawks didn't direct. I think he
worked on the project. It's good, too.
You know about AIR FORCE, I presume. Someday I'll resee TOP GUN and see
if I can still make a case for it....
> 4 Friday - 7:30 AM Immortal Battalion (1944)
THEY WERE EXPENDABLE is here, of course. I don't care for THE WINGS OF
EAGLES, but for some (like Sarris), it's one of Ford's greatest.
THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN is early Tarkovsky, and it's good.
I love HUMORESQUE! I'm higher on Negulesco than any auteurist I know.
This one and THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS are probably the high points.
> 5 Saturday - 10:00 AM The Shanghai Gesture (1941)
There's La Cava's PRIMROSE PATH, which we were talking about recently.
Some like 3:10 TO YUMA. It's one of Charles Francois's favorite films.
Of course, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and NINOTCHKA.
> 6 Sunday - 6:00 PM Pillow Talk (1959)
This film was big with the MOVIE magazine critics.
> 7 Monday - 7:30 AM Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (1956)
There's THE LADY VANISHES, of course. I need to resee EDWARD, MY SON -
not my favorite Cukor, but some admire it.
> 10 Thursday - 9:30 AM Downstairs (1932)
A big favorite of the late James Card - maybe Monta Bell's most
distinctive film.
I like QUEEN CHRISTINA. And DEVIL'S DOORWAY is Anthony Mann - vigorous
and well shot, though flawed.
> 12 Saturday - 12:01 PM Hell and High Water (1954) Fox Movie Channel
> (letterboxed; also at 2am)
I have some problems with Minnelli most of the time, but THE COURTSHIP
OF EDDIE'S FATHER is one of his best.
Don't mean to make a habit of recommending Mamoulian films, but THE MARK
OF ZORRO is pretty good.
You know about STAGECOACH.
> 13 Sunday - 6:00 PM A Star Is Born (1954)
> 13 Sunday - 1:30 AM The Raven (1935)
Welles and Hawks here, of course. THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON has
wonderful things in it, even for this non-Walshian.
> 14 Monday - 10:00 AM They Drive by Night (1940)
> 14 Monday - 4:00 AM The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
You've seen POINT BLANK? A very good film.
> 15 Tuesday - 5:00 AM Queen Christina (1933)
MARIE ANTOINETTE is surprisingly good. THE MERRY WIDOW is Lubitsch.
16 - McCarey's good ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON. HATARI! Leisen's TO EACH
HER OWN, which some auteurists (not quite me) think is a great film.
17 - if Blake Lucas were on this list (has he got email yet, Bill?),
he'd make a big case for Charles Vidor's LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME.
18 - MARNIE, and Clouzot's terrific LE CORBEAU, the most Dostoyevskian
film ever.
> 19 Saturday - 2:00 PM The Long, Long Trailer (1954)
HE WALKED BY NIGHT is partly directed by Anthony Mann, and there's a
very striking Mann-like scene at the end.
SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON and LOVE AFFAIR, of course.
20 - WHY WORRY? is one of Harold Lloyd's few best.
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, of course.
21 - THE WOMEN is a good Cukor film.
> 22 Tuesday - 6:00 PM Born To Be Bad (1950) (I really like this Nick
> Ray movie)
A LIFE OF HER OWN is a very good Cukor film, one that expands your ideas
of what Cukor can do.
> 23 Wednesday - 10:00 PM Comanche Station (1960)
BEND OF THE RIVER is an important Anthony Mann, but I'm troubled by
Borden Chase's script. (RED RIVER isn't one of my favorite Hawks, and I
blame Chase.)
FORT APACHE, of course. I worship this film.
24 - The remake of DAWN PATROL isn't bad. RECKLESS is one of Fleming's
best (I think he's a good director), and BOMBSHELL is worth seeing too.
BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO is good - I like Huston's docs better than his
fiction films.
25 - THE HORSE SOLDIERS is underrated.
> 26 Saturday - 6:00 AM Mary of Scotland (1936)
A good one.
THE WOMEN again.
> 27 Sunday - 10:15 PM Car Wash (1976)
DANGEROUS WHEN WET is quite good. Second-rank Charles Walters, but I'm
a big Walters fan.
I also like TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME. Berkeley had talent apart
from his choreography.
SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, of course. THE GREAT RACE is one of Edwards' best.
> 28 Monday - 3:00 AM The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse (1962)
LIBERTY VALANCE, of course. Do you know ATTACK! An amazing film.
That'll do. - Dan
231
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 4:25am
Subject: Re: Re: (unknown)
> Is IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE part of this awful "populist rabble-rousing"?
Yes, certainly, but it's got truly wonderful things in it. I can't
swallow it whole, but it's important.
> But whither DIRIBLE?
You mean DIRIGIBLE? That's a really good film too. Capra was amazing
in the early sound days. - Dan
232
From:
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 0:36am
Subject: James Ivory
In a message dated 6/27/03 12:21:45 AM, sallitt@p... writes:
>I like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Ivory gets a bad rap - I think he's a
>good director, and sometimes more. But he works in a genre that's not
>reputable among auteurists, the Masterpiece Theatre-type period drama.
I like Ivory a lot too, though admittedly I have the most affection for his
films which stray from the Masterpiece Theatre mold. Maybe it's just
interesting to see him apply his gifts to non-English locales, but I'd argue for "Mr.
and Mrs. Bridge" and "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" as among his best (to
say nothing of the early Indian films.) The latter manages that rare feat of
being anecdotal and episodic throughout the whole body of the film; Ivory isn't
warming up to the "real" story, but just building incident upon incident. I
think it coalesces very well. "Le Divorce" looks pretty charming and low-key
too.
I found "The Golden Bowl" interesting on a formal level in the way it
integrated that tinted, sped-up footage of "the new world" in American City. It
reminded me how much more sophisticated Ivory is than he's often given credit for.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
233
From:
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 0:51am
Subject: Re: Re: (unknown)
Since I think I'm the group's resident Richard Lester auteurist (yes, I've
publicly gone on record in support of "Superman III"), I might mention, Jaime,
that The Movie Channel is broadcasting his very-rare "The Bed-Sitting Room" on
July 11. I don't necessarily count it among my favorite Lesters, but it's
certainly one of his most ambitious and was the endpoint of the first part of his
career. It was to be four years until he made another film (such was the
commercial failure of BSR) and something subtle in his perspective changed in
that time; from then on, he addressed himself primarily to period and
fantasy-based films. The big exception is "Cuba," which recalls "Petulia" in its mixture
of a "romance" with a contemporary political vision.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
234
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 5:54am
Subject: Re: TCM Recommendations?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > 1 Tuesday - 7:30 AM Glory Alley (1952)
>
> I like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Ivory gets a bad rap - I think he's
a
> good director, and sometimes more. But he works in a genre that's
not
> reputable among auteurists, the Masterpiece Theatre-type period
drama.
>
I find Remains Of The Day watchable, but to me it's dispiriting
because it's such a desecration of its source material. Kazuo
Ishiguro's novel is a marvelously brittle comedy about self-delusion
but Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala turned it into a stiff-upper-lip
tear jerker.
I agree with Peter that Ivory's best are Mr, and Mrs. Bridge and A
SOldiers Daughter. In both of these, Ivory revealed himself to be a
wry observer of social mores of very particular milieus, and a
sympathetic portrayer of the romantic temperament. In both regards
he is worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as George Cukor.
235
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 5:41pm
Subject: Re: Re: TCM Recommendations?
> I agree with Peter that Ivory's best are Mr, and Mrs. Bridge and A
> SOldiers Daughter.
MR. AND MRS. BRIDGE is one of my favorites, but somehow A SOLDIER'S
DAUGHTER didn't get me - maybe I'll try again sometime.
HOWARD'S END is my favorite, but I also like THE GOLDEN BOWL, A ROOM
WITH A VIEW, and HULLABALOO OVER GEORGIE AND BONNIE'S PICTURES, as well
as the ones we've mentioned. I feel an intelligence in the way Ivory
gives and takes away images - his editing is like a small, inconspicuous
commentary on the events of the story. - Dan
236
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 6:00pm
Subject: So much to say, so little time
So I'll just say that loving The Great Race is a rare take on
Edwards, but I agree - I just interviewed him, by the way. He's
writing a play called Scapegoat, in which the Devil gets
depressed and undergoes analysis, with a female analyst, and
the book for a Pink Panther musical.
I have always had a soft spot for Capra's rabble-rousing
because of my friend Bob, whose inspiration for restructuring the
American foreign aid system during the 80s was those films, in
particular Deeds and Wonderful Life, whose message he sujms
up as: "It matters who you owe money to." My maternal
grandfather had a Savings and loan and lent money till everyone
till the Crash. There was a run on the bank, and a few months
later he shot himself.
A topic thrown out - with all the mentions by Dan and others of
Cukor, I would ask if he is not due for a big reevaluation up. He's
been neglected lately. I'm amazed that "queer theorists" haven't
taken up the cause. And since Pete is taking up the mantle of
tracking lost film art, might I suggest seeing if what was cut out
of Bowhani Junction and Chapman Report can be unearthed?
If you take out the politics and cut together just the sequences
built around close inspection of Ava Gardner, you'd have an
avant-garde film worthy of early Philippe Garrel. (Inspired by a
remark of Joe Dante's that raised the hackles of a French critic
who will remain nameless to the effect that you could doa great
short by cutting together all the cigarette gags in Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt.) Of course, you'd need to find the cut rape
footage, but MGM has good archives.
Dan, as far as I know, Blake still doesn't have e-mail.
237
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 7:02pm
Subject: Re: TCM Recommendations?
> Perhaps this would be a good use for the group's calendar feature.
> People can add interesting showings as they discover them and post them
> to the calendar with some comentary.
Didn't mean to ignore this. It would have been a lot of work, though,
to enter all those TCM recommendations that I posted yesterday.
The biggest problem would be that we'd all have to get in the habit of
checking the calendar, unless it automatically sent email to the list
when something was entered. - Dan
238
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 7:09pm
Subject: Auteurism discussion on the radio
Today on the local Chicago public radio station, WBEZ, there was an
hour-long program on the "auteur theory." The guests included Sarris and
Dudley Andrew (both by phone). Unsurprisingly, t wasn't overly profound,
but coming in light of recent discussions I found it kind of interesting.
Sarris said something like, "The auteur theory was born because people
saw a lot of all these films and wondered why they liked a number of
films....It was an Aristotelian process, not a Platonic process...,"
which recalled Patrick's comment on auteurism and neo-Platonism, though
I don't think one needs to say that one position is right and the other
is wrong. Certainly when I go to a film by a director whose work I know
and love I *do* have some kind of grid in my head that is supposed to
help me see it in terms of his other work.
Later I called in with my "formal" view of auteurism and my personal
testimony to Sarris' early importance to me, mentioning in passing that
not all directors should be considered auteurs, and that "Stephen
Speilberg is not an auteur." Sarris responded with gratitude but then
mentioned that he thought Spielberg had two auteur films that are great
films and that were also commercial flops: "Empire of the Sun" and "A.I."
I've seen them both, and have only one comment: "Yuck" (which I did not
deliver on the air). Sarris then said, "I could not write anything like
the American Cinema today and have that air of confidence," suggesting
that as he got older he felt the need to consider many other factors.
He also showed that he was still bothered by his critics, forty years
later. I remember when I met him in '67, he asked plaintively, "Why does
Kael hate me," not that I would know. This time he joked that the
screenwriters' guild used to use his photo as a dartboard.
My comments weren't particularly coherent and you've all read them before.
Perhaps most interesting was that the discussion took the direction that
discussions about auteurism almost always take -- "Yes, but did the
director control the editing"; "What about screenwriters," "I make films
and it's a collaborative process"; et cetera. While these are legitimate
responses to a dumb statement like "The director is the only author that
matters in a film," they don't apply to *my* version of auteurism, which
is an approach to viewing that includes not viewing too many films by
Huston and Speilberg. Don't ask me to defend this; I know one should see
as much as possible. And yeah, one of the late Hustons I've seen, "The
Man Who Would Be King," creates a nice mood and is kind of neat.
The program can be listened to via their main page at
http://www.odysseyradio.org/
- Fred
239
From: heyrocker
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 7:20pm
Subject: Re: TCM Recommendations?
> Didn't mean to ignore this. It would have been a lot of work,
though,
> to enter all those TCM recommendations that I posted yesterday.
>
> The biggest problem would be that we'd all have to get in the habit
of
> checking the calendar, unless it automatically sent email to the
list
> when something was entered.
Actually, I was just looking at the calendar, and for every event you
can setup reminders that go out to the entire group. So like if you
entered that the great auteurist classic E.T. was going to be showing
on the 23rd, you could set it up with a reminder to go out x
days/hours before. Everyone in the group would get the reminder. Of
course this has its drawbacks in that I believe the reminders would
go into the archives, and that is a lot of clutter. Also, obviously
it would be a lot of work to enter stuff, although I'm sure I don't
speak just for myself when I say that your effort typing up that list
of recommendations was much appreciated. Hung it up on the wall just
for reference.
