Home Film
Art
Other: (Travel, Rants, Obits)
Links About
Contact
a_film_by Main Page
Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
from an auteurist perspective. The index to these files of posts can be found at http://www.fredcamper.com/afilmby/ The purpose of these files is to make our posts more accessible, for downloading and reading and to search engines.
Important: The copyright of each post below is owned by the
person who wrote the post, and reproducing it in any form requires
that person's permission.
It is possible to email the author of any post by finding a post
they have written in the a_film_by archives at
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/messages and
emailing them from that Web site.
901
From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Aug 5, 2003 9:54pm
Subject: Tracking back from Lola
Just to throw in some detail that may or not affect Fred's more
general argument:
The restoration of Lola Montes by the Munich Archives put back
the single long tracking shot. It also restored the soundtrack,
which is completely covered by the hurdy-gurdy music in the
earlier French restoration: the people are talking, in several
languages, mostly about money. The last word you hear is
"dollars" in English.
Ophuls' son Marcel refused to allow this version to be shown at
Cannes because he is certain that the French restoration is what
his father wanted and doesn't want the Germans messing with
it. He really does feel that you don't need that long a tracking
shot, and doesn't seem to mind the substitution of unabashed
sentimentality (the hurdy-gurdy music) for something more
complex (the comments of the crowd under the hurdy-gurdy
music).
Actually, I guess this is a good example of what Fred is talking
about, and a pretty good explanation of why Marcel Ophuls isn't
much of a filmmaker. I've seen both versions of the ending and
prefer the version in the new restoration. But the reasons for that
are complex, like art.
In any event, since the shot is a summing up of the "explosion of
the Romantic ego," it behooves us to see it in the right version!
902
From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Aug 5, 2003 10:01pm
Subject: Re: Tracking back from Lola
hotlove666 wrote:
>Just to throw in some detail that may or not affect Fred's more
>general argument:
>
>The restoration of Lola Montes by the Munich Archives put back
>the single long tracking shot.
>
Bill, that's great news! At the time I read this, which I think was a
couple of decades ago, I asked around, and though I don't think I was
asking the right people I got the idea the missing footage was lost. I'm
assuming that this means the missing footage wasn't lost -- I mean, this
new long take wasn't something cooked up in Marin County with digital
effects?
Has the print ever been shown in the U.S.? Is there a version of the
restoration with English subtitles (which would make it easier to get it
shown here)?
This shot is of course an unusually elaborate demonstration of my point,
but I think the point would be the same for a short tiny camera
movement, or a short but meaningful static shot.
- Fred
903
From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Aug 5, 2003 10:09pm
Subject: Re: Trees of Filmmakers
Mike,
The chart is interesting and suggestive. The problem is that as you
doubtless know it has its innate limitations; it can't chart multiple
influences and cross influences, and its implied taxonomy can be too
easily misunderstood. I can see how both Mizoguchi and Jack Smith might
have been influenced by von Sternberg, but Mizoguchi and Jack Smith
also seem to me to be on opposite sides of the cinematic arena, so to
speak.
The Fluxus artist George Maciunus made obsessively complex art world
diagrams showing his own views of the evolution of modern art. There's a
reproduction of one at
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/music/chen/chen.htm and a
slightly larger version of it can be seen by clicking on it or by going
to
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/music/chen/popup_1.html
It's still too small to read, and maybe there are larger versions on the
'Net somewhere (let us know if anyone finds one), but it has certainly
been published. It's rather nutty, but he does try to display
cross-connections.
- Fred
904
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 1:01am
Subject: Lola Montes
The restoration was legitimate, and a subtitled print was shown
at CalArts a few months ago. I just saw sample scenes on DVD
at Joseph K's, who can no doubt add to my observations. I'll give
you the e-mail of Stefan Droessler in Munich if you want to
arrange bringing it to a venue near you.
905
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 1:33am
Subject: Re: Lola Montes
I heard that Droessler (I think it was him) said that Film Forum would
be giving this a week-long run later this year--I think was at one of
the Lubitsch screenings. Dan may actually have heard him say this, if
true.
PWC
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> The restoration was legitimate, and a subtitled print was shown
> at CalArts a few months ago. I just saw sample scenes on DVD
> at Joseph K's, who can no doubt add to my observations. I'll give
> you the e-mail of Stefan Droessler in Munich if you want to
> arrange bringing it to a venue near you.
906
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 3:10am
Subject: Re: Re: Lola Montes
> I heard that Droessler (I think it was him) said that Film Forum would
> be giving this a week-long run later this year--I think was at one of
> the Lubitsch screenings. Dan may actually have heard him say this, if
> true.
I must have missed it. - Dan
907
From: jaketwilson
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 3:22am
Subject: Re: Auteurism via THE EMBALMER, OHARU
> One reason for this, I believe, is that a lot of auteurists
get "fooled"
> by what I'd call the superficial elements: a good story told well,
but
> without any distinctive visual form. It's a lot harder to like an
> abstract Brakhage film for superficial reason, though I suppose
some
> *do" treat them as trippy light shows.
I agree with much of Fred's post, and particularly that style and
content can't be separated. But I want to tease out what I don't
agree with, because I think it makes for a more interesting
discussion. Maybe I can lead off by quoting something else Fred wrote
on this list a while back:
`I got interested in TV soaps briefly a long while ago, and for one
or two summers I followed a couple of shows, watching them almost
every day. There are a lot of things that interested me about them,
but I make no aesthetic claims for any. In fact, it was kind of
important to me to understand that what I liked about them (and I
didn't like them all *that* much) was likely what ordinary viewers
liked about them. On the other hand, I don't' think my viewings
of "Vertigo," "Kiss Me Deadly," "The Searchers," and "Written on the
Wind" have much to do with the way ordinary viewers experience them.'
My responses:
1) The quote above seems to distinguish aesthetic interest from soap-
opera-style narrative interest. The alternate approach, which I
favour, would be to presume that if a fictional work interests me
deeply (pornography apart) then it must offer an aesthetic experience
of some kind, which has to be accounted for rather than dismissed.
Certainly I don't see why the fascination of soap opera narrative
can't be analysed in formal terms (in this sense, I think content
creates form as well as vice versa). And leaving questions of
artistic sophistication aside, I think the way that Hitchcock plays
on his audience's desires and expectations has a whole lot in common
with soap operas.
2) Unlike Fred, I'd imagine that what I like about, say, Vertigo is
pretty close to what any `ordinary' viewer might like about the film.
Hitchcock to me is great partly BECAUSE he was able to make his art
so accessible, which is not to say the films are simple or
straightforward (I suppose we agree that there's all the difference
in the world between loving a work of art and finding an appropriate
critical language to describe it). Probably this means that what I
get out of Hitchcock isn't what Fred gets out of him, and maybe it
isn't an `aesthetic experience' at all, but I don't know what other
terms would be appropriate.
3) Personally, I can't get very interested in the possibility of
moving beyond the 'superficial' to appreciate film style on a purely
abstract basis, since what interests me in most narrative and even
non-narrative films includes particular moral codes, styles of
physical behaviour, types of constructed landscape and so forth.
Whether or not this material strikes us as 'realistic' it remains
culturally and historically SPECIFIC, and hence constitutes primary
data that may be organised in ways which provide new insights into
the experience of being alive (I don't mean a 'message' that can be
paraphrased). Roughly speaking, this is what I'd call
the `novelistic' (as opposed to `lyric') side of film art. And how
one responds to a film on this level is ultimately a function of
one's equally historically grounded `personality' - including limited
worldly knowledge, moral principles, private fantasies, etc - which
is why `taste' remains by definition subjective and contingent
(though not arbitary).
Billy Wilder might be a good test case. I don't know if Wilder's
films have much `distinctive visual form' (others may contest this)
but I think a whole lot of interesting things are happening in them,
mainly on the level of acting, dialogue and plot. Not that these
things aren't aspects of `form' (doesn't analysing anything mean
treating it as form?) but I suspect it's often more interesting to
look at how Wilder constructs his scripts holistically than at how he
uses the camera in a particular scene. To reiterate, my guiding
principle would be that anything an artist can do which holds our
attention is valid.
