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601

From: filipefurtado
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 6:14am
Subject: Re: McCarey, Wilder

> >Would you say those reasons relate to McCarey's humanism
and warmth versus
Wilder's cynicism and derisiveness?

Yes. I remember seeing The Bells of St. Mary's with a friend
and she liked till the last scene, when she start to laugh I
asked to her what's so funny about it and she told me that it
was an absurd that anyone did an scene like that straight.

>The Wilder films I value most are the late ones, which
Sarris has pinpointed
as revealing a more bittersweet, somber side of the
filmmaker.

Couldn't agree more, Sherlock Holmes seems to be a turning
point, which makes sense after The Fortune Cookie. My own
favorite is Fedora, but Avanti! and The Private Life of
Sherlock Holmes isn't far behind. I would say some of this
side is in The Front Page, but it only show in some small
bits with Wilder's early manner more present.

The rise of Wilder's popularity is a phenomenon that
interests me, many filmmakers on the Less than meets the eye
section of The American Cinema had had a rise of reputation
on the 80's which seems natural reaction of they've been very
attack before (attacks that were itself reactions from
thei've being overrated early). But Wilder's is something
different, I think he's better respected today than in the
50's (ok, he isn't that popular in more auteurists circles,
but I know some that put him pretty high). I'd say Wilder's
films isn't that better than Wellman's, but if there's a new
Wellman cult, I haven't heard of it. So i guess that there's
something in Wilder's manner that made people very receptive
of it (and most "Wilder is god" cinephiles didn't care to the
late films or Love in the Afternoon or even Ace in the Hole).

Filipe

---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
602

From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 7:00am
Subject: Re: McCarey, Wilder

And a welcome to the board from me, too, Filipe -- it's nice to see
you here. And it's very cool that three of the 5 people with whom
your list has the most affinity at YMDB are also members of this
board.

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "filipefurtado"
wrote:

> The rise of Wilder's popularity is a phenomenon that
> interests me, many filmmakers on the Less than meets the eye
> section of The American Cinema had had a rise of reputation
> on the 80's which seems natural reaction of they've been very
> attack before (attacks that were itself reactions from
> thei've being overrated early). But Wilder's is something
> different, I think he's better respected today than in the
> 50's (ok, he isn't that popular in more auteurists circles,
> but I know some that put him pretty high).

I think part of the reason for the rise in Wilder's popularity
starting in the 80s is that he was so quotable; because of his bon
mots and wilingmess to dish people with whom he worked, his
interviews during the last two decades of his life made him an
endearing figure to a lot of people, who then sought out his movies
(not so much the more interesting later ones, but the
certified "classics," such as Sunset Boulevard and Double
Indemnity). The fact that he was one of the last links to
the "Golden Age of Hollywood" -- and a very articulate one
at that -- also helped his reputation. In short, as an old man,
Wilder was very adept at selling Billy Wilder.

And, of course, the superficial nastiness of Wilder's films struck a
chord with contemporary viewers at a time when he could no longer get
a movie deal. I've always thought Wilder should be celebrated as a
writer rather than as a director, and I would have preferred to see
Mitchell Leisen direct his scripts over the years.

As opposed to Wilder, McCarey was generally mischaracterized as a
sentimentalist. One reason, I suppose, is that his best-remembered
films in the 60s and 70s deal with priests and nuns, and also starred
Bing Crosby, who, to baby boomers couldn't possibly have seemed any
less cool (which was also a mischaracterization).

Still, Once Upon A Honeymoon is much more outrageous than anything
Wilder ever did, and Six Of A Kind and The Awful Truth are much
funnier than Some Like It Hot, which to me is probably the most over-
rated comedy of all time. McCarey died relatively young, three
decades before Wilder, and wasn't around in the 70s when there was a
resurgence of interst in early filmmakers, through such vehicles as
Schickel's The Men WHo Made The Movies on PBS. Even when there was
an uptick in interest in An Affair To Remember a decade ago due to
Sleepless In Seattle, a McCarey revival didn't materialize.

-- Damien
603

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:32pm
Subject: Re: Wilder

> It's pretty amazing, isn't it? On a first viewing, you think that Wilder
> might take some of the jokes too far and become crass about them - like with
> Juliet Mills' weight problem or Lemmon having to switch clothes with the guy on
> the airplane. But he never does. There's a serenity behind the comedy and also
> a genuine affection for the characters.

In a way, he does take some of the jokes too far, at least for my taste.
But Wilder keeps returning to that feeling hanging in the air of that
film, that paradise-at-the-end-of-time feeling that the characters seem
just as aware of as the director. The atmosphere manages to hold the
different elements in place. - Dan
604

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:44pm
Subject: Re: Wilder

> The rise of Wilder's popularity is a phenomenon that
> interests me, many filmmakers on the Less than meets the eye
> section of The American Cinema had had a rise of reputation
> on the 80's which seems natural reaction of they've been very
> attack before (attacks that were itself reactions from
> thei've being overrated early). But Wilder's is something
> different, I think he's better respected today than in the
> 50's (ok, he isn't that popular in more auteurists circles,
> but I know some that put him pretty high). I'd say Wilder's
> films isn't that better than Wellman's, but if there's a new
> Wellman cult, I haven't heard of it. So i guess that there's
> something in Wilder's manner that made people very receptive
> of it (and most "Wilder is god" cinephiles didn't care to the
> late films or Love in the Afternoon or even Ace in the Hole).

To some extent Wilder's films fit the tone of today's cinephilia better
than they did the tone of auteurist cinephilia in the 60s and 70s.
Auteurists took Wilder down for being nasty, cruel, vulgar, cynical,
etc. I get the feeling that cynicism goes down a little better in
today's filmgoing zeitgeist.

I agree that the late Wilders and LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON aren't big
titles for today's Wilder fans, but I think ACE IN THE HOLE is. The
sheer outrageousness of the film's attitude seems to earn it a lot of
points with Wilder fans. - Dan
605

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:52pm
Subject: Re: McCarey

> McCarey died relatively young, three
> decades before Wilder, and wasn't around in the 70s when there was a
> resurgence of interst in early filmmakers

I think it would have taken more than longevity to make McCarey popular
today. The 30s films (and AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, interestingly, thanks
to a nostalgia element) play pretty well for modern audiences, but as
McCarey wandered off into his private world in the 40s and 50s, he
revealed aspects of his personality that now seem dated. This is no
criticism: I think McCarey is one of the ten or so greatest filmmakers.
But there's a culture gap to be crossed before GOING MY WAY, THE BELLS
OF ST. MARY'S, GOOD SAM, or MY SON JOHN can work the way McCarey wanted
them to work. - Dan

606

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:18pm
Subject: McCarey, Wilder, Hawks

Putting Pants on Philip is pretty key. I like McCarey better, too,
but I think the Wilder/McCarey comparison is interesting for the
theory of auteurism: Wilder certainly has all the earmarks of an
auteur, and I'm not sure that cynicism should be considered an
esthetic flaw. I think whatever problems I have with the films may
have to do with a lack of dialectic between script and film -
although all the recent research indicates that Wilder was as
slapdash as Hitchcock about finishing the script before shooting and
sticking to it.

Personally, I like the late films, but see no discontinuity with the
early ones; I think he's formally subversive from Major and the Minor
on, and I think The Front Page is one of the most important films of
the 70s - for one moment of madness (maybe 6 months) I preferred it
to His Girl Friday. But that's just me. Anyway, the comparison is
interesting there, too - not just with Friday, but with Ball of Fire,
which Wilder scripted. Do we all like it better than Some Like it
Hot? Why? (That's not a rhetorical question.)

Hawks said to Bogdanovich: "Climaxes bore me, and I think they bore
the audience, too." Would that a few contemporary "auteurs" had read
that line.

607

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 4:04pm
Subject: Re: McCarey, Wilder, Hawks

> Anyway, the comparison is
> interesting there, too - not just with Friday, but with Ball of Fire,
> which Wilder scripted. Do we all like it better than Some Like it
> Hot? Why? (That's not a rhetorical question.)

Yes. Because Hawks directed it! I dunno, BALL OF FIRE isn't my
favorite Hawks, but SOME LIKE IT HOT just seems pretty obvious and
lip-smacking - it doesn't make me laugh, and the vibe isn't pleasant to
me. I haven't seen it in years - I keep meaning to revisit it.

> Hawks said to Bogdanovich: "Climaxes bore me, and I think they bore
> the audience, too." Would that a few contemporary "auteurs" had read
> that line.

This is pretty cool. I like to go on and on about how Hawks opposes a
genre background to a realistic foreground, but for Hawks it's just,
"I'm bored - let's not drag this out." - Dan
608

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 6:26pm
Subject: Hawks and Hitchcock

for Hawks it's just,
"I'm bored - let's not drag this out." - Dan

And always the audience: "I think audiences are bored with
climaxes, too." Like Hitchcock, Hawks thought constantly about
the audience.

We hear that, but until you've plowed through 900 pages of
transcript overhearing Lehman and AH plotting Family Plot, you
can't imagine how much of an obsession it was. "Will they get
it?" is Hitchcock's most often-asked question, while making
films that are among the most profound and multi-layered ever
made. And, "They've already seen this - they'll be bored."

Hawks wasn't just attributing his own intelligence to audiences.
He spent a lot of time after his layoff in Europe post-Pharoahs
watching tv to seee what audiences had been seeing in his
absence. That's how he came to the conclusion that they'd seen
all the stories a million times and were bored with them, so he'd
blow off story altogether (witness the repetitions of the Rio Trio)
and focus more than ever on character.
609

From:
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 2:43pm
Subject: Re: Wilder

In a message dated 7/18/03 10:34:14 AM, sallitt@p... writes:

> But Wilder keeps returning to that feeling hanging in the air of that
>film, that paradise-at-the-end-of-time feeling that the characters seem
>just as aware of as the director. The atmosphere manages to hold the
>different elements in place.

That's a great way of putting it.

A friend of mine once compared watching a Coen Brothers film to having your
fingers covered with newsprint and having the strong urge to wash them. While
I like Wilder much, much, much more than the Coens, I kinda get that sensation
too when it comes to Wilder at his most corrosive. That doesn't mean that I
don't like some of those corrosive films (just as I have a fondness for
"Raising Arizona"), but that there's an overall sensibility at work which takes
effort on my part to get past.

But films like "Love in the Afternoon" or "Avanti!" seem to foreground a
different side of Wilder which makes all the difference.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
610

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 7:23pm
Subject: Wilder and the Coens

They are very, very similar, and my problems with the Coens are
much like my problems with Wilder, even the ones I like - The
Front Page is virtually a Coen brothers film in advance.

Again, I think it has to do with the role of the script, which the
Coens adhere to religiously, while Wilder was looser.
Nevertheless, the relationship of film to script feels very
constrained in Wilder, and in that sense Wilder's relationship to
the art of mise en scene is problematic. As is that of the Coens,
despite the evident mastery -- in both cases.

For the most part, however, I get the feeling that the anti-Wilder
contingent just plain doesn't LIKE the scripts, and that seems to
be true of the anti-Coen contingent as well. (I don't like the
Runyonisms, but apart from that I think they write well.)

The other big influence on the Coens is another auteur who is
considered bad by many in this group, Kubrick. In Raising
Arizona POE and OEP (from Strangelove) appear on the wall of
the gas-station restroom where Cage's buddies go to grease
their hair after getting out of jail. As previously stated, I have no
problems with Kubrick.
611

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 7:35pm
Subject: Re: Wilder and the Coens

> For the most part, however, I get the feeling that the anti-Wilder
> contingent just plain doesn't LIKE the scripts

I have at times played with the idea that a lot of Wilder's films fall
apart on their own terms because of something about the direction that
doesn't quite engage with the script, or the plan. According to this
theory, a script plus a surface attitude doesn't come together into a
directorial orientation.

But I was probably just justifying a distaste. There's a mix of really
smart and really low-brow in Wilder that doesn't appeal to me. There's
something about him that's as prurient or crude or eyebrow-waggling as
directors come. And this quality goes hand in hand with really sharp,
pointed, witty dialogue, even if it often verges on cruelty.

So, basically, I think you're right. I mean, I like Albert Lewin, and
you could argue that his direction doesn't always grab hold of his
script ideas. But I like his mind and his sensibility, and I therefore
forgive a lot.

I don't think of the Coens and Wilder together. I like some Coen films
and am baffled by the others, but in a way they're all about form, even
if that form might be a detached commentary on the form of films of an
earlier era. - Dan
612

From:
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:42pm
Subject: Kubrick, Coens

In a message dated 7/18/03 3:25:35 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:

>The other big influence on the Coens is another auteur who is
>considered bad by many in this group, Kubrick. In Raising
>Arizona POE and OEP (from Strangelove) appear on the wall of
>the gas-station restroom where Cage's buddies go to grease
>their hair after getting out of jail. As previously stated, I have no
>problems with Kubrick.

What's interesting here is that I consider myself a big Kubrick fan. But I
have the feeling that the Kubricks I like the most ("Barry Lyndon," "Eyes Wide
Shut") are not the ones the Coens have been influenced by (probably "Dr.
Strangelove" and "A Clockwork Orange"), or even the ones most people associate with
Kubrick. My enthusiasm for the latter category of Kubricks has waned a
little bit - I think there's a lot about ACO which is absolutely paper-thin,
despite the obvious facility - though I remain committed to the more humanist side
of the director. BL moves me as few things in cinema do, and the shot, for
example, of the sheep pulling the casket of Barry's son moves me as few shots do;
here, Kubrick is a master of cinematic space as a vehicle of emotional
expression on the level of anyone in film history.

We might need to work towards a redefinition of Kubrick, as I think he's
saddled with adjectives ("cold," "sterile," "unemotional," "sardonic") which are
certainly applicable to some of his films, but not at all useful in talking
about others - and it's those other films which make him a great filmmaker for me.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
613

From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 9:05pm
Subject: Re: Hawks

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:

> This is pretty cool. I like to go on and on about how Hawks
opposes a
> genre background to a realistic foreground, but for Hawks it's
just,
> "I'm bored - let's not drag this out." - Dan

That certainly sheds some light on how the end of many of his films
are (while often great, as in the case of THE CROWD ROARS and others)
all business, no dilly-dallying. This isn't unusual in itself, I
guess, but putting these Hawks films next to a lot of conventional
stuff from today and his period, a director feels he has to spend ten
minutes on action, a brief interlude (with flashbacks and funny
music) in which a primary character has to exorcise some personal
demon and overcome his fear for this and that, another five minutes
on the characters getting their interpersonal conflicts resolved,
another minute or two taking care of "Wait a minute, officer, arrest
these two, they're not really married!" and "No, arrest *that* man,
he's been bothering us the course of the entire picture!" type stuff,
and a bit more cleaning-up-small-details stuff, and then stage
everything for a decent dolly-back, and then a clever closing line,
and *then* you can go.

Hitch's NORTH BY NORTHWEST, of all great movies, is the one that most
clearly say to the audience, very suddenly, "Okay, show's over, get
the fuck out."

Jaime
614

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 9:10pm
Subject: Let's talk structure

Deleuze gets it right about Kubrick - any Kubrick film is about a
brain which malfunctions, whether it be an individual brain or a
group-mind. That situates him in the forefront of modern cinema
- what Deleuze calls the cinema of the brain, along with Resnais
and others - and outside dichotomies like feeling/unfeeling.

The Coen films are about family values (kinship relations) vs.
mercantile values (exchange relations). A common trope is the
person who becomes exchangeable: the body in Blood Simple,
the babies in Raising Arizona, Bernie in Miller's Crossing, etc. I
think their most honest film is Fargo, where McDormand's last
line - about how they'll always need the little stamps when the
big ones change price (the constant usury of inflation) - explains
why the chief of police in this little town still has a black and white
tv.

From early to late, Wilder made films about wiseguys (detectives
or reporters or swindlers or...) undone by love. Always a critical
theme, by the time of Sherlock Holmes - but probably even
before - this essentially sentimental idea had become a way of
unspringing classical cinema. I see his late films as being much
more about film than those of the Coens or Kubrick. The
symbolic figure of the castrated metteur en scene - so important
in Renoir and Godard - is omnipresent in Wilder, and is
essentially a modernist structure.

What all three (counting the Coens as "one") have in common:
modernism. In the case of Wilder, modernism that is
contemporary with that of his European contemporaries, Renoir,
Ophuls, Bresson. Modernism in the sense I'm talking about was
a way of reshaping the conventions of classical cinema into a
critique of society, which becomes somewhat routinized in
European and American cinema by the 70s. The mannerist
cinema of Kubrick and the Coens developed in reaction to that,
beginning in Kubrick's case with Dr. Strangelove.
615

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jul 18, 2003 9:16pm
Subject: Endings

I absolutely agree with Jaime's characterization of conventional
filmmaking. I don't know how today's audiences avoid falling
asleep: the climaxes are so PREDICTABLE!

I'm studying Objective Burma, and a comparison with the
shooting script is enlightening - Walsh cut a lota nd changed
some important things. I thought of it reading Jaime's post
because he eliminated a wisecracking conversation between
Flynn and George Tobias in the glider at the end. In the film Flynn
hands his superior the dogtags, says "a handful of Americans,"
and we go right to the group boarding the glider and end one
shot later with the plane flying down, snagging it and flying off
with it.
616

From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Jul 19, 2003 6:46am
Subject: Street Angel, Osaka Elegy, (and Sunrise)

SPOILERS FOR THE THREE FILMS

My thoughts were on Mizoguchi's 1936 film OSAKA ELEGY pretty much all
the way through STREET ANGEL tonight, because they're both about
women who are damned by their efforts to do care for their loved
ones. STREET ANGEL is a fine film, but I couldn't help but think
that Mizoguchi's film criticizes the phony moral high ground that
Borzage (through his characters and situations) take against
prostitution/delinquency, etc. STREET ANGEL requires the viewer to
despise not just the profession of prostitution but those who partake
in it, so that the drama hinges on the idea that Angela can either be
pure (non-prostitute) and "an angel," cue all the angel metaphors, or
impure.

Isn't this kind of psychotic? Can you imagine the viewer who chooses
to share Gino's 'moral high ground' when he tries to murder Angela?
(Would he have looked like a Frankenstein's monster, as George
O'Brien does in two similar scenes in SUNRISE?) I mean, she's saved
because she's able to convince Gino that she never *actually* engaged
in prostitution, that she remained (as per traditional-Christian-male-
dominated-society guidelines) pure at heart, worthy of angel-ness.

There's a single moment, a flash, in OSAKA ELEGY where we seem to be
called upon to look at Ayako with disgust. (It's towards the end of
the movie, when, just before sitting down to dinner, she spits out
her cigarette butt.) This moment is striking as well as alien to us;
it seems to have been projected from the emotional spaces of the
father, sister, and brother characters. The moment seems functional,
so that when Ayako is rejected by her family, it "makes sense"; i.e.
she has become repulsive to them, and we know what it looks like.
Mizoguchi does not say, "Audience: Ayako is repulsive." We get a
glimpse of the perspective of these characters, but we don't assume
it, ourselves.