240
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 7:50pm
Subject: Spielberg?
Why is Steven Spielberg an auteur? Why is he not?
I admire several of his films, SCHINDLER'S LIST and SAVING PRIVATE
RYAN in particular (among auteurists, this makes me one lonely
cinephile, but they're among the most popular movies of the last ten
years, so I'm not entirely alone in my admiration), but one of the
biggest challenges in evaluating his career is in answering the
question, does his style constitute a vision? Does he have
a "vision"? How does he/does he not qualify as an auteur?
Discuss.
Jaime
241
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:25pm
Subject: Auteurism and Its Enemies
Here's a weird one: a girl I work with had two dates with a lawyer
who got into a big argument with her on the second date about
whether film should even be considered an art form. He was not
coming from a lofty place of second- or third-degree skepticism;
he really had never heard the idea, and thought it ridiculous to
consider films as anything but entertainment. End of story, end of
the guy, as far as she was concerned. (She majored in film
history at Berkeley.)
I have always been bored by nay-sayers who JUST FOUND OUT
that films have editors, production designers, etc. and think that
this blows auteurism out of the sky. In the old days I would just
quote Hoyveda's review of Party Girl in the Cahiers, where he
rhetorically raises the question: "But what about - as I am still
asked - the influence of the screenwriter, the cameraman, the
production system? To which I always reply: Why not, while we're
at it, throw in the influence of the heavenly bodies?"
Since living in H'wd and particularly since writing Hitchcock at
Work I am actually fascinated by the tiniest production details
concerning films I like, because I find they only enrich and
confirm my response to the films as works of art by directors.
For one thing, ach auteur's production process is different from
all others -- as different as his films are. Also, examining the
details of production up-close has enabled me to discover
meanings - my particular passion - that I would have missed.
Sometimes just by immersing yourself in a film or group of films
(say Ford in the 30s, which I did years ago for an article) has the
same effect: suddenly the films begin to talk to you.
Immersing yourself in the production can have the same effect:
suddenly you discover hidden articulations which have the
auteur's fingerprints all over them, like Hitchcock's decision to
eliminate transitional shots in getting Grant from Chicago to the
crossroads, and in getting him from the airport to the cafeteria
looking out at Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest. Lehman
scripted elaborate transitions; Hitchcock, who was running late
and over and getting hassled about it, eliminated them and just
did dissolves; and the result is two dissolves in different parts of
the film that cry out to be read together, although as far as I know
only the second has been commented on (by Stanley Cavell).
There's no reason someone couldn't see that just by watching
the film, and for all I know someone has, but for me it was a
revelation that came out of studying the process and seeing it
reflected in the "product" in a way that shed new light on it. But
Leonard Leff, a good scholar who wrote a book about AH and
Selznick that seems to me to be full of special pleading,
interpreted the same documents by putting himself in the place
of MGM dealing with Hitchcock, and the result is a piece
(published in The Hitchcock Reader) that makes fascinating
reading, but yields few insights into the film. That doesn't mean
I'm smarter or more sensitive than Leff; it just means I went at
the task from a different viewpoint - Hitchcock's - based on a
different theory: that the director is the author of the film. It being a
good theory, my approach was more productive than his.
That's one answer to people who quarrel with auteurism.
242
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:26pm
Subject: Re: Spielberg?
There's a neat sematic way out of this for me: Based on a very small
sample. I don't like his films. Period. And I'll admit it's a lazy use
of language to use "auteur" to mean "directors one likes." I had to get
over early on a tendency to use "art" to mean good art, so that a
terrible painting is "not art." This is a mistake because no one will
understand what you're talking about. The same problem exists around the
word "auteur." But certainly my use of "auteur" to mean "good director"
was not unique among early auteurists.
There are directors whose "style" does constitute some sort of "vision"
-- in other words, it's more than just a collection of touches and tics
-- who I still don't like. The problem is that I've seen only four
Spielbergs, I liked none of them, none of them made me want to see any
more, none of them made me think about much of anything except how to
explain why they were bad to people who like them, and I have no idea
how strong an argument one can make for how personal or unified his
output is. They seemed to me to be stylistically emptier than Kubrick.
But "personal" and "unified" doesn't make for good cinema. A guy could
make a series of long take films of his girlfriend that were
stylistically distinctive and highly personal, and they could still be
awful.
Also, in asking questions like "does his style constitute a vision," I
think it's important to remember that "style" and "vision" are
themselves human constructs. You're not asking a question like "Is mass
one of the properties of matter?" -- you're asking something much
fuzzier, except for someone who is sure one way or the other about him.
My temptation would simply be to say his style doesn't constitute a
"vision" because I don't like his films at all -- but that would be kind
of circular.
- Fred
243
From:
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 4:27pm
Subject: Cukor, Edwards
In a message dated 6/27/03 2:04:22 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>A topic thrown out - with all the mentions by Dan and others of
>Cukor, I would ask if he is not due for a big reevaluation up. He's
>been neglected lately. I'm amazed that "queer theorists" haven't
>taken up the cause. And since Pete is taking up the mantle of
>tracking lost film art, might I suggest seeing if what was cut out
>of Bowhani Junction and Chapman Report can be unearthed?
That's something I would love to look into if I could find some time to
devote to such a project.
(BTW, is Friedkin still searching for "Ambersons" on the Paramount lot?)
It seemed that a few years ago there was something of a Cukor revival. We
had that PBS "American Masters" documentary and the simultaneous reissue of
Gavin Lambert's "On Cukor." I'm also really enjoying Robert Emmet Long's
compilation of Cukor interviews published by University of Mississippi Press. I'd
like to see some of the late ones (the superb "Travels With My Aunt" and "Love
Among the Ruins") talked about a little more frequently. Interestingly, Cukor
found an outlet in TV late in his career (LATR and "The Corn Is Green") much as
Bogdanovich has.
That new play of Edwards' sounds great. Where will your interview be
appearing, Bill? And did he mention his previously announced plans to remake "10" as
"10 Again"?
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
244
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:29pm
Subject: Huston
PS: The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The
Dead are wonderful films. On the other hand, Biette, who also
liked The Dead, wrote this putdown of Huston in his review of
the one about the crazy preacher: "With each new film it is as if
John Huston presents the spectator a note that reads, 'Excused
from mise en scene.'"
245
From: Schwartz, David
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:34pm
Subject: Dante, anyone?
Joe Dante.
With a big live-action/animation Looney Tunes movie coming out this
November--which should be right up his alley--I'm thinking of putting
together a Joe Dante retrospective at the Museum. Gremlins 2 is a great
all-live action comedy infused with the spirit of Daffy Duck, and
Matinee is a terrific movie-movie. Is Dante worthy? (Of either a Museum
show or taking up time in "A_film_by.") Which are his best?
David Schwartz (American Museum of the Moving Image)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
246
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:41pm
Subject: 10 Again
10 again became Skin Deep, which is a terrific film. There is now
a remake in development at Paramount, this time set in
England, with BE as producer. Also a new take on Peter Gunn,
the feature. The interview ran in the Cahiers.
247
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:40pm
Subject: Ambersons
Fred Chandler already did that. As second-in-command in
post-production, he found and protected It's All True, rescued a
print of The trial and looked all over for Ambersons. Friedkin may
be married to the boss, but he reportedly used a vault full of old
movies to light a fire on the same lot while making his Sonny
and Cher picture, so I don't know if he's the guy . Brazil is the
place to look now, before jungle rot sets in. See the Ambersons
article in Vanity Fair timed to the miniseries.
248
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 8:52pm
Subject: Re: Huston, & auteurism, & Spielberg again
hotlove666 wrote:
>....Biette, who also
>liked The Dead, wrote this putdown of Huston in his review of
>the one about the crazy preacher: "With each new film it is as if
>John Huston presents the spectator a note that reads, 'Excused
>from mise en scene.'"
>
>
That's a great quote, and I appreciated your long post about auteurism
and directorial style too.
I think in the directors who I don't think of as auteurs (good or bad
ones), there's a kind of impersonal quality (not the anonymous quality
to great art I referred to earlier, which is very different) that makes
it look as if the direction was just a job of patching a bunch of
elements together with bailing wire and chewing gum, or skillfully
putting them together but merely in a side by side, additive manner,
without organizing them into a meaningful framework. Great direction is
more "multiplicative," but that's not quite the right metaphor: the
point is, it infuses everything with meaning. That's why John Alton's
cinematography "means" something different in "Border Incident" than it
does in "The Big Combo," to return to my earlier examples.
The Hustons you mention as "wonderful films" may be wonderful on the
literary/theater level of story and acting and mood, but I got no more
out of them. And the Spielbergs I've seen may be controlled, but the
imagery never does, for me, amount to a vision.
- Fred
249
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 9:22pm
Subject: Re auteurism
Fred,
Despite our disagreement about Sierra Madre, I firmly believe
that auteur-spotting is like chicken-sexing. Show me a film and
I'll tell you if it's an auteur work or not. We may disagree on
particular cases, but after spending the better part of a lifetime
doing this and discussing the results with others who do it that
this is something I can just "tell," even if I can bring all sorts of
analytical tools to bear on the work. Moreover, it's something that
determines my viewing habits across genres (we all have our
favorites), periods and so on. If I "don't get off on" a particular
horror film (my favorite genre), but "do get off" on a particular
Masterpiece Theatre offering (my least favorite), I'll watch the
Masterpiece Theatre monstrosity and enjoy myself more than I
would sitting through the other. My crude term, "getting off,'" is a
translation of the phrase Jean Eustache used in making
essentially the same point to his friends at the Cahiers, in the
course of a 1977 interview where he helped talk them down from
the trip into political abstraction that led them at one point to
compare The Mother and the Whore to The Night Porter:
"prendre mon pied."
Do I believe that these things are ineffable? Yes. Do I feel
nonetheless that they are worth talking about in very concrete
terms? Yes. But the standard arguments - he's an auteur
because he has themes, tics and obsessions, for example -
don't convince me. For me, they're part of the process of talking
about the film or oeuvre after you've made your decision that it's
worth the trouble. And even then, when Biette would talk about a
film, back in the late 70s, he would habitually end his
dissertation with a phrase: "The mystery remains."
250
From:
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 5:34pm
Subject: Re: Dante, anyone?
In a message dated 6/27/03 4:39:09 PM, dschwartz@m... writes:
>Which are his best?
My favorite actually might be his short "It's a Good Life," released as part
of "The Twilight Zone" movie. I don't think I've seen a live-action film
which better replicates the looks, sounds, and attitudes of a great cartoon.
(That was until I saw "Gremlins 2," anyway.) It's full of Dante's signature
satiric points about some of the negative aspects of American culture, most notably
television.
"Explorers" is highly underrated, a peek at a more earnest side of Dante.
(It's also a must-see for it's inclusion of a high school named after one
Charles M. Jones.)
I >cannot wait< for his Looney Tunes movie.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
251
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 9:36pm
Subject: Re: Spielberg?
My Spielberg re-evaluation came in 2001 when I saw A.I., was baffled
by it, and saw it again – and everything clicked. I started watching
Spielberg's movies again, or seeing them over again, and found a lot
to like, even if I'll agree with everyone else in acknowledging his
inconsistency. THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is a very decent film, and JAWS
has a lot of good moments – particularly of the nighttime discussion
in which the crew discuss the massacre of the sailors by sharks.
1941 has many bad things but amounts to a whole lot. I remember
liking EMPIRE OF THE SUN a lot when I saw it several years ago, and
continue to think of it highly because my memory of it more closely
resembles the Spielberg I like than the Spielberg I don't.
SCHINDLER'S LIST is complicated, I think it's ultimately a good film
but suspect I'll keep changing my mind on it each time I see it.
His greatest film is ALWAYS, however, and I'd maintain that no
auteurist should dismiss Spielberg without seeing this one to be
sure. There's a clarity of vision in this film, a fascination with
light and color and elements as they attach themselves to characters
and emotions, that appears in strands of Spielberg before and after,
but takes center stage here. I think this film is a masterpiece.
I see Spielberg as an artist desperate to regain something he lost in
childhood, and his adult characters are often this way too – they
want to escape to a place where the unknowable, the ineffable, and
the horrific are safer (childhood). I think this is the root of why
Oskar Schindler stares at the girl in the red dress. The children in
Spielberg's films (think of the kids in HOOK and E.T., or Christian
Bale in EMPIRE OF THE SUN, etc.) tend to react in stride to
inexplicable encounters, while the adults become uptight and
confused. I think Spielberg makes a connection between dinosaurs &
aliens and war & holocaust because his reaction to modern horrors is
as strange and overwhelming as confronting pure fantasy would be for
adults, and a yearning to "revert" to childhood is the instinctive
solution. His last few films have blurred these lines more than
usual, and have taken him into interesting, uncharted, productive if
not always successful areas.