JTW
908
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 7:30am
Subject: Rudolph
Dan, I noticed that in That Other Group you gave a "con" to THE
SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS. As I know that in the past you often liked
Alan Rudolph's work, I wondered what your problems were with the new
film, with I probably would have given a "pro" to (even though I feel
it's far from perfect).
909
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 11:21am
Subject: Re: Auteurism via THE EMBALMER, OHARU
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> just as I have trouble
> seeing why the interpretation of "The Gangs of New York" quoted above is
> an argument for the film, I have trouble seeing how Dan's objections are
> in any way an argument against O'Haru, at least by my standards.
Bill Krohn didn't claim it was an argument, by the way: he specifically said, at least in the passage you quote, it was "for fans or near-fans of that film."
> Dan finds aspects of the film that are "blunt, manipulative,
> heavy-handed, preachy, enamored of caricature, and more or less
> insensitive to human complexity." Well, I'm in sympathy with Dan's
> sensibility, in that I tend to prefer nuanced views of "human
> complexity" to "blunt" and "preachy" "caricature," all of which sound
> rather, well, _Republican_, but, as a consequence of my notion that
> anything can be great, I would insist that a work that is describable in
> Dan's terms can be great.
>
> I was earlier arguing something to the effect that all tastes are
> "topologically" equivalent to "I don't like the color green." I fail to
> see how Dan's critique is not just an expression of taste, of a
> preference for films that take a particular attitude toward the human
> condition, and thus his critique seems to me the equivalent of, say, "I
> don't like moralistic westerns," or even, "I don't like westerns," a
> statement that would surely amount to sacrilege among auteurists. A film
> can adhere to Dan's description and be incredibly complex and very great
> anyway.
I invoked Tag Gallagher's essay in an attempt to suggest a deeper humanity in OHARU, but speaking more generally, I don't know why one should necessarily have to love aspects of a film one really considers humanly objectionable. Objecting to a fascist film, for example (I'm not referring to the Riefenstahl, which I haven't seen within recent memory), doesn't seem like a mere assertion of "taste."
On a considerably lesser scale of human iniquity, one beloved classic that really did strike me as sadistic is THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER: Jimmy Stewart circumstantially figures things out early on and uses his privileged knowledge to manipulate and/or torment Margaret Sullavan for much of the rest of the film. The difficulty being that Lubitsch didn't seem to be doing anything to place this uncomfortable situation in perspective -- he seemed, if anything, to be participating in the cruelty. (Nor did a remake by a female, Nora Ephron, do anything to mitigate the unpleasantness of the experience, even adding a further layer by making the male a rapacious capitalist pig into the bargain.) At least that's how I saw it when I saw it; I could easily be wrong -- I hope I am -- and should probably revisit the film, but my point is that so far I've been loath to do so.
Even if I'm wrong about the Lubitsch, I don't think I'm talking about something as arbitrary as a preference in colors.
910
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 0:25pm
Subject: "Reading, culture, and auteurs"
Following the link on Mizoguchi I found an article by Tag Gallagher
titled "Reading, culture, and auteurs". It is one of the best things
I have read about film. I love the mentality behind every single word.
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/tgbfr12
a.htm
Did everybody else know about it?
Any comments?
Yoel
911
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 1:36pm
Subject: Re: Rudolph
> Dan, I noticed that in That Other Group you gave a "con" to THE
> SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS. As I know that in the past you often liked
> Alan Rudolph's work, I wondered what your problems were with the new
> film, with I probably would have given a "pro" to (even though I feel
> it's far from perfect).
I didn't hate the film - somehow it seems better in retrospect, and
maybe I'd like it more with a second viewing. My impression at the time
was that the FIGHT CLUB-like concept of the Denis Leary character was a
big mistake that undercut the not-too-comfortable virtues of the
original concept. I think the filmmakers were working with art-film
material (i.e., a passive, inarticulate protagonist who wants stasis
instead of change, no matter how bad the status quo is - but who
nonetheless is firmly our point-of-view figure) but didn't want to make
an art film, and did a Hollywood number on it - "Let's make it
communicate more clearly to the audience" - which in fact changed the
project in basic ways.
It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but on the whole I tend to like the
projects that Rudolph writes more than the ones he directs from the
scripts of others. - Dan
912
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 2:49pm
Subject: Re: 'Content' in ISHTAR (was: Auteurism via THE EMBALMER)
jaketwilson wrote:
> Without arguing for the primacy of form over content or vice versa,
> can form be said to exist aside from its purpose of presenting
> the `content' of a movie in a compelling way? (Cf Ford Madox Ford's
> dictum while collaborating with Joseph Conrad: `The first purpose of
> style is to make work interesting. The second purpose of style is to
> make work interesting…')
The whole form-vs.-content thing is tricky. Probably there is no area
of filmic expression that can't be considered in formal terms. Does
this mean there's no such thing as content? I don't know.
Conceptually, I often feel a foreground-background interaction that I
want to describe as form-vs.-content. But I don't feel confident that
the element I'm labelling as "content" couldn't become "form" with a
different filmic treatment, or perhaps just a different perspective.
To me the form-vs.-content issue is related to the issue of whether art
is a different kind of thing from science/philosophy or not. If I'm
writing a piece of film criticism, for instance, style functions for me
the way it does for Ford Madox Ford: it's just a way of making my ideas
clearer or more palatable, and it isn't the main point. The ideas I'm
trying to get across are the main point, and I feel a lot of leeway in
how I do it, and the style is not all that important, really, except to
my ego.
Whereas if I make a film, the ideas I'm trying to get across are not the
main point, and I'm not really even trying to get them across: the ideas
are just floating around the work, and the audience can get some of
them, or none of them, and still experience the film. The style of the
film conveys a kind of experience, and it is crucial to me to organize
that experience with the filmmaking devices at my disposal.
Perhaps this dichotomy has more to do with my desire to compartmentalize
these two kinds of experience than it does with anything intrinsic about
them. At any rate, I certainly acknowledge that formal play can go on
at many levels, some of them created before the director even steps in.
> The quote above seems to distinguish aesthetic interest from soap-
> opera-style narrative interest. The alternate approach, which I
> favour, would be to presume that if a fictional work interests me
> deeply (pornography apart) then it must offer an aesthetic experience
> of some kind, which has to be accounted for rather than dismissed.
> Certainly I don't see why the fascination of soap opera narrative
> can't be analysed in formal terms (in this sense, I think content
> creates form as well as vice versa). And leaving questions of
> artistic sophistication aside, I think the way that Hitchcock plays
> on his audience's desires and expectations has a whole lot in common
> with soap operas.
That's interesting that you make an exception for pornography. Why?
I have always tended to lump pornography in with all other filmmaking
elements that temporarily erase the viewer's awareness that he or she is
watching fiction instead of real life! So it bears a resemblance to
some other forms of visceral experience. For instance, some kinds of
violence erase the fiction for me and seem to act directly on my nervous
system, as if the violence was really happening. You can make a strong
argument that very pure forms of identification are also "pornographic"
in this regard.
Perhaps these elements are impurities, destructive to art if offered in
concentrated form, but potentially interesting if they interact with the
rest of the work.
Hitchcock has always seemed to me almost an exception among the ranks of
good directors. His use of identification is so pure that it almost
erases the work of art; and then he turns that around on the viewer to
create dissonant emotional reactions that we would have rejected without
the "pornographic" inducement to participate. Sadly, most of the
directors influenced by Hitchcock omit the turn-around part.
Not meaning to force the discussion into an auteurist context, but it's
probably worth noting that auteurists are viewers who, almost by
definition, have made some key distinction between the soap-opera
experience and the films they like. (Assuming that the soap-opera
experience can be said to be impersonal or non-directorial.) I'm all
for more thinking about narrative fascination, of course, but the
further one goes toward unifying all these filmic experiences, the
further one moves from the auteurist stance.
It's very nice to see so many formidable new members on this list. - Dan
913
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 2:50pm
Subject: The People Against OHARU
jess_l_amortell wrote:
> The film is surely Brecht-like to a degree, and glancing at Tag
> Gallagher's Mizoguchi article at
>
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/tgfr13b.htm
> I see he picks up on this:
>
> (for example) "... Mizoguchi's actors usually have a commedia
> dell'arte side to them, a Pirandellian awareness of playing, and of
> playing within a stock role. Thus the theme of artifice. ... Evil is
> systemic in Mizoguchi, not individual: we have not 'awakened' yet.