That's another difference - when Ayako's boyfriend rejects her after
the police tell him what kind of woman she is, how he doesn't want to
be associated with her because it will mean trouble, it's part of the
film's tragedy. The rift created by The Man's attempted murder of
his wife in SUNRISE is tragic. But the possibility of Angela's
murder at Gino's hands, there's no way it could have happened. And
if he had strangled her, it would have been because she really *did*
the prostitution, really *did* steal the money, etc., so the message
would have been: she had it coming. The sympathy we feel for Angela
(with Gaynor's eyes, we become Pavlov dogs; the emotional space she
creates in STREET ANGEL seems to emit some kind of powerful
radiation) would be void, because her status as 'angel' would have
been revoked.

But basically, the worldview that Borzage seems to endorse in STREET
ANGEL gets torn to shreds in the Mizoguchi film, I think. Especially
considering the traditional-patriarchal society that Borzage seems to
condone, at least in that film.

That said (and by saying that, I'm not ignoring or setting aside my
objection), it's a helluva film. For long stretches I was looking at
it using Camper-ish methods (or, I hope I was), Borzage's seems to
pretty explicitly articulate a character's state of mind through the
mise-en-scene in a lot of interesting ways, and it's not redundant,
it's like an act of putting on a few extra layers, highlighting,
emphasizing: why have the heroine simply double over with grief (at
the sight of her dead mother) when you can also put a great big half-
arch that describes the curve of her collapse. That's the most
obvious example - that and the match-lighting/reunion scene, where
the amount of light in the frame matches Gino's feelings in finding
his long-lost love. The shape of the mise-en-scene in STREET ANGEL
is also very mystical, but in a manner that sets it apart from a
Murnau films, particularly SUNRISE. I don't quite know how to put
this, but Murnau's films often resemble glorious dreams or anxious
nightmares, but they also seem to exist outside of the cinema, or at
least the rest of cinema.

Borzage's films (those that I've seen, like this one, THE MORTAL
STORM and SEVENTH HEAVEN) are dreams and nightmares that are "of
film." I don't mean cinematic versus un-cinematic, but rather that
they seem to inhabit (or perhaps they helped to create it?) the world
of Kino! Cinema! Romance! Tragedy! that engenders a kind of mysticism
that's unique to pre-talkie melodramas. The final moments of STREET
ANGEL, I don't know, they seemed to float around in the ether, and
they were very stirring, although not emotionally devestating in the
way that the endings (and other parts) of MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW,
L'ATALANTE, or SUNRISE were.

Jaime
617

From: filipefurtado
Date: Sat Jul 19, 2003 9:01am
Subject: Re: Wilder

I agree a little with everyone. I would say that Wilder's
cynicism make it harder for me to relate to some of his
films, but I like other cynical filmmakers and there's some
Wilder's films (One, Two, Three...) were this doesn't bother
me. So there must be some other problem.

Damien, I agree that Wilder is a better writer than director.
And I would also add that as a director he sometimes lacks
the conviction to pull off some of his ideas as writer (not
exactly the best ones but probably some of his most
personal). Let's put in another way, I can easily think of
him having the idea from the condom joke in Skin Deep, but I
can't see him put it in a film or if he include it, would
probably attempted to make it feel tamer. Most of his films
seems to me to he suffer something like it between the
writing and the directing. Take Double Imdenmity. Wilder's
very self-aware, studied direction ended making it feels even
more derivative and lifeless than the run-of-the-mill
thrillers from whom it's supposed to be a more serious
version. This is not the only problem with Wilder`s
direction, but it's part of it.

Peter, I agree with you on Kubrick (whick reminds me that I
must see Barry Lindon).

Filipe

---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
618

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Jul 19, 2003 4:04pm
Subject: Re: Street Angel, Osaka Elegy, (and Sunrise)

> My thoughts were on Mizoguchi's 1936 film OSAKA ELEGY pretty much all
> the way through STREET ANGEL tonight, because they're both about
> women who are damned by their efforts to do care for their loved
> ones. STREET ANGEL is a fine film, but I couldn't help but think
> that Mizoguchi's film criticizes the phony moral high ground that
> Borzage (through his characters and situations) take against
> prostitution/delinquency, etc. STREET ANGEL requires the viewer to
> despise not just the profession of prostitution but those who partake
> in it, so that the drama hinges on the idea that Angela can either be
> pure (non-prostitute) and "an angel," cue all the angel metaphors, or
> impure.

I'm a little rusty on both films, but.... despite the fact that one is
critical of society and the other accepts it, you could see them both as
taking a blunt instrument to the audience. Sometimes Mizoguchi can be
as manipulative in his choice of story and direction of actors as Capra:
there's a kind of enthusiasm in his depiction of victimization that rubs
me the wrong way. (Contrast with MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, where the
malevolent impulses of many of the characters are scaled down and human.)

The Borzage film hasn't got a point to make about society, but it also
manages to lean pretty hard on its plot turns, to the point where the
people start to represent big allegorical forces, designed to teach us a
lesson we already know. On the whole, I much prefer Borzage's
perspective on society to Mizoguchi's: he is naturally able to absorb
large and small upheavals while maintaining a small-scale focus on the
emotional states of individuals or couples. But STREET ANGEL doesn't
work for me nearly as well as the two films to follow, THE RIVER and
LUCKY STAR.

I don't mean to deny the amazingly delicate and vibrant perspective that
Mizoguchi's camera and rhythm can impart, but he has other tendencies
that can work against that delicacy for me. - Dan
619

From: rpporton55
Date: Sat Jul 19, 2003 7:18pm
Subject: Film Criticism and the Intenet

I am currently planning to write the next Cineaste editorial on
film criticism and the Internet and assume it's OK to mention this
site. (The Cinemasters moderator once told me he didn't want
his site named in an article). Any other suggestions are
welcomed.—not only names of sites but the significance of the
phenomenon as a whole.. Is it more egalitatrian or merely
another resource? What are the strengths and limitations etc.?
The Senses of Cinema forum ("Permanent Ghosts) of a few
years ago is quite useful. I've also been alerted to Adrian Martin's
new webzine, Rouge. Although only the title is up now, it seems
as if it will be replete with "content" soon.

Yours from a Luddite at heart,

Richard Porton
620

From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 3:22am
Subject: Re: Film Criticism and the Intenet

Richard,

I'll answer for myself, and as co-moderator, and trust that others will
chime in if they disagree.

One of the big motivations on my part for joining Peter, who first
suggested it, in founding this group was to have a group whose posts
were publicly archived on the Web.

The other Yahoo! group which some of us belong to, whose moderator has
asked us not to even name it (hence Dan's neat locution, "That Other
Group"), used to be publicly archived but has long been closed. As I
understand it a major reason for closing it was that members wanted to
feel free to speak negatively about critics, including making negative
personal remarks, without fear of having that get back to their targets.
Thus members of that group are asked to also not disclose posts in it to
outsiders. But for my part, if I were going to answer a query about, oh,
say, Robert Mulligan, and type out some thoughts about him, I want my
brilliant insights to be publicly available -- that's the great thing
about the Web. So being public was a central motivation for our group's
founding -- since it was my main motivation, and I was one of the three
actual founders. And indeed, I have created an index page at
http://www.fredcamper.com/M/a_film_by.html in which I index groups of
our posts and mention topics, in the hope that google will index the
whole thing. And google has already found my index page, though so far
it doesn't seem to have indexed most of the posts themselves. But at
least for now if someone does a Web search for any of the topics
mentioned my index page, including the names of various directors, they
will get that index page, and it is of course linked to our group's site.

Part of my idea is that Web searches will occasionally get us new
members, and we have already gained one new member that way. Originally
I was only going to index the names of directors whose work I like, but
when I saw that google wasn't finding the actual posts right away, I
started indexing most names, and I'm delighted that our new member, who
has already contributed much of value, found us by searching for the
name of a director I might not of included in our original plan.

Meanwhile any and all of our members are encouraged to index our posts
on their own sites, stressing topics they like or posts they think are
especially worthy. The more links google finds to a post, the higher it
ranks it.

This is all a very long way of saying that *of course* you can mention
our group and our url, and indeed, if you mention our group, please *do*
include our url.

It is my view of copyright law that the copyright to our posts is owned
by the people who write them, so a long quotation from a post would
require permission from the writer, and I hope all will adhere to that.

About 'Net film groups, I've had a look at the Yahoo! group "MovieHead"
(which it seems accepts anyone) and found it to be all over the map. You
might have a look at the Criterion DVD forums, by the way. As you can
see from our Statement of Purpose, the idea was to keep our group
relatively focused and serious; note that I've disabled "polls" and we
have a no-flame rule. And I think it has succeeded. So far Peter and I
have had to do just about nothing as moderators, but I think the fact
that we've got some great people in the group, plus the fact that people
know that the moderators are there, will keep us on track.

One great thing about such groups is that they connect people of like
interests who wouldn't otherwise be connected, geographically dispersed
and of very different ages -- by the time your article appears, I think
you'll be able to say that we have members as young as 15 and as old as
62 (at the moment, or as of a few weeks ago, it was 14 and 61). Such
groups can be a great resource for exchanging views and information. I'm
also a member of the listserv FrameWorks, devoted to avant-garde film
and whose posts are archived on the Web (see
http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/index.html), and have belonged since 1996,
almost since its founding. In the first few years I got into a few nasty
flame wars, and observed a few others (someone nicknamed the group
"FlameJerks" at one point), but it's been pretty well behaved for quite
a while, and has proven a great exchange information and views. Just the
other day, I learned about a never-released Brakhage film on FrameWorks
- and I'm in the middle of working on a Brakhage filmography! Also, I
also suspect that my presence on FrameWorks may have helped me get a
lecture invitation or two.

One problem with such groups is that they can prove incredibly time
consuming, even if one only just tries to read all the messages. Behind
in all sorts of work, I have to have been nuts to have gotten involved
in this one. Related to this is that the posts in these groups, and I
speak of my own too, are rarely as concise, well written, carefully
argued, or interesting, as a well-reasoned and well edited article or
book. So one has to be careful about not spending too much time on such
things.

Some day soon a kid in Kansas, or Scotland, or South Africa, or
somewhere else, is going to see and love "Detour" and "Day of the
Outlaw" on television, get curious about the directors, and do a google
search for "Andre de Toth" and "Edgar G. Ulmer" hoping to learn more. At
the moment, the first hit for such a search is my index page for this group.

- Fred
621

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 3:45am
Subject: NYC: Kansas City Confidential

It's last minute, but: Karlson's KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL is showing
tomorrow at 4:30 at the Y at 53rd and Lex. Screenings there are usually
16mm, in a room with not-so-comfortable chairs and poor acoustics. - Dan
622

From: rpporton55
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 4:03am
Subject: Re: Film Criticism and the Intenet

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:

>
> I
> One of the big motivations on my part for joining Peter, who
first
> suggested it, in founding this group was to have a group
whose posts
> were publicly archived on the Web.
>

>i
>
> This is all a very long way of saying that *of course* you can
mention
> our group and our url, and indeed, if you mention our group,
please *do*
> include our url.
Fred,

I appreciate your efforts to make the group's posts accessible.
Despite the virtues of the film magazines which still exist (and
are realtively non-academic), they are inevitably exclusionary.
For various reasons, Film Comment, Cineaste, Cinema Scope
etc. have specific agendas and can't publish everything. One
advantage of a group like this is its egalitatrianism: no one
condescends to anyone else and aging critics can learn from
precocious 18-year olds.
While in-jokes, gossip, and arcane slang can be fun in some
respects, there is also an adolescent quality to groups which
thrive on this sort of thing. And that can be irritating. I will certainly
take a look at the groups you mention and will certainly cite this
group's url in the magazine. But I am only writing an 800-1000
word editorial and must be succinct and certainly can't be
comprehensive. Still, perhaps someone will treat this subject at
greater length eventually. (I understand that Rosenbaum and
Martin's forthcoming "Movie Mutations" deals with this subject,
although perhaps only tangentially.). I've been mulling over the
prospect of writing a book on cinephilia and its many
mainifestations. If I ever do, I'd certainly include a chapter on
cinephilia and/on the Internet.
Richard

Richard
623

From:
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 0:23am
Subject: Top "10" Project

Hello all,

I know many of us here are self-confessed movie list addicts. (It can't be
mere coincidence that Joseph McBride's book of movie lists is one of the most
paged volumes in my collection!) So in that spirit, I've decided to utilize
the "Files" section of our group's home page and create a document compiling
group member's year-by-year Top "10" lists. I put "10" in parenthesis since I
know many of our lists exceed that number, but the term is useful as shorthand.

I encourage all of you to submit to me, via private e-mail, your Top "10"
lists, whether they date back to the 1900s (as I know Dan's do) or only a year or
two ago. In terms of the always-confusing matter of determining a film's
release date, I intend to use the IMDB as a reference.

Finally, to anyone on this board who has never indulged in this business, I'd
encourage you to take a stab at it. It's great fun going back in history and
determining your favorite films from each year. After compiling my list for
1959, I'm of the opinion that it's something like the greatest in history -
okay, maybe not the greatest, but, come on, "Day of the Outlaw," "North by
Northwest," "Anatomy of a Murder," "The 400 Blows," "Ride Lonesome"!

Cheers,

Peter
P.S. - If anyone has any questions about this, please address them to me in
private e-mail, so as not to clog up the board.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
624

From: George Robinson
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 5:01am
Subject: Re: Top "10" Project

A splendid notion. I'll send mine to you shortly.
George Robinson

Alas, where is human nature so
weak as in a bookstore?
-Henry Ward Beecher
----- Original Message -----
From: ptonguette@a...
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2003 12:23 AM
Subject: [a_film_by] Top "10" Project

Hello all,

I know many of us here are self-confessed movie list addicts. (It can't be
mere coincidence that Joseph McBride's book of movie lists is one of the most
paged volumes in my collection!) So in that spirit, I've decided to utilize
the "Files" section of our group's home page and create a document compiling
group member's year-by-year Top "10" lists. I put "10" in parenthesis since I
know many of our lists exceed that number, but the term is useful as shorthand.

I encourage all of you to submit to me, via private e-mail, your Top "10"
lists, whether they date back to the 1900s (as I know Dan's do) or only a year or
two ago. In terms of the always-confusing matter of determining a film's
release date, I intend to use the IMDB as a reference.

Finally, to anyone on this board who has never indulged in this business, I'd
encourage you to take a stab at it. It's great fun going back in history and
determining your favorite films from each year. After compiling my list for
1959, I'm of the opinion that it's something like the greatest in history -
okay, maybe not the greatest, but, come on, "Day of the Outlaw," "North by
Northwest," "Anatomy of a Murder," "The 400 Blows," "Ride Lonesome"!

Cheers,

Peter
P.S. - If anyone has any questions about this, please address them to me in
private e-mail, so as not to clog up the board.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

625

From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 5:11am
Subject: credits fun

I caught a few minutes of that great television show LEAVE IT TO
BEAVER on TV yesterday and thought what a great counter-double-bill it
would make with Ray's BIGGER THAN LIFE. But at least according to the
imdb, Jerry Mathers (Beaver) actually has an uncredited role in the
Ray--intriguing...

Patrick
626

From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 5:55am
Subject: Re: credits fun

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ciccone" wrote:
> I caught a few minutes of that great television show LEAVE IT TO
> BEAVER on TV yesterday and thought what a great counter-double-bill
it
> would make with Ray's BIGGER THAN LIFE. But at least according to
the
> imdb, Jerry Mathers (Beaver) actually has an uncredited role in the
> Ray--intriguing...

Patrick, as a Leave It-phile, I too immediately thought how Bigger
Than Life in so many ways seemed like the dark side of Beaver -- in
effect a melodrama in which Eddie Haskell took over the role of Ward
Cleaver. But I'm 99 percent sure that Jerry Mathers is not in the
film; I seem to remember reading some place that his role was cut.
627

From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 6:18am
Subject: Re: Top "10" Project

Peter, as you know, I am an inveterate list maker so I love the idea
of your Top 10 Project.

I would like to sugest one thing for clarity and consistency, which
is that we consider a film to be from the year it was first shown
publicly anywhere in the world -- whether commercially or at a
festival -- and not the year it was first shown in, say, New York or
Los Angeles.
628

From:
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 10:45am
Subject: Re: Re: Top "10" Project

I'm really pleased to hear that there's some enthusiasm for this project!

>I would like to sugest one thing for clarity and consistency, which
>is that we consider a film to be from the year it was first shown
>publicly anywhere in the world -- whether commercially or at a
>festival -- and not the year it was first shown in, say, New York or
>Los Angeles.

I think that's a good suggestion - and it's how I compile my own lists - but
I don't want to ask folks who have already made lists and use other criteria
(NY/LA, for example) to change their lists. I'd only suggest that anyone who
is going to start fresh specifically for this project to go by the criteria
Damien names above - but it's still only a suggestion. Eric C. Johnson's Top 10
page - which collects the lists of critics like Kehr, Sarris, Rosenbaum, etc.
- simply posts the critic's lists without asking them to readjust or change
anything; I'd like our project to do the same.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
629

From: nzkpzq
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 2:55pm
Subject: Re: Film Criticism and the Intenet

Dear Richard Porton,
This is Mike Grost in Michigan.
You asked for feedback on the Internet and criticism.
Here are my own personal experiences.
None of my critical works would be published today, were it not for
the Internet.
They include:
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection
(http://members.aol.com/mg4273/classics.htm). This is an attempt to
write a history of prose mystery fiction, in the style of Andrew
Sarris and The American Cinema.
Size of site: 700 hardback pages.
Total home page visits since 1996: 186, 000.
Visits per day: Over 100.
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).
Size of site: 800 hardback pages.
Total home page visits since 1999: 70, 000.
Visits per day: 65.
Classic Film and Television (http://members.aol.com/mg4273/film.htm),
auteurist film criticism.
Size of site: 500 hardback pages.
Total home page visits since 1996: 70, 000.
Visits per day: 35.
I know that many Internet users are reaching the articles on the
sites directly through search engines, instead of going through the
home pages. So the actual readership of the sites is probably roughly
double the above numbers. This means that they have a combined
international readership of several hundred thousand people.
Reviews. Only one of the sites has ever been reviewed in print: the
mystery site was reviewed (favorably) by the distinguished mystery
historian, Jon L. Breen. This is the ONLY print reference to the
sites I have ever seen. Film books, printed on paper, that are much
shorter, less scholarly and less serious than the sites are regularly
reviewed in print. My sites are books: they are book length works of
original scholarship. But they are never treated as books by
reviewers.
Bibliographies. Print bibliographies never include any of the
articles on my sites. The articles are never referenced by articles
in print film journals.
Let's give an example. The film web site has an article on Fritz Lang
(http://members.aol.com/mg4273/lang.htm). It covers 25 films, and is
over 80 hardback pages long (39, 000 words). Although it has been on
the web since 1998, it is not listed in any recent books or print
film journal articles on Fritz Lang. It is a serious work of
scholarship, with many original comments on Lang's work. There are
other substantial articles on the site, about Walsh, Minnelli,
Antonioni, Tourneur, Mann, Ulmer and others. None of them are ever
cited in print.
Readership: The sites generate huge quantities of e-mail. Almost all
of it is from regular people: non-academic readers who are interested
in mystery fiction, film or comics, and who are serious about
educating themselves and others on these topics. Only rarely do I
hear from academics or professional writers of print books on these
subjects (exception: Australian academics regularly write). Fred
Camper is one of the few film scholars who have written over the
years. The e-mail from regular readers is thoughtful, constructive,
literate, highly informed and scholarly. Example: just received a
letter from a reader recommending films by Shohei Imamura and
Kobayashi.
I feel frustrated by the systematic boycotting of Internet work by
the scholarly community. It seems to be regularly ignored by scholars
who publish in print. I would welcome any criticisms of the contents
of my scholarly books on the Internet. But I do believe that simply
ignoring scholarly research because it appears on the Internet is
inappropriate, anti-intellectual behavior.
One doubts if my politics are alienating readers: they are typical
liberal but non-Communist politics of the Democratic Party. Also, I
am not academically trained in Film Studies. My Ph.D. is in
mathematics from the University of Michigan. Still, one suspects that
the barriers here relate to the Internet versus print, pure and
simple.
Hope this gives you some perspective.
630

From: nzkpzq
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 4:22pm
Subject: Re: Top "10" Project

My top films of the year are already available on my web site at:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/zten.htm)
They currently range from 1975 to 2002.
The plan is to extend them back to the 1890's, but haven't had time!
Mike Grost
631

From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 4:38pm
Subject: Varia

Lists - Wouldn't know where to begin.