Henry Sheehan wrote a two-part article on Spielberg for Film Comment
in 1992, and it's easily the best thing I've ever read on the
director. It probably won't change the unsympathetic reader's mind,
but it does make it harder to put forth an argument that Spielberg's
cinema lacks coherence or value on both stylistic and thematic
grounds. You can read it here -
http://www.henrysheehan.com/essays/stuv/spielberg-1.html
--Zach
252
From:
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 5:42pm
Subject: Re: Ambersons
Thanks for the run-down, Bill. The Vanity Fair article (which I thought was
very good) at least gave me some hope that - between Brazil and Hollywood -
the original version of this masterpiece might still exist somewhere. As I
think you said in the piece, people thought "It's All True" was lost too...
Friedkin's search at least had the earmarks of a concentrated effort (and it
doesn't hurt that the guy is mad about Welles and I'm sure would love the
publicity if he made a find). Is there anything like that going on in Brazil at
the moment?
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
253
From:
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 5:46pm
Subject: Re: Spielberg?
While Spielberg's style is certainly consistent, I've found that his work
nonetheless can be broken down into termite and white elephant art categories.
In the latter group, I'd put many of his blockbusters (the "Indiana Jones"
trilogy) and quite a few of his self-consciously "serious" films ("The Color
Purple," "Amistad," "Saving Private Ryan"). One can argue about the quality of
these films, but there's little denying - to my thinking - that they were
conceived with at least one eye to the box office or to critical respectability.
It's, then, the films in the former category which intrigue me the most.
These films - I might say they include "E.T." (which, despite its ostensible
blockbuster status, was conceived as a little movie), "Always" (which Zach got me
to see and which has become my favorite), and definitely his recent "Catch Me
If You Can" - seem to come from a much different place than the white elephant
films, somewhere more personal and less mindful of how they are going to be
received. Spielberg himself might not even consider them his best, as in
interviews he tends to conflate "important historical topic" with "important film";
but that very lack of self-consciousness is part of what makes these termite
movies so good. I feel as though I know who Spielberg is in them instead of
who he wants to be.
I'll try to write more on this a little later.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
254
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Fri Jun 27, 2003 10:01pm
Subject: Re: Re auteurism
Bill:
> Do I believe that these things are ineffable? Yes. Do I feel
> nonetheless that they are worth talking about in very concrete
> terms? Yes. But the standard arguments - he's an auteur
> because he has themes, tics and obsessions, for example -
> don't convince me. For me, they're part of the process of talking
> about the film or oeuvre after you've made your decision that it's
> worth the trouble. And even then, when Biette would talk about a
> film, back in the late 70s, he would habitually end his
> dissertation with a phrase: "The mystery remains."
I wonder if the biggest point of contention among auteurists today is
the issue of what constitutes an auteur or an auteur film.
I think that all directors have a 'personality', which may adhere
closely or diverge drastically from the conventions of its time and
place (and this relation to convention is usually multi-tiered and
can be subtle in some ways but obvious in others). This personality
may also manifest itself with varying degrees of consistency from
film to film. I actually place almost no emphasis on deciding who is
an auteur and who is not, as my own answer to it would only really
be "an auteur is a great filmmaker [and I draw an arbitrary line in
the sand somewhere between great and merely good filmmakers]."
The key to being a great filmmaker, or simply a good one, to me, is
showing evidence that one's personality is complex and illuminating
and manifests itself in complex and illuminating ways in the films
themselves - whether or not one is clearly an author of a film
doesn't have much to do with whether or not I find their presentation
ultimately worthwhile. The best filmmakers, generally speaking, will
present themselves as sophisticated, insightful artists in a good
proportion to their whole body of work, but sometimes it doesn't take
much for me to think that a director has a really good touch, and for
some set of reasons might not show this touch very often.
--Zach
255
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 4:10am
Subject: Aristotle, Plato, Sarris
> Sarris said something like, "The auteur theory was born because people
> saw a lot of all these films and wondered why they liked a number of
> films....It was an Aristotelian process, not a Platonic process...,"
> which recalled Patrick's comment on auteurism and neo-Platonism, though
> I don't think one needs to say that one position is right and the other
> is wrong. Certainly when I go to a film by a director whose work I know
> and love I *do* have some kind of grid in my head that is supposed to
> help me see it in terms of his other work.
I imagine the two approaches both exist in the minds of almost every
auteurist. I don't know any people who became auteurists just because
they had an abstract attraction to the idea of grouping films by
directorial personality. On the other hand, if you start to see films
as an expression of something about a person, how can you not think
about the person as well as the films?
> Sarris then said, "I could not write anything like
> the American Cinema today and have that air of confidence," suggesting
> that as he got older he felt the need to consider many other factors.
My take: like a lot of filmgoers, Sarris had an auteurist and a
non-auteurist inside him. His auteurism, which was a sincere expression
of his young-adult enthusiasms, was built on top of a silver-screen
obsessed childhood, and he pushed those old feelings down a bit during
his period of maximum auteurism. You could see the old pre-auteurist
starting to emerge in the late seventies: his tastes and his language in
describing films both changed pretty quickly, so that the 1981 critic
seems very different from the 1976 critic. (I believe all this happened
well before his serious illness.)
His relationship with Wilder is a good chart of this internal struggle.
He loved Wilder when young, so his later acceptance of Wilder was a
making of peace with his earlier enthusiasm.
This is just my opinion based on years of reading Sarris, not a piece of
inside information.
- Dan
256
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 4:25am
Subject: Re: Spielberg?
> Why is Steven Spielberg an auteur? Why is he not?
>
> I admire several of his films, SCHINDLER'S LIST and SAVING PRIVATE
> RYAN in particular (among auteurists, this makes me one lonely
> cinephile, but they're among the most popular movies of the last ten
> years, so I'm not entirely alone in my admiration), but one of the
> biggest challenges in evaluating his career is in answering the
> question, does his style constitute a vision? Does he have
> a "vision"? How does he/does he not qualify as an auteur?
I notice that Spielberg has a good following among the young auteurists
here. Sadly, I must contribute to the age gap, as I don't care for the
fellow. Although I admit to being impressed with the first part of
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.
After seeing DUEL, SUGARLAND EXPRESS, and JAWS, my take on Spielberg was
that he didn't like people very much and enjoyed reducing them to
quivering masses or portraying them with little sympathy. Maybe I'd
modify that opinion if I saw the films again. The Disney-based
Spielberg that started taking over with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS amused me,
because I didn't see him as a people-loving kind of guy. I still don't,
actually. EMPIRE OF THE SUN holds the record, I think, for the most
scenes in which a hungry person bites through the packaging of food
instead of opening it. I think Spielberg likes that perspective.
These days I guess I most mind the simplicity and familiarity of his
emotional appeals, the same as most of his other critics.
Here's what I wrote on That Other List about A.I. back when my memory
was fresh.
---
No, I don't like Spielberg much, and I didn't like AI. It felt pretty
much like a regular old Spielberg film to me - aside from some attempts
in the first section to ape Kubrick's visual style, I didn't feel
Kubrick's presence.
My overriding idea about the film is that it relies heavily on everyone
in the audience responding to David as essentially a person, so that
we'll care about following him through the narrative; and yet the
storytelling relies just as heavily on most of the people in the film
responding to David as essentially a machine, so that he can be abused
and imperiled in various ways. I can't find any way of thinking about
this dichotomy that doesn't make the film feel false to me.
Part one of the film was dominated for me by various DANCER IN THE
DARK-style contrivances designed to make the narrative go in as painful
a direction as possible. (Not being restrained by Dogme, Spielberg uses
old-fashioned typage to push our buttons, sending out a casting call for
all the child actors that play the bullies and twits on TV shows.) Part
two felt most like a classic Spielberg narrative, with its fairy-tale
quest structure, its sidekicks, its series of perils and problems - it
worked well enough on its own terms, but didn't interest me. Part three
had a tone that reminded me of a fifties Universal weepie, one of the
bad ones that Sirk didn't direct. The creepy/melancholy feeling that
some have mentioned strikes me as the synthesis of the sentimental urge
for wish-fulfillment (David gets his dream) and the feeling that a
totally happy ending would be a copout (so a soporific sense of
bittersweet parting-to-be hangs over the proceedings).
I liked Jude Law's performance (and also the stylized acting of Sheila,
the mecha in the first scene - why does that actress look familiar?),
but not his character. I liked how Teddy spent a lot of time saying
helpless things like "I don't know" or "I can't tell," though I thought
he basically served the more familiar functions of the devoted helper
and the cute animal. I liked the moment when the anguished woman at the
Flesh Fair stood up and said, "Mechas don't beg for their lives!" -
raising the interesting, reflexive issue of how identification works, a
direction that this film wasn't about to do justice to. I liked the
beginning of part three, with the icy snowscapes and the weird feeling
that no one we know is left to be an identification figure - once David
is defrosted and the dialogue starts, that feeling dissipates pretty
quickly.
----------
- Dan
257
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 4:42am
Subject: Re: Dante, anyone?
> With a big live-action/animation Looney Tunes movie coming out this
> November--which should be right up his alley--I'm thinking of putting
> together a Joe Dante retrospective at the Museum. Gremlins 2 is a great
> all-live action comedy infused with the spirit of Daffy Duck, and
> Matinee is a terrific movie-movie. Is Dante worthy? (Of either a Museum
> show or taking up time in "A_film_by.") Which are his best?
Welcome, David. A lot of my friends liked Dante, but I was always
pretty immune to his charms. I've heard from a lot of people that
GREMLINS 2 and MATINEE are the best, but I haven't seen anything since
THE BURBS. I plan to give him another try. - Dan
258
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 5:33am
Subject: Re: Re auteurism
> Despite our disagreement about Sierra Madre, I firmly believe
> that auteur-spotting is like chicken-sexing. Show me a film and
> I'll tell you if it's an auteur work or not.
This is a really difficult issue, actually. I don't like to describe
directors as auteurs or not - I'd rather say that I like or don't like
them. And yet I must confess to feeling as Bill does about spotting
personal direction. I'm probably just deceiving myself and not allowing
enough for my personality entering into it, but I usually feel pretty
confident about appraising a film's direction as personal or not. This
is one reason that I am willing to say that I'm a fan of uneven or
flawed directors like Fleischer, Negulesco and Milestone. Even if they
don't hit all the time, I feel that there's something about their images
or personality that unifies the film experience, even for a few moments
at a time. So I don't really care if they have ten failures for every
success - I'm still in their camp. Whereas a dude like Huston will have
a few successful films (I like THE UNFORGIVEN outright, and WISE BLOOD
works for me too, amid a late period that was a definite improvement),
maybe at the same rate as one of my pet uneven directors. But I still
feel like casting him into the pit of hell, because I get an overarching
sense that he's generally content with stuff that seems pale and
conceptual to me. I know this is too Manichean an approach, but it
comes from my gut.
Where this really breaks down is when a personal director isn't up one's
alley for whatever reason. You can feel pretty sure what's going on
when a film works for you, but when it doesn't work for you, there's
always a chance that you're missing something.
> But the standard arguments - he's an auteur
> because he has themes, tics and obsessions, for example -
> don't convince me.
Yeah, this is really an unproductive way to go. You can find themes for
almost anyone. - Dan
259
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 3:18am
Subject: Re: Re auteurism
In a message dated 6/28/03 1:34:00 AM, sallitt@p... writes:
>Where this really breaks down is when a personal director isn't up one's
>alley for whatever reason. You can feel pretty sure what's going on
>when a film works for you, but when it doesn't work for you, there's
>always a chance that you're missing something.
Along these lines, hasn't Fred commented that he tends to be very confident
about the films he likes but often less so about the ones he doesn't, because
there's the chance he's just missing something in the latter instances? I
certainly feel the same way. What scares me is how many films I didn't care for
or only mildly liked on first or second viewings, but have come to love on
subsequent viewings. The list is close to endless.
> > But the standard arguments - he's an auteur
>> because he has themes, tics and obsessions, for example -
>> don't convince me.
>
>Yeah, this is really an unproductive way to go. You can find themes for
>almost anyone.
Does it come down to "form" for you guys as the determinant of a "personal
vision"? When I was a little younger, I was big on arguing for auteurs on
thematic grounds. But I gradually came around to what I think of as a more
holistic approach: "form" (composition, editing, sound design, music, performance
styles, etc) as a means of expressing theme and as the best indicator of
personality. Besides, often a director's most interesting "tics" or signifiers are
visually based. The all-in-ones of Preminger, the way Welles' edits flit across
the screen like a piece of old movie film, the collage effects of Lester,
etc., etc.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
260
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 7:22am
Subject: Re: Dante, anyone?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> My favorite actually might be his short "It's a Good Life,"
released as part
> of "The Twilight Zone" movie. I don't think I've seen a live-
action film
> which better replicates the looks, sounds, and attitudes of a great
cartoon.
=====================================================
I've always been fond of Dante, but at the same time I find that he
is so fixated on set pieces, outrageous characterizations, gags, pop
culture references at the expense of narrative cohesion that he has
yet to make a completely satisfying feature film (Matinee comes
closest). Therefore, I'd also say that "It's A Good Life" is his
finest film to date. It's wildly inventive and the abbreviated
running time didn't give Dante the opportunity to peter out.
But if you want to see sublime live action cartoons, look no further
than the works of The Master, Frank Tashlin, The Disorderly Orderly
perhaps most particularly.