> Thus the actors seem to be speaking to us, not just to each other,
> and are not afraid to be hammy ... playing to us, telling us - like
> commedia, Brecht and Chaplin - that social constructs are persecutive
> rather than preserving. ... It seems like a Brechtian joke, in The
> life of Oharu, when someone is arrested for counterfeiting in this
> geisha-like world where every relationship is counterfeited and the
> only authentic emotion is fear.
I haven't read this article yet. When I think of the adjective
"Brechtian," though, I think of the artist pushing the viewer back away
from a certain pleasurable identification, forcing them to a distance so
that the pleasure of immersion doesn't obscure some other consideration.
Whereas the hamminess in Mizoguchi seems to me an attempt to involve us
rather than to distance us. I feel as if Mizoguchi relies so heavily on
the emotion of pathos that he seems almost addicted to it as a
storytelling device: if I follow Mizoguchi into the film, then I
personally am going to experience a lot of pathos, a lot of "No, don't
do that to her!" and "Oh, this is terrible!" feelings. This doesn't
feel Brechtian to me, however imprecise the term might be in common usage.
I'm sort of glad to hear someone actually talking about the exaggerated
acting in Mizoguchi - sometimes I feel that it goes unnoticed by most
commentators.
Fred wrote:
> And actually, in Dan's original post (842), just as I have trouble
> seeing why the interpretation of "The Gangs of New York" quoted above is
> an argument for the film, I have trouble seeing how Dan's objections are
> in any way an argument against O'Haru, at least by my standards.
>
> Dan finds aspects of the film that are "blunt, manipulative,
> heavy-handed, preachy, enamored of caricature, and more or less
> insensitive to human complexity." Well, I'm in sympathy with Dan's
> sensibility, in that I tend to prefer nuanced views of "human
> complexity" to "blunt" and "preachy" "caricature," all of which sound
> rather, well, _Republican_, but, as a consequence of my notion that
> anything can be great, I would insist that a work that is describable in
> Dan's terms can be great. And one doesn't have to search all that far
> for examples, actually, or stoop to my limit case of "The Triumph of the
> Will": how about all those wonderful early pre-1912 Griffiths with
> oleaginous villains taking advantage of sweetly innocent women -- you
> know, the ones where a scene of the two together is followed by a title
> announcing "Nine months later" followed by the sweet innocent alone with
> child? Is this not "caricature"? These films are full of ethnic
> caricatures too. Note the use of the word "greaser," for example.
But a lot of people, including myself, have problems with Griffith's
sensibility too! And did even at the time. (By the way, is there a
basis for that apostrophe you placed in OHARU?)
I knew that you and some others here took a different position: I was
just trying to clarify my feelings, and hoping to prompt clarifying
reactions in others. When I experience Mizoguchi, I experience
dissonance, because visuals and dramaturgy seem to be to be expressing
such different things. I don't know if you agree with the basics of my
argument, but it seems that you're aware of the characteristics of the
drama, even if they don't govern your experience of the film. Do those
dramatic characteristics simply vanish in your experience? Or are they
transformed by form into something else? When you respond to TRIUMPH OF
THE WILL, you presumably don't feel the same pleasures that a naive
fascist would feel. Does Riefenstahl use form in such a way that you
can experience these fascist feelings in a more useful, constructive way
than a fascist would? Or does form lead you toward something other
feeling altogether? - Dan
914
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 2:51pm
Subject: Re: Re: Auteurism via THE EMBALMER, OHARU
> Maybe we need a more nuanced vocabulary, because depending on the
> ways in which we couch the question, I'm falling on different sides.
> In one way, sensibility dictates form: it's the thing (probably
> rarely conscious) that drives an artist to make the choices that make
> his or her work distinctive. And we can see form as the way the
> viewer can find his or her way "back" into the artist's overall
> sensibility. So form is the means of communication between artistic
> sensibility (I hesitate to say "the artist") and the viewer.
>
> But form can offer an impersonal experience, a new method of
> perception, to a viewer that takes him or her outside into otherness:
> the sensibility providing this is irrelevant in this optic, and what
> is important about art becomes the very fact that form allows us to
> leave ourselves and enter the void with other people.
I guess I'd like more clarification on this last, interesting paragraph.
Are you talking about, for instance, the fact that simply putting a
frame around something and hanging it on a wall creates a context for
experience that defines much of what goes on in the viewer's head? Or
are you talking more about the disconnect between, for example,
Hitchcock and "Hitchcock," between the person making the film and the
set of filmmaking devices that we experience? Or something else
altogether? - Dan
915
From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 4:30pm
Subject: Re: "Reading, culture, and auteurs"
I read it as a result of your post. I agree with you; it's really good.
I'm perhaps not quite as much of a "humanist" as Gallagher, and would
put things differently, but I think some of his basic distinctions are
right.
Writers are really in the business of selling their writing. Thus for
most, it's the writing that has to sound good, whether entertaining (for
the popular press) or bewilderingly intelligent-sounding (in academia).
And academics have an incentive to sound like they have access to arcane
knowledge that the rest of us don't know anything about. That's what
justifies their salaries. And, in the case of a physicist specializing
in quantum electrodynamics, it would be true. But for a film writer or
professor to speak of the ineffability of what he is speaking about
would be a tough sell. So we invent things, tell stories. The good ones
among us try to make up stories that help illuminate the actual work.
At the same time, thinking about the "prose" aspects of a great film --
comparing a Western to others in its genre, for example -- can sometimes
offer genuine insights into its "poetry."
- Fred
916
From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 4:33pm
Subject: Re: The People Against OHARU
Dan Sallitt wrote:
> (By the way, is there a
>basis for that apostrophe you placed in OHARU?)
>
>
>
No, I think it's just my mistake. I'm probably a victim of my own dumb
past joke, which you'veall been spared up until now, of referring to
"that noted Irish-Japanese feminist filmmaker Miss O'Guchi."
I'll respond to the more substantive matters in a day or two, when I get
some time.
Fred
917
From: tagtagta
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 5:33pm
Subject: Re: The Forest and the Trees
Hi, group. Just learned of your existence.
Can I ask hotlove666 where Douchet says this about Ford/Murnau? (I
like it, but wonder what all he means...)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>
> Ford/Griffith, Ford/Murnau - Which one was such a powerful
> father that his influence risked crippling Ford, and which one
> enabled him to "make it new" and escape that plight? Douchet
> said that after Ford discovered Murnau, he gave Griffith's cinema
> an unconscious.
918
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 6:20pm
Subject: Re: Rudolph
>I didn't hate the film - somehow it seems better in retrospect, and
>maybe I'd like it more with a second viewing. My impression at the time
>was that the FIGHT CLUB-like concept of the Denis Leary character was a
>big mistake that undercut the not-too-comfortable virtues of the
>original concept. I think the filmmakers were working with art-film
>material (i.e., a passive, inarticulate protagonist who wants stasis
>instead of change, no matter how bad the status quo is - but who
>nonetheless is firmly our point-of-view figure) but didn't want to make
>an art film, and did a Hollywood number on it - "Let's make it
>communicate more clearly to the audience" - which in fact changed the
>project in basic ways.
Was wondering if Leary as Id was part of the original novella. Not
sure what a film without that device would have looked like. I doubt
it would have been palatable to any kind of general audience, as the
present approach allows the balance of comedy and drama they
obviously were after. Or without Leary the comedy might have fallen
on Scott's head in an unpleasant way, as the passive, possibly
cuckolded husband. The art of the film to me is that, what with
[*S P O I L E R*] Leary constantly urging Scott to "do the wrong, but
in some way natural, thing," there's some kind of believable
resolution despite/because of the Scott character's passive approach.
>It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but on the whole I tend to like the
>projects that Rudolph writes more than the ones he directs from the
>scripts of others. - Dan
INVESTIGATING SEX, which was co-written by Rudolph and the
aforementioned Michael Henry Wilson, didn't get a distributor here.
Rudolph undoubtedly was worried that two undistributed films in a row
would be the literal end of his career. So I can understand it if he
wanted to go a bit more mainstream this time around.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
919
From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 6:32pm
Subject: Our new member
I'm pleased to report that our new member, "tagtagta," is Tag Gallagher.