Beaver - I'm an Ozzie and Harriet man, myself.

Internet - I cited Internet sources in Hitchcock at Work and more
recently in an article on Suspicion being published in the Hitchcock
Annual. In the latter case, Sidney Gottlieb, the editor, encouraged
me to do so.
632

From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 4:40pm
Subject: ps on Internet

When I wrote a review of Three Kings for Cahiers I cited Dan's
Internet essay on David O. Russell, but botched the spelling of the
address. I don't see any difference between Internet sources and
scholarly journals, except that Internet sources are more varied and
frequently better.
633

From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jul 20, 2003 6:12pm
Subject: Re: Re: Film Criticism and the Intenet

Mike (also for Richard, and any others interested in film and the 'Net),

I was interested in your comments, and was upset to discover that I'd
neglected to add a link to your site to my links page, an omission I've
just corrected. I'm getting over 200 daily visits, a large number of
them driven by the Brakhage stuff on my site, so maybe the link will get
you a few more. Getting other critics to link to your site too, if you
haven't already done so, will help..
Still 35 visits a day is good: if only one of them each day gets
something significant out of it, that's great.

Something that may also interest Richard, since it relates to film and
the 'Net: The day Brakhage died, I got the same email that about 600
other FrameWorks subscribers got announcing his death. Without really
thinking about why I was doing so, I turned the email into an html page,
put it on my site, and put an announcement of his death on my main page
as well. I had already put up information on his illness, his move to
Canada, the disposition of his films and papers, et cetera. A month or
so later I took a look at the Web page my Web hosting company creates
showing hits to my site for that month, which anyone else can view at
http://www.fredcamper.com/webstats/usage_200303.html Scroll down to the
bar graph. Brakhage died on the afternoon of March 9, and as word
filtered out I started to get more hits that day. In the next few days
the number of hits I got exploded tremendously. For some reason I found
this very moving. Around the world, people who knew Brakhage and his
work, did a Web search on google, found my links page (which comes up
first under "Brakhage"), and from there could access the information
described above. As means of disseminating specialized information
quickly, I think the Web can't be beat.

There are reasons, some of them legitimate, why writers are reluctant to
reference Web sites. One is that urls can change. That's why I purchased
my own domain name: I figured I could get it into books and magazines
without worrying about it ever changing. AOL is presumably not going to
start changing urls on people, but capitalist enterprises are
fundamentally unstable, as we know: even giant companies can go out of
business.

There's a good reason why bibliographers don't routinely include Web
resources. Let's say I were doing a bibliography of Brakhage. I would
want to include every published article about him or by him that I could
find, and I wouldn't necessarily have to read them in order to decide:
if it got by the editors of the Podunk Daily News, that would be good
enough for me, and in part because the very fact that it was published
means it has entered the world in some kind of significant way, but also
because the fact that an editor published it at least in theory assures
some kind of control. The Web, as you know, is different. Anyone can
post anything they want, with only very limited exceptions. I wouldn't
include "Joe's Brakhage page" without reading it. And that itself takes
a lot of work.

I still remember the very first Web search I ever did seeking
information, just after I got online in 1996. For an art review I was
working on, I wanted to verify the facts, which I already was pretty
sure I had correct, of the Katyn Forest Massacre -- an event early in
World War II, before the German invasion of the USSR, in which the
Russians occupying Eastern Poland systematically murdered thousands of
Polish army officers in a forest. The very first hit I got was this
incredible anti-Semitic site being run off of a server in Poland that
ascribed the whole thing to the Jews. That was a good lesson in not
accepting anything on the Web at face value. And while it's certainly
true that a lot of garbage does make it by print editors, I think the
average quality of print publications is higher than Web pages on any
particular topic.

Also, when you have your own Web site and are writing just for it, you
don't have to edit. And like it or not, most of us need editors, and we
write more concisely when we know we have to get it by an editor. Even
though "Spiral," the publication I originally wrote my "Trouble With
Video" article for, was not going to change anything, I made it fairly
concise; my Web update to that article rambles on and on, and since
there are no deadlines and no editor breathing down my neck, I did get
around to fixing it. Then a print publication wanted to reprint the
original article; it needed some kind of update, and I wrote a new and
better and shorter one for them, which I still haven't gotten around to
posting.

I haven't read nearly enough of your site. I've liked the things I've
read. I wouldn't hesitate to cite something. But there are reasons why
people are reluctant to cite Web sites in general.

- Fred
634

From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Mon Jul 21, 2003 1:23am
Subject: Re: Film Criticism and the Internet

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
> There's a good reason why bibliographers don't routinely include Web
> resources. Let's say I were doing a bibliography of Brakhage. I would
> want to include every published article about him or by him that I could > find, and I wouldn't necessarily have to read them in order to decide:
> if it got by the editors of the Podunk Daily News, that would be good
> enough for me, and in part because the very fact that it was published
> means it has entered the world in some kind of significant way, but also
> because the fact that an editor published it at least in theory assures
> some kind of control. The Web, as you know, is different. Anyone can
> post anything they want, with only very limited exceptions. I wouldn't
> include "Joe's Brakhage page" without reading it. And that itself takes
> a lot of work.

For what it's worth, I can attest that the first time I ever did a Web search for either Sirk or Tourneur, or both, I was taken to Michael Grost's site. That it was an appropriate place to be would, I think, have been quickly evident to any knowledgeable bibliographer.
635

From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Mon Jul 21, 2003 5:17am
Subject: Re: Film Criticism and the Intenet

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "rpporton55" wrote:
> I am currently planning to write the next Cineaste editorial on
> film criticism and the Internet

While I wouldn't want to make too much of this, I've come across the occasional surprisingly thoughtful review -- along with a lot of not-so-thoughtful ones -- posted on the IMDb. And clicking on the writer's name or nickname can reveal hundreds of other reviews, a virtual oeuvre.

For example, recently found this of THE GOOD THIEF:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0281820

One of this writer's hundreds of other reviews, by the way, is of a film called THE AUTEUR THEORY. Have we seen this?
636

From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Mon Jul 21, 2003 5:34am
Subject: Re: Re: Film Criticism and the Intenet

Jess wrote:

> One of this writer's hundreds of other reviews, by the way, is of a
> film called THE AUTEUR THEORY. Have we seen this?

If you look up the DVD for this on Amazon, its "Better Together"
suggestion has it paired with EXODUS (30 bucks for both films). Now
there's someone pushing auteurism! (but who, etc.?)

Gabe
637

From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Aug 22, 2003 4:12am
Subject: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)

A little lull in our group has allowed me to get caught up and now I've
got some thoughts and responses to some recent posts.

First, about Wilder, though not really about Wilder per se:

Dan wrote (post 604), "Auteurists took Wilder down for being nasty,
cruel, vulgar, cynical, etc."

And then later (617), "I would say that Wilder's cynicism make it harder
for me to relate to some of his films, but I like other cynical
filmmakers...so there must be some other problem."

And Dan goes on to nail it: " Wilder is a better writer than director.
And I would also add that as a director he sometimes lacks the
conviction to pull off some of his ideas as writer."

And Bill (606): "Wilder certainly has all the earmarks of an auteur, and
I'm not sure that cynicism should be considered an esthetic flaw. I
think whatever problems I have with the films may have to do with a lack
of dialectic between script and film."

I was glad to see the direction this discussion took. A more typical
discussion among non-auteurist, or not-sufficiently auteurist, "film
buffs" would go something like, "Well, I like cynicism," and "Well, I
don't," and they would wind up in a head-butting contest over personal
preferences.

What this is leading me to is to make a statement about taste. I'm
against it.

That is, I don't think there are any identifiable qualities that make a
film good or bad, and when people talk about liking one quality over
another, I think they're asserting their own selves, rather than opening
themselves up to a variety of possibilities. The ideal viewer is as
emptied-out of an intrusive self as possible, possessed of what Keats
called "negative capability," open to whatever vision a work might have
to offer. The whole point of art, for me, is to take me out of myself,
to let me see through others' eyes. And it can only really do that when
it's a fully developed vision, not a collection of themes and motifs.

I'm not claming perfection in regard to the limitations of taste. All
other things being equal, I prefer melodramas to musicals, and greatly
prefer Vincente Minnelli's "Some Came Running" to his "Gigi," though I
would claim that was for "objective" aesthetic reasons I'm sure my love
of melodrama plays a part in the preference. On the other hand, I think
"Brigadoon" is greater than Minnelli's "The Bad and the Beautiful"
(Warren Sonbert, the late great avant-garde filmmaker whose images grace
our home page, also made a film of that title), and Minnelli's "The Bad
and the Beautiful" is a great film. So a musical can sometimes be much
better than a melodrama by the same director.

Here's what I think about taste: that almost all tastes are
"topologically" equivalent to answering the old "What's your favorite
color" question by saying, "I prefer blue to red." In other words, they
represent an imposition of the self on the world in a way that closes
off the self to some of the possibilities of the world.

The conceptual artists Komar and Melamid have made a seriously hilarious
project out of creating "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" paintings. They
poll the people of a particular country as to what they most like and
least like in paintings and then produce composites. Americans like blue
rural scenes and don't like red abstractions, for example. See
http://www.diacenter.org/km/homepage.html for more.

How this all relates to auteurism is that I think a great director can
"put over" any point of view. It's an overused example by now, but an
extreme one: I think Leni Reifenstahl's "The Triumph of the Will" is a
great film. It's an evil film, it's a scary film, its superman ideology
would be evil even if it were Roosevelt rather than Hitler who emerged
from the plane at the opening, but part of what's great about it is that
in its creeepily beautiful way it makes me see the fascist within me.
Great direction can transform any material by infusing it with ecstatic
beauty. Wilder is very good at creating moods, which is why I enjoy some
of his films (and I haven't seen all that many), but he never gets
beyond projecting a mood, he never creates a form, a space, a way of
seeing and thinking that's complete in itself. After you appreciate it,
and are moved by it, *then* you can judge it, disagree with it, argue
with it, and I think on a deeper level than just rejecting it for being
cynical or insufficiently humanist or whatever.

To the charge that this last description is an "identifiable quality," I
have two answers: it inhabits a far more general category than cynical
or not cynical, and there are films I like that it don't quite fit as
well, including the "anti-cinemas" of Isou and Lemaitre.

Anyway, this leads me to Jaime's post about Mizoguchi's "Osaka Elegy"
and two other films (616) and Dan's reply (618). I'm mostly sympathetic
to Jaime's perspective, and was before the paragraph in which he refers
to my "method," in that my "taste" is for the tougher and more ambiguous
and less judgmental position. But this *is* a taste, it seems to me, and
it's fine to have that taste in life, but as a film viewer it's
limiting. A film that expresses contempt for a whole profession, or even
for its own characters, and asks its viewers to do the same, is in no
way a priori inferior to a film that does the opposite. Some of
Chabrol's films come to mind. My favorite is perhaps "The Champagne
Murders," and though I don't remember it all that well, I think the
major characters are indeed pretty contemptible, or at least pretty
ridiculous, and the final images express that attitude pretty clearly.

Whether we feel sympathy or disgust for characters; whether a director
asks us to judge them or refrains from doing so -- none of these make
for a good or bad film. My "taste" might be for ambiguity and
contradiction, but all that really counts in terms of aesthetic merit
and effect is how great the direction is -- oops, and the fabulous
acting of course, or else Patrick will start repeating again that I
ignore acting. But "direction" includes "acting," it includes the
relationship of the mise en scene to the script, it includes the
relationship of a camera angle to a performance, it includes the way (to
recall my early example) John Wayne's performance infuses one's
emotional reaction to the reframing on the cactus rose at the end of
"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" (or to his wandering off in the final
image of "The Searchers"), it everything except the projection and the
popcorn really, and I *never* eat popcorn during movies.

About Mizoguchi: while I may not share Dan's reservations (which sound
like more "taste" to me), it seems that Mizoguchi's great interest in
and sympathy for Japanese prostitutes was not exactly that of an, um,
disinterested observer. I heard somewhat reliably, though third-hand,
that Yoda Yoshikata, his longtime scriptwriter whose reminiscences of
Miso-san were published in Cahiers in the late 1960s, had said, while
leaving this out of the print edition, that in fact Mizoguchi was a
regular patron. Furthermore, his wife's madness during World War II was
due, Mizoguchi believed with intense guilt, to syphilis that she caught
from him after he transmitted it from one of the women he was, uh,
studying for his next film. (I don't know much about syphilis, so maybe
the story is a little suspect -- can a carrier infect someone and remain
asymptotic for a decade after? And no, I'm not trying to start a
gigantic thread about *that*.)

So maybe Mizoguchi doesn't take the moral high ground because already he
was down and dirty with the "women of the night." On the other hand, for
all I know Borzage was a top client at Madame Orgasmo's in Bel Air.

Anyway, I can't be too critical of anyone who tries to use "Camper-ish"
methods! But though style can articulate scenes, films can also (and
great films usually do also) have a general style, one which pervades
every frame. The whole of "Street Angel," and much of Borzage's best
work, have that "floating around in the ether" quality Jaime noticed in
the ending.

Since my old friend John Belton and the "Hollywood Professionals" series
have come up separately here, I should mention his volume on Hawks,
Borzage, and Ulmer; his writings on the first two owe at least some debt
to my slightly earlier writings on them.

A key to "Osaka Elegy" can be found in the last shot. That's the image
that the whole film had been leading up to. There's a simple scheme in
Mizoguchi that greatly oversimplifies his work but can help get you
started in seeing it: the historical films argue for the unity of
individuals in a traditional cultural context (as in the end of
"Ugetsu," even though tragic, or even in the end of the devastatingly
sublime "Sansho Dayu," though infinitely more tragic), while the modern
prostitute films are about the utter alienation of the individual from
all context, about individualism itself as a tragedy.

Speaking of "Sansho Dayu," and to leave all this anti-taste stuff behind
in favor of a personal "taste" story, my eyes don't tear up often during
films, and I could probably count the number of times it's happened in
my whole life on my fingers and toes, but the last time I saw "Sansho,"
maybe my tenth viewing in all but my first in 35mm, about four or five
years ago, my eyes were moist almost from the beginning, but
"worse," for much of the film I felt like I was on the brink of really
losing it, and the whole thing was just so totally devastating that I
could barely see it. That's happened to me with maybe only five or six
films ever (among them "Ordet," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,"
parts of "Dog Star Man" on early viewings), and this is the only time in
the last decade or so, and perhaps was the most intense of all of them.
My reaction left me so wiped out that I certainly had no interest in
analyzing the film formally, though I'm sure its form was part of what
made it so overwhelming. My candidate for the most moving piece of sound
in any movie would be the mother's wailing cry after her lost children:
"Anzu....Zushio....Anzu...Zushio."

- Fred
638

From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 6:29am
Subject: Question

While everyone is busy with their lists, a thought that has been
eating away at me in silence floated up to consciousness as I was
reading a fascinating comment in a recent post on the portrayal of
grief in film: What can be done to eliminate - immediately - the
cliche of having a character scream "NOOOOOOOOO!" when someone gets
killed? I would almost be willing to lay down my own life, if I
thought it would do any good, to call public attention to the sheer
toxicity of this cliche, which is an offense both to cinema and to
the human race. I think the widespread use of this convention shows
how far we have sunk in American film. Nobody EVER does it in foreign
films. It really, really sucks.
639

From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 6:30am
Subject: Question

While everyone is busy with their lists, a thought that has been
eating away at me in silence floated up to consciousness as I was
reading a fascinating comment in a recent post on the portrayal of
grief in film: What can be done to eliminate - immediately - the
cliche of having a character scream "NOOOOOOOOO!" when someone gets
killed? I would almost be willing to lay down my own life, if I
thought it would do any good, to call public attention to the sheer
toxicity of this cliche, which is an offense both to cinema and to
the human race. I think the widespread use of this convention shows
how far we have sunk in American film. Nobody EVER does it in foreign
films. It really, really sucks.
640

From: Damien Bona
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 8:06am
Subject: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> > I was glad to see the direction this discussion took. A more
typical
> discussion among non-auteurist, or not-sufficiently
auteurist, "film
> buffs" would go something like, "Well, I like cynicism," and "Well,
I
> don't," and they would wind up in a head-butting contest over
personal
> preferences.
>
> What this is leading me to is to make a statement about taste. I'm
> against it.
>
> That is, I don't think there are any identifiable qualities that
make a
> film good or bad, and when people talk about liking one quality
over
> another, I think they're asserting their own selves, rather than
opening
> themselves up to a variety of possibilities.

It's not Wilder's "cynicism" that makes me generally less-than-
enthusiastic about him. Rather, it's the lack of conviction he has
in conveying that cynicism. He's essentially a sentimentalist in
acerbic clothing, and his misanthrophy comes across as very glib.

The director with whom my own sensibility most matches up is probably
Leo McCarey, but that doesn't mean that there aren't filmmakers I
love whose world views are diametrically opposed to mine. For
instance, Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité is one of my favorite films of
the last several years, but Dumont's despairing attitude is alien to
me. What matters is the skill and ingenuity and forcefulness with
which his attitude is exppressed. It seems pretty self-evident that
any point of view can form the basis of a great movie.