By the way, the Frank Tashlin book edited by Roger Garcia for the
1994 Locarno Film Festival has a marvelous interview conducted by
Bill Krohn with Dante on the subject of Tashlin. Not surprisingly,
Dante's a great admirer of Tashlin and says, "Ever since before I
knew who he was, I was influenced by him."
-- Damien
261
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 8:12am
Subject: Re: Aristotle, Plato, Sarris
Dan Sallitt wrote:
> His auteurism, which was a sincere expression
>of his young-adult enthusiasms, was built on top of a silver-screen
>obsessed childhood, and he pushed those old feelings down a bit during
>his period of maximum auteurism. You could see the old pre-auteurist
>starting to emerge in the late seventies
>
Well, that's right about Sarris, though I thought "it" emerged more like
in the early seventies, but my memory isn't perfect here. It also
explains something about me: I never *had* a "silver-screen obsessed
childhood." I didn't even go to movies much, I grew up without a
television (though I got a few weeks of it some summers at an aunt's,
and I think having seen the sublimely ludicrous "Queen for a Day,"
recognizing even at age 9 or whatever that it was absurd, helped me
appreciate Sirk later), and by my early teens I was becoming something
of an intellectual snob (something I'm not proud of). I remember seeing
"Gone With the Wind" at about 14 on a re-release, on the theory that it
was so famous maybe I should have seen it, and thought it was
ridiculous. Then at 15 I saw an avant-garde film, Gregory J.
Markopoulos's "Twice a Man," at the time being shown silent, which I
thought was totally amazing for its colors, texture, editing rhythms.
There was the shadow of a plot in there somewhere too, with time
crossing editing and so on, but I can hardly say I was moved by the
story. Big revelations with Brakhage soon followed, and at around the
same time, when I discovered Hollywood films, I largely filtered them
through that context: from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" to
"Bringing Up Baby" to "Bonjour Tristesse" to "All That Heaven Allows"
(choosing some key masterpieces that I saw early), it was all about
light and space, and in the early years I often paid little attention to
the story.
But I know I wasn't just making things up, inventing auteurs wherever I
looked, partly because I went to a few by George Stevens and William
Wyler and others and thought they were terrible, and didn't like Chaplin
either (who's in the Pantheon). A different experience was even more
important. I stumbled completely by accident on a film I'd never heard
of by a director I'd never heard of: a rare Godard short was advertised
as being shown before something which, by its title, I assumed was some
pinko political propaganda, and I went to see the Godard planning to
leave right after it, but the Godard print hadn't shown up, and I only
found that out after I'd paid and sat down, so the principle of inertia
caused me to stay for the "feature," which was called "Cuba Si!" This
was the summer of 1964, when Cuba was a hot issue with the American
left. It was shown under really poor conditions: no subtitles was not
that much of a disaster for me, but they made it worse by trying to read
an English translation over the sound track. To my great shock, within
five minutes I thought it looked incredibly great, strangely poetic in a
weird and original way, and hardly anything like propaganda. I was
suspicious that I was on some kind of weird movie-viewing "high" (and
no, I did not do any drugs) in which almost anything was starting to
look great, but it really *did* look great. So I went off to the Gotham
Book Mart (remember there were very few books about film in English back
then) to see how this director's past films had fared in Cahiers
"Conseil de Dix," in which a group of critics rated new films each month
with stars -- and saw that almost everyone gave almost every film by
Chris Marker four stars, and felt gratified and confirmed.
I tell this story not as evidence that I always get it right, because I
don't, but as evidence that it *is* possible for a relatively
inexperienced movie-viewer (this was less than a year after my discovery
of "Twice a Man"; I was 16) to discover a great filmmaker on his own.
"Filter," indeed. And since I had no idea what was going on (the live
English voiceover being itself mostly unintelligible) this was hardly
"entertainment" in the sense of being engaged with the subject or
characters.
Eventually I discovered I was also capable of being entertained. I mean,
I went to "E.T." when it opened, at a time when my friends were decrying
Spielberg almost as the anti-Christ, on the same day that I went to
"Blade Runner," which the some of the same friends (not, I should add
with a bit of self-deprecating humor, my *closet* friends) were praising
to the skies. I really hated "Blade Runner," which seemed to me pompous
and pretentious and stylistically little more than an incoherent rip-off
of "Metropolis" (the building stuff) and "Kiss Me Deadly" (the street
level stuff), and quite enjoyed "E.T." I think my emotions during "E.
T." were about the same as those of the kids in the audience. But the
enjoyment of having my emotions manipulated and being taken along for a
ride (a frequent metaphor in movies of the last several decades, I
think) matters little to me, it's not a pleasure I hugely care about,
and more to the point I think it has nothing to do with the mix of
vision and aesthetic beauty that makes "art." One's identification with
the characters can be put in the service of art, as Robin Wood has
pointed out in "Psycho," but simply getting involved in the story and
being moved by the acting is not the same thing at all as seeing a film
with real vision. So I have no problem when someone says they like a
film for any one of a number of reasons, anything from an amusing story
to acting to hot babes in the cast; my problem comes when they say they
like Ford for his incredibly expressive compositions and they like "The
French Connection" because the final car chase was really exciting and
that both films can be judged as "art" for those reasons and in the same
ways. (I know that no one has said that here).
Coming back the point made by Bill, or should I say by Hotlove Satan
(or, for longtime New Yorkers, Hotlove Tishman Buildling) (humor
intended), I agree that you cannot prove the worth of anything, even to
yourself. I've said before that I think this unprovabilty is almost
provable, by counterexample: any mechanical algorithm that would allow
you to decide what makes a good film would also be a formula for the
production of a good film, and we can just about be sure that that
doesn't exist. I think all people can do in defending the films they
love is invent stories, stories that try to describe how they came to
love the film, whether by what sounds like detailed analysis (which is
what I try to do) or by allusive and poetic maxims (as Bresson did) or
by suggestive descriptions of the moods or feelings evoked or, I don't
know, some kind of fiction?
One final point, one I tried to make before: I think it's going to be
ultimately confusing to use "auteur" as a synonym for "good director,"
even though historically that *is* how it was used. As others have
remarked along with me, most of us can think of personal, and controlled
and controlling directors with an obvious and complex "style" who we
think are bad directors. But to say that someone who *is* expressing
himself in film, in a controlled way, is not an "auteur" seems like a
mistake to me. Similarly, I think many of us can think of terrific films
that were made by people who, to judge from the rest of their career,
aren't "auteurs."
Whew, that's all the time I've got. Any possible response on Spielberg
will have to wait a few days.
- Fred5
262
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 3:04pm
Subject: The Hulk
I loved it. I was a big Marvel fan back in the day, and it's great
seeing how Spiderman and The Hulk have captured that mix of
melodrama, wit and relatable superhero characters, at a time when
H'wd needs a shot in the arm to get it past its infatuation with FX.
But whereas Spiderman was just a successful copy by a director who
has systematically erased his own personality since Army of Darkness,
this is as fearless as the comics were. Those insane high-angle shots
of The Hulk bouncing around the desert are like nothing I've ever
seen, and the intersecting tragic arcs of Banners Sr. (Nick Nolte)
and Jr. take us to the dark places of myth, just like a good comic
book should. Ang Lee can do it all.
263
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 3:25pm
Subject: Dante (plus Warren)
I've seen a handful of Dante films, and probably like GREMLINS the
best. He certainly has a knack for intertwining sociopolitical
commentary into his films beneath the radar. Some here might find an
article on MATINEE, written for us at 24fps by Murray Leeder, of
interest - http://www.24fpsmagazine.com/Vault/Matinee.html
I also wanted to give the group a heads up Charles Marquis Warren (I
mentioned him a few weeks ago in passing). The other day I took a
look at his 1957 film TROOPER HOOK and thought it was rather
impressive: this guy is definitely worth some attention. From two
films and Manny Farber's brief comments on a third film, I'm thinking
of Warren as a low-key, workmanlike artist more than anything
interested in achieving a balance between psychological plausibility
(a kind of naturalism in the acting and blocking) and explosive
tonality (his filmmaking implies more than anything else a quiet
tension that blows up, and then quiets down to the same monotonous
tense hum until the next blow-up). His visuals are generally
conventional, though there are moments in TENSION AT TABLE ROCK and
TROOPER HOOK that, if they spread out over the films more wholly,
would convince me that Warren was an unknown master. He's not quite
that good, but there's something really special about, for instance,
the first shot of TROOOPER HOOK, in which the frame is filled by
soldiers staggering (one with an arrow through his leg) from the
waist down; the camera pans up and we see they're being led to the
edge of a cliff, to be executed by victorious Apache. There's
another scene in the same film that has Joel McCrea and the man who
plays Barbara Stanwyck's husband conversing tensely, and we cut to
these jarring shots of the two men facing each other in three-
quarters pose but not seeming to look at each other. The rapid
editing only lasts briefly, before we cut back to the conventional
shot of both men, but for a moment it startled me into appreciation
for the exchange.
For any readers who don't have Farber's "Negative Space" handy, I'll
copy what he wrote on a C.M. Warren film from 1951 ... as I said
before, it was mentioned first on the list of '"Best Films" of 1951',
though I don't know if Farber really intended an order to the list:
"LITTLE BIG HORN. A low-budget western, directed by Charles Marquis
Warren, starring John Ireland and Lloyd Bridges. This tough-minded,
unconventional, persuasive look-in on a Seventh Cavalry patrol riding
inexorably through hostile territory to warn Custer about the trap
Sitting Bull had set for him, was almost as good in its unpolished
handling of the regular-army soldier as James Jones's big novel. For
once, the men appear as individuals, rather than types--grousing,
ornery, uprooted, complicated individuals, riding off to glory
against their will and better judgment; working together as a team
(for all their individualism) in a genuinely loose, efficient,
unfriendly American style. The only naturalistic photography of the
year; perhaps the best acting of the year in Ireland's graceful,
somber portrait of a warm-hearted but completely disillusioned
lieutenant, who may or may not have philandered with his captain's
wife."
--Zach
264
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 3:55pm
Subject: Dante, Spielberg
I edited a book about Joe Dante with essays, a biofilmography, a New
World dictionary and a book-length interview by me, out only in
French and Italian. My introduction is posted at Senses of Cinema,
for anyone who's interested. I don't think Joe has made a bad film,
except for his episode of Amazing Stories, where he was defeated by
the material. (His Twilight Zone tv'er, Shadow Man, is Val Lewton
brilliant.) After Small Soldiers he said no to lots of projects while
trying to get his own going, and finally said yes to Looney Tunes:
that's how you avoid having a spotty oeuvre.
It's a Good Life is still his best. Explorers, coming off of a huge
gross on Gremlins, might have topped it, but he was rushed in the
editing by Diller and Company, who wanted to beat Cocoon (by an
another ex-New Worlder, Ron Howard, ironically) into the market and
broke their promise to the director about the release date to achieve
that. So the ending is rushed - it was planned to be a much more
ambitious thing where we realize that the dream-lives of all the
characters intersect, and he just didn't have time to "find" it in
the editing room - it's literally an unfinished film in its present
state, thanks to that perennial enemy of art, studio interference.
Don't miss his great satirical HBO film, The Second Civil War, and
his episodes of Eerie, Indiana. (And other people's - I like Ken
Kwapis's signoff episode a lot.) There's even a little western - very
black - called Lightnin', which was part of that Showtime films-from-
paintings series.
Spielberg is a problem, isn't he? I haven't seen Always and should
check it out. I like the first two-thirds of ET, all of Raiders 1 and
Jaws, the first two-thirds of Close Encounters and then nothing else
except parts of Schindler's and Ryan (the massacres, mostly), until
we get to AI, which is the best script he ever had for the simple
reason that the story was carefully imagined by Kubrick for two
decades before SS wrote his adaptation - it's the second big Kubrick
futurist myth, the long-awaited follow-up to 2001, and it turned out
far better than I had dared hope. I think the last 30 minutes are a
complete success. I agree with Dan about the way Osment is used.
Kubrick wanted a real robot, and the film would have been a two-hour
exercise in the uncanny if he had made it the way he wanted (although
SS did spent millions digitally removing the eye-blinks - no one
noticed, unfortunately). Ironically, the one person who could maybe
have done it right was Joe Dante! Then Minority Report showed us that
SS still knows how to ruin a perfectly good film with a totally
inappropriate last act when left to his own devices, and Catch Me If
You Can turned out to be fun and un-ruined. The jury is out. It may
still be out when we're all in our graves.
One cavil, Dan: Of course he hates people - why is that a negative?
So does Clouzot, and I agree with you that Le Corbeau is a
masterpiece. Are you objecting to the sentimental crap that SS,
unlike HGC, glosses that over with? I couldn't agree more.
By the way, Joe McBride's all-out defense of SS in his biography is
another must-read for people who want to think more about this
important, but hardly satisfying, artist. I share Greg Ford's
suspicion that the Trump-figure in Gremlins 2 is Joe D's affectionate
portrait of his sometime-producer.
I like George Lucas better.