And I know a number of us will be interested in the following list of
his writing that's online. I recently read the Walsh, which I liked very
much; while not agreeing with it one hundred per cent, I found it had
important insights into his style that I hadn't really thought of.
- Fred
Dreyer: http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html
Ferrara:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/tgfr10d.htm
Hitchcock: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/24/hitch_machines.html
Short manifesto about cinema & academia:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/tgbfr12a.htm
McCarey:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/tgfr13a.htm
Mizoguchi:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/tgfr13b.htm
Ophuls: http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html
Rossellini's Joan of Arc:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0300/tgfr09a.htm
Ulmer:
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/tgafr12a.htm
Vidor, Hawks, Ford ("American Tryptych"): http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html
Ford's Bucking Broadway:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/john_ford_rises.html
von Sternberg: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/19/sternberg.html
Walsh: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/walsh.html
920
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 7:02pm
Subject: Re: Rudolph
> Was wondering if Leary as Id was part of the original novella.
He's not, I'm told.
> INVESTIGATING SEX, which was co-written by Rudolph and the
> aforementioned Michael Henry Wilson, didn't get a distributor here.
> Rudolph undoubtedly was worried that two undistributed films in a row
> would be the literal end of his career. So I can understand it if he
> wanted to go a bit more mainstream this time around.
If I recall correctly, this script was originally written for the late
Norman Rene to direct. - Dan
921
From:
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 3:26pm
Subject: Re: Rudolph
I've got a whole stack of posts to reply to, but I'll just say I'm a little
disappointed to read Dan's reaction to "The Secret Lives of Dentists" since I
think Rudolph has been on a terrific roll since "Afterglow." I think that film
and "Breakfast of Champions" are among his best. And I like "Trixie." I
haven't seen "Investigating Sex," but I seem to remember a very favorable Film
Comment "Distributor Wanted" piece on it a few years back.
I do tend to agree with Dan, though, that Rudolph is at his best when
directing from scripts he's written himself or co-written (even "Endangered Spieces"
- which I do not believe originates with him - is better, I think, because
Rudolph had a hand in the final script). "Songwriter," "Made In Heaven," and
"Mortal Thoughts" - the ones where he's strictly a gun for hire - are probably
his least interesting films. Even so, his mise en scene seems to translate
fairly well to these impersonal projects. The clips I've seen of "Dentists"
certainly look like his work.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
922
From:
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 3:31pm
Subject: Re: Our new member
In a message dated 8/6/03 2:36:20 PM, f@f... writes:
>McCarey:
>http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/tgfr13a.htm
I haven't read all of these pieces yet, but I have read this one and found it
to simply be one of the most valuable things ever written about McCarey.
I wonder if Tag would have any thoughts on an observation I made about
McCarey's work from a few weeks back:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/message/564
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
923
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 8:45pm
Subject: Varia
I had not heard that Norman Rene died. I really liked the first part
of Prelude to a Kiss - I thought it was the most believable
meeting cute/falling in love story I'd seen in ages. The play was
good, too - although I thought the adaptation didn't quite work
after the body-switch - but I liked Rene's direction of the actors a
lot. He had promise.
The Douchet quote is from one of the columns he did for the
Cahiers in the mid- to late-90s.
I'm not a Rudolph fan (he never did anything approaching the
first half of Prelude to a Kiss, as far as I can see), but for those
who are, I'll say that the sex in Investigating Sex was kind of sexy,
but nothing compared to the sex in Comedy of God (rentable,
and recommended), and that Luc Moullet considers Breakfast of
Champions to be one of the best films of the late 20th Century. I
haven't seen it yet, but I trust Moullet's taste enough to have a
look. He also recommends that we catch up with Clarence
Badger and Ben Turpin (as director).
I'm following the People Against O'Haru debate with great
interest.
On the one hand, the topic is important, but it tends to evaporate
in one's hands when the words "form" and "content" enter the
fray. I'd prefer to stick with more specific elements: plot, character
(anyone going to pick up on that one?), themes etc. and lighting,
camera movement, etc., without putting them under one or the
other side of a binary opposition. (Confession: I distrust
philosophical or esthetic debates build around abstract
categories formed as binary oppositions, both on principle and
after a fair amount of experience. I think the part of the brain that
loves those either/ors runs on the cybernetic equivalent of
kerosene. Our brains and our language systems may use 1s
and 0s, or "differences," to make sense, and kerosene is fine for
running "differential engines" like that, but when you get to
philosophy and esthetics, what Gurdjieff called formatory
thinking is an invitation to endless time-wasting discussions, in
my opinion. But that's just me.)
On the other hand, under "themes" I observe that moral ideas
play a preponderant role in our debates: Is a director a good
person or a bad person? (In the all-turniphead press and
Akademia they would say "Is he left or right?" when he probably
isn't either.)
On the third hand, there are the aspects of any film that simply
please some people and not others - the genre (we all have our
favorites), the tale, the score, an actress, a cameraman and so
on. This is more of a pleasure/pain issue than a right/wrong
issue, and therefore more easily confused (perhaps) with
esthetic pleasure.
On the fourth hand, there's esthetic pleasure: What is it? Are
morality and politics extrinsic to it or intrinsic? What part do other
pleasures play in it? These are not issues we just discovered -
they've been around. They have a history.
On the fifth hand (one of life's little ironies), I've been trying to
come up with a defense of the Cahiers' Rereading Classical
Film pieces (there were only 4 - Lincoln, Morocco, Sylvia Scarlet
and Intolerance) by noting equivalents in American auteurist
discourse. One equivalent is what I was GOING to call the "I've
Never Understood the Fuss about Mizoguchi" Move, which is
really a way of raising fundamental theoretical issues in
language an American film buff can relate to. (It needs a
universally admired director to work. No one cares if you don't
understand the fuss about Richard Fleischer, although they
might consider it their duty to agree or disagree.) But before I
could write the post, one of our most distinguished members
used the move - with Mizoguchi after the "about"! And it has led to
an interesting discussion.
That's an aside, as are my personal remarks about "form" and
"content." The thrust of this post is that
auteurism-in-search-of-its-theory has to deal with the issue of
moral judgement ("bad" auteurs who are cynical or sadistic,
"good" auteurs who are filled with the milk of human kindness,
and vice-versa); with the issue of story, genre etc. as
taste-makers; and ultimately with the whole notion of personality
as an esthetic criterion (and impersonality, as Fred keeps
reminding us, invoking yet another whole history of esthetic
debate that didn't just fall off the back of the truck).
And on the one very interesting point about SHOP - what if
Lubitsch and Hawks were MORE cynical than Billy Wilder?
924
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 9:21pm
Subject: Re: Rudolph
> I've got a whole stack of posts to reply to, but I'll just say I'm a little
> disappointed to read Dan's reaction to "The Secret Lives of Dentists" since I
> think Rudolph has been on a terrific roll since "Afterglow."
Don't take my word for it - some people think it's one of Rudolph's best.
> I think that film
> and "Breakfast of Champions" are among his best.
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS was probably my favorite Rudolph film since the
WELCOME TO L.A./REMEMBER MY NAME/CHOOSE ME trilogy. It's a crazy movie,
just the sort I usually don't care for, but somehow it got me. The
script was a dream project, written by Rudolph 20 years ago or more - I
don't know if he did revisions after the project was a go.
- Dan
925
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 9:34pm
Subject: Re: Varia
> On the one hand, the topic is important, but it tends to evaporate
> in one's hands when the words "form" and "content" enter the
> fray.
Yeah, undoubtedly. I was trying to address the form-content issue
without actually deploying the terms.
I think maybe it's a useful dichotomy in certain specific situations,
attached to specific elements, as long as you know that it's like sand
sifting through your fingers....
> Confession: I distrust
> philosophical or esthetic debates build around abstract
> categories formed as binary oppositions, both on principle and
> after a fair amount of experience.
It's hard to do without them, though. My thinking seems to start with
them, and then I try to bring in complications....
> On the other hand, under "themes" I observe that moral ideas
> play a preponderant role in our debates: Is a director a good
> person or a bad person?
I hate to be the one to give a moral tinge to the discussions, because
my moral systems have pretty much collapsed in the last 5-10 years. But
neither simple nor complex social systems function without some
standards of desirable and undesirable behavior. I don't attach any
more weight to it than that, but I don't see how to transcend it.