't love filmmakers
641

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 1:32pm
Subject: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)

The email seems not to have arrived at its destination, so I'm resending.

> Dan wrote (post 604), "Auteurists took Wilder down for being nasty,
> cruel, vulgar, cynical, etc."
>
> And then later (617), "I would say that Wilder's cynicism make it harder
> for me to relate to some of his films, but I like other cynical
> filmmakers...so there must be some other problem."
>
> And Dan goes on to nail it: " Wilder is a better writer than director.
> And I would also add that as a director he sometimes lacks the
> conviction to pull off some of his ideas as writer."

I think that this last quote may belong to Filipe instead of me.

> That is, I don't think there are any identifiable qualities that make a
> film good or bad, and when people talk about liking one quality over
> another, I think they're asserting their own selves, rather than opening
> themselves up to a variety of possibilities.

You could substitute "act" or "person" for "film" in the above sentence,
couldn't you? I don't exactly mean this to be argumentative: I think it
may be true, actually, though not a comfortable thing.

> I *never* eat popcorn during movies.

It's a good way to keep awake when you're pushing your limits. One
kernel at a time.

> So maybe Mizoguchi doesn't take the moral high ground because already he
> was down and dirty with the "women of the night."

But it seems to me that Mizoguchi consistently takes the moral high
ground toward somebody. Like, for instance, all those Eitaro Shindo
characters.

> Since my old friend John Belton and the "Hollywood Professionals" series
> have come up separately here, I should mention his volume on Hawks,
> Borzage, and Ulmer; his writings on the first two owe at least some debt
> to my slightly earlier writings on them.

I'm pretty sure that Belton cites your writing on Borzage, and that
that's where I first heard your name, many years ago.

- Dan
642

From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 2:11pm
Subject: A carrier can infect someone unknowingly.

(I don't know much about syphilis, so maybe
the story is a little suspect -- can a carrier infect someone and remain
asymptotic for a decade after? And no, I'm not trying to start a
gigantic thread about *that*.)

A carrier can infect someone unknowingly. A man may be asymptomatic,
then have genital pain severe enough to seek treatment which can offer
a cure. In the meantime, the woman is less likely to have symptoms
until syphilis spreads beyond pelvic inflammatory disease, often to the
brain and not easily treated.

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 02:18 AM, a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
wrote:

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> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
>
> There are 4 messages in this issue.
>
> Topics in this digest:
>
> 1. Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)
> From: Fred Camper
> 2. Question
> From: "hotlove666"
> 3. Question
> From: "hotlove666"
> 4. Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)
> From: "Damien Bona"
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 23:12:04 -0500
> From: Fred Camper
> Subject: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)
>
> A little lull in our group has allowed me to get caught up and now I've
> got some thoughts and responses to some recent posts.
>
> First, about Wilder, though not really about Wilder per se:
>
> Dan wrote (post 604), "Auteurists took Wilder down for being nasty,
> cruel, vulgar, cynical, etc."
>
> And then later (617), "I would say that Wilder's cynicism make it
> harder
> for me to relate to some of his films, but I like other cynical
> filmmakers...so there must be some other problem."
>
> And Dan goes on to nail it: " Wilder is a better writer than director.
> And I would also add that as a director he sometimes lacks the
> conviction to pull off some of his ideas as writer."
>
> And Bill (606): "Wilder certainly has all the earmarks of an auteur,
> and
> I'm not sure that cynicism should be considered an esthetic flaw. I
> think whatever problems I have with the films may have to do with a
> lack
> of dialectic between script and film."
>
> I was glad to see the direction this discussion took. A more typical
> discussion among non-auteurist, or not-sufficiently auteurist, "film
> buffs" would go something like, "Well, I like cynicism," and "Well, I
> don't," and they would wind up in a head-butting contest over personal
> preferences.
>
> What this is leading me to is to make a statement about taste. I'm
> against it.
>
> That is, I don't think there are any identifiable qualities that make a
> film good or bad, and when people talk about liking one quality over
> another, I think they're asserting their own selves, rather than
> opening
> themselves up to a variety of possibilities. The ideal viewer is as
> emptied-out of an intrusive self as possible, possessed of what Keats
> called "negative capability," open to whatever vision a work might have
> to offer. The whole point of art, for me, is to take me out of myself,
> to let me see through others' eyes. And it can only really do that when
> it's a fully developed vision, not a collection of themes and motifs.
>
> I'm not claming perfection in regard to the limitations of taste. All
> other things being equal, I prefer melodramas to musicals, and greatly
> prefer Vincente Minnelli's "Some Came Running" to his "Gigi," though I
> would claim that was for "objective" aesthetic reasons I'm sure my love
> of melodrama plays a part in the preference. On the other hand, I think
> "Brigadoon" is greater than Minnelli's "The Bad and the Beautiful"
> (Warren Sonbert, the late great avant-garde filmmaker whose images
> grace
> our home page, also made a film of that title), and Minnelli's "The Bad
> and the Beautiful" is a great film. So a musical can sometimes be much
> better than a melodrama by the same director.
>
> Here's what I think about taste: that almost all tastes are
> "topologically" equivalent to answering the old "What's your favorite
> color" question by saying, "I prefer blue to red." In other words, they
> represent an imposition of the self on the world in a way that closes
> off the self to some of the possibilities of the world.
>
> The conceptual artists Komar and Melamid have made a seriously
> hilarious
> project out of creating "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" paintings.
> They
> poll the people of a particular country as to what they most like and
> least like in paintings and then produce composites. Americans like
> blue
> rural scenes and don't like red abstractions, for example. See
> http://www.diacenter.org/km/homepage.html for more.
>
> How this all relates to auteurism is that I think a great director can
> "put over" any point of view. It's an overused example by now, but an
> extreme one: I think Leni Reifenstahl's "The Triumph of the Will" is a
> great film. It's an evil film, it's a scary film, its superman ideology
> would be evil even if it were Roosevelt rather than Hitler who emerged
> from the plane at the opening, but part of what's great about it is
> that
> in its creeepily beautiful way it makes me see the fascist within me.
> Great direction can transform any material by infusing it with ecstatic
> beauty. Wilder is very good at creating moods, which is why I enjoy
> some
> of his films (and I haven't seen all that many), but he never gets
> beyond projecting a mood, he never creates a form, a space, a way of
> seeing and thinking that's complete in itself. After you appreciate it,
> and are moved by it, *then* you can judge it, disagree with it, argue
> with it, and I think on a deeper level than just rejecting it for being
> cynical or insufficiently humanist or whatever.
>
> To the charge that this last description is an "identifiable quality,"
> I
> have two answers: it inhabits a far more general category than cynical
> or not cynical, and there are films I like that it don't quite fit as
> well, including the "anti-cinemas" of Isou and Lemaitre.
>
> Anyway, this leads me to Jaime's post about Mizoguchi's "Osaka Elegy"
> and two other films (616) and Dan's reply (618). I'm mostly sympathetic
> to Jaime's perspective, and was before the paragraph in which he refers
> to my "method," in that my "taste" is for the tougher and more
> ambiguous
> and less judgmental position. But this *is* a taste, it seems to me,
> and
> it's fine to have that taste in life, but as a film viewer it's
> limiting. A film that expresses contempt for a whole profession, or
> even
> for its own characters, and asks its viewers to do the same, is in no
> way a priori inferior to a film that does the opposite. Some of
> Chabrol's films come to mind. My favorite is perhaps "The Champagne
> Murders," and though I don't remember it all that well, I think the
> major characters are indeed pretty contemptible, or at least pretty
> ridiculous, and the final images express that attitude pretty clearly.
>
> Whether we feel sympathy or disgust for characters; whether a director
> asks us to judge them or refrains from doing so -- none of these make
> for a good or bad film. My "taste" might be for ambiguity and
> contradiction, but all that really counts in terms of aesthetic merit
> and effect is how great the direction is -- oops, and the fabulous
> acting of course, or else Patrick will start repeating again that I
> ignore acting. But "direction" includes "acting," it includes the
> relationship of the mise en scene to the script, it includes the
> relationship of a camera angle to a performance, it includes the way
> (to
> recall my early example) John Wayne's performance infuses one's
> emotional reaction to the reframing on the cactus rose at the end of
> "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" (or to his wandering off in the
> final
> image of "The Searchers"), it everything except the projection and the
> popcorn really, and I *never* eat popcorn during movies.
>
> About Mizoguchi: while I may not share Dan's reservations (which sound
> like more "taste" to me), it seems that Mizoguchi's great interest in
> and sympathy for Japanese prostitutes was not exactly that of an, um,
> disinterested observer. I heard somewhat reliably, though third-hand,
> that Yoda Yoshikata, his longtime scriptwriter whose reminiscences of
> Miso-san were published in Cahiers in the late 1960s, had said, while
> leaving this out of the print edition, that in fact Mizoguchi was a
> regular patron. Furthermore, his wife's madness during World War II was
> due, Mizoguchi believed with intense guilt, to syphilis that she
> caught
> from him after he transmitted it from one of the women he was, uh,
> studying for his next film. (I don't know much about syphilis, so maybe
> the story is a little suspect -- can a carrier infect someone and
> remain
> asymptotic for a decade after? And no, I'm not trying to start a
> gigantic thread about *that*.)
>
> So maybe Mizoguchi doesn't take the moral high ground because already
> he
> was down and dirty with the "women of the night." On the other hand,
> for
> all I know Borzage was a top client at Madame Orgasmo's in Bel Air.
>
> Anyway, I can't be too critical of anyone who tries to use "Camper-ish"
> methods! But though style can articulate scenes, films can also (and
> great films usually do also) have a general style, one which pervades
> every frame. The whole of "Street Angel," and much of Borzage's best
> work, have that "floating around in the ether" quality Jaime noticed in
> the ending.
>
> Since my old friend John Belton and the "Hollywood Professionals"
> series
> have come up separately here, I should mention his volume on Hawks,
> Borzage, and Ulmer; his writings on the first two owe at least some
> debt
> to my slightly earlier writings on them.
>
> A key to "Osaka Elegy" can be found in the last shot. That's the image
> that the whole film had been leading up to. There's a simple scheme in
> Mizoguchi that greatly oversimplifies his work but can help get you
> started in seeing it: the historical films argue for the unity of
> individuals in a traditional cultural context (as in the end of
> "Ugetsu," even though tragic, or even in the end of the devastatingly
> sublime "Sansho Dayu," though infinitely more tragic), while the modern
> prostitute films are about the utter alienation of the individual from
> all context, about individualism itself as a tragedy.
>
> Speaking of "Sansho Dayu," and to leave all this anti-taste stuff
> behind
> in favor of a personal "taste" story, my eyes don't tear up often
> during
> films, and I could probably count the number of times it's happened in
> my whole life on my fingers and toes, but the last time I saw "Sansho,"
> maybe my tenth viewing in all but my first in 35mm, about four or five
> years ago, my eyes were moist almost from the beginning, but
> "worse," for much of the film I felt like I was on the brink of really
> losing it, and the whole thing was just so totally devastating that I
> could barely see it. That's happened to me with maybe only five or six
> films ever (among them "Ordet," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,"
> parts of "Dog Star Man" on early viewings), and this is the only time
> in
> the last decade or so, and perhaps was the most intense of all of them.
> My reaction left me so wiped out that I certainly had no interest in
> analyzing the film formally, though I'm sure its form was part of what
> made it so overwhelming. My candidate for the most moving piece of
> sound
> in any movie would be the mother's wailing cry after her lost children:
> "Anzu....Zushio....Anzu...Zushio."
>
> - Fred
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 06:29:54 -0000
> From: "hotlove666"
> Subject: Question
>
> While everyone is busy with their lists, a thought that has been
> eating away at me in silence floated up to consciousness as I was
> reading a fascinating comment in a recent post on the portrayal of
> grief in film: What can be done to eliminate - immediately - the
> cliche of having a character scream "NOOOOOOOOO!" when someone gets
> killed? I would almost be willing to lay down my own life, if I
> thought it would do any good, to call public attention to the sheer
> toxicity of this cliche, which is an offense both to cinema and to
> the human race. I think the widespread use of this convention shows
> how far we have sunk in American film. Nobody EVER does it in foreign
> films. It really, really sucks.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 06:30:45 -0000
> From: "hotlove666"
> Subject: Question
>
> While everyone is busy with their lists, a thought that has been
> eating away at me in silence floated up to consciousness as I was
> reading a fascinating comment in a recent post on the portrayal of
> grief in film: What can be done to eliminate - immediately - the
> cliche of having a character scream "NOOOOOOOOO!" when someone gets
> killed? I would almost be willing to lay down my own life, if I
> thought it would do any good, to call public attention to the sheer
> toxicity of this cliche, which is an offense both to cinema and to
> the human race. I think the widespread use of this convention shows
> how far we have sunk in American film. Nobody EVER does it in foreign
> films. It really, really sucks.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 08:06:40 -0000
> From: "Damien Bona"
> Subject: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>>> I was glad to see the direction this discussion took. A more
> typical
>> discussion among non-auteurist, or not-sufficiently
> auteurist, "film
>> buffs" would go something like, "Well, I like cynicism," and "Well,
> I
>> don't," and they would wind up in a head-butting contest over
> personal
>> preferences.
>>
>> What this is leading me to is to make a statement about taste. I'm
>> against it.
>>
>> That is, I don't think there are any identifiable qualities that
> make a
>> film good or bad, and when people talk about liking one quality
> over
>> another, I think they're asserting their own selves, rather than
> opening
>> themselves up to a variety of possibilities.
>
> It's not Wilder's "cynicism" that makes me generally less-than-
> enthusiastic about him. Rather, it's the lack of conviction he has
> in conveying that cynicism. He's essentially a sentimentalist in
> acerbic clothing, and his misanthrophy comes across as very glib.
>
> The director with whom my own sensibility most matches up is probably
> Leo McCarey, but that doesn't mean that there aren't filmmakers I
> love whose world views are diametrically opposed to mine. For
> instance, Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité is one of my favorite films of
> the last several years, but Dumont's despairing attitude is alien to
> me. What matters is the skill and ingenuity and forcefulness with
> which his attitude is exppressed. It seems pretty self-evident that
> any point of view can form the basis of a great movie.
>
> 't love filmmakers
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
> _______________________________________________________________________
> _
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
643

From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 6:30pm
Subject: To Elizabeth Nolan

Dear Elizabeth,

I am thrilled that we have a female member. Excuse me for not
noticing it before. (Your latest post certainly is an
attention-grabber.) I hope there will be more women joining the
group.

I think it would be silly to pretend to be gender-blind in this
respect. There is a long history of cinephilia being a
nearly-exclusive male practice - one that had relatively little to do
with the general misogyny of the culture - and having lived
through that period, I'm happy to see the beginning of the end of
it. That is part of the theoretical reflection I'd like to see this group
engage in from time to time.

What do you - and the other members of the group - think of this
definition of cinephilia which Serge Daney gave me when we first
met in 1977?: "Images exchanged between men"? He was
thinking of The American Friend, which was released that year.
644

From: rpporton55
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 7:37pm
Subject: Re: To Elizabeth Nolan

This is actually a matter which has perplexed me for some
time. There are of course female cinephiles, but anyone who
has haunted the Museum of Modern Art, Cinematheque
Francaise etc. knows that that the hard-core buff types are
mostly male. When I was doing a bit of research on cinephilia
last year, one critic I spoke to compared an obssesion with film
to the mania for collecting (e.g.,stamps, baseball cards, or a
preoccupation with sports statistics) that you often see in
adolescent boys. Never having been smitten with those
activities, I wasn't completely convinced. Or maybe I'm not a
bona fide cinephile.

R. Porton

Any other thoughts on the matter.
>
>
> I think it would be silly to pretend to be gender-blind in this
> respect. There is a long history of cinephilia being a
> nearly-exclusive male practice - one that had relatively little to
do
> with the general misogyny of the culture - and having lived
> through that period, I'm happy to see the beginning of the end
of

> What do you - and the other members of the group - think of
this
> definition of cinephilia which Serge Daney gave me when we
first
> met in 1977?: "Images exchanged between men"? He was
> thinking of The American Friend, which was released that year.
645

From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 7:59pm
Subject: Re: Re: To Elizabeth Nolan

I appreciated very much Elizabeth Nolan's answer to my implied query
about syphilis, which at least confirms that the story I heard could
have been true, and which also provided information I didn't know about
the disease.

About the question of female cinephiles, there are lots of women who
love cinema; they just don't necessarily gather in the front and sides
of revival screenings before and after films shouting at each other in
odd nasal tones about trading obscure videos or how the print of a rare
Capra being screened next week is going to be. And while there may be
gender differences on "average" -- that is, perhaps there are more male
collectors of a certain type than female collectors -- there are no
rules here: almost any statement you make about "men" is going to be
true of some women, and vice versa.

Seriously: I hope Elizabeth Nolan feels free to *not* answer these
gender questions if she doesn't want to. I mean, a woman should feel
free to participate in our group as a human being, without her gender
being made a subject, or without having to answer questions about
"female cinephiles." If a new member joins and mentions that he's of
African descent, is he going to have to answer a lot of queries about
why there aren't more black cinephiles???

What film discussions could use more of is actual information about the
world, even if it be the world of syphilis, and less time spent by
cinephiles talking about cinephilia (though I admit that like most
subjects, it's a completely legitimate one to research). But after all,
the true subject of great films is the world too, even on the abstract
level I like to defend them on, because they offer models for a human's
vision of how things are, or ought to be, or are feared to be.

- Fred
646

From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 8:52pm
Subject: Re: my question

If a new member joins and mentions that he's of
African descent, is he going to have to answer a lot of queries
about
why there aren't more black cinephiles???

Why not? Isn't it a valid question?
647

From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 9:01pm
Subject: Re: Re: my question

hotlove666 wrote, first quoting me:

>If a new member joins and mentions that he's of
>African descent, is he going to have to answer a lot of queries
>about why there aren't more black cinephiles???
>
>Why not? Isn't it a valid question?
>
>
>
>
It's about as valid a question as for you to ask yourself why you're a
male and a cinephile and what cinephilia has to do with maleness. But
when a new male members posts no one asks him about being male. A woman
makes one post and she's asked about being a woman. Some women will find
this perfectly fine, and be interested to respond, but I know for sure
that other women will take it as hostile, as if they've just entered the
boys' clubhouse and now have to explain what they're doing there. For
most women being a woman isn't *all* of what they are. Women are human
beings too. So are people of all "races" and ethnicities.

- Fred
648

From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 9:10pm
Subject: How a Frenchwoman Sees It

That's why I prefaced my question by saying that it would be silly
to be gender-blind in this case - it's not like joining a gun club. My
apologies if my question offended anyone, but it's an issue I
hope will receive honest discussion - Serge's comment about
American Friend was not made casually!