265
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 4:04pm
Subject: Re: Dante
David,
I would personally love to see a Dante retro (I haven't seen many of
these on film) but further, I think a look at those TV films of his,
which seem to have a high-rep in France, would be pretty nifty. I
wonder if prints are available though-- And props to the AMMI for its
retros of modern auteurs--that De Palma series was great. Wish I
could have made it to the Romero stuff...
By the way, though I haven't seen CINEMANIA yet, I believe the entire
cast was there for HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY at MoMA. What a film--some
of it reminded of a montage-based silent film, with so little camera
movement and the angular compositions. And talk about the cinema of
memory; it could have been interesting to have the same Ford direct a
version of DAVID COPPERFIELD.
PWC
266
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 4:09pm
Subject: Re: Warren
Zach,
Thanks for the Warren post. I'll be off to Eddie Brandt's as soon as
I get my trust fund dividend.
267
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 4:40pm
Subject: Re: Re auteurism
> Does it come down to "form" for you guys as the determinant of a "personal
> vision"?
It does for me, but I believe strongly that form comprises more than
visuals. You can find form in a performance style, in the deployment of
conventions vis a vis personal material, in the manipulation of
emphasis, and in a million other things. The trick of being a good film
thinker, in my opinion, is be on an eternal quest for kinds of formal
expression that had never occurred to you before. It's definitely a
thinking-outside-the-box enterprise, and you need to be guided by
emotion and intuition as well as intellect. - Dan
268
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 5:04pm
Subject: Sarris, Chaplin, Friedkin
>>His auteurism, which was a sincere expression
>>of his young-adult enthusiasms, was built on top of a silver-screen
>>obsessed childhood, and he pushed those old feelings down a bit during
>>his period of maximum auteurism. You could see the old pre-auteurist
>>starting to emerge in the late seventies
>
> Well, that's right about Sarris, though I thought "it" emerged more like
> in the early seventies, but my memory isn't perfect here.
It's interesting that we both see a change occuring, but that that
change seems to synchronize with a point in our own evolutions instead
of Sarris's. (I started later than you, in 1972 or 1973. So we both
read Sarris for a few years and then started diverging from him.) I
guess it casts suspicion on our readings.
I didn't flinch when Sarris ten-bested BARRY LYNDON in 1975, even though
I was no Kubrick fan: that's the sort of taste difference that I could
assimilate. But I was weirded out when LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR made his
top ten in 1977 - I thought that he got the sex of the chicken wrong, to
borrow Bill's phrase. (I knew that the French were big on Richard
Brooks and that Sarris and Movie magazine loved ELMER GANTRY, but
GOODBAR just didn't make the cut. Perhaps this was arrogance on my part
- I haven't revisited the film.) Each year I related less to what
Sarris liked and didn't like, and in 1981 I looked at his ten-best lists
and thought, "This is a random selection - I can't relate to anything
about this list."
So, as I tell this story, I realize that it could possibly be more about
me than Sarris.
> It also
> explains something about me: I never *had* a "silver-screen obsessed
> childhood."
Nor I. This makes a big difference in the evolution of film buffs, I think.
> and didn't like Chaplin
> either (who's in the Pantheon).
Chaplin is an interesting case. Obviously he was a god of the museum
days, and in a way he was grandfathered into the Pantheon along with
Griffith and Flaherty. And the ascension of Keaton cast Chaplin in a
different, and not altogether flattering, light. But there's something
about his personality that really divides people these days: odd, as he
was once as universally loved as was any artist. I too have never cared
for him.
> my problem comes when they say they
> like Ford for his incredibly expressive compositions and they like "The
> French Connection" because the final car chase was really exciting and
> that both films can be judged as "art" for those reasons and in the same
> ways. (I know that no one has said that here).
That car chase isn't at the end of the film, which makes a big
difference. Are you one of the many auteurists who doesn't care for
Friedkin? The only other auteurist group that I remember being
pro-Friedkin was that MODERN TIMES/Noah Ford circle that Bill had some
connection with.
Friedkin looked messy and disorganized by the conventions of the time,
but I don't think he really was. I think he was one of the best
American directors of the seventies, and is still doing good work. - Dan
269
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 5:39pm
Subject: Re: Spielberg vs. Clouzot
> One cavil, Dan: Of course he hates people - why is that a negative?
> So does Clouzot, and I agree with you that Le Corbeau is a
> masterpiece. Are you objecting to the sentimental crap that SS,
> unlike HGC, glosses that over with? I couldn't agree more.
Well, DUEL isn't that sentimental, and I have a negative reaction to it.
So it's probably not just the layering.
This is tricky. I wouldn't have said that Clouzot hates people,
actually. He's more than comfortable with showing them as cruel or
petty, but I don't think of him as someone who offers the audience the
pleasure of luxuriating in the results of the cruelty. Even LES
DIABOLIQUES (not at all my favorite) is a bit spartan in this regard.
Maybe you can argue in the other direction. He's certainly in touch
with his inner sadism, to put it mildly, but there's also some inner
judge or arbiter that filters the sadism into a hard-edged presentation
that poses the audience interesting questions.
Spielberg doesn't care as much about showing cruel people, and when he
does he's audience-canny enough to put them on the wrong end of a
rooting situation. (Which bothers me too.) He, as the director, is
usually the agent of cruelty, in that he sometimes likes to put
characters in a bad way. And then he plays it for everything it's
worth. He seems particularly into the spectacle of people losing their
dignity and becoming animal-like.
I'm open to input, especially on my Clouzot comments. - Dan
270
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 1:44pm
Subject: Re: The Hulk
I'm not as enthusiastic as Bill is, though I did like parts of "The Hulk"
very much: the time Lee gives to Bruce's childhood, the performances of Bana,
Nolte, and Elliott, Elfman's score (and particularly that one melody he used
repeatedly), and the often-arresting visual design (the paneling effects, the dark
lighting, and extreme close-ups). It definitely has more personality than
"Spiderman" (and the action sequence are better).
I still maintain, though, that Lester's "Superman II" represents a heretofore
unequaled fusion of humanism and genre in comic book movies, as filtered
through the personality of a great director.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
271
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 1:57pm
Subject: Re: Spielberg vs. Clouzot
It's funny you guys should mention Clouzot, as I just saw for the first time
the newly restored version of his "Quai des Orfevres." I think it may be my
favorite Clouzot yet, packed with atmosphere and memorable imagery (the blood
dripping on the jail floor, the rich blacks of the night exteriors, etc.) I'd
have to re-see the others, but in this film Clouzot reminded me a tiny bit of
Kubrick: there's definitely an impulse towards misanthropic caricature (the
'dirty old man' Brignon), but there's also a real sympathy for the characters,
put-upon as they are by the vagaries of fate and their own failures of
communication and connection.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
272
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 2:02pm
Subject: Re: The Hulk
In a message dated 6/28/03 1:45:33 PM, ptonguette@a... writes:
>I still maintain, though, that Lester's "Superman II" represents a heretofore
>unequaled fusion of humanism and genre in comic book movies, as filtered
>through the personality of a great director.
Not sure why I used the word "heretofore" in the above sentence, as I didn't
mean to imply that I felt Lee's film equalled Lester's. Oh well.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
273
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 6:55pm
Subject: Friedkin, Clouzot
LA film lovers - including Monte Hellman and certainly Noah, but
everyone, basically - really took to To Live and Die in LA, which I'm
sure Dan remembers because he was here then. I recently heard Janet
Bergstrom say she was disappointed when she screened it for a class,
because itr really hadn't held up. Strange, but that almost never
happens to me, I'm happy to say - being a film critic is perilous
enough without constantly having to wonder if you still like every
film you ever liked. I mostly do.
Anyway, I'd have to see TLADIL again, but I really liked The Brink's
Job and defended it in my third column for the Cahiers. Since then my
attendance has been spotty, but I'm getting back into Friedkin
because Giulia d'Agnolo Vallan is preparing a complete retrospective
for Torino (including his filmed interview with Lang, a world
premier), and I picked Cruising to write on for the catalogue this
year. Reseeing it, I still liked it quite a bit, although I liked
Rampage even better when I finally saw it at Giulia's urging. (I'd
love to see his first release version - the law 'n' order ending he
tacked on spoils a perfect film.) Urged on partly by Giulia and
partly by Dan, I tried to see The Hunted but just missed it. Friedkin
has goten a bad press in every sense of the word - I've never read so
much sheer bullshit about a director, except maybe for Cimino.
Clouzot was an enemy-designate of The New Wave, but I think they were
wrong. Rhough he certainly seems to have a sour take on things, the
doctor in Le Corbeau is a positive (albeit deliberately unpleasant)
character. One piece I read recently in MLN argues that he's a
consciously Nietzschian hero, in that he becomes stronger by going
through a bad experience. This, it was argued, somehow proved that
Clouzot was a collaborator after all - I'm not too sure about that
part. There's a mysterious shot of a crow at the end of Godard's
Histoire 3a, after his denunciation of the French wartime cinema
(singling out "Je resiste" in Les Dames as an excepetion!) and his
throat-catching music video in praise of Italian neorealism. In any
case, he was a very influential filmmaker, for obvious reasons.
274
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 2:55pm
Subject: Friedkin
In a message dated 6/28/03 1:05:29 PM, sallitt@p... writes:
>Friedkin looked messy and disorganized by the conventions of the time,
>but I don't think he really was. I think he was one of the best
>American directors of the seventies, and is still doing good work.
Friedkin's a major figure, I think. He's actually a really useful example of
an utterly distinctive director who pretty much lacks signature "themes."
His trademarks tend to be entirely formal: a penchant for shocking the audience
with abrupt action (Dan's talked about this; a good recent example is the car
breaking out of the garage in "The Hunted"), a kind of genius at using real
locales to supremely expressive ends (NYC in "Connection"; Iraq in "The
Exorcist"; Oregon forests in "The Hunted"), and what I might call a supreme bluntness
in presentation. In an earlier draft of my review of "The Hunted" for The
Film Journal, I characterized him as the movies' "greatest materialist." I
ultimately dropped that lingo because I couldn't quite nail down what I meant by
it, but I meant something like: he's unflinching and straightforward even when
his stories are supernaturally based.
So I think there's a real good case one can make for Friedkin. I will say
that, unlike Bogdanovich or Coppola (to name two of his contemporaries), I don't
think he's progressed too much over the past 30 years. His sensibility seems
to me to have been crystallized on "The French Connection" and it hasn't
changed too much. That's not a criticism, because his style has served him quite
well on the studio assignments he specializes in these days. But if he ever
wants to make the "Citizen Kane"-level film he openly says he aspires to, I
think he might need to push himself a little more.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
275
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 3:05pm
Subject: Cimino Request
In a message dated 6/28/03 2:56:36 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>Friedkin
>has goten a bad press in every sense of the word - I've never read so
>much sheer bullshit about a director, except maybe for Cimino.
Incidentally, all, can anyone recommend any particularly >good< pieces of
analysis or criticism on Cimino? I've read Robin Wood's, but have certainly run
up against a brick wall in searching for worthwhile pieces on the Web. There
ain't nothing there.
I was considering taking him up for Senses of Cinema's 'Great Directors'
series, though I really should re-see the ones I'm skeptical about first.
P.S. - I wish his novel would be published Stateside!
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
276
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 10:52pm
Subject: Pauline Hates Andy
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> He also showed that he was still bothered by his critics, forty
years
> later. I remember when I met him in '67, he asked plaintively, "Why
does
> Kael hate me," not that I would know. This time he joked that the
> screenwriters' guild used to use his photo as a dartboard.
>
======================================================
I figure Pauline Kael "hated" Sarris because she was a bully and,
typical of a bully, she simply lashed out at, and picked on, someone
to whom she felt (rightly so) intrinsically inferior. I think she
was intimidated that other people could actually have a theory in
regards to film criticism instead of just responding on a visceral
level to what was on the screen as she did. She couldn't best Sarris
on the merits so she relied on vituperation and personal attacks.
Kael always struck me as nothing more than a little kid (although she
was somewhat more articulate) who is sitting at the movies reacting
emotionally without attempting to analyze or comprehend the reasons
how and why those emotions were engaged. I can picture her at a
children's matinee in a theatre full of 8-years-olds as she
excitedly jumps up and down on her seat while watching Get Out Your
Handkerchiefs, or gleefully kicks the chair in front of her while
busting a gut during a Ritz Brothers movie, or gurgles with
excitement over All Night Long by that great auteur, Sue Mengers's
husband.
It's been eons since I wasted time reading Kael, but what I mention
whenever anyone tries to posit her as anything remotely resembling a
serious critic is her denigration of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
because she found it so risible that Jimmy Stewart was being
presented as a young law student. This apparently overrode all the
beauty and melancholy and Fordian tropes in the film, not that she
would have been able to appreciate the heartbreaking elements in
Liberty Valence anyway; even if she had been devoid of her smugness,
her literalness and her painfully limited imagination would have
still gotten in the way.
I suppose I can imagine how someone might enjoy Kael as an
egocentric, slightly hysterical essayist, but I'll never be convinced
that as a film critic she was anything other than worthless.
277
From:
Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 7:36pm
Subject: Re: Pauline Hates Andy
Damien points to Kael's "Liberty Valance" essay as a kind of critical low
point for her. I'd offer her work on Welles as my own personal example of What
Pauline Doesn't Get.