- Dan
926
From:
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 6:05pm
Subject: Re: Rudolph
In a message dated 8/6/03 5:22:38 PM, sallitt@p... writes:
>BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS was probably my favorite Rudolph film since the
>WELCOME TO L.A./REMEMBER MY NAME/CHOOSE ME trilogy. It's a crazy movie,
>just the sort I usually don't care for, but somehow it got me. The
>script was a dream project, written by Rudolph 20 years ago or more - I
>don't know if he did revisions after the project was a go.
My understanding was that the initial drafts of the script were done for
Altman to direct. I believe Patrick McGilligan's bio indicates that Altman's
dream cast included Sterling Hayden as Kilgore Trout, Ruth Gordon as Elliott
Rosewater (!), and Flip Wilson in multiple roles of black servants, among others.
Anyway, while I kind of dream about what Altman would have done with the book,
I love Rudolph's film and am very glad to hear it has its supporters.
Thinking about how Altman's film would have been different is a useful way of
thinking about what makes Rudolph unique from Altman. In many ways, his
surface style is very indebted to Altman; the zooming, the fly on-the-wall feel of
the visual design, the throwaway dialogue and overlapping sound, and so on.
But this intersects with a particular kind of stylization almost completely
absent from the usually more naturalistic Altman: for starters, Rudolph seems
very much the movie romantic, from the spontaneous 'musical' number which opens
"Choose Me" to the whole idea behind things like "Love At Large." If I
recall, there's even a wisecracking private eye character somewhere in "Breakfast of
Champions." The ending is certainly a sort of 'vision of paradise' in line
with Rudolph's sensibilities; I can't imagine Altman going in this direction.
It is completely nutty in parts - representing the polar opposite of Keith
Gordon's restrained version of "Mother Night" (which I'm also a big supporter
of) - but nutty with a kind of integrity which I find to be kind of rare.
Because it's on my mind, I'll contrast it to the infinitely more calculated, sel
f-conscious eccentricity of "Northfork"; there's a prepackaged feel to that film,
whereas Rudolph's vision of madness seems a lot more deeply felt and, well,
termite-like. Strangely, a lot of the references to pop culture and
commercialization seem a little dated - as though Rudolph took them straight from the
novel - but they manage to be amazingly accurate. I'm thinking of a shot, which
must have been done on a 200mm lens or something, which compacts about thirty
road signs into the same space... horrifying landmarks dotting the American
landscape.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
927
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 10:31pm
Subject: Morality
I hate to be the one to give a moral tinge to the discussions,
because my moral systems have pretty much collapsed in the
last 5-10 years. But neither simple nor complex social systems
function without some standards of desirable and undesirable
behavior. I don't attach any more weight to it than that, but I don't
see how to transcend it.
Sorry to hear about the collapse. I'm still an insufferable prig
about almost everything to do with the behavior of actual human
beings within complex social systems, but not about movies.
That doesn't mean that, watching The Naked Spur, I don't find it
comical that Robert Ryan is defined as "bad" by his rap-sheet at
the beginning, and feel that the screenewriter or the director or
both (let's see those files...) are making a subtle point about that.
To jump back to my "lit crit" training, I was nauseated when I saw
how what Harold Bloom called "the Churchwarden school" of
critics had been reading Elizabethan and Jacobean English
drama. Their stuffy Christian orthodoxy made them sound like
moral idiots when it came to evaluating characters like Falstaff or
Prince Hal - a lot of it seemed to go back to their acceptance of a
doctrinally inculcated image of God whom William Empson, in
Milton's God, described as a Machiavellian monster.
So moral codes do play a role in the creation and reception of
art, and the codes by which we judge a particular fictive action
vary according to the recipient. Debates about the morality or
immorality of characters would then be debates about how we
interpret the work, not different in kind from "The Great Chain of
Being in the Works of Thomas Marston" or "Was Cyril Tourneur
an Atheist?" The next step - damning Tourneur to Hell or praising
him to the skies for BEING an atheist - may not have that much to
do with criticism.
928
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 10:50pm
Subject: Re: Morality
> Sorry to hear about the collapse.
It's got its pluses and minuses.
> I'm still an insufferable prig
> about almost everything to do with the behavior of actual human
> beings within complex social systems, but not about movies.
So then how does it work when you sense a person behind a movie? It's a
running theme of auteurism that we should sense a person behind a movie,
and think of him or her much as we think of people we know. Obviously
auteurists might disagree about that, but it's certainly part of our
cultural heritage. (Not that it's here or there, but Bazin once dropped
a comment about "the heresy of art for art's sake.") I don't propose
any simple way of mapping the director onto the person or the director's
acts onto a person's acts, but it's quite natural to do this in some form.
> The next step - damning Tourneur to Hell or praising
> him to the skies for BEING an atheist - may not have that much to
> do with criticism.
Maybe not. It's not incredibly interesting to sit in judgment on a
director's personality, but I don't know how to eliminate that component
and still be a reacting person in front of the screen. - Dan
929
From:
Date: Wed Aug 6, 2003 7:56pm
Subject: Re: Varia
Second the motion by Luc Moullet on Clarence Badger! His "Hands Up!" (1926)
is one of the comedy classics of the silent screen. The famous "It" with Clara
Bow is also fun.
Have never seen anything directed by Ben Turpin. He always breaks me up as an
actor.
On morality: "Moral issues are ever so much more fun than real issues" -
Nichols and May.
Dan Sallitt's choice of Gunman's Walk (Phil Karlson, 1958) is also heartily
seconded here. Also was surprised at how good Karlson's early The Texas Rangers
(1951) is. This film shows a good sense of color - like many 1950's Westerns,
it is a color dream.
I read Cyril Tourner's The Revenger's Tragedy in school, but now remember
nothing about it. By contrast, the non-stage Elizabethan poetry has stuck with
me forever - Spenser, Emilia Lanier, Sir John Davies, Campion, John Dowland,
Michael Drayton.
O Love they wrong thee much
that say thy sweet is bitter,
When thy true fruit is such
as nothing could be sweeter.
Fair house of joy and bliss
where truest pleasure is
I do adore thee!
I know thee what thou art
And serve thee with my heart
And fall before thee.
Tobias Hume - Fain Would I Change that Note.
Mike Grost
930
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 0:29am
Subject: Morality
Well, we're homing in on the question.
I know that auteurists feel that they must pass judgement on the
character, morality and overall personality of the author; or feel
that that is what they are doing when they look at a film.
I know that this is part of our heritage, although I also prefer not
to bog down in debates about the heritage, which heritage,
whose heritage, sez who etc., in order to focus on what it is we
ought to do, and in fact do do when we're making up these lists.
I will just repeat what I have said: I don't do that. I don't assess or
judge Otto Preminger's morality when I watch In Harm's Way.
I do pass moral judgements on the characters (yes, moral
judgements, contrary to Preminger dogma: Patrick O'Neal's
character is a total asshole), and I infer what moral judgements
Preminger is passing - that's definitely part of my job as a critic,
and it assuredly takes into acount how he shoots them, how he
directs the actors etc. Because we are roughly contemporary,
and both political liberals, his rule book and mine pretty much
match up. So what?
On the other hand, I would be hard-pressed to view Abraham as
a good man when he is preparing to sacrifice Isaac in the
Hebrew Bible. But if Preminger or Hawks or Bunuel or Rossellini
or Renoir or Sirk or McCarey or Borzage had chosen to film this
story (let's skip Huston, who unfortunately did), my slant on it
might change depending on how the auteur presented it.
Kierkegaard, for example, reinterpreted Abraham so that he
matched Kierkegaard's very modern rulebook, and I'm sure that
some of the brilliant people we study could do the same - the
Straubs, say - or make us laugh at him, or make us feel deeply
the impossible dilemma he is in, or make us see it from Isaac's
point of view, or Sara's, God's, or the lamb's! And saying what the
moral judgement they made their art in telling the tale - or didn't,
if Peter Greenwood decided to take the helm - is part of what the
critic interpreting their work is supposed to do.
Will my judgement of the film - good, bad or great - include my
conclusions about the morality of the author? (The author as
embodied in the work, of course, since the real person is
unknown to us - right?) Mine will. Will the work stand or fall on
that one thematic interpretation? Not mine, any more than mine
would stand or fall on what "politics" or "gender politics" I infer
from the way Ophuls films Joan Fontaine in Letter from an
Unknown Woman, God save us all...