Recommended reading:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/pierre.html
649

From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 9:24pm
Subject: Re: How a Frenchwoman Sees It

hotlove666 wrote:

>it's an issue I
>hope will receive honest discussion
>
I think it's a legitimate topic for discussion -- I just don't want
Elizabeth Nolan to feel that she needs to engage in the discussion. I
want our group to be open to all who share our interests without their
personae being made into topics.

- Fred
650

From: Damien Bona
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 9:38pm
Subject: Re: my question

In addition to gender breakdown among cinephiles, there's also the
interesting ancillary question of sexual orientation. If you took
100 male cinephiles at random, I'm sure more than 10 -- the supposed
percentage of the gay populace -- would be gay. But would the total
be more than 50? I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised
if it were.
651

From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 10:27pm
Subject: Re: My question

Actually, I am surprised to hear Damien's 50% guesstimate. In
the old days Roger and Howard were the only gay buffs I knew in
NY, and out here the number is more like zero! Daney had to
leave the Cahiers for Liberation (pun intended?) to come out, but
today I'm happy to say there are a number of gay members of the
editorial board at CdC, as well as a number of women. It used to
be one woman at a time - including some brilliant ones: Sylvie
Pierre (see my interview at Senses of Cinema), Daniele Dubroux
(a terrific filmmaker - her Diary of a Seducer is rentable) and
Camille Nevers (the pen name of Sandrine Rinaldi). And I would
insist that each of them brought something precious and special
to the magazine, which Sylvie aptly describes in the interview as
a bunch of guys on a post-68 ego-trip - most of all Daniele, who
arrived during the Maoist period and whose articles (after the
Maoist period ended) were as funny and syubversive as her
films. Hats off to Thierry Jousse for breaking the glass ceiling
when he was editor-in-chief by bringing into the fold Camille
Taboulay (author of a beautiful book on Demy), the extraordinary
Laurence Giavriani, the impentrable Marie-Anne Guerin (mere de
famille and deep film thinker) and my pure-hearted friend Clelia
Cohen, among others. Vive la difference [sic]!
652

From:
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 6:58pm
Subject: Cinephiles

Cinephiles seem a bit different in Detroit than their image in the media.
The biggest gathering place for the showing of art films here is the Detroit
Institute of Arts, which is also our gigantic art museum. The crowds at the
art exhibits and the film screenings tend to overlap. Both are made up of highly
refined, genteel and dignified looking people, of all races. Most of them are
clearly enormously pleased with the opportunity of seeing art and culture,
whether it is a painting or film. They stare with rapt, enthusiastic attention
at everything. People are polite and couteous at all times. The recent
cinephilia movie (which I haven't seen) reportedly included a patron who threw
something at a ticket taker. Our ticket takers are all volunteers here, trying to
promote the arts. Everyone would be shocked and appalled out of their gourds if
anyone harrassed them. They draw highway maps for out-of-towners, help elderly
ladies who are visiting the musem with the aid of walkers, and are general
all-around helpful types.
Some movies do draw more of men or women, of course, just as in commercial
theaters. Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I drew a mainly female crowd, while
Fritz Lang's Metropolis attracted lots of young men, who seemed to be science
fiction fans. The biggest crowd recently came to see Russian Ark. This nearly
packed the gigantic, opera theatre style auditorium. Equal numbers of women and
men were there. People knew they were watching film history being made! It was
very moving.
Mike Grost
653

From:
Date: Tue Jul 22, 2003 7:03pm
Subject: Re: Cinephiles

In a message dated 7/22/03 7:01:20 PM, MG4273@a... writes:

>The biggest crowd recently came to see Russian Ark. This nearly
>packed the gigantic, opera theatre style auditorium. Equal numbers of women
>and
>men were there. People knew they were watching film history being made!
>It was
>very moving.

I had much the same experience when "Russian Ark" played to packed houses at
the Wexner Center for the Arts here in Ohio (it was such a success that it
subsequently played for another three or four weeks at the local art house). At
the screening I attended at the Wex, not only was there very nearly standing
room only, but applause at the end. Definitely a high-point of my recent
filmgoing life.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
654

From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 1:05am
Subject: Re: How a Frenchwoman Sees It

On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 04:10 PM, hotlove666 wrote:

> That's why I prefaced my question by saying that it would be silly
> to be gender-blind in this case - it's not like joining a gun club. My
> apologies if my question offended anyone, but it's an issue I
> hope will receive honest discussion - Serge's comment about
> American Friend was not made casually!

Daney also had comments about being gay and being a cinephile (forgive
the rough translation):

"The cinema, it is childhood, not adolescence. It is a feeling much
more intense, carefree and serious, not to belong to the world, or to
be tolerated there of extreme accuracy. One knows, as of the first
entry at the primary school, in the playground, that there are people
with whom one will not be buddies and others with which one will make a
band with three or four in a corner: they will be the introverts,
perhaps later the homosexual ones - that was the case for me - in fact
the film enthusiasts. Obviously, they will not divide their treasure.
They erudite that they belong to another version of the world or the
mankind. It is not to flee. I never fled. When one is adolescent, kid,
there is full with ways of fleeing, in the fantastic one, the science
fiction, in a better world. The Utopias, police or nuns, never
interested me because I do not have any imagination. I find the world
such as it is formidable. And I find formidable that one let to me live
it without losing too many feathers there, because I did there about
what I wanted. Our idea, it was: 'There will be this world, but it
finally will be lived.' Here is the fuel of my cinephilia."

I like this quote a lot. Of course it doesn't only talk about him being
gay.

On the subject of women cinephiles, this has been explored numerous
times in That Other Group, and for good reason, too. Currently there
are only one or two active female members in a group of 126. I think
discussing this fact is unavoidable for such a large group, but it
would be anyway if the group were still in the 30-40 people range, as
we are.
655

From: Damien Bona
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 3:15am
Subject: Re: My question

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Actually, I am surprised to hear Damien's 50% guesstimate. In
> the old days Roger and Howard were the only gay buffs I knew in
> NY, and out here the number is more like zero!

Interesting. I guess I was basing my estimate on my own circle of
friends. (Though, Bill, for Howard and Roger era, you can also add
Stuart Byron). Of course, when you go from cinephiles to such
subsets of movie buff-dom as Kathryn Grayson cultists or Steve Reeves
aficionados (not to mention when Judy, Bette and Marilyn come into
play), the percentage of gay men will be a lot higher.

On the matter of cinephile demographics: Although most film lovers
tend to be liberals, I have come across a handful of right-wingers
over the years. But I think every auteurist I've known has been far
left (with the exception of that centrist Democrat, Andrew Sarris).
I'm curious if other people have found this to be the case.
656

From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:57am
Subject: Joe's Place, et al

Mike,

The screenings you're describing are arthouse screenings - those
films all played at the Nuart here, and the audiences were similar to
what you describe. Who goes to see Ulmers where you are? I bet it's a
different - and much smaller - group.

Speaking of right-wing, Kael was both right-wing and homophobic when
she was starting out in San Francisco, according to a friend who was
there at the time. I think both tendencies continued surreptitiously
at The New Yorker. When she died Sarris told a jaw-dropping story
about his first meeting with her, when she told him on the phone that
it was all right for him to bring his "lover." Reminds me of my
college film society, which was totaly auteurist, where some guy was
handing out flyers at one screening denouncing the Cahiers du cinema
(this was the early 60s) as a "homosexual cabal."

By the way, did anyone here ever go to Joe's Place in NY while it
still existed? It was in an abandoned building behind the Port
Authority bus terminal. I went there once. It struck me as pretty
right-wing.

In France there were the MacMahonians, who are described by Pascal
Kane in his film Liberty Belle as proto-fascists: that was the bunch
who worshiped Lang, Walsh, Preminger and Losey, and all went to the
Cinema MacMahon. I wasn't there, so I couldn't say. They're famous
for Michel Mourlet's quote: "Charlton Heston is an axiom."

Gabe - Great quote from Daney. I think it's appropriate that his
first collection from P.O.L. (all the writing from the Cahiers
period) was called The House of Cinema and the World. For me the two
things that have always defined the Cahiers are 1) interest in the
relationship between film and other arts (or media) and 2) interest
in the relationship between film and the world. I don't think you
find that in other film magazines to the same extent.
657

From:
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 8:17am
Subject: Politics, Auteurism

Politics: I have been a liberal, centrist Democrat all my life. I have always
been opposed to both Communism and conservatism. I believe in moderate
political approaches, and have a deep ingrained suspicion of radicals of both far
left and far right.
Somehow, my impression was that most of the opposition to auteurism came from
Communism. For example, academic Marxists tend to believe that the idea of
looking at films from an aesthetic point of view is wrong, and that political
analysis of film is the only correct approach. The recent LA Times article about
UC Santa Barbara was an example: the film theorists there stated that their
adherence to Film Theory was grounded in Marxism. Film Theory seems like a
Marxist-inspired attempt to come up with an anti-aesthetic, anti-auteurist
approach to film. By contrast, I am anti-Marxist, pro-aesthetic and pro-auteurist. I
agree with Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema, where he describes Communism
as "totalitarianism" and "sickening". Look at Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. These men
are monsters. Look at what the Communists did in Tibet. I admire the
anti-Communist film Kundun of our other leading auteurist, Martin Scorsese.
My Democratic politics are also linked to my strong, lifelong support for
Civil Rights and full social equality for all racial minorities, women and gays
and lesbians. A consensus is building among all Americans, that we want a
society where everyone is accepted and supported.
Mike Grost
658

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 1:19pm
Subject: Re: Joe's Place, et al

> In France there were the MacMahonians, who are described by Pascal
> Kane in his film Liberty Belle as proto-fascists: that was the bunch
> who worshiped Lang, Walsh, Preminger and Losey, and all went to the
> Cinema MacMahon. I wasn't there, so I couldn't say. They're famous
> for Michel Mourlet's quote: "Charlton Heston is an axiom."

The Positif people certainly saw the whole of Cahiers as a right-wing
religious movement. (Those of you who haven't read Peter Graham's
compilation THE NEW WAVE should really try to find a used copy: it tries
to give the critical context in France at the time. The book includes
several hostile essays from Positif writers, some of which make this
point at great length.) I think this is a defensible viewpoint, at
least before the political landscape started changing in the 60s.
Truffaut's seminal "Certain Tendency" essay seems quite conservative in
some ways, for instance. Rohmer is said to be politically conservative
to this day, though he mostly keeps his own counsel.

A lot of the heritage of auteurism is Catholic. Directors like Renoir
and Rossellini were championed above more socially activist critics
because they evoked certain religion-based values for the early Cahiers
writers. We sometimes forget today how much of film criticism used to
be pegged to a vision of world change, and how odd it seemed when the
Cahiers reserved its highest praise for films that showed life as an
unchangeable force rolling around and over their heroes (and very often
heroines. Note how many auteurist classics are what used to be called
"women's films," and how these films emphasized the world acting upon
people instead of vice versa).

Obviously many political changes have affected the auteur movement over
the years. But I still see some of the old Catholic influence in our
tendency, to this day, to criticize filmmakers who seem bitter, sour, or
cynical, and to praise those who evoke something ineffable about time,
space, the continuity of human existence. - Dan
659

From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 2:57pm
Subject: Dan's Post

Wonderful observations on the roots of auteurism. Positif has always
remained center left, but I don't consider Bazin's Catholicism to be
necessarily reactionary - Catholicism has always had its left
contingent.

Truffaut was as far as I know an agnostic, but it's fascinating how
much of "A Certain Tradition" consists of attacks on anti-clerical
sentiments smuggled into literary adaptations by the Tradition of
Quality. I don't think that was just FT adopting Bazin's point of
view: Films like La Symphonie Pastorale are open to criticism from
both ends of the political spectrum, because their "daring" strokes
are profoundly middlebrow and conservative. Barthes, a leftist, is
very good on this kind of film, too. The inclusion of the
MacMahonians in the Cahiers fold - Michel Mourlet's key polemic, On
An "Ignored" Art - appeared in the Cahiers - was perfectly logical.

So the New Wave started from a shared position of being anti-PC and
viscerally anti-bourgeois. Le Petit Soldat, one of Godard's best
early films, shocked mainstream opinion by taking a rightwing
political operative as its hero - and by portraying certain realities
of the Algerian War in a film at a time when that was verboten.
(Remember that an anti-DeGaulle gag was cut from Breathless before
its release.) And it has always appeared logical from the point of
view of the folks at Positif that he would eventually go off the
rails and become a Maoist: They have never moved.

Nevertheless, when the Daney generation of the Cahiers (led by two
Algerian-born "pied noir" firebrands, Comolli and Narboni) critiqued
the Bazin heritage in the name of Marx, they still could have an
intelligible, fascinating interview with Rohmer, who came from the
same tradition and simply espoused a diferent point of view - an anti-
semiological poiint of view which Godard later came to share, after
his own Maoist engagements were over - he now HATES the whole idea
of "reading" a film, which he feels keeps people from seeing.

So Bazin's mansion has many rooms, and even today I would argue that
Rohmer is one of the few really lucid political filmmakers around, in
both L'anglaise et le duc and The Tree, The Mayor and the
Mediatheque, which was basically an anti-Socialist campaign film. If
you're going to make political films politically, the latter is a
better model than Bertrand Tavernier, whose films (for me) embody
those drawbacks in the Tradition of Quality which Truffaut attacked.

And since we all live in that mansion, I think it behooves us to know
some of the basic things Dan has laid down in his post, with which I
don't disagree: That spirituality - skidding toward religiosity at
the turns - is very much a part of the auteurist heritage, and is
better served by being consciously assumed, or consciously critiqued.
Either way, the view of cinema within which the quarrels take place
will be one where certain basic questions, which I would call
philosophical (the relationship between film and the world, for
example) are being asked - even when we're drawing up lists!
665

From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 3:16pm
Subject: Re: Joe's Place, et al

> When she died Sarris told a jaw-dropping story
> about his first meeting with her, when she told him on the phone that
> it was all right for him to bring his "lover."

Couldn't a "lover" have been a woman too? Maybe not, but even Ed Sikov, in his definitive account of Kael's homophobia in "Citizen Sarris," acknowledges Sarris' own sexual defensiveness at the time. (Sarris' writing could be homophobic too, in a less virulent form.)

Anyway, that story (even given its dramatis personae) always struck me as so bizarre that I wondered if what she really said, over a bad connection, was "mother" -- which I suppose could be taken as an even worse insult.

Praying Yahoo! doesn't post this one six times ...
666

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 3:25pm
Subject: Re: Dan's Post

> I don't consider Bazin's Catholicism to be
> necessarily reactionary - Catholicism has always had its left
> contingent.

I always had the impression that Bazin had left political sympathies.

I wonder if Amedee Ayfre's influence on early auteurist thought is
underrated today. He's an extremely penetrating writer. I believe Tag
Gallagher plays up his influence in his Rossellini biography.

> The inclusion of the
> MacMahonians in the Cahiers fold - Michel Mourlet's key polemic, On
> An "Ignored" Art - appeared in the Cahiers - was perfectly logical.

Some of the famous MacMahon texts seem reactionary without necessarily
seeming political, if you know what I mean. Sometimes Mourlet sounded
as if he wanted to live in a world of noble barbarians and tribal values.

> Nevertheless, when the Daney generation of the Cahiers (led by two
> Algerian-born "pied noir" firebrands, Comolli and Narboni) critiqued
> the Bazin heritage in the name of Marx, they still could have an
> intelligible, fascinating interview with Rohmer, who came from the
> same tradition and simply espoused a diferent point of view - an anti-
> semiological poiint of view which Godard later came to share

Do you know if this interview with Rohmer has ever been translated into
English? I'd like to read it.

> So Bazin's mansion has many rooms, and even today I would argue that
> Rohmer is one of the few really lucid political filmmakers around, in
> both L'anglaise et le duc and The Tree, The Mayor and the
> Mediatheque, which was basically an anti-Socialist campaign film. If
> you're going to make political films politically, the latter is a
> better model than Bertrand Tavernier, whose films (for me) embody
> those drawbacks in the Tradition of Quality which Truffaut attacked.

I feel as you do about Tavernier, but a lot of auteurists seem to be
more favorably disposed to his films. I'm glad he's toned down his
political agenda a bit, but his films still don't interest me much.

THE TREE, THE MAYOR AND THE MEDIATHEQUE is a wonderful film. - Dan
667

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 3:32pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, et al

> (Sarris' writing could be homophobic too, in a less virulent form.)

Yeah, anti-gay comments crop up quite a bit in Sarris's early work.
He's a writer who doesn't seem to have a lot of hatred in him, so I
always want to give him a break, given the time in which he was writing,
not to mention the internal psychosexual dialogue that many film buffs
conduct well into their adult lives. - Dan
668

From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:13pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

What follows is a rather long reminiscence about film viewing in the
1960s and 1970s, which will not be of interest to everyone. And Dan,
since you apparently were connected with film societies at Harvard a
little after I was there, I'd be fascinated to read a similar account
from you.

There have been a few references to New York City screening facilities
in the 1970s so I thought I'd put a few facts on the record for people
who have no idea what is being referenced. I grew up in Manhattan in the
early 60s, with many trips back while I lived in Cambridge,
Massachusetts from 1964-71, and then lived in Manhattan again until
1976, when I moved to Chicago.

Howard and Roger, Howard Mandelbaum and Roger McNiven, were two young
men who lived together and showed films in their apartment(s). When I
first heard about them around 1971 they lived in a small apartment in
the Lower East Side. The rooms were small so the only way they could
show things was with the projector in the entrance hall and the screen
in the kitchen. This gave them a certain amount of "throw" for a larger
than postage-stamp-sized image, but the throw wasn't that long, and it
was hard to let people in once the projector was set up. This all
resonated with me because it's still the case that when looking for an
apartment I look for some combination of rooms that will give me a
decent throw, often a hallway leading to the "living room." Howie and
Roger later moved to a "nicer" apartment in Greenwich Village, on 13th
Street I believe, and then to a loft in the East 20s that had a really
nice throw. There may be a residence I'm forgetting. For a while too
they tried running a 16mm theater off of Times Square. Their first
series was Westerns. It didn't do well and they closed it.

Their taste was largely the Sarris list. They showed 16mm prints. As I
think someone mentioned, they also had three auteurist friends who ran a
film society at the University of Connecticut, and there was a lot of
shuffling prints back and forth. This was all familiar to me from the
film society I ran with friends at MIT and our connections via friends
to the two film societies at the time at Harvard and the one at Yale.
The main way I learned to view films was by having access to 16mm prints
and looking at them multiple times within a few days, often to try to
write program notes. Anyway, Howie and Roger's was a great place to see
obscure things such as 1940s Anthony Mann films, early Cukor, Walsh, et
cetera, that would never get shown in the few places that showed older
movies back then. And it was at that Times Square space that I first
discovered McCarey, having been dubious based my first few, in a
superbly programmed double bill of "Make Way for Tomorrow" and "An
Affair to Remember." There were very few people there; Roger had known
that I hadn't liked McCarey; the theater was at this point clearly
failing. When I came in, Roger's face lit up, and he said, "I'm so glad
you came," and added that this program was his best argument for McCarey
- which it sure was; I was astounded.