For a critic purportedly dismissive of polemical stances, it's disconcerting
to read her essay on the writing of "Citizen Kane," posited as it is against
not only the auteur theory but against the rising tide of opinion at that time
that CK was the greatest film ever made. By inflating (through faulty and
highly selective research) Mankiewicz's role in the writing of "Kane," she thinks
she's dealing a blow to the auteur theory (when, in fact, even assuming her
research had merit, it does nothing to diminish the tenets of auteurism). By
minimizing Welles' role, she's implicitly saying, "Look, everyone, Welles
didn't even have that much to do with the creation of the one film everone admires
by him!"
Whenever I think back fondly of a handful of Kael essays I like, all it takes
is for me to think of what she did to Welles (and it >did< damage his
reputation) to thoroughly sour me on her. (Welles did, however, get his revenge; in
his unreleased "The Other Side of the Wind," there's a character supposedly
based on Kael, a critic named Juliet Rich; in the clips I've seen which feature
this character, she's appropriately annoying/clueless.)
Another instance of What Pauline Doesn't Get actually occurs in what may be
her finest review: her piece on Welles' "Chimes at Midnight," which praises the
film to the skies only to drag in through the mud for its supposedly inferior
soundtrack. I know many people who have trouble with that film's soundtrack
(I never have, but that's just me), so I don't object to that criticism in and
of itself. But a more astute critic, a more expansive critic, would have
stepped back and considered how the production circumstances of the film led to
the quality of the sound - and how it's something like a miracle that it's as
good as it is. Holding a film like this to the "standards" of sound in a
Hollywood production just doesn't make good aesthetic sense; along these lines, it
makes me wonder how familiar Kael ever was with underground, avant garde, or
genuinely independent narrative cinema. Would she find the same problems with
the sound in Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep"?
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
278
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 0:35am
Subject: Re: Re auteurism
Dan is getting at what I was trying to in my gentle prodding of Fred a
few days back--I think in talking about a narrative film (especially
the Hollywood narrative film) form has to have a wider scope than
merely visual style. And I think Dan's point of "manipulation of
emphasis" might be a good reply to Fred's rather ascetic position that
emotional reactions to characters in films do not matter--I think they
are utterly important--and I think this is one reason why modern
audiences often have trouble with "old" films. I've always been
frustrated how my otherwise intelligent friends (even intelligent
before other arts) have really no handle on cinema, and I'm beginning
to think that it's not just form at a visual style level. And I'm not
talking about "theme"!--I hope this makes some sense.
Patrick
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > Does it come down to "form" for you guys as the determinant of a
"personal
> > vision"?
>
> It does for me, but I believe strongly that form comprises more than
> visuals. You can find form in a performance style, in the
deployment of
> conventions vis a vis personal material, in the manipulation of
> emphasis, and in a million other things. The trick of being a good
film
> thinker, in my opinion, is be on an eternal quest for kinds of formal
> expression that had never occurred to you before. It's definitely a
> thinking-outside-the-box enterprise, and you need to be guided by
> emotion and intuition as well as intellect. - Dan
279
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 2:09am
Subject: Re: Sarris, Chaplin, Friedkin
It's funny, because even though I don't go to many new Hollywood films I
*did* see "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" when it opened, and completely hated
it. What a bad film, stylistically and on every other level. It's not a
risible debacle or anything -- I mean, it competently gets from
beginning to end -- but I found it pretty worthless.
It is true that many of us are affected by when in our early life
certain things happened. I find 70s nostalgia incomprehensible to anyone
who remembers the 60s -- I mean, DISCO??? -- but also note that 70s
nostalgists tend to be considerably younger than I am.
I thought I'd seen more than one Friedkin, but apparently I've seen only
"The French Connection," and obviously don't remember it very well. I do
remember it seeming mechanical and uninteresting. But it does often take
me multiple films by a good director to see what's happening. Obviously
I'm not the movie-goer many of you are: when I've decided a director is
great, I try to see everything, and often have, and have seen lots of
things 10 or 15 times, but at the margins, I just don't have the time or
patience to explore as much as I should, even though that means I'm
missing out on a lot.
There may be a time for one or the other of us to hash it out over a
film we disagree on, but it should be something I've seen more recently
than "The French Connection" or the Hustons that Bill mentions.
- Fred
280
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 2:48am
Subject: Re: Re: Re auteurism
Patrick:
"Dan is getting at what I was trying to in my gentle prodding of Fred a
few days back--I think in talking about a narrative film (especially the
Hollywood narrative film) form has to have a wider scope than merely
visual style. And I think Dan's point of 'manipulation of emphasis'
might be a good reply to Fred's rather ascetic position that emotional
reactions to characters in films do not matter..."
Well, I read Dan's post, and while I may notice acting less often and
put less emphasis on it than most other film viewers, I didn't find
anything to disagree with in it, nor did I get that he was disagreeing
with me. But now I think I'm being mischaracterized in the quote above.
I wrote in an earlier response to Patrick, Post 201:
"I'm not saying acting is irrelevant. I think if you could somehow
manage to transpose the acting styles of a Hawks film to a Lang, or vice
versa, doing so would interject a discordant element that would
seriously harm the whole."
And later, in 261:
"One's identification with the characters can be put in the service of
art, as Robin Wood has pointed out in 'Psycho,' but simply getting
involved in the story and being moved by the acting is not the same
thing at all as seeing a film with real vision."
Both posts were quite lengthy, and I tried to set out my view that a
great film is a system in which all the parts gain meaning from the
whole, and in which no element, least of all acting, can be evaluated
separately from the whole. And acting is more important in some films,
and in some directors' films, than in others. Certainly it's important
in Hawks, and my memory of "Land of the Pharoas" is that it suffered
from un-Hawksian acting.
Maybe the disagreement is really over the locus of what is most moving.
The scenes that have moved me to tears in movies, almost to the point of
being devastating, include the mother-daughter motel room encounter in
"Imitation of Life," the mother-son conversation in the kitchen in "Home
>From the Hill, the funeral in "Some Came Running," " the "frozen"
composition on the family when the two sons say they want to go to
America in "How Green Was My Valley," the relationship between the
mother's mournful wail of "Anzu...Zushio" and the incredible sense of
light on landscape in "Sansho Dayu," the spinning and dispersing monks
at the end of "The Flowers of St. Francis," the tiny camera movement
reframing for emphasis the cactus rose on Tom Doniphon's coffin in "The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the intrusion of the death mask in "The
Tarnished Angels," the ending of "Letter from an Unknown Woman" in which
the woman's words on the sound track seem inseparable from the camera's
movement, the crowd at the end of "The Naked Kiss," the encounters
between Tanya and Quinlan in "Touch of Evil," Hutu's hand pulling the
ship's hold's cover shut at the end of "Tabu," the ten-minute sunset
take on the ship's deck in which lovers who have never touched during
this seven hour film now part forever near the end of "The Satin
Slipper," the long take of the cross at the end of "Diary of a Country
Priest," the very ending of "La Jetée," the initial awareness of image
manipulations in Brakhage's "The Wold-Shadow," the whole of Bruce
Baillie's short silent portrait "Tung," the ecstatic effects of Robert
Breer's combinations of photographed, rotoscoped, and abstract imagery
in any one of a number of films, the gradual unfolding of formal
perfection that one sees on multiple viewings of Kubelka's
"Schwechater," the great cut (I don't want to spoil it for those who
haven't seen it) in "The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" -- well, you get
the idea. most of these scenes do not involve characters saying "I love
you," or, "his illegitimate son...Rafe." The first two do, but the
others all involve different things. Would the reframing of the cactus
rose be as moving if Doniphon were played by an actor not of Wayne's
stature? Of course not. Would it have been ruined by a ridiculously bad
piece of miscasting, even though the miscast actor was not even in this
shot? Probably. But for me, the experience of being moved by a
performance I love in an otherwise bad film -- the one I like to cite is
Olivier's wonderfully mannered and humane Simon Wiesenthal-like
character in "The Boys From Brazil" -- has almost nothing to do with the
way that I am moved by Wayne's performance in "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance." Doniphon (Wayne) says (spolier coming), "Besides, YOU didn't
shoot Liberty Valance" to "Pilgrim" with an absolutely perfect mix of
certitude and contempt, but that contempt is only given its true and
great meaning by the framework of the whole film, by the quality of its
light, by the architecture of its compositions, by the way Ford
constructs the whole thing as a not-so-hidden love poem to the kind of
man Doniphon represents. And the emotions thus evoked can not be evoked
by acting alone, or even mostly by acting. Bresson may not have approved
of the acting in any of the films mentioned, since for him an abstracted
cross is really the ideal performer (joke, joke), but his point about
acting is still worth generalizing, in the sense that while a solo
performer may be able to bring off a theater piece on a bare stage, I
think it's fundamentally unfilmic to consider acting outside of the
context of compositions, light, rhythm.
There are cases of films I liked a lot because of a performance. I even
made one, Capra's "Rain or Shine," a "Chicago Reader" "Critic's Choice"
(http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/16736_RAIN_OR_SHINE )
because I thought the performance was so extraordinary. I just wouldn't
call it a great film.
- Fred
281
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 6:25am
Subject: Re: Dante, Spielberg
Bill wrote:
>Then Minority Report showed us that
>SS still knows how to ruin a perfectly good film with a totally
>inappropriate last act when left to his own devices, and Catch Me If
>You Can turned out to be fun and un-ruined. The jury is out. It may
>still be out when we're all in our graves.
Don't know, Bill, if you read the Philip K. Dick short story MINORITY
REPORT is based on, 50 years old IIRC. Spielberg radically
conventionalizes (if I can say such a thing) the source material, and
by doing so, betrays both the story and everything Dick himself stood
for. Phil would never in a million years have had the sentimental
pre-cog, taken out of her tank and brought into the rest of the story
as a "moral" voice.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
282
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 6:48am
Subject: Re: Sarris, Chaplin, Friedkin
> I thought I'd seen more than one Friedkin, but apparently I've seen only
> "The French Connection," and obviously don't remember it very well. I do
> remember it seeming mechanical and uninteresting. But it does often take
> me multiple films by a good director to see what's happening.
It did take me a film or two to start appreciating Friedkin, though I
can understand you stopping if you didn't like him. If you're
interested, I wrote something about his last film for Gabe and Zach's
web site, and it includes some general analysis of his style:
http://www.24fpsmagazine.com/Review/Hunted.html
> Obviously
> I'm not the movie-goer many of you are
I'm pretty much a shadow of my former self. In my late teens and all
through my twenties I was pretty omnivorous, but these days I let a lot
of things go. - Dan
283
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 7:00am
Subject: Re: Dante, Spielberg
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Joseph Kaufman
> Don't know, Bill, if you read the Philip K. Dick short story
MINORITY
> REPORT is based on, 50 years old IIRC. Spielberg radically
> conventionalizes (if I can say such a thing) the source material,
and
> by doing so, betrays both the story and everything Dick himself
stood
> for. Phil would never in a million years have had the sentimental
> pre-cog, taken out of her tank and brought into the rest of the
story
> as a "moral" voice.
Maybe I'm the lone MINORITY REPORT defender here, I think it's a
great movie, even with the third-act "problems," and I also think
Spielberg's adaptation improves on Dick's story. I've read about a
dozen P.K. Dick short stories, along with DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF
ELECTRIC SHEEP?, and on the whole I prefer Spielberg's gross
sentimentality to Dick's cynicism, Spielberg's pat endings to Dick's
neat ones. Also THE MINORITY REPORT seems malleable - it's a model
short story, not really fit for a 90 or a 150-minute feature, I think
you can expect the same kind of expansion (if not the same style)
with John Woo's PAYCHECK. By way of contrast, a shot of moralizing
in SECOND VARIETY would surely have been criminal. Imagine a
revamped third act, with a hopeful ending, moments of catharsis, etc.
I feel like a dope when I go to bat for Spielberg, moreso here than
anywhere else - there are quite a few films of his that I either
dislike immensely (HOOK, AMISTAD) or don't much care for, so the
litmus test of, do I find his 'bad'/problematic films to be a source
of interest, I would have to answer: no. I don't know if I find
the 'auteurist'/'not an auteurist' classification exercise useful,
especially if we were to value one over the other. I suppose I'm not
necessarily 'an auteurist' but I'm sympathetic to auteurism, in this
regard, and in others.
Jaime
284
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 8:37am
Subject: Re: Dante, Spielberg
>Maybe I'm the lone MINORITY REPORT defender here, I think it's a
>great movie, even with the third-act "problems," and I also think
>Spielberg's adaptation improves on Dick's story.....
Spielberg for me veers from "Lightly Likeable" to "Less Than Meets
the Eye." I don't find him utterly lacking in artistry. My problem
is that he always affirms a conventional morality, says this is what
the world really needs, and therefore shouldn't be adapting Dick.
The latter's main theme was to question reality and morality, to
invert them many times over. Seems "morally wrong" to subvert your
source in that way, assuming your source isn't Thomas Dixon or
someone like that.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
285
From: nzkpzq
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 4:31pm
Subject: Introduction, Minnelli, Spielberg
The guidelines for the site say we are supposed to introduce
ourselves.