To me, these THEMES - signifieds, moral codes, moral
judgements, call them what you will: I like the old words, so I say
"themes" - are elements along with many, many others in the
work we are assessing, and I would advocate taking good hard
luck, as we are doing now, at the part of our heritage that makes
it so easy to say, "Wilder - too cynical for me," when maybe we
should be saying, "Wilder - he believes too much in blueprints -
the stuff just lies there on the screen when he's done executing,"
or something else along those lines.
Personally, I believe that passing judgement on the author's
character (let's blur it to go fast - "character," that seems to
include "personality" and "morality" without the irrelevant
connotations: "She's not pretty, but what a personality!" or "We
need a return to morality in this country!") is what auteurists
THINK they are doing because they THINK it's what they are
supposed to do, but if you look behind the accepted language
they use for talking amongst themselves about movies, you'll
see that "Wilder - what a fucking sadist!" is really a translation or
shorthand for judgements of a much more sophisticated kind,
which could be expressed better, in a more nuanced and
complex fashion, if we cut clear of that half-inherited,
half-invented private language.
I repeat, what if Lubitsch and Hawks were the real cynics? That
would change my interpretation of their work, but not my
evaluation. (And let's not forget that Diogenes was a pretty slick
guy...)
931
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 0:39am
Subject: Re: Rudolph
> > Was wondering if Leary as Id was part of the original novella.
>
>He's not, I'm told.
It would be interesting to see how Jane Smiley handled it all. If
there isn't a literary precedent, it certainly was a big step to
insert Leary so much into the proceedings. (I'm assuming, by the
way, that Rudolph had a great deal to do with the direction the
script took, even if he didn't get a credit.)
Smiley's title, "The Age of Grief", suggests a different emphasis.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
932
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 0:46am
Subject: Re: Rudolph
> It would be interesting to see how Jane Smiley handled it all. If
> there isn't a literary precedent, it certainly was a big step to
> insert Leary so much into the proceedings. (I'm assuming, by the
> way, that Rudolph had a great deal to do with the direction the
> script took, even if he didn't get a credit.)
Don't know if you saw the post on That Other List, but: apparently the
Denis Leary character existed in the book, but had a much smaller role
and didn't appear until 2/3 of the way through. He didn't appear as a
fantasy figure, but the protagonist talks about this character invading
and influencing him. So it's an issue of expanding a suggested idea
considerably instead of creating it whole. - Dan
933
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 1:07am
Subject: Re: Varia
Bill K.:
>Our brains and our language systems may use 1s
>and 0s, or "differences," to make sense, and kerosene is fine for
>running "differential engines" like that, but when you get to
>philosophy and esthetics, what Gurdjieff called formatory
>thinking is an invitation to endless time-wasting discussions, in
>my opinion. But that's just me.)
Gurdjieff referred to "wiseacring for the swing of thought," too much
wiseacring *not* being a good thing.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
934
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 1:19am
Subject: Re: Rudolph
>Don't know if you saw the post on That Other List....
Only after the fact.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
935
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 2:51am
Subject: Re: Morality, SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
> On the other hand, I would be hard-pressed to view Abraham as a good
> man when he is preparing to sacrifice Isaac in the Hebrew Bible. But
> if Preminger or Hawks or Bunuel or Rossellini or Renoir or Sirk or
> McCarey or Borzage had chosen to film this story (let's skip Huston,
> who unfortunately did), my slant on it might change depending on how
> the auteur presented it.
Sure, and probably most people would agree that that's a good thing.
> Will my judgement of the film - good, bad or great - include my
> conclusions about the morality of the author? (The author as embodied
> in the work, of course, since the real person is unknown to us -
> right?) Mine will.
Do you mean that you recognize the morality of the author, but not to
the credit or detriment of the film? Or are you saying that your
opinion of the film may be affected?
> I would advocate taking good hard luck, as we are doing now, at the
> part of our heritage that makes it so easy to say, "Wilder - too
> cynical for me," when maybe we should be saying, "Wilder - he
> believes too much in blueprints - the stuff just lies there on the
> screen when he's done executing," or something else along those
> lines.
This is the part that I resist. I think there's a real danger of
auteurists saying "X's formal style is nonexistent/incoherent/too
simple" when they really mean that X rubs them the wrong way for some
personal reason. It's just too easy to charge a director with
insufficient formal command - and of course it's really hard to make the
charge stick, since you're trying to prove a negative.
I used to think Wilder lacked something, not so much visual authority as
the ability to integrate storytelling and theme. There would be a
moment in the middle of a Wilder film where the story would go slack for
me, where I'd feel that the storytelling had become doodling. Anyway,
I'm not so sure these days. I recently revisited KISS ME STUPID, and I
don't know if there's anything wrong with it other than my not being
interested in the director's vision and not finding his jokes funny. I
definitely feel that Capra-Riskin know exactly what they're doing and do
it well. No slackening of the directorial grip there. But I'm not with
the program.
It seems much cleaner to cop to a personal aversion.
> I repeat, what if Lubitsch and Hawks were the real cynics? That would
> change my interpretation of their work, but not my evaluation.
If they are cynics, then it's just a question of a new terminology for
an old experience. No reason to reevaluate. Do you think they are cynics?
I can relate to what Jim said, though I don't feel it as strongly:
> On a considerably lesser scale of human iniquity, one beloved classic
> that really did strike me as sadistic is THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER:
> Jimmy Stewart circumstantially figures things out early on and uses
> his privileged knowledge to manipulate and/or torment Margaret
> Sullavan for much of the rest of the film. The difficulty being that
> Lubitsch didn't seem to be doing anything to place this uncomfortable
> situation in perspective -- he seemed, if anything, to be
> participating in the cruelty. (Nor did a remake by a female, Nora
> Ephron, do anything to mitigate the unpleasantness of the experience,
> even adding a further layer by making the male a rapacious capitalist
> pig into the bargain.) At least that's how I saw it when I saw it; I
> could easily be wrong -- I hope I am -- and should probably revisit
> the film, but my point is that so far I've been loath to do so.
I think the account of the sadism might be a bit too much. My memory
(which is fairly recent) is that only a small portion of the film, right
near the end, features Stewart inflicting discomfort on Sullavan. When
Stewart first figures things out, he is treated rather brutally by
Sullavan, who wounds him by calling him an "insignificant little clerk";
he then leaves her to a painful fate (she waits in vain for her loved
one to meet her), but I don't register this as sadism on the director's
part: both characters are shattered, and we feel the pain all around.
The film puts the romance aside for a while to deal with the Matuschek
affair, and only near the end, as we become aware of the impending happy
ending, does Stewart manipulate the situation to demonstrate power over
Sullavan. (Sullavan's continued arrogance is the film's excuse, but I
agree that this isn't a good excuse.) I'm bothered by this a little,
but not intensely - maybe because Stewart flips back and forth between
demonstrating concern for Sullavan and enjoying his ruse.
There is one Lubitsch film that is far more sadistic: BLUEBEARD'S EIGHTH
WIFE, where Colbert's persecution of Cooper is extreme and loveless.
Could this sadism have anything to do with Wilder and Brackett, the
scriptwriters? I think Lubitsch was a powerful enough dude that he has
to take the blame.
- Dan
936
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 3:15am
Subject: Re: Our new member
Thanks, Peter.
No, I don't have any ideas about McCarey's use of names. I know next
to nothing about his personal life. On the other hand, I know a lot
about Ford's and Rossellini's personal lives, but that's never given
me any ideas about the names they chose (a lot of women in Ford named
after cities: Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver) or were chosen for them.
In McCarey's case, his method was to gather round his cast and spend a
few days while all of them together worked out skits, etc., to expand
on the initial idea for a scene (which is one reason his sequences
tend to be long), so the names of characters could have derived from
the cast members as easily as from McCarey or other writers.
Tag Gallagher.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> I wonder if Tag would have any thoughts on an observation I made about
> McCarey's work from a few weeks back:
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/message/564
>
> Peter
>
> http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
937
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 3:49am
Subject: Re: Natalka Poltavka
I don't understand the inordinate enthusiasm for Natalka. It's a nice
movie, but it's obvious that Ulmer directed only parts of it, and not
very well, if you're acquainted with any of Ulmer's later work. The
non Ulmer parts are horribly wooden. Ulmer did NOT have much control
at all!