At least in their apartment, they charged $1 I believe, I think $1 per
movie (most were double bills) to help defray the rental costs, since
they mostly rented the prints from distributors (though I think some
were shared with the University of Connecticut guys), and the audience
was a mix of genuine auteurists and sometimes-annoying film buff types.
I'll never forget the time when after an early Cukor, literally just
after it had ended, a guy stood up, faced the rest of us (this was in
the Lower East Side kitchen which was very cramped and I don't think
could have seated more than 8 or so), and said, quite loudly, "Does
anyone remember the line about the banana?" (As I recall, no one did.)

And Bill, a.k.a. hotlove, I'd guess the regulars at Howie and Roger's
were maybe a quarter or a third gay. You just didn't know. Maybe one of
them heard you asking Howie, "Why aren't there more gay cinephiles," and
decided he didn't want to get into *that* kind of discussion.

Eventually, Roger and Howie split up. Howie is still going strong and
runs a business selling movie photographs called Photofest. Roger
decided to enroll in NYU Cinema Studies where he suddenly discovered an
interest in avant-garde film that I found a bit unconvincing. He wanted
to become a film professor. Unfortunately, he died of HIV/AIDS.

I went to "Joe's Place" twice. This was more of an older film buff's
place, a kind of grungier version of the long-runningTheodore Huff
Society: both attracted the kind of people who "love old movies," have
fetishes for particular actresses, et cetera. Once I saw a faded print
of Stahl's "Oh What a Beautiful Doll," unseeable otherwise, which didn't
seem too good, but the print was so bad that I can't be sure. The other
time I saw Borzage's "The Big Fisherman." They only showed 16mm. I'd
seen the Borzage once before in a beautiful 35mm studio print, but
except for one scene (the Sermon on the Mount, which is tremendous, and
*very* Borzagean) had thought it not so great, which is why I was
willing to endure another try in 16mm. And "endure" is the word. The
whole floor seemed to be wet -- because the toilet had overflowed! As if
that wasn't bad enough, when the film came on the 16mm anamorphic print
was being projected not fully unsqueezed. (Anamorphic prints: the image
is horizontally squeezed on the film strip by a factor of 2:1 so that a
wide 'Scope image can be fit onto a frame that's close to square. They
require a special projection lens with a cylindrically curved (rather
than spherically curved) element to unsqueeze them.) I was pretty
shocked, and complained. They were quite proud, on the other hand, that
they had found a rare lens that only unsqueezed by a ratio of 1.5:1, in
order to fit the image on their less-than-'Scope screen! I didn't ever
go back.

I should also say that when I lived in New York my viewing of 16mm
prints continued. I had a few collector friends who were generous, and
accumulated a small collection myself, mostly sold off now. One could
often purchase used 16mm prints of great films for $100 or less. A close
friend worked for a 16mm distributor in a suburb and could borrow things
to take home. And NYU professor William K. Everson had a huge collection
that he was incredibly generous in loaning. Occasionally I was able to
loan things to him, which made me feel better about my borrowings.
Having a 16mm print, being able to view it two or three times, was a
great way to "learn." And for me, the difference between a good 16mm and
a good 35mm, especially for a non-'Scope film, was just not that great,
whereas the difference between films on TV with commercials and poor
resolution and 16mm was huge. Remember this was before videocassettes. I
still think TV can't match the unique quality of projected light. A
friend at the time who was just discovering Fuller and others used to
say with amazement that I could just "order up" films to show him by a
director he was interested in. Being able to see multiple great films by
a great director multiple times is my own best argument for auteurism,
with the unconvinced urged to subject their own candidates for "auteurs"
not on my list to the same treatment to see if the work really holds up.

There were "classier" venues too: for a while, the New Yorker theater;
always, the Museum of Modern Art; for a while, the long-since-closed
"New York Cultural Center" had a film program run by my friend Marty
Rubin, where I first discovered the greatness of cartoon auteurs in a
superb series programmed by Greg Ford. All it took, really, was the
right ten Chuck Jones cartoons seen in one sitting, ending, of course,
with the sublime "Duck Amuck." For avant-garde film, there was whatever
venue Jonas Mekas was running at the time, and he was soon joined by
both Millennium Film Workshop and the Collective for Living Cinema, the
latter now closed.

But no account such as this would be complete without mention of 42nd
Street. On a single block of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue,
just adjacent to Times Square, there were ten movie theaters. They had
been "legit" theaters, presenting live theater, originally. They almost
all showed older Hollywood movies. Admission was very cheap, less than
$1 I think, and they attracted a collection of alcoholics, the homeless,
the mentally unbalanced, and other marginal types. They also served, for
budding auteurists, as our cinematheque. There are even scenes in an
early Sonbert film, "The Tenth Legion," showing Warren's friends the
filmmakers Nick Dorsky and Jerry Heiler outside those theaters in the
late 1960s. This is where I first saw "Red River," coming to New York
for it when I was living in Cambridge (my friend Robert used to say I
was the only person in history to have flown into New York for a film on
42nd Street; I never wanted to tell him that on that particular occasion
I had taken the bus). The same theater where I saw "Red River," the
Times Square Theater, showed mostly Westerns; "Rio Bravo" was in their
regular repertoire. I first saw "The Searchers" there at the last show
of the night (it had been preceded by Tashlin's "The Disorderly
Orderly," my first Tashlin!), starting at 1 AM, and it was one of the
first auteurist masterpieces I'd ever seen. This would have been in
1964, and an important part of that viewing was my sense that this was a
film that *nobody* outside a few American cultists took seriously, yet
it was so obviously great that the way I saw it and the place I saw it
in seemed an important commentary on official film culture at the time.

When the last show of the night ended in one of those theaters, almost
immediately attendants would go noisily up and down the aisles yelling
"show's over" or something, banging on the chairs, in order to wake up
those who used it as a place to sleep. This was not a good thing to have
happen at the end of "The Searchers," but it contributed to the sense of
only being able to see a masterpiece in a "bad" venue.

These theaters were pretty grungy. You did not want to try to use the
men's room if you could avoid it. You could sometimes hear a woman yell
something like, "Take your fingers out of there." A friend of mine saw a
guy piss on the seat in front of him without getting up. Another friend
heard the greatest line of all: "You're sorry? You're sorry? You piss on
my girlfriend and all you can say is you're sorry???" They often sold
refreshments during the movie, with people walking up and down the
aisles calling out "ice cream" or whatever. Some theaters had a policy
of not turning the lights all the way down, presumably for security
reasons, but I think sex sometimes happened anyway, though I never saw
that. And the audience could be noisy: they totally *loved* the rape
scene in "Play Dirty," but loved it even more when a gunshot put a stop
to it, to their credit. Projection was less than perfect, to put it
charitably. But these were 35mm prints of great films. When I came to
New York I usually took a walk down both sides of the street on arrival
(especially if arriving by bus, because the bus station was adjacent) to
both see what was playing and what was coming from the posters in their
tiny lobbies.

Other cities had similar but smaller scenes. I remember a theater in
Boston called the "Publix." And Chicago, before I moved here, had
something called the "Clark," where local auteurists could see many many
films.

Then around 1973 I heard for the first time in a 42nd Street theater a
discussion behind me about Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller between some
guys around my age, mid-20s. Then I knew that auteurism was reaching
critical mass. And oddly, I was annoyed: "my" scene was being invaded,
or something.

What's amazing is that the city later used the police power of the state
to seize the land under "eminent domain" to "clean it up" and offer
"culture" such as Disney crap. Real estate interests, and the New York
Times, whose building is nearby, had long campaigned to "clean up" Times
Square. But the street had infinitely more real culture then than it
does now. And I prefer the life of the former street too, with its mix
of junkies, transvestites, prostitutes, transvestite prostitutes,
crooked street gamblers, runaways, and undifferentiated homeless types
of all ages and races, a scene that on a lively night was infinitely
more interesting and more disturbing than the most elaborate of
Fellini's concoctions, to the tourist-friendly environment of today.

- Fred
669

From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:25pm
Subject: Varia

I have a vague recollection that the Rohmer interview is in the BFI
collection of the Cahiers in the late 60s/early 70s, edited by Nick
Browne, I wouldn't bet on it. The interview coincided with the
release of My Night at Maud's.

Mourlet's writing does have that Milius-y feel to it. Biette thought
he was influenced by Valery's The Method of Leonardo da Vinci.
In any case, there's no point in trying to just read Mourlet out of
the Movement - Godard is still quoting him (and attributing the
quote to Bazin!) in Histoire(s) du cinema, and the debate over
Lang and Hitchcock (i.e. who's better) is still going on in the
pages of Trafic, and elsewhere.

The Kael anecdote is indeed bizarre, but so was Kael, more
than her fans ever knew. I was recently flipping through old New
Yorkers on sale at a thrift shop, looking for issues that had stuff
worth a quarter a pop. Initially I would always look at the Kael
review, but I eventually stopped because the criticism was so
bad. Not just unpleasant, not just contrary to my ideas -
godawful! She reminds me of the unnamed woman in Lady
Chatterly's Lover who lived in the village and always put the
wrong words on people and things.

Fred, your post is fascinating and very necessary - for one thing,
there's a lot to be said about Marty, who was the gutsiest
programmer ever to occupy a minstream venue. (The First
Avenue Screening Room was also rather something.) I'll tell my
own Joe's Place story later. But my recollection is that it was
John Hughes who frightened everyone at Roger and Howard's
out of revealing their lifestyle choices. Now I'm wondering, "Who
the hell...?"
670

From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:49pm
Subject: Re: Varia

hotlove666 wrote:

>But my recollection is that it was
>John Hughes who frightened everyone at Roger and Howard's
>out of revealing their lifestyle choices.
>
Bill, I'm glad you seem to have taken my jibe with the good humor with
which it was intended.

I think John Hughes frightened a lot of different people in a lot of
different ways. He scared me just by the way he would overuse the word
"Brechtian."

Fred
671

From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 5:53pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

Additional to what Fred wrote about the New York scene in the old
days: crucial to me was the Bleecker Street Cinema. It was there
that I got a solid dose of the French New Wave in a few weeks in
1965. Plus I think any number of other key films in those heady days.

I lived in Philly at the time and it had something similar to 42nd
Street. There was a long and narrow theater called the News
(presumably an old newsreel theater) that showed three films for 25
cents. One often would be a nudist camp movie, but the others could
be anything. I saw a 35mm print of CEILING ZERO there. Where's that
print today?

Other downtown theaters slipped Losey (EVA, for example) and Duvivier
into the mix.

Today, Joe's place would have to be my apartment, and I think Dan and
Bill would confirm that it's not a bad venue in which to see a film,
if a little hot in the summer.

Re the rara avis the right wing auteurist, I know such a person.
He's pretty far right, and I've had a falling out with him, but he's
extremely intelligent and even came up with some revelatory and
complex theories of his own.
--

- Joe Kaufman

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
672

From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 6:00pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

Joseph Kaufman wrote:

>Additional to what Fred wrote about the New York scene in the old
>days: crucial to me was the Bleecker Street Cinema.
>
The Bleecker was interesting as a trend indicator. In the mid-60s it was
all French New Wave -- it seemed like they showed "Jules et Jim" and/or
"Shoot the Piano Player" every other weekend, often to trendy Greenwich
Village types responding with knowing "cool" laughter, and it was there
when an older guy laughed at me as I wrote "Rio Bravo" and the like into
their request book.,A few years later, maybe around 1970, they were
showing auteurist Hollywood classics, as the taste for Hitchcock and
Hawks had become more acceptable, and soon it doubled as a screening
room also for the NYU Cinema Studies Department. I even was a
projectionist for classes there in the early 70s, as well as teaching
there myself, and remember thinking that this was a come-down from the
old days. So it sort of followed what was happening, at the time, from
New Wave to Hollywood autuers to film academia. Now it's closed.

- Fred
673

From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 8:02pm
Subject: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

> The Bleecker was interesting as a trend indicator.
>
> it sort of followed what was happening, at the time, from
> New Wave to Hollywood autuers to film academia. Now it's closed.

The building houses a Kim's Video now (a good place to find alternate-region DVDs), so it's still a trend indicator, one might say.
674

From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 8:24pm
Subject: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)

Wanted to reply to this before it gets swept off the page:

> That is, I don't think there are any identifiable qualities that
> make a film good or bad, and when people talk about liking one
> quality over another, I think they're asserting their own selves,
> rather than opening themselves up to a variety of possibilities.
> The ideal viewer is as emptied-out of an intrusive self as
> possible, possessed of what Keats called "negative capability,"
> open to whatever vision a work might have to offer. The whole point
> of art, for me, is to take me out of myself, to let me see through
> others' eyes. And it can only really do that when it's a fully
> developed vision, not a collection of themes and motifs.

I don't know if this is going to directly address what you're saying,
but I just wanted to maybe riff on the subject and share some of my
own thoughts. Basically it boils down to this: a viewer, that is,
Jaime (since I can't speak for anyone else, not *really*), if he's
aware of what's going on in his head while viewing a film/work of
art, knows that his mind is being pulled in two different
directions. There's "me", and I'm asking questions like "Am I
enjoying myself, What is this picture doing to/for me, What am I
getting out of this, How is *my* life changed, if it is at all,"
and so on. This might be an oversimplification, but basically I'm
talking about the "sadistic" tendencies that we sometimes talk about,
the me-me-me thoughts that a viewer processes. I don't think these
tendencies can be suppressed to any great degree, at least, not
without creating a viewing state of mind that I feel is mighty
artificial.

Then there's the the-work-the-work-the-work thoughts,
the "masochistic" stuff that is sometimes, rightly or wrongly,
attributed to auteurists above all others. These are thoughts
like, "Am I *getting* this, What is the work saying/trying to say,
What kind of questions should I be asking about the work, What does
it mean, How does the mise-en-scene do this and that and the other
thing," and so on. I think there's a greater temptation to suppress
one's potential sympathy for the work if a few bad signals are
received (referring to the "taste" discussion), and this becomes most
apparent to other viewers if a beloved film gets dissed for (in the
other viewer's opinion) bizarre, b.s., or arbitrary reasons. Like
when some young person says something idiotic like, "CITIZEN KANE can
be improved, it needs less obvious camera angles and a bit more heart
and soul."

But I have my own problems without butting heads with some kid over
CK. Every viewer is going to have to figure out for themselves
whether to place his trust in the film more than himself, and when,
and how, and so on. I still remember the words of P. Adam Sitney at
the recent Brakhage tribute: "Trust! the image. Trust! yourself."
I haven't read anything by Sitney, but I don't believe he was giving
one tendency priority over another. And if he was, well, I don't
agree.

> and was before the paragraph in which he refers to my "method," in
> that my "taste" is for the tougher and more ambiguous
> and less judgmental position.

Well, no, I was talking about how Borzage uses the mise-en-scene to
reflect the emotional states of the characters, which struck me as a
patently (although not uniquely) Camper-ian analysis. And I did
allude to the fact that this was a rough approximation of your
methods, at best. I don't think I linked your "method" with a
preference for one filmmaker's worldview over another.

> A film that expresses contempt for a whole profession, or even
> for its own characters, and asks its viewers to do the same, is in
> no way a priori inferior to a film that does the opposite.

I agree, but I wasn't making any a priori judgments. The film, which
I thought was very good, presented its contempt for prostitution as a
prerequisite for full emotional investment in the melodrama. That's
a path I didn't wish to go on; it's a content-related barrier that no
amount of formal brilliance could get me past. But it's not like I
had a little checksheet that said, "Contempt for way of life, minus
five points." I don't consider STREET ANGEL inferior to OSAKA ELEGY,
or superior (I like them both about the same, in different ways), but
I definitely find Mizoguchi's *attitude*, as he articulates it
through the film, preferable.

On the subject of whorin', I have zero experience. But my history
with the church is almost equally non-existent, so perhaps I'm the
disinterested observer?

Jaime
675

From: Damien Bona
Date: Wed Jul 23, 2003 10:38pm
Subject: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

Fred, thank you for you wonderful and highly evocative recollections
of New York in the 60s and 70s.

I came to New York in 1973 and unfortunately never got to the
legendary Roger and Howie screenings, although I have now known
Howard for many years.

By my time in New York, the 42nd Street grind houses had pretty much
stopped showing older (i.e. pre-1965) films, although occasionally
one would still show up on the bottom half of a double bill with a
first-run feature. In my time, the great appeal of 42nd Street --
besides the funky atmosphere -- was that you could see the same brand
new movie that was playing around the corner on Times Square at
Loew's State or the Criterion and pay $1.75 rather than the 4 bucks
the big houses were charging (and you also got a second feature). I
saw new releases ranging from Saturday Night Fever to The Town That
Dreaded Sundown there.

Also, through the early 70s, the Apollo was a 42nd Street anomaly --
it was the strip's art house, where foreign films would go after
completing their run at, say, the 68th Street Playhouse. Earlier on,
the Apollo was primarily a showcase for Russian films, and one can
only imagine how many FBI agents were regulars there.

I don't think anyone's mentioned the Thalia, which when I got to the
City tended to show things from the Janus Collection, and other
movies that would be right at home in Bosley Crowther's pantheon. By
the late 70s, though, programming became much more eccentric and
auteurisy-oriented. I can remember a series program in the early 80s
of TV shows made by great directors. AFter being shut for several
years and having gone through several incarnations, the Thalia
(official the Leonard Nimoy Thalia) is again a revival theatre,
although it was pretty much gutted and you'd never recognize the old
joint.

The New York Cultural Center, which was housed in the former
Huntiington Hartford Museum, was a great shining light in the 70s --
and, unlike most of the dumps that were revival theatres, it was
extremely luxurious.

There was also the Elgin (now the Joyce, a dance theatre) in Chelsea,
which tended to go with head and other cult movies -- pot smoke was
also in the air here, accompanying programs such as The Betty Boop
Follies. This was one of the first theatres to show midnight movies
(maybe even the first), and I believe it kicked off with EL Topo.
Pink Flamingos later played midnights here seemingly forever.

By the way, the Coronet and Baronet, two of the City's pre-eminet
first-run houses in the 60s and 70s are no longer. They were
demolished to make way for a high-rise.
676

From: Tristan
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 0:17am
Subject: Fassbinder

How many of you are familiar with the work of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder? I've become a fan over the last few months. I have seen
Fear Eats the Soul, Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, Merchant of
Four Seasons, and the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I will see
Pioneers in Ingolstadt and Whity on Friday. Next month I will be able
to see Berlin Alexanderplatz. I'd really like to discuss his style
and his oeuvre.
677

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 4:15am
Subject: Re: Fassbinder

> How many of you are familiar with the work of Rainer Werner
> Fassbinder? I've become a fan over the last few months. I have seen
> Fear Eats the Soul, Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, Merchant of
> Four Seasons, and the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. I will see
> Pioneers in Ingolstadt and Whity on Friday. Next month I will be able
> to see Berlin Alexanderplatz. I'd really like to discuss his style
> and his oeuvre.