My name is Mike Grost. Born 10/10/1953. I make my living in the
computer software industry, and also am an abstract painter. I became
an auteurist in 1971, after a screening of Detour by Edgar G. Ulmer.
Going to the bookstore the next day, none of the film books had
anything in them about Ulmer. But The American Cinema by Andrew
Sarris had a whole section about Ulmer. Similar experiences were
repeated again and again in the coming months, as Sarris had vast
insights into films that others barely talked about.
All of my writings are on the web – have never written for any
commercial source. The best known is A Guide to Classic Mystery and
Detection (http://members.aol.com/mg4273/classics.htm). This is an
attempt to write a history of mystery fiction, in the style of Sarris
and The American Cinema. Also wrote Classic Comic Books
(http://members.aol.com/mg4273/comics.htm), a similar attempt to
write a Sarris style history of American Comic Books (1935-1970).
Have also been writing mystery short stories over the past year,
featuring Jacob Black, a 1920's pulp writer of air adventure stories,
who becomes a detective after getting a job as a scriptwriter in
Hollywood in 1923. Some of these are also on the web
(http://members.aol.com/mg4273/mymyst.htm). Have also written
auteurist film criticism, collected at:
http://members.aol.com/mg4273/film.htm. This includes a long study of
Fritz Lang, and pieces on many veteran Hollywood directors, such as
Mann, Minnelli, Joseph H. Lewis, Tourneur, Walsh, Sternberg, Cukor.
On style
I wholeheartedly agree with Fred Camper. Visual style is extremely
important in film. I think auteurists have traditionally admired
directors who are visually creative. And they have dismissed
directors whose films are visually dead. It is hard to prove
objectively that one director is visually creative, and another is
not. Still, one CAN talk about visual style, even if it is hard work.
If we are to communicate meaningfully with others about film, we
should make the effort to put what we are seeing in films into words.
Visual creativity is partly beautiful compositions, camera movement,
lighting and color. It is also the creation of atmosphere, feelings
and insight into the human heart through evocative images. Acting
certainly plays a key role in all of this.
Minnelli.
Also agree with Fred Camper on the importance of Vincente Minnelli.
He's right: Some Came Running is magnificent. This year is Minnelli's
centenary: he was born February 28, 1903. Among others, Turner
Classic Movies is showing beautiful, letterboxed prints of Minnelli
films this year to celebrate. Please don't miss them! These movies
are wonderful. Minnelli has an awesome visual sense, and is
especially creative with color.
Spielberg
I didn't like Spielberg's early films at all, such as Duel, Close
Encounters or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg definitely improved
with his recent social commentary films. Schindler's List deserves
respect. And Amistad seems especially impressive. It is one of
several good films made about slavery in recent years, including
Carlos Diegues – Quilombo; James Ivory – Jefferson in Paris;
Christian Lara – Bitter Sugar. The beautiful imagery and evocation of
the past in Quilombo recalls John Ford. And the experimental
technique of Bitter Sugar recalls Alain Resnais.
In conclusion, I've really enjoyed reading everyone's posts. It is a
real learning experience!
Mike Grost
286
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 6:42pm
Subject: Kael
I thought Adrian Martin came up with a good answer to my initial
question - how did auteurism get edged out of the driver's seat in
the 70's, and where did all these dopey film critics come from? - in
a Cineaste piece on David Thomson. The quote is about Kael, and is
offered here as such: "For many readers, Thomson is now stepping in
to fill the vacuum left by the death of Pauline Kael - not
a 'critic's critic' for cinema specialists, but someone who writes in
a lively, opinionated, humorous way, with just enough (and certainly
not too much) learning laid bare on the sleeve to satisfy the
requiremnts of educated, middle-class gentility...Such a reader is
easy to get on side with gags about some mysterious foreign body
named Bela Tarr, and thundering preemptive strikes against little-
seen and barely-distributed oeuvres (like that of Abbas Kiarostami),
which are deemed to be apocalyptic signs that 'our medium is gone and
this is funerary art.'"
As I wrote in a Cahiers issue on the Internet, shortly after her
death, Kael's loudmouth anti-intellectualism became the template for
endless bad critics coming up from the ranks of alternate press
reviewing and eventually landing posts in mainstream publications. I
think that, thanks to them them, it became the voice of film
criticism on the Net, which I suspect is often the work of kids whose
main exposure to film criticism is in the alternative papers - and
not the first two or three generations, when it was mostly auteurists
covering the film beat, but the recent ones, when it's all ambitious
Bizzaro-world Kael clones, with a token film-buff assigned to cover
the films no one else wants to write about.
We had a particularly horrible group of Young Turks like that in a
neo-con publication, New Times, that killed off the old LA Reader.
New Times' editor, Joseph K. tells me, actually ran an ad saying more
or less that he was looking for blithering idiots who had never
written about films before. He got 'em, and syndicated them all over
the country, to make matters worse, but the paper was mercifully
vaporized by a trust-building arrangement between two alternative
press syndicates, rather like the tyrannosaurus saving the kids from
the raptors at the end of Jurrassic Park - a scene I often find
myself using as a metaphor for what hope remains in many contexts
these days.
Anyway, I think that Kael - the original - was put in place by The
New Yorker, that publication immortalized by Tom Wolfe in "Tiny
Mummies!...55th Street's Land of the Living Dead," to counter the
rise of auteurism, which was taking this filum thing just too damn
seriously for the guy inspecting the butterfly. Kael got the bit in
her teeth and ran like Seabiscuit, but if it hadn't been her, it
would have been someone else...and later was. Even in France, where
mainstream critics make ours look like retards, there has been a
backlash against the revolutionary auteurist stance of the 50s
Cahiers. (If you don't think the stance of the New Wave critics was a
knife in the eye of French bourgeois culture, read some of those old
articles, particularly the ones by Truffaut and Chabrol.) In 1999
Patrice Leconte wrote a letter to fellow members of the French DGA,
which Betrand Tavernier "accidentally" published for his own nasty
purposes, in which Leconte complained about the damage that bitchy,
smartass reviewing was doing to French cinema. Everyone jumped on
Leconte, while Tavernier sniggered in the shadows, but I had read
some of the stuff Leconte was talking about, and just saw what he was
describing as the rise of sous-Kaelism a la francaise.
A personal anecdote: I got a call from a fact-checker at the New
Yorker when they were getting ready to run her last interview,
wanting to know if what she said about Hitchcock was true - that he
never went to the movies, and had film shot of actors he was
interested in casting so that he wouldn't have to see their movies or
meet them in person. I reminded the kid that Kael was talking about
an era before video and asked rhetorically where he thought all those
cans of film were, quoted Gary Graver about how he used to see AH and
Alma regularly at the movie theatre he managed in Beverly Hills as a
young man, quoted Robert Boyle to the effect that AH "saw
everything," cited the lists of competitive screenings he was signed
up for at Paramount and the projection room he had built in his
office at Universal so he and Peggy Robertson could watch films in
the afternoon, referred to his memo telling everyone on one of his
picture to see Red Desert as proof that white walls could be filmed
without shadows, and clinched it with the well-known anecdote about
how he cast Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much because he loved
her in Storm Warning.
"That's all I need," said the kid, happy to sally forth and slay
another dragon factoid, and a big one at that. And The New Yorker ran
the piece with no changes.
287
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 7:20pm
Subject: Re: Kael
hotlove666 wrote:
>And The New Yorker ran
>the piece with no changes.
>
>
>
Are you saying they left in Kael's mistake? Hmmm....
Something about criticism that a lot of people don't quite get is that
when it's written for a commercial source, it has to get by editors. And
editors are often more interested in something that's "fun to read" (or
whatever their particular standard is) than in something that is, say,
true in some deep sense to the work being discussed, which they're not
going to be good judges anyway. Writers who get into print know what
editors want, and try to gear their copy accordingly.
So there's a kind of economic process at work here. Young Joe Schmoe
wants to be a film critic. He *really* wants to make a living at it.
Maybe he has had an early epiphany around the profound visual
expressiveness of Andre de Toth's "Day of the Outlaw." But he looks
around, as any sensible person seeking a career would do, for models of
successful film critics. He finds, what? That Kael, the Paulettes,
Siskel, Ebert, and others of their ilk greatly outnumber the Hobermans
and Rosenbaums of the world. Don't disregard the possibility, too, that
the processes by which a budding neo-Sarris becomes a Kael imitator may
be happening subconsciously. Someone who would never say, "I'm going to
sell out in order to make a living," may still find his tastes, and the
way he writes and the things he writes about, changing anyway as he
tries to make a career for himself.
I guess it's been pretty well documented that unknown movie critics for
WXYZ-TV can often get quoted in ads if they listen to the publicists who
say, "If you say, 'It's a rip-snorting adventure for the whole family,'
in your review, we'll run that as a quote from you," and given the
length of TV reviews, that might be all that said unknown movie critic
gets to say.
Critics who let publicists write their copy should be fired, in my
opinion, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
- Fred
288
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 7:47pm
Subject: Re: Kael
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> my initial
> question - how did auteurism get edged out of the driver's seat in
> the 70's
Do you discount the role of structuralism, particularly in academia in this country? Although I tuned out, about then, for years, my shadowy recollection is that it had become practically impossible to read, write or talk about film (and above all, I'd daresay, to teach it, although there I'm really only guessing) without that language creeping in and taking over. Well, maybe not in the New Yorker. And I've no doubt that structuralist and auteurist studies did find (uneasy?) ways to coexist, so maybe it's just simplistic of me to think that structuralism played a large part in nipping the auteurist retrospective movement of the 70's (from Howard & Roger screenings on out) in the, er, bud...
289
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 7:53pm
Subject: Re: Re: Kael
jess_l_amortell wrote:
>.....I've no doubt that structuralist and auteurist studies did find (uneasy?) ways to coexist...
>
Not so much. The body of "thought" usually called "theory" is mostly
opposed to the idea of an indivdual author and individual
self-expression. That's almost the "point" of it, or of the bulk of it,
insofar as I understand it. I can tell a long story about this involving
Preminger's camera movements and a seminar on auteurism and a film
academic's rejection of my defense of auteurism, but I've told enough
stories for the moment....
- Fred
290
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 8:18pm
Subject: Re: Academia
> jess_l_amortell wrote:
>
> >.....I've no doubt that structuralist and auteurist studies did
find (uneasy?) ways to coexist...
This is my pet rant, and I have little patience for film writing with
structuralism, but the basic stupidity of so much of this line of
thought is maddening: the structuralists used a model of language that
doesn't really work (though perhaps that can be forgiven thirty years
ago) then import to cinema (a ridiculous logical leap) then often
slather on crackpot-psychologist-idiot Lacan (who know one can figure
out and whom no one in psychology takes remotely) to justify this
stuff. It's really really sad--Academia is a hideous place for free
thought, really disheartening...
Patrick
291
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 11:50pm
Subject: Academia, auteurism, structuralism, "theory"
I don't see a vital need to reconcile auteurism without the theories
that took it over (partly because auteurism demanded serious
consideration of the cinema to begin with). Auteurism is tied to
movie buffdom and exists in a sphere untouched by theory. Academics
still sometimes write and teach with directorial authorship slant,
too - it's just that they do it with Haynes or Greenway or Treut in
mind, rather than Hawks or Rossellini. This leads to a lot of
problems, obviously, which I don't think we need to lay out because
it'll involve a sermon to the choir.
There's always a figure like BU's Ray Carney though, an infuriating
intellect who jumps to a lot of foolish conclusions, but nonetheless
a viewer and critic concerned with the integrity of artistic vision
as a way of knowing that remains unexplained by the theories that
have been privileged in recent decades. His own canon doesn't have
much Hollywood in it either, though. (Just Capra.)
The problem with much theoretical work is that often arrives at
conclusions that the preceding theoretical work in question need not
support (e.g., "John Ford's cinema is sexist, so John Ford's
importance is vastly negated"). I think, from a functional POV,
pieces from feminist, Marxist, ethnographic, etc. standpoints should
generally stay within the jurisdiction of its own discipline - and
branch out into broader, riskier pronouncements only when the writer
is sure enough of their importance. Not to dismiss interdisciplinary
studies: I think they're a good thing. But too often tunnel vision
seems to lead the writer to overly far-reaching conclusions. Thus, a
theoretical piece that decides that John Ford (or classical
Hollywood, or the women's picture genre) is sexist or motivated by
sexism he lacked the intelligence/progressiveness/agency to avoid
should end with *this* (and not a broader value judgment) as its
conclusion.
(A tangent: the biggest problem with current theoretical writing, in
film studies and elsewhere, has less to do with the points raised or
even many of the methods employed, and more to do with issues of
writing style: I've yet to come across a reason for the appalling
similarity of voice in essay after essay. Passive voice, a lack of
self-critique, an insistence that the author's idea is a correct one
and, strikingly, always exists as a true revisionism of dominant
ideas. And many of these same people have to gall to joke about how
they think "jargon" is alienating.)