How can anyone prefer Natalks to Cossacks on the Danube? Cossacks, I
think, is about the best movie I've ever seen of an opera. One need
only compare the sensibility and sensitivity with which characters are
constructed, or the poetic invention with which dances are staged in
Cossacks alongside the prosaic reportage of Natalka.
Tag Gallagher.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> The East Coast premiere of this recently recovered* Ukrainian
> operetta co-directed by Ulmer and Vasily Avramenko (the first of
> Ulmer's ethnic films) was as well attended as the same event would
> have been at Roger and Howard's in the old days - but we were a bit
> lost in the vast auditorium of the Egyptian Theatre (aka The American
> Cinematheque). I found the film astonishing - much better than
> Cossacks in Exile. It taught me a lesson about Ulmer: The early PRCs
> are minor because he didn't have power at the studio yet, not because
> of budget. Here he had very little money, but total control of the
> mise en scene (VA directed the dancers, singers and actors, but Ulmer
> rewrote the script to conform to his own visual plan), and it's a
> major film. In other words, he didn't need means; all he needed was a
> free hand.
>
> PS - I believe Lee Sanders and Joe Kaufman agreed with me about the
> film. The Ukrainians in the audience definitely loved it.
>
> PPS - Arianne hopes it will be shown on TCM next year during the EGU
> 100th birthday festival.
>
> *by Michael Friend, former head of the Academy Archives.
938
From: jaketwilson
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 3:52am
Subject: Pornography
Dan Sallitt wrote:
> I have always tended to lump pornography in with all other
filmmaking elements that temporarily erase the viewer's awareness
that he or she is watching fiction instead of real life! So it bears
> a resemblance to some other forms of visceral experience. For
instance, some kinds of violence erase the fiction for me and seem to
> act directly on my nervous system, as if the violence was really
happening. You can make a strong argument that very pure forms of
identification are also "pornographic" in this regard.
>
> Perhaps these elements are impurities, destructive to art if
offered in concentrated form, but potentially interesting if they
>interact with the rest of the work.
This discussion has gone off in too many intriguing directions for me
to follow up, but in response to this particular point:
I'm not sure that pornography makes us believe we're watching real
life (in one sense it surely makes us hyper-aware of the gap between
us and the onscreen action). But I think that when porn 'works' for
us -– when it turns us on -– the human response, so to speak,
overrides the aesthetic one. At least by analogy, I agree that pure
emotional identification does the same thing. Maybe our experiences
differ, but I don't respond in this way to simulated violence
(`real' atrocity footage is a different matter).
I like the point about `impurities.' Perhaps over-optimistically, I'd
distinguish in this light between eroticism and pornography:
eroticism is the fuel that cinema runs on, but porn is what you get
when the fire runs out of control.
On morality: I think that moral convictions (and religious ones, and
lack of same) enter into ALL our judgments -– they don't just occupy
a separate, cordoned-off area.
But paraphrasing Godard (and Oscar Wilde): is style ultimately a
matter of morality, or is morality a matter of style?
JTW
939
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 3:59am
Subject: Re: Vidor
I adore both WAR AND PEACE and AN AMERICAN ROMANCE. As we know from
Vidor's book, MGM cut out half an hour from the latter movie after
release, and Vidor quit MGM in disgust after working there nearly 25
years. At the time of the Vidor centenary (celebrated with only
slightly more fanfare than was accorded von Sternberg's centenary,
which passed unnoted), we queried Turner who claimed that no trace of
the cut footage survives. Let's hope this isn't true.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > "Solomon and Sheba" is, as I
> > remember it, terrible, and "War and Peace," while really good, didn't
> > overwhelm me.
>
> I'm actually a big fan of WAR AND PEACE. I don't believe that any
movie
> will ever render battle scenes with such dynamic clarity.
>
> > "An American Romance."
>
> The other person I know of who's a big fan of this film is David
> Thomson. I saw it once on TV and missed most of the qualities you guys
> talk about, but I really want to see it again. - Dan
940
From: jaketwilson
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:02am
Subject: binary oppositions
"The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against the
inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the
tranquil, the romantic against the classical: these are great and
interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see
satisfactorily settled."
-- Thomas Love Peacock, CROTCHET CASTLE
I'm trying to think some more about the concept of 'character.'
Characters in movies are different from characters in books, aren't
they?
JTW
941
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:13am
Subject: Re: Vietnam, Vietnam
For the record, Ford did not spend three years on Vietnam, Vietnam.
He did not direct the film. He was not present when it was shot. His
input came during post-production. And it would appear that his input
seemed "out of it" to almost everyone involved. Ford was old,
decaying, half-crazy, and certainly out of it. It's not fair to hold
this movie against him.
Fred reopens the old wound of Ford's asking God to bless Nixon. But
the reason for blessing Nixon was that he withdrew from Vietnam! It's
obvious from the satire of Nixon in The Last Hurrah that Ford had
complete contempt for the man. Besides, the greater the sinner, the
more we should hope for God's blessing, no?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
> hotlove666 wrote:
>
> >For the record, Ford did spend 3 years on Vietnam, Vietnam.
> >
> >
> And I would hold, as a matter of principle, that there could be Fordian
> elements there -- even, that, on an aesthetic level, greatness --
that I
> simply missed it on my one viewing.
>
> -Fred
942
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:20am
Subject: Re: The People Against OHARU
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
> Dan Sallitt wrote:
>
> > (By the way, is there a
> >basis for that apostrophe you placed in OHARU?)
> >
> >
> >
> No, I think it's just my mistake. I'm probably a victim of my own
dumb
> past joke, which you'veall been spared up until now, of referring
to
> "that noted Irish-Japanese feminist filmmaker Miss O'Guchi."
>
The apostrophe usually shows up when the name is romanized in French
texts: "La Vie d'O'Haru, femme galante." I've also seen "O-haru." My
understanding is the apostrophe or dash is inserted into the
romanization of a Japanese word if there is any ambiguity about how it
is pronounced. Maybe French speakers have to be reminded that the "h"
is not silent?
Paul
943
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:44am
Subject: Re: binary oppositions
> "The sentimental against the rational, the intuitive against the
> inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the
> tranquil, the romantic against the classical: these are great and
> interesting controversies, which I should like, before I die, to see
> satisfactorily settled."
>
> -- Thomas Love Peacock, CROTCHET CASTLE
This guy is pretty cool. I hope he got his wish.
> I'm trying to think some more about the concept of 'character.'
> Characters in movies are different from characters in books, aren't
> they?
Well, they're different in how they're rendered, but I wonder if that's
crucial. You can argue that movies show people from the outside and
books from the inside, but then each medium has ways of compensating for
its natural predispositions.
Bazin argued that characterization can in some cases transcend artistic
media - he pointed out that people who've never read Don Quixote have a
clear picture of the man.
- Dan
944
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:51am
Subject: Re: Re: The People Against OHARU
Thanks, Paul; I probably did get the apostrophe from somewhere; I did
try to get through Mizoguchi's scriptwriter's reminiscences in Cahiers.
But as long as we're talking about the title of this overwhelmingly
liberating and nonjudgmental cosmic masterpiece (just kidding, Dan, and
I will try to get caught up on the substantive posts soon), I should
point out that it's my understanding that the Japanese title actually
translates to something like "Tales of a Woman By Saikaku," Saikaku
being a writer whose story (stories?) formed the basis of the script. It
would be a typically Western conceit (or maybe it was just box office
thinking) to misrepresent the thrust of the film by titling it after the
name of its protagonist.
- Fred
945
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:54am
Subject: Re: Re: Vietnam, Vietnam
Well, I'm sure you're right Ford didn't direct it, and it certainly
doesn't look like anything he did direct. But he did put his name on it.
And I think you misunderstand my report of the old Nixon blessing, or
perhaps I misrepresented my intent. I don't really hold that against
Ford, even though it personally sickened me; for one thing, he looked
like he was sick, and for another, I don't hold an artist's politics
against him, or more to the point against the work. I was just reporting
as a historical matter the event itself, which I witnessed with surprise
on TV, and the reactions of more than one Ford-lover at the time.