I think he's one of the all-time greats. The selection you've seen
includes some of the best. Of the ones coming up: INGOLSTADT, which has
little reputation, is top-notch; WHITY is very weird and not that good
to my mind; and ALEXANDERPLATZ is very very good.

Why don't you start with your observations? One thing I've always
thought about Fassbinder is that he would be considered a great writer
even if the cinema never existed. - Dan
678

From: Tristan
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 4:32am
Subject: Re: Fassbinder

Okay, where to start? Fear Eats the Soul has been my favorite so far.
It is really amazing in its analysis of race. It is much better than
Far From Heaven at adapting Sirk. Most of the framing was amazing. I
liked when they went to a fancy restaurant, and they were framed from
another room with a doorway between us and the couple. Fassbinder
detaches us from the couple, like society is detached from them. We
feel like we are supposed to connect with these characters, but
Fassbinder tries to make it hard for us by detaching them from us
like this. The opening shots also struck me. In the bar, with the old
woman coming in. Todd Haynes has an interview on the DVD talking
about how the whole movie is about looking. This scene automatically
puts you into the movie.

Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant will need another viewing from me. It
was interesting, but it certainly lost my attention. A little known
gem from him that I saw was his early short The Little Chaos, about a
group of friends and their adventures. It is like a short german Band
a Part. Very enjoyable. Fox and His Friends was very good.
**SPOILERS** I don't know much about Fassbinder's life, but it seemed
like it could very well mirror it. A gay man performing in the circus
(Fassbinder worked in the theater at writing and directing IIRC),
winning the lottery(he became "successful" at making movies), enters
bourgeois society and is used, then dies from a valium overdose and
is robbed by some kids. Even though Fassbinder had a few years left
of his life, it's amazing how he kind of predicts his drug overdose.
These are just some thoughts I've had. I'll bring up some more later.
679

From: Tristan
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 4:50am
Subject: Chat

Has anyone used the chat feature on this forum? I'd like to plan some
real time chats. Text chats, not voice chats of course. What times
are good for people?
680

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 5:03am
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

> What follows is a rather long reminiscence about film viewing in the
> 1960s and 1970s, which will not be of interest to everyone. And Dan,
> since you apparently were connected with film societies at Harvard a
> little after I was there, I'd be fascinated to read a similar account
> from you.

We'll bore the youngsters to death! I knew about Tim Hunter running one
of the film societies before I got there, but there wasn't a lot of
auteurist activity in the film societies in 1972-1976. I eventually
shared the reins of my film society with four other people in my house,
and none of them made auteur-oriented booking choices.

One incident sticks in my mind. One of the other film societies
approached me one week asking if we could trade prints before we shipped
them back, so we could each have private screenings. I was a moralistic
little kid and was nervous about this breach of the contract with the
distributor, but made the trade anyway and found myself sitting in a
tiny storage closet, projecting a 16mm print of LIFEBOAT for myself.
Never in my life before or since have I had such an acute sense of the
plastic qualities of the image as I did looking at that tiny square of
Hitchcockian space projected a foot in front of me on a white wall.
Maybe it was the unfamiliar circumstances that made me so aware of the
frame and the world that it demarcated. It was kind of a life-changing
experience.

> But no account such as this would be complete without mention of 42nd
> Street. On a single block of 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue,
> just adjacent to Times Square, there were ten movie theaters. They had
> been "legit" theaters, presenting live theater, originally. They almost
> all showed older Hollywood movies. Admission was very cheap, less than
> $1 I think, and they attracted a collection of alcoholics, the homeless,
> the mentally unbalanced, and other marginal types. They also served, for
> budding auteurists, as our cinematheque.
>
> Other cities had similar but smaller scenes. I remember a theater in
> Boston called the "Publix."

The Publix, and then another one on the other side of Boylston, right?
It seems amazing now what you could see on those quadruple bills: good
prints of things like THE TAMARIND SEED, CHARLEY VARRICK, ULZANA'S RAID,
countless others.

When I got to LA in 1976, there was still a theater or two downtown
showing this kind of quadruple bill of second or third-run features. I
saw many films at the Optic, a run-down little theater that served
primarily as a gay pick-up spot - to watch films there, you had to
ignore guys who would sit in front of you, turn around and stare for a
minute or so, then move on. But it was simply the only place to see the
good films of recent years on a screen. The World in Hollywood kept
showing triple-bills into the eighties, but they didn't reach as far
back into the past as the Optic.

I remember one day at the Optic when an older guy was really distracting
me with his cruising, and I thought, geez, sit down and watch the movie,
there are other things in life besides sex. And after a while he did
just that. I thought, cool, another convert for the cinema. But the
film was George Stevens' THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, and, I dunno, I guess it
didn't hold his attention - he was back on the prowl after twenty
minutes. I suppose very few of us find a happy middle ground between
sex and cinema.... Certainly not me at that point in my life.

> Today, Joe's place would have to be my apartment, and I think Dan and
> Bill would confirm that it's not a bad venue in which to see a film,
> if a little hot in the summer.

I happily confirm that Joe's place in Hollywood has the best technical
facilities I've ever seen in a home, and we've had many a pleasant
private screening there. Before Joe's place became the main venue for
private shows in my group, Lee Sanders ran a little film program for
many years, twice a week at its peak, before he gave it up sometime in
the 80s. The regulars there included Bill, Myron Meisel, Todd McCarthy,
Michael Wilson, Florence Dauman, and many others, with occasional guest
appearances by people like Monte Hellman, Andre De Toth, Kathryn
Bigelow, and Curtis Hanson. - Dan
681

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 5:21am
Subject: Re: Re: Fassbinder

> Okay, where to start? Fear Eats the Soul has been my favorite so far.
> It is really amazing in its analysis of race.

Maybe even more in its analysis of love. Really, it's one of the purest
love stories I can think of.

> It is much better than
> Far From Heaven at adapting Sirk.

I notice that auteurists are divided by this film, which is interesting.
I'm a big admirer, but I know that some Sirk fans really dislike it.

Neither film is a straight adaptation, of course, and it might be
distracting to think of them as such.

> Most of the framing was amazing. I
> liked when they went to a fancy restaurant, and they were framed from
> another room with a doorway between us and the couple. Fassbinder
> detaches us from the couple, like society is detached from them. We
> feel like we are supposed to connect with these characters, but
> Fassbinder tries to make it hard for us by detaching them from us
> like this.

Of course, the couple is having trouble connecting to each other at this
point. So forcing us into the next room doubles the distance that we
already feel.

> The opening shots also struck me. In the bar, with the old
> woman coming in.

The opening is brilliant - it just jumps right in, as if the film were
well underway, and socks us with dramatic tension before we even know
what's happening.

> Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant will need another viewing from me. It
> was interesting, but it certainly lost my attention.

It's my favorite, but I didn't love it the first time. It helps to know
exactly what's going to happen and how long the film is - the first time
around, it's hard not to think, "How long will this film go on?"

> A little known
> gem from him that I saw was his early short The Little Chaos, about a
> group of friends and their adventures. It is like a short german Band
> a Part. Very enjoyable.

He dedicates this film to Rohmer, doesn't he? And this is 1965 or 1966
- he probably could have been referring only to THE SIGN OF THE LION.

> **SPOILERS** I don't know much about Fassbinder's life, but it seemed
> like it could very well mirror it. A gay man performing in the circus
> (Fassbinder worked in the theater at writing and directing IIRC),
> winning the lottery(he became "successful" at making movies), enters
> bourgeois society and is used, then dies from a valium overdose and
> is robbed by some kids. Even though Fassbinder had a few years left
> of his life, it's amazing how he kind of predicts his drug overdose.

Fox is much nicer and gentler than the real-life Fassbinder! - Dan
682

From:
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 2:01am
Subject: Youngsters, Tim Hunter

In a message dated 7/24/03 1:04:06 AM, sallitt@p... writes:

>We'll bore the youngsters to death!

Not at all! I find these accounts really interesting. I won't speak for the
other under 25 members of the group, but certainly I've never really felt
part of a "real" (as opposed to virtual) auteurist contingent. So it's valuable
for us young'ins to get a history lesson about how things used to be and how
tastes were formed and cemented. Maybe the younger generation can eventually
talk about how they've found substitutions for the sort of communities
described by Fred, Dan, and Bill. In my own case, video stores were my private
auteurist haunts for a large part of my life, growing up as I did in the sticks in
Louisiana. It was only once I moved to Ohio that I was offered the chance to
see rep picks theatrically. It was kind of amusing renting odd combinations of
things from Sarris' lists and seeing the clerks' reactions.

>I knew about Tim Hunter running one
>of the film societies before I got there, but there wasn't a lot of
>auteurist activity in the film societies in 1972-1976.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that I recently caught - by accident -
Tim Hunter's "Tex" on television. I thought it was really a remarkable movie
and makes me curious to seek out Hunter's other work, being completely
unfamiliar with it. In terms of S.E. Hinton adaptations released in the early '80s, I
think I even prefer "Tex" to Coppola's excellent "Rumble Fish." Hunter's
approach in this film never approaches the stylization of Coppola's, yet there's
a great sophistication in the mise en scene. The shot of the bloodied Tex on
the pay phone (I won't reveal the plot circumstances) is a standout in the way
it uses low angles and a constantly (as I recall) tracking camera. There's
also something about Hunter's style which makes the film seem episodic and
character-based even when its forwarding the narrative.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
683

From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 6:33am
Subject: Re: Fassbinder

Tristan,

It's wonderful to hear that you've responded so intently to
Fassbinder. He's one of the seminal figures of the 1970s/early 80s,
and I find it very exciting that he continues to affect viewers who
weren't born while he was alive.

I don't know how familiar you are with Sirk's films, but Sirk is the
touchstone for Fassbinder. To use shorthand, Fassbinder is a post-
modernist to Sirk's modernist – and their politics were both far left
(The less said about Todd Haynes's silly little pastiche the
better).

Both Sirk and Fassbinder used – here comes that dreaded word –
Brechtian devices, but whereas Sirk was trying to distance the
audience from the glossy world of Universal-International.
Fassbinder's starting point was much more natural; he went off on an
ironic stance on the real world. Like Sirk, Fassbinder masterfully
used objects and the direction/blocking of his actors as visual
shorthand to enhance such themes as a helplessness brought about by
capitalism, the awfulness of the bourgeoisie and the cruelty of the
world as it is.

They were both very ironic filmmakers, but Fassbinder's irony
pertained to the real world, Siek's more about popular
representations of real life.

One of the fascinating, seeming contradictory, aspects of
Fassbinder's work is that as sour is the world view he presents is on
the surface, there still is affection for his often unspeakably
awful, self-obsessed individuals, and that tension is one of the
qualities that made Fassbinder such a complex and great artist.
He'll often show characters indulging themselves acting out and
ranting, while others are in the same visual space, impassively lost
in their own inner worlds, indifferent to the melodramatics occurring
around them. He was a filmmaker completely in control – what you see
on the screen is a total Fassbinderian world.

To appreciate Fassbinder one needs to LOOK at the screen – his use of
décor, his stationing of his actors, his production design and art
decoration. In other words, Fassbinder's mise-en-scene is one of the
most complex and rewarding of all filmmakers.
684

From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 7:26am
Subject: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> I remember one day at the Optic when an older guy was really
distracting
> me with his cruising, and I thought, geez, sit down and watch the
movie,
> there are other things in life besides sex. And after a while he
did
> just that. I thought, cool, another convert for the cinema. But
the
> film was George Stevens' THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, and, I dunno, I
guess it
> didn't hold his attention - he was back on the prowl after twenty
> minutes.

Given the choice, I probably would have taken cruising over The Only
Game In Town. But Take Me To Town, now that would have been another
story . . .

-- Damien
>
685

From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 9:35am
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

We all had a lot more stamina then, too.

I can remember going from a double-bill of Bunuel films at the Elgin to a pairing of Red River and the Searchers at the New Yorker (another wonderful rep house -- and a great bookstore -- now replaced by an utterly unnecessary condo). Then I would go home to check if there was anything on TV.

Or I would go to a double-bill on 42nd Street for breakfast -- no one mentioned that another part of the attraction of those houses was that they ran from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. -- not that I would hang around Times Square at 3 a.m. -- I wasn't that dedicated.

These days, I'm happy if I can get through two movies in a day with a long lunch in between.

(Yeah, I know, it's those long lunches that are killing me.)

George (too many lunches) Robinson

Alas, where is human nature so
weak as in a bookstore?
-Henry Ward Beecher
----- Original Message -----
From: Damien Bona
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 6:38 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

Fred, thank you for you wonderful and highly evocative recollections
of New York in the 60s and 70s.

I came to New York in 1973 and unfortunately never got to the
legendary Roger and Howie screenings, although I have now known
Howard for many years.

By my time in New York, the 42nd Street grind houses had pretty much
stopped showing older (i.e. pre-1965) films, although occasionally
one would still show up on the bottom half of a double bill with a
first-run feature. In my time, the great appeal of 42nd Street --
besides the funky atmosphere -- was that you could see the same brand
new movie that was playing around the corner on Times Square at
Loew's State or the Criterion and pay $1.75 rather than the 4 bucks
the big houses were charging (and you also got a second feature). I
saw new releases ranging from Saturday Night Fever to The Town That
Dreaded Sundown there.

Also, through the early 70s, the Apollo was a 42nd Street anomaly --
it was the strip's art house, where foreign films would go after
completing their run at, say, the 68th Street Playhouse. Earlier on,
the Apollo was primarily a showcase for Russian films, and one can
only imagine how many FBI agents were regulars there.

I don't think anyone's mentioned the Thalia, which when I got to the
City tended to show things from the Janus Collection, and other
movies that would be right at home in Bosley Crowther's pantheon. By
the late 70s, though, programming became much more eccentric and
auteurisy-oriented. I can remember a series program in the early 80s
of TV shows made by great directors. AFter being shut for several
years and having gone through several incarnations, the Thalia
(official the Leonard Nimoy Thalia) is again a revival theatre,
although it was pretty much gutted and you'd never recognize the old
joint.

The New York Cultural Center, which was housed in the former
Huntiington Hartford Museum, was a great shining light in the 70s --
and, unlike most of the dumps that were revival theatres, it was
extremely luxurious.

There was also the Elgin (now the Joyce, a dance theatre) in Chelsea,
which tended to go with head and other cult movies -- pot smoke was
also in the air here, accompanying programs such as The Betty Boop
Follies. This was one of the first theatres to show midnight movies
(maybe even the first), and I believe it kicked off with EL Topo.
Pink Flamingos later played midnights here seemingly forever.

By the way, the Coronet and Baronet, two of the City's pre-eminet
first-run houses in the 60s and 70s are no longer. They were
demolished to make way for a high-rise.

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686

From: Tristan
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 2:34pm
Subject: Re: Fassbinder

I'm familiar with Sirk. All I've seen is All that Heaven Allows(one
of my favorite films) and Written on the Wind(didn't care much for
this).
687

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 3:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)

> This might be an oversimplification, but basically I'm
> talking about the "sadistic" tendencies that we sometimes talk about,
> the me-me-me thoughts that a viewer processes. I don't think these
> tendencies can be suppressed to any great degree, at least, not
> without creating a viewing state of mind that I feel is mighty
> artificial.
>
> Then there's the the-work-the-work-the-work thoughts,
> the "masochistic" stuff that is sometimes, rightly or wrongly,
> attributed to auteurists above all others. These are thoughts
> like, "Am I *getting* this, What is the work saying/trying to say,
> What kind of questions should I be asking about the work, What does
> it mean, How does the mise-en-scene do this and that and the other
> thing," and so on.

This whole issue is very important and could probably stand a bit more
discussion. Are the expressive powers of the film subordinate to
something else, or are they an end in itself?

Another way of saying this: Does form express something about our lives,
and is that something subject to our evaluation, the way that other
things in our lives are subject to evaluation? Or does form tap into an
entirely different (should I say Platonic?) sphere of experience, one
where we can afford to concern ourselves only with how much expression
we get, and not with which kind we get?

Maybe I just absorbed too much Leavisian philosophy via Robin Wood, but
I can't square myself with Fred's thesis that any point of view can be
put over.

I can certainly agree that we should open ourselves up to everything,
that we should let the artist set the ground rules and see what happens.
In other words, I don't think we should reject TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
because of our feelings about Nazism, because we can't predict where
Riefenstahl will take us until we've gone there. (Though I prefer
TIEFLAND, myself.)

But I don't think we can transcend or suppress our personalities as
viewers, any more than a director can be expressive without revealing a
personality.

Take Capra-Riskin, for example. Fred may disagree, but I think Capra
has got it together, formally speaking, and that the classic Capra films
from DEEDS to STATE OF THE UNION are fully functional and very
expressive. But they take me to places where I discover an admixture of
emotions that I don't want: a subtle self-congratulation, for one
(subtle so the hero can fall and rise with the drama, yet still embody
that self-congratulation); and that uncomfortable sense of reality
having been magnetized so that all the iron filings are lined up in the
same ideological direction.

Of course, some people will like these expressions and dislike others
that I like. And so we are thrown into a realm of subjectivity that, I
admit, feels impure, not of a piece with the formal concerns that make
us auteurists.

I could try to obliterate my preferences and learn to value all
expressions. And maybe that would be a good thing, I don't know. But
I'm not sure that we could live with that degree of total amorality (I
do not intend negative connotations here), and I certainly don't see it
happening any time soon.

So I'm stuck with a view of cinema where what I really care about is
formal expression, but where that expression has to do the right things
for me. This opens a gap that is very dangerous for auteurism: is a
director bad because of a lack of expression or because of what they
express? Lest we are very, very, careful, we can lose a lot of
credibility in these straits.

Open for rebuttal, I guess. It's a tricky issue. - Dan
688

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 5:22pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

> Given the choice, I probably would have taken cruising over The Only
> Game In Town. But Take Me To Town, now that would have been another
> story . . .

Or BUS RILEY'S BACK IN TOWN! Or even GIRLS ABOUT TOWN.

I always manage to conflate THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN and THE GREATEST STORY
EVER TOLD into THE ONLY STORY EVER TOLD. - Dan
689

From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 5:39pm
Subject: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:

> We'll bore the youngsters to death! I knew about Tim Hunter
running one
> of the film societies before I got there, but there wasn't a lot
of
> auteurist activity in the film societies in 1972-1976. I
eventually
> shared the reins of my film society with four other people in my
house,
> and none of them made auteur-oriented booking choices.