As for commercial movie reviewing ... if newspapers and magazines
continue in their current direction of willful anti-intellectualism
and advertising, and if academia fails to autocritique and correct
its own indulgences that have led to a schism between "theory"
and "auteurism" that need not exist, then I don't know where those of
us who come to A Film By can go to communicate productively to
others. But I do take that a community like this one is thriving is
a good sign.
--Zach
292
From:
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 7:53pm
Subject: Re: Re: Re auteurism
In a message dated 6/28/03 8:36:02 PM, pwc8@c... writes:
>And I think Dan's point of "manipulation of
>emphasis" might be a good reply to Fred's rather ascetic position that
>emotional reactions to characters in films do not matter--I think they
>are utterly important--and I think this is one reason why modern
>audiences often have trouble with "old" films.
You know, I think emotional reactions to characters are vitally important,
but at the same time I don't consider myself at odds with anything Fred's
written. My feeling is that there's a whole bunch of components which lead to an
emotional response in a great film and only one of those components is the
acting. Let me give a few examples from favorites of mine. The scene in Welles'
"Chimes at Midnight" where Hal banishes Falstaff from the court is perhaps the
single piece of film I'd take with me to a desert island, if forced; I find it
unbearably moving. A great part of it is the way Welles attacks the scene
visually, his use of low and high angles to impart meaning, his crosscutting
between various size close-ups of Hal and Falstaff's faces to emphasize lines or
expressions, his spartan choice to shoot in B&W (because - as he once said -
in color, Falstaff's eyes >must< be blue). Since it's not a silent film,
another part of it is the Shakespearean language, as great as any ever written.
And, surely, another part of it are the performances of Keith Baxter and Orson
Welles, Baxter's stunning delivery of "I know thee not, old man" and the flurry
of looks which come across Welles' face as he listens.
Certainly one can talk about the individual things at work here - the
visuals, the writing, the acting - but I find it just about impossible to separate
them. I love the acting in this scene, but it's not as though the acting exists
in a vacuum, or on a blank stage; we 'experience' the acting through Welles'
visual choices just as much as we do through the actors' inflections and
movements. I know Fred doesn't care for him, but I'll use Altman as my other
example. Here's a guy who, according to various accounts, allows enormous latitude
in terms of the actors' performances. Yet I find that there's a great
unanimity in Altman and I think it's because of his mise en scene; the slow zooms,
the camera peering from behind corners, the crosscutting, the tendency to cut a
scene on a 'punch-line' - this all informs the way we view the performances.
I think it's easier to isolate acting inconsistent with a film's vision than
it is acting which has been successfully integrated into the whole.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
293
From: Fred Camper
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 0:34am
Subject: Re: Re: Re auteurism
Peter:
>You know, I think emotional reactions to characters are vitally important....
>
To which I would agree, with two caveats: this isn't important in all
films, and in a great film, as in some of the examples I give, acting is
only one of many elements which produce those reactions.
As a theoretical matter I have no real argument about why a film that
consisted of one uninteresting camera setup filming a stage for an hour
or two couldn't be a great work of art based on the acting it showed. I
might mutter some kind of modernist cant about truth to materials, and
there would be some truth to that, but I think there are no real rules
in art. My comments about acting are extrapolations based on my film
viewing experience.
On an unrelated note, in a little stealth message here, I'm thinking of
film stills up in the "pictures" section. For the moment, these might be
primarily avant-garde films, because that's mostly what I have on my
hard drive, and also as a little way of inserting some of my own
editorial bias. I mention this in case anyone wants to register an
objection (presumably in a private email -- one idea behind our group is
*not* to have big discussions about the group on the list.). If I don't
hear any credible objections I'll maybe put up one pic a month, or
change them every two months or something. Once I've started, I'd be
open to suggestions, and I think Peter and I should decide on it jointly.
- Fred
294
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 0:37am
Subject: Re: Thomson
> I thought Adrian Martin came up with a good answer to my initial
> question - how did auteurism get edged out of the driver's seat in
> the 70's, and where did all these dopey film critics come from? - in
> a Cineaste piece on David Thomson. The quote is about Kael, and is
> offered here as such: "For many readers, Thomson is now stepping in
> to fill the vacuum left by the death of Pauline Kael - not
> a 'critic's critic' for cinema specialists, but someone who writes in
> a lively, opinionated, humorous way, with just enough (and certainly
> not too much) learning laid bare on the sleeve to satisfy the
> requiremnts of educated, middle-class gentility...Such a reader is
> easy to get on side with gags about some mysterious foreign body
> named Bela Tarr, and thundering preemptive strikes against little-
> seen and barely-distributed oeuvres (like that of Abbas Kiarostami),
> which are deemed to be apocalyptic signs that 'our medium is gone and
> this is funerary art.'"
I certainly have a few problems with Thomson's writing and
self-presentation, starting with the second edition of his BIOGRAPHICAL
DICTIONARY OF FILM. And I haven't got a good sense of what he means to
the public at large. But I think it's important to consider his
virtues. For one thing, he's seen a whole lot, and continues to see a
lot - not just fashionable things, but TV movies, old Hollywood films
without a pedigree, etc. So I still find him a valuable source of tips
on directors to check out. For another thing, he sometimes gets a lot
of substance into those little write-ups. I still think his short piece
on Hawks may be the best work on that much-written-about director, for
instance.
He's gone in a lot of crazy directions, but he's a child of Cahiers, and
I think that original influence is still active in his work. - Dan
295
From:
Date: Sun Jun 29, 2003 8:48pm
Subject: Acting, Thomson
In a message dated 6/29/03 8:35:42 PM, f@f... writes:
>> You know, I think emotional reactions to characters are vitally
important....
>
>To which I would agree, with two caveats: this isn't important in all
>films, and in a great film, as in some of the examples I give, acting is
>only one of many elements which produce those reactions.
Caveats with which I agree - I should have said that it's important in >some<
narrative features films, though not all. And even in films where I'd hold
acting is an element which produces those sort of responses, it's part of a
fabric, a network of elements which feed off each other.
About Thomson: a real mixed bag, as far as I'm concerned. I agree with Dan
that his writing on Hawks and certain others is great, but I share Martin's
deep reservations about his pronouncements on current international directors and
pretty much detest what he's written about Welles. I know that last point
might be suspect coming from me with my admitted biases and polemical stances
regarding that director, but I really can't see much value at all in that
'biography' he wrote of Welles or his various comments about how the unseen OW work
should never be released.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
296
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 0:52am
Subject: Lit-crit
> Do you discount the role of structuralism, particularly in academia
> in this country? Although I tuned out, about then, for years, my
> shadowy recollection is that it had become practically impossible to
> read, write or talk about film (and above all, I'd daresay, to teach
> it, although there I'm really only guessing) without that language
> creeping in and taking over. Well, maybe not in the New Yorker. And
> I've no doubt that structuralist and auteurist studies did find
> (uneasy?) ways to coexist, so maybe it's just simplistic of me to
> think that structuralism played a large part in nipping the auteurist
> retrospective movement of the 70's (from Howard & Roger screenings on
> out) in the, er, bud...
I don't think there's much doubt that the rise of
semiotics/structuralism/Marxism/gender studies/psychoanalysis ended
auteurism's chances of getting a solid foothold in academia.
(Parenthetically, I'll say that I don't think we were ready for our
closeup. Auteurist thought at the time was full of unconsidered and not
always thoughtful reflex reactions, and it was easy for the lit-crit
people to take our heads off. Today's auteurist survivors, who can't
afford to be as naive and overconfident as their forebears, are probably
better equipped to put up an honorable fight.) How much this affected
the climate of popular film criticism, I don't know. The lit-crit
people didn't do too well in that realm either.
Somehow, around the beginning of the 80s, it seemed that everyone was
into mainstream films and what the top-ten grossing releases of the week
were. I think there was a trend at the time in American thought in
general that made auteurism less appealing. And America has never
really liked film nerds all that much. Anyone else had the experience
of going to France and hearing genuine admiration in people's voices
when you display a bit of knowledge of film culture? - Dan
297
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 1:22am
Subject: Unity
> Both posts were quite lengthy, and I tried to set out my view that a
> great film is a system in which all the parts gain meaning from the
> whole, and in which no element, least of all acting, can be evaluated
> separately from the whole. And acting is more important in some films,
> and in some directors' films, than in others.
I was thinking about this today as I had a discussion with a friend
about ESTHER KAHN. She hated the film, and the reason she gave is that
she thought Summer Phoenix was terrible as Hedda Gabler, and that the
narration kept telling us how great she was.
I said, well, yeah, I don't think she was terrible, but she probably
wouldn't have been a star of the British stage in that period with that
performance. Basically I copped to a defect of realism, and started
praising the things about Phoenix's performance that I liked.
Later I thought: OK, maybe it would have been good if Phoenix had been
the sort of actress who could transform on stage into a completely
different character, which is after all the way Symons writes about her.
Why don't I care much about that problem? I remembered what Hitchcock
said about working out plot consistency: "It's the easiest part, so why
bother?" I love that quote, and it embodies my feelings about the
Summer/Esther/Hedda problem. It would have been easy to cast an actress
who would have changed on-screen when she played Hedda. Certainly Lynch
was much praised for casting an actress (Naomi Watts) who pulled
something like this off in MULHOLLAND DRIVE. But I didn't care about
Watts' achievement: I would have appreciated it much more if she had
made the perky Midwesterner in the beginning of the film seem like more
than a stock type. I mean, I have nothing against her, but the amazing
intensity of Summer Phoenix in ESTHER is not within reach of most actresses.
I think Desplechin traded something easy for something hard. He knew
that Summer Phoenix was fusing scarily with the role of Esther in a way
that perhaps no other actress would be able to do. And he loved this so
much that he gave up the opportunity to see the Jewish tailor's daughter
transform into Hedda, which isn't all that interesting, and which may
even have been counterproductive. All that transformation really would
have proved is that, hey, Summer is an actress after all. Whereas the
impact of ESTHER comes from our not being sure whether Summer can act or
whether she's really Esther.
All this to say that the material of ESTHER may have made it impossible
for all the parts to have moved together in perfect harmony, and that I
love Desplechin's choice of which moving parts were the most important.
(Not that he deserves all the credit for the accident of God that is
Summer Phoenix falling into his lap. Money can't buy a performance like
that.) Successes like this make me not want to put too much emphasis on
all elements of style connecting with each other. Sometimes a fire
lights in one corner of the film, and a little debris around the edges
doesn't reduce the power of this crucial creative chemistry. - Dan
298
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 1:50am
Subject: Re: Lit-crit
> Anyone else had the experience
> of going to France and hearing genuine admiration in people's voices
> when you display a bit of knowledge of film culture?
Well, not to gloat, but my adviser on independent research (in fact
about what exactly the Cahiers critics were defending in the 1950s,
and its subsequent important to US--aka the history of
"auteurism"--which I need to expand) was surprised enough by my
knowledge that I got a copy of book on Godard inscribed "A Patrick, le
seul cinephile américain digne du nom"--the guy's Marc Cerisuelo, by
the way, and the book's awesome, though not available in English.
But, aside from that, I think its interesting that it was also Cahiers
that was first putting Lacan, Althusser and some others into film crit
in their 68-74 period--though most of those people (e.g. Daney) gave
it up, luckily--Bill probably knows more about this. There is an
interesting two-volume history of Cahiers by Antoine de Baecque that
also hasn't been translated, which is pretty fascinating.
Patrick
299
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 5:29am
Subject: Re: Re: Lit-crit
> But, aside from that, I think its interesting that it was also Cahiers
> that was first putting Lacan, Althusser and some others into film crit
> in their 68-74 period--though most of those people (e.g. Daney) gave
> it up, luckily
... You go through one end of the tunnel to get to the other.
> --Bill probably knows more about this. There is an
> interesting two-volume history of Cahiers by Antoine de Baecque that
> also hasn't been translated, which is pretty fascinating.
In my opinion this book is a big waste of time. Sorry if I'm offending
anyone here. The second volume tries to condense too much information
and gives way too much importance to the first seven years -- there is
hardly anything about the more current periods in mag's history.
Although there is a picture of Bill in an armchair if I recall
correctly...
Gabe
300
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 5:33pm
Subject: The Cahiers and structuralism, actors
Obviously I have a little to say about the above topic, when I have
a second. Yes, Gabe, the 2-volume Cahiers history is a travesty,
and the people who know best - the people it's about -would be
the first to agree with you.
I find it ironic that we have one the best theorists of acting as an
element of film form on earth in our midst - Dan. He's been
listening in on this debate and contributing only asides. He has
written fantastic (early) articles on Lubitsch and acting which you
all should see - one is now in print, I believe.
An example of what Fred's talking about. I saw In Cold Blood last
night for the first time, because I'm writing about it for an Italian
dictionary. The two leads are very good, but the film is cold and
inert (to borrow an adjective from Hoberman) - they might as well
be acting in a tin barn with the lights off, even in the murder
scene, which is quite well staged and shot. Weird. Does anyone
have anything to say in its defense? (Obviously the lighting is
fantastic.) Is this Brechtian filmmaking...or bad filmmaking? (I
vote for the latter.)
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