Which house? I was involved in the Mather House Film Society from
1983 to 1986. I showed a few interesting films: "Will Success
Spoil Rock Hunter?", "The Man With a Movie Camera," Chabrol's
"La Rupture," Murnau's "Tabu," a lot of cartoons (silent Disney's,
Max Fleischer, Bob Clampett). These didn't atract a large audience,
but they were inexpensive to rent (about $50 each). ("Tabu" attracted
quite a few people who mistook it for a porn film called "Taboo.")
However, almost every film we showed lost money. I think this was
partly because home video, which was becoming popular,
took away much of our audience.

I saw several major films for the first time at the house film
societies: "Week End", "The Bitter Tears of Petra von
Kant," "Persona," "The Man Who Shot Libery Valance." These were
all 16mm prints, projected in the dining halls of the houses.

> approached me one week asking if we could trade prints before we
shipped
> them back, so we could each have private screenings. I was a
moralistic
> little kid and was nervous about this breach of the contract with
the
> distributor, but made the trade anyway and found myself sitting in
a
> tiny storage closet, projecting a 16mm print of LIFEBOAT for
myself.

I remember projecting "Tabu" on the wall of my room, as well as a
private exhibition of "The Sure Thing" for my roommates.

I think every film society was in breach of contract with the
distributor, since they would pay to exhibit the film for a single
night but show the film for twice a night for two nights, Friday and
Saturday. That was the only way to break even, since an old film
might atract 10 to 20 people per show, a recent release, 50, and
tickets were $2 each. Since the distributors received parts of the
profits, perhaps they would forgive us...

Paul
690

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 5:47pm
Subject: FAR FROM HEAVEN

> (The less said about Todd Haynes's silly little pastiche the
> better).

If we had the poll function working, I'd be tempted to start a poll
about how people felt about FAR FROM HEAVEN. I know that Blake Lucas's
reaction was similar to Damien's, perhaps less fierce. Most of the Film
Comment/Village Voice/Chicago Reader types seemed to like it, though
it's missing from some key ten-best lists (Kehr, Sarris).

Blake felt that Haynes was gilding the lily, in a way, that there was
already a lot of distance built into those 50s melodramas. I think he
felt as if he had to defend Sirk against Haynes.

I have a prior commitment to Haynes as a major director, on the basis of
SAFE and DOTTIE GETS SPANKED. But I remember feeling my way into both
SAFE and FAR FROM HEAVEN, trying to figure out whether the films were
derisive. I can almost understand turning against the film, though I'd
think it would be equally hard to see the films as purely derisive or
purely heartfelt.

I wrote a piece on the film at:

http://www.24fpsmagazine.com/Review/FarFromHeaven.html

- Dan
691

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 5:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joe's Place, & film viewing venues for auteurists

> Which house? I was involved in the Mather House Film Society from
> 1983 to 1986.

I was at Leverett. I saw many a film in that Mather dining room - Nick
Browne used to be a fellow there, and used the hall for his class
screenings.

> I think every film society was in breach of contract with the
> distributor, since they would pay to exhibit the film for a single
> night but show the film for twice a night for two nights, Friday and
> Saturday. That was the only way to break even, since an old film
> might atract 10 to 20 people per show, a recent release, 50, and
> tickets were $2 each. Since the distributors received parts of the
> profits, perhaps they would forgive us...

I think that I went by the book back then and rented for two nights.
But I can't remember for sure. I do remember that we often managed to
break even in those pre-video days, after we realized that we had to try
hard. (I started out booking a chronologically arranged Western series.
I had to cancel all the films after 1939.) A lot of the students
booked very popular films, and we made enough money to keep buying
better equipment every year. - Dan
692

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 7:06pm
Subject: Re: Youngsters, Tim Hunter

> Maybe this is a good time to mention that I recently caught - by accident -
> Tim Hunter's "Tex" on television. I thought it was really a remarkable movie
> and makes me curious to seek out Hunter's other work, being completely
> unfamiliar with it. In terms of S.E. Hinton adaptations released in the early '80s, I
> think I even prefer "Tex" to Coppola's excellent "Rumble Fish." Hunter's
> approach in this film never approaches the stylization of Coppola's, yet there's
> a great sophistication in the mise en scene. The shot of the bloodied Tex on
> the pay phone (I won't reveal the plot circumstances) is a standout in the way
> it uses low angles and a constantly (as I recall) tracking camera. There's
> also something about Hunter's style which makes the film seem episodic and
> character-based even when its forwarding the narrative.

I think TEX is a wonderful film. (I must admit that I used TEX as a
club to beat THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLE FISH back when I was a critic.
It's a polemic I wouldn't engage in now, though I have never managed to
like Coppola.) The other Hunter career highlight for me is RIVER'S
EDGE. I've been a little let down by some of his other films -
SYLVESTER, PAINT IT BLACK, LIES OF THE TWINS, THE SAINT OF FORT
WASHINGTON. - Dan
693

From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 7:29pm
Subject: Far From Heaven

I like it, and DOTTY (best of all) - haven't seen SAFE yet.

Maybe I read a skewed selection of reviews (the local
all-turniphead press, as usual), but it seemed to me that people
were using the All That Heaven Allows reference to avoid talking
about the subject of the film, which was 80 percent about
something that has no equivalent in the Sirk: the breakup of the
marriage and its aftermath. I was struck (and so were two
women I saw the film with, who had "lived" it) by the ease with
which Moore's sophisticated best friend accepts Quaid's coming
out, as opposed to her punitive horror at Moore's dating a black
man. (I assume that this is ananchronistic re: the 50s, but not re:
the 70s, according to my "dates.") Moore is everyone's victim in
the film - the "nigger of the world," in Lennon's phrase.

I also remember being struck by a detail of the dialogue - the
way Moore and Quaid replace names with kinship categories
when talking to the kids - "Listen to your father!" "Apologize to
your brother!" A bit broad, I'll grant, but certainly familiar! (As a
child I never said, "Fuck you, I have a name!", but I wanted to.)
And used rather subtly later - when Moore goes to see the man
she loves and he tells his daughter, "Your father has to talk to
someone," I knew then that their relationship was doomed,
because he's using the same reifying language Quaid and
Moore use to talk to their children. The lighting and production
design were nice - not a big plus or minus to me. Dan's post,
which I read after seeing the film, was the only intelligent writing I
saw about it, and he talks about that aspect with more
inspiration than I can muster.

I really have to give Fassbinder another try. For my taste he's
always been always been too...Brechtian.

Reminiscence: When interviewed Sirk at Berkeley in 1983
(about his defense of Syberberg in Germany during the
controversy over Hitler: A Film from Germany), his wife was there
and watched him like a hawk. I have the impression she always
did. A complicated guy and, I'd say, a complicated marriage.
694

From:
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 3:38pm
Subject: Coppola, Hunter

In a message dated 7/24/03 3:09:17 PM, sallitt@p... writes:

>(I must admit that I used TEX as a
>club to beat THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLE FISH back when I was a critic.
>It's a polemic I wouldn't engage in now, though I have never managed to
>like Coppola.)

I have kind of a quirky take on Coppola. His big '70s quartet - G1, G2, "The
Conversation," "Apocalypse Now" - have always struck me as overrated and even
a little impersonal. I suppose G1 is the best of these, but it's only in
some of the '80s Coppolas that he comes alive for me: "One From the Heart,"
"Rumble Fish," "Tucker." I'd go so far to say that "Tucker" is his best film - a
formal marvel, yet also incredibly personal. I think FFC >is< Preston Tucker
in so many ways.

>The other Hunter career highlight for me is RIVER'S
>EDGE. I've been a little let down by some of his other films -
>SYLVESTER, PAINT IT BLACK, LIES OF THE TWINS, THE SAINT OF FORT
>WASHINGTON.

Thanks for the recommendation of "River's Edge." I'll also try to check out
some of the others too. On the basis of "Tex," he has such a distinctive
sensibility that I can't imagine that these wouldn't at least be interesting.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
695

From:
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 6:15pm
Subject: Re: Re: What makes a film good? (Wllder, Osaka Elegy, more...)

In a message dated 7/24/03 11:55:45 AM, sallitt@p... writes:

>This opens a gap that is very dangerous for auteurism: is a
>director bad because of a lack of expression or because of what they
>express?

Yeah, I've wrestled with this one for years. My inclination is to say that a
director's bad for the former reason, but I recognize that gaps or quirks in
my own system of tastes may cause me to confuse the latter for the former. In
other words, I say I don't like Curtiz because he doesn't strike me as
particularly expressive. But what if I have it wrong, he is expressive and I just
don't like his what he expresses?

Usually making the distinction isn't so difficult. The Coens are clearly
expressive, distinctive, memorable, but I don't care for a lot of their films
because of the very components which make them expressive, distinctive, and
memorable.

At the same time, I think of all movie-viewing groups, auteurists are the
most open, the most willing to not allow their personality to get in the way of
appreciating a great film. My example for this is the tolerance many left-wing
auteurists (including myself) have for flatly conservative filmmakers:
McCarey, Eastwood, Milius even. We find these guys so expressive and worthwhile
that we can get past barriers posed by ideological differences we might have with
them.

For me, one of the real pleasures of going on what I call "auteur binges" -
that is, watching a group of films by a single director over a short time span,
whether as part of a revival or on my own prerogative with videos - is the
feeling that you're seeing things through a very particular set of eyes. And
then it's fun switching from that set of eyes immediately to another, going
from, say, Hawks to Cimino. There's a huge distance between Howard Hawks and
Michael Cimino in every sense, but it's a distance I enjoy mapping because it
opens me up to other ways of looking at the world, ways which may be mutually
exclusive or even paradoxical. But that's what makes the world go round.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
696

From:
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 6:30pm
Subject: Re: Chat

In a message dated 7/24/03 12:50:54 AM, limphead52@n... writes:

>Has anyone used the chat feature on this forum? I'd like to plan some
>real time chats. Text chats, not voice chats of course. What times
>are good for people?

I think this could be fun... as long as we don't get addicted to it. ;)

I'll let someone else throw out some times. Remarkably, I'm able to open the
Chat page without anything on my overloaded iMac crashing.

Peter

http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
697

From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 11:01pm
Subject: Re: Chat

ptonguette@a... wrote:

>
>
>
>I think this could be fun... as long as we don't get addicted to it. ;)
>
>I'll let someone else throw out some times.
>
I think I could join this at any time between 5 PM and 10 PM on Sunday
Chicago time.
Another suggestion: same time range on Monday.

I'm not much of a chatter though. Since I've hardly ever done this I'm
curious to see how it might go...

Fred
698

From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 11:14pm
Subject: Expression/What is Expressed

From an interview I did with Serge Daney in 1977:

"The articles on classical cinema which appeared in the Cahiers
at the beginning of the Seventies were a last tribute, more or
less avowed, that we rendered to what we have always loved.
We wanted to reread Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and
not Rene Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael....

"Incidentally, in the collective text on YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, we
distinguished clearly between ideology and writing. We were very
conscious then of the danger (which we subsequently did not
always avoid) of confusing ideology with writing. It's quite simple:
the cinema loved by the Cahiers from the beginning is a CINEMA
HAUNTED BY WRITING.* This is the key which makes it
possible to understand the successive tastes and choices. This
is also explained by the fact that the best French filmmakers
have always been - at the same time - writers (Jean Renoir,
Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, Jean Epstein, etc.)"

http://home.earthlink.net/%7Esteevee/Daney_1977.html

*For '"writing" read "expression" (as in Astruc and Epstein's idea
of cinema as "writing with images"), for "ideology" read "what is
expressed." That's why, as I believe Peter observed, auteurists
are able to love films that express an ideology contrary to their
own. We don't go to films to see ideologies, although being
aware of them may play a part in analysis of "writing."

...as in the Young Mr. Lincoln article that the Cahiers published in
1971, where for ideological reasons the figure of Lincoln has to
be shoehorned into Ford's symbolic universe where he is
something of a foreign body, and Ford's "writing" puts over the
idea represented by Lincoln, but at a price: the various dreamlike
distortions in the figure, the unconscious apparition of Nosferatu
as a kind of spectral superimposition at the end, and so on. (The
actual ideological analysis at the beginning of that article is not
much good. It makes uncritical use of secondary sources and is
highly tendentious. But the article really doesn't depend on it - it's
not an "ideological expose" of Young Mr. Lincoln.)

Directors who write with images don't control their instrument the
way propagandists (or non-auteurs, if there is such a thing) do -
the signifier is in charge, like the Almanac, sneakily circling
around Lincoln, who is unaware of it until it lands in his hands
the night before the trial.

I did an article that eventually appeared in Noah Ford's magazine
about Ford in the 30s where I found the Cahiers YML article very
fruitful for understanding Ford Before He Became Ford (a useful
exercise with ANY auteur), and I was recently reminded of it
again listening to Joe McBride's commentary on How Green
Was My Valley on DVD: He observes that it makes no sense for
Walter Pidgeon to renounce the love of Maureen O'Hara - that it's
almost as if Ford were thinking of these people as Irish and
Pidgeon as a Catholic priest. That's a great insight, but I would
add that it is only through that renunciation - his symbolic
castration, if you will - that he becomes the powerful, charismatic
preacher who reads the riot act to the community when they turn
on O'Hara and her family, and leads the rescue mission after the
mine collapse. By that point he has pretty much replaced Sara
Allgood as the symbolic center of the community.

Needless to say, the subtle reading of YML was quickly
caricatured here into the notion that Ford's Lincoln is a "nutless
wonder" because Ford is a "fascist," or some such idiocy. That
wasn't what it was at all. And the core idea of that piece - that
what matters is not ideology, but writing, and that writing in the
hands of an artist may even subvert the ideology it is inscribing -
speaks to the interesting debate that we're having about whether
we like (or dislike) auteurs for their ideas. Obviously not! But as
Daney notes, even the Cahiers group, in the heat of ideological
combat, were tempted to forget that, as we all do, too.
699

From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Jul 25, 2003 9:46am
Subject: Borzage, film viewing issues

First off, I wanted to ask: which Borzage films are our favorites?
I have Dan's "best of" page bookmarked, and there's quite a few
there, and Damien has recommended a couple from between 1932 and
1944. How about Fred, Mike Grost, Bill K., etc.?

I've really enjoyed everyone's thoughts on the viewing-related issues
I brought up (or inadvertently triggered) in my STREET ANGEL post.
My guess is, everyone who has a relationship with the cinema, be it
casual, serious, or obsessive, will develop their own "thesis" to
describe how they experience films, and why, etc. It certainly seems
like form vs. content models are a lot more complicated than they are
often treated.

Dan:

> Are the expressive powers of the film subordinate to something
> else, or are they an end in itself? {...} Does form express
> something about our lives, and is that something subject to our
> evaluation, the way that other things in our lives are subject to
> evaluation? Or does form tap into an entirely different (should I
> say Platonic?) sphere of experience, one where we can afford to
> concern ourselves only with how much expression we get, and not
> with which kind we get?

Hard for me to answer these questions without looking at a specific
film - I know there are some cases where the rewards of watching a
movie is simply "the cinema of it," if that makes any sense. But
that doesn't mean that its relationship with the rough stones, etc.,
is abstract, theoretical, or in any case, not something that has
anything immediately to do with La Vie de Jaime. Just that their
implications tend not to be what I focus on, or remember best.

And I think some "amoral" or morally ambiguous films are really
great. Quite a few Samuel Fuller and Anthony Mann movies activate
conditioned responses in the viewer (cast James Stewart as lead =
instant viewer identification; see also VERTIGO), and this puts the
viewer in a spot that allows the filmmaker to "work them over" and
perhaps lead them (the viewer) to question their responses to the
material. Mann's development of the Arthur Kennedy and James Stewart
characters in BEND OF THE RIVER and (much more successfully, I feel)
THE MAN FROM LARAMIE put the viewer in a bind that, if you'll forgive
the continued reference to S&M, is part of the pleasure that those
films offer. THE FAR COUNTRY, also a good Mann/Stewart western with
some amazing stuff in it, is somewhat inferior in comparison; the
screenplay for that one sets up a simplistic suspense situation in
which the hero eventually must "find" the correct ideological
position, one that the audience has had all along. In that film's
case, there really isn't much of a journey for the viewer to make,
it's a waiting game, and of course the hero will make the right
decision in the end. Then you've got something like DEVIL'S DOORWAY,
which seems to dictate a very elementary good-guy/bad-guy schema to
the audience, but that alos seems to be a ruse, since we eventually
come to find that, despite the righteousness of the Robert Taylor
hero and the greasy dishonesty of the Louis Calhern villain, the film
has no easy solution for anyone (the characters, the viewer) to be
led towards.

Jaime

http://filmwritten.org/
700

From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Fri Jul 25, 2003 11:54am
Subject: female cinephiles

Just a few words about myself:
I have been enjoying my study of film for the past few years. The
variety of films I see is limited by what is available in San Diego;
fortunately that is increasing with more local film festivals. I
venture to LA about once a month to attend some screenwriting
conferences, seminars, etc; recently saw DER GOLUB (1921 or 26) as well
as RUSSIAN ARK.

In the past few years, I have seen a large number of films. Reading is
not enough with all the references to movies never seen or not well
remembered, so I often see one or two a day, sometimes five or more
when at a festival. My most recent book purchase was SARRIS' THE
AMERICAN CINEMA. I admit that I merely recognize the names of most
critics but do know that Sarris was an auteurist. I enjoyed reading a
Giannetti's Directors as it helped bring some focus to all the movies I
had seen.

I prefer to see movies in theaters and go about 4-5 times a week; I
watch a lot of DVD's as well as cable showings and have two fully
loaded TiVo's. I spend most of my time with movies, watching, reading,
and writing (screenplay)...the other time I spend with my husband.

I was an emergency physician until 1991, hence, my reply to the
sexually transmitted disease comment. Previous, I was a child
psychologist and will share these comments about male / female
differences.

First ... take this little quiz and answer as quickly as you can the
following... humor me, please.

Name as many states in the United States as you can in one minute.

Generally speaking,
MEN are more visual and begin their answers with a geographical map
representation Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont or Washington,
Oregon, California, or Florida, Georgia, Alabama.

WOMEN are more verbal and begin their answers with Alabama, Alaska,
Arkansas.

Of course, women might be 'reading" a visual list in their mind.

It's not a really scientific thing, but for the most part men are more
visual, females more verbal and that may influence the male interest in
films.

Additionally, and this is really going out on a limb, films offer the
less athletic male a different venue, especially before the computer
age.
My sense is that males like to group (girls like one or two friends)
and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, etc. Films are a great way to
do that,
There is really something very special about each gender spending time
with its own gender to share common interests, but sometimes a common
interest outweighs gender differences.

An article on my reading list is WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE WOMEN
SCREENWRITERS. At one time, women accounted for more scripts than men,
now screenwriting is male dominated....and there are more action and
thriller movies out there. I'll let you know what I learn.

I'm in Richmond, Virginia now, then going to Pennsylvania for a few
days and may not get on the net too much until I get back to
California. These modem connections are just too slow.

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