- Fred
946
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 6:22am
Subject: Re: Vietnam, Vietnam
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Well, I'm sure you're right Ford didn't direct it, and it certainly
> doesn't look like anything he did direct. But he did put his name on
it.
Yes, and to his lasting shame. And which tends unfortunately to make
Ford bashers feel comfy and secure. What I gathered from people at
the USIA is that Ford outraged everybody by insisting that the US was
in Vietnam to defend freedom, that it was a simple matter of black and
white. Ironically, his simple iteration may have convinced people who
saw the movie of the ridiculous of our noble claims. I think it is to
Ford's credit that he has managed to irritate and outrage so many
people for three-quarters of a century. You should see This Is Korea!
for a much more complex attempt to reconcile the pax americana and horror.
> And I think you misunderstand my report of the old Nixon blessing, or
> perhaps I misrepresented my intent. I don't really hold that against
> Ford, even though it personally sickened me; for one thing, he looked
> like he was sick, and for another, I don't hold an artist's politics
> against him, or more to the point against the work. I was just
reporting
> as a historical matter the event itself, which I witnessed with
surprise
> on TV, and the reactions of more than one Ford-lover at the time.
>
> - Fred
I felt the same way. But that time, it seemed to me that the people
who turned against Ford's pictures because of his remark had been
quite far from comprehending those pictures before the remark was
made. He was dying of cancer.
947
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 7:02am
Subject: Morality
>> Will my judgement of the film - good, bad or great - include my
>> conclusions about the morality of the author? (The author as
embodied
>> in the work, of course, since the real person is unknown to us -
>> right?) Mine will.
>Do you mean that you recognize the morality of the author, but not to
>the credit or detriment of the film? Or are you saying that your
>opinion of the film may be affected?
I am in pretty close agreement with Preminger's morality, as
expressed in In Harm's Way, for historical reasons: It's of my era in
human history and my political stripe (even though the novel is by a
Nixon speech-writer). I was 20 when it came out, and if I'd seen it
then, I probably would have agreed with those aspects of it. I
despise the characters played by Patrick O'Neal and Dana Andrews, and
I feel sorry for the character played by Kirk Douglas, but not enough
to overlook the fact that he raped and killed a woman whose worst
fault was being a tease. Those are moral judgements I share with
Preminger, so I like his moral code as expressed in the film,
starting with these examples of flagrant actions like rape and amoral
opportunism and working right down - or up - to the small details of
behavior as represented through all the wonders of Preminger's mise-
en-scene, and the mise-en-scene itself, insofar as it can be
considered a moral act. (I don't hold it against Preminger, for
example, that he makes moral judgements, even though there's a
considerable body of criticism that praises him for NOT making films
with villains, for some reason. I like the fact that his films have
villains. My life is full of villains!)
On the other hand, even though I think any man who would sacrifice
his son on orders from God is committing an evil act, I consider the
story of Abraham and Iasaac, as told in the Hebrew Bible, to be an
incommensurably greater work of art than "In Harm's Way." I say that
even though the author approves of Abraham's near-crime, and every
detail of how the tale is told supports that judgement. Because the
author is telling the tale to a) explain the need for animal
sacrifices and probably to b) memorialize the cessation of human
sacrifices by his tribe, I agree with his moral conclusions, but not
with some of his moral assumptions, which are cultural, and I wonder
if millions of people who believed that the tale was a literal
account of something God did were not a little more ready to
sacrifice their own children to the going holy cause than they would
have been if they hadn't read it. Just for the sake of argument -
it's not a big deal to me to prove that they did: How could I? I'm
indicating an aspect of the tale I find abhorrent, even if the tale
is sublime beyond the reach of almost anything we're likely to talk
about on this web site. (By the way, if you think Jimmy Stewart is
being a dick at the end of Little Shop, how about that Yahweh?)
Back to In Harm's Way. When it premiered at Cannes in 1965 it was
panned by French critics who saw it as a gung-ho war film made by an
auteur who had betrayed his liberal convictions by supporting the
Vietnam War with this film. I don't happen to agree with that (and
neither did Wayne's fans, who turned out for the first weekend and
then stayed away). If I did, it would probably affect my assessment
of Preminger and his film. But it wouldn't totally determine my
assessment of either - it wouldn't even be the principle thing I
would say about the film. To me politics and morality are THEMES we
can infer from the film, but they are not the whole film, even if a
particular theme - that revenge is bad, for example - seems on the
basis of 15 films by the same director to be a belief held by the
director himself, at least in his films. (For all I know he may have
engaged in endless vengeful behavior in the executive suites and on
the soundstages of Hollywood when he wasn't making films, or even
when he was. There's a limit to what can be inferred about a maker
from his artifact.)
A part of the whole, a meaning - one that can be expressed in an
infinite variety of beautiful ways, and interact or interfere in all
sorts of beautiful ways with OTHER meanings. Not to be set aside or
confined to some separate area any more than politics is. Why would
anyone who loves art want to diminish it that way?
>I think there's a real danger of
auteurists saying "X's formal style is nonexistent/incoherent/too
simple" when they really mean that X rubs them the wrong way for some
personal reason. It's just too easy to charge a director with
insufficient formal command - and of course it's really hard to make
the charge stick, since you're trying to prove a negative.<
I'm sure you've heard that particular move made many times, and I
agree that it's lazy and even intellectually dangerous. (I tend to
distrust any esthetic judgement where the word "control" is used
anyway, but that's just me.) By the same token, I also feel that
talking about the author's personality or morality can be a shorthand
way of talking about things that are real and important, but hard to
talk about.
On the subject of personality, would anyone care to describe
Shakespeare's?
948
From:
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:03am
Subject: Re: Morality
The stack of posts to respond to grows but higher...
A few quick comments.
I think this discussion is related to the one we touched on a few days ago
about how auteurists - of all movie sects - seem to be most willing to set aside
ideology in appreciating a film. I'm sure there are things - attitudes,
assumptions, politics, etc - I don't agree with in the collected canons of Clint
Eastwood, Michael Cimino, Don Siegel, and Leo McCarey. But I find their best
work so great that I'm not going to let what essentially amount to ideological
differences cloud my appreciation of said work. In turn, maybe this relates
to Dan's insight that, when he makes a film, "the ideas are just floating
around the work, and the audience can get some of them, or none of them, and still
experience the film."
Of course, I'm not at all sure we should be using "ideology" and "ideas"
interchangably, but what I'm getting at is that "expression" is possibly more
important than either or both of them. It's so important, in fact, that it may
often undermine or complicate whatever surface ideology is being expressed; it
almost certainly has the function of overshadowing the ideology if the work is
great. If I liked Reifenstahl more, I think that's how I'd defend her.
Thought experiment: maybe only a Republican like McCarey could make a film
where the breakup of a family is as heartbreakingly detailed as it is in "Make
Way For Tomorrow"; the ideology is there, but for our purposes it's ultimately
a means to an end, a way of accessing a larger truth.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
949
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 0:36pm
Subject: Re: Morality
about morality...
In his book "Notes et Contre-Notes", Ionesco (who is one of
my
favorite artists) makes his case for an amoral look at art. He is
mainly angry with the critics who criticize works of art for moral
reason but he also claims that art, the essential part of it, has
nothing to do with morality, not in a direct way. I agree with his
theories 100% so instead of quoting him I'll just explain what I
think.
Ideology, morality and political beliefs are not the essential things
about the "human nature". They cannot be. Nothing proves us that our
morality is any better than anybody else's (unless, of course, you
like to believe that we have been told everything we need to know
about morality by a superior being). Many of us surely have found one
day that the whole system of thoughts we had built up until then were
nothing but an illusion. And I cannot see why that cannot happen
again tomorrow, or maybe even in the next five minutes. For any
skeptic, morality is simply a choice, determined by our "nature" AND
our past.
However, there are things about me that are not choices and that I
KNOW FOR SURE. I know that I have desires; I know that they sometimes
conflict with the universe, and that sometimes they don't. I know I
have problems and insecurities that throw me off-balance when the
life feels like it. I know I look for meaning or purpose (even when I
know there is none). I know the way I experience the world through my
senses is only one way of experiencing the world, and there probably
are infinite number of other ways. And I know some other stuff that I
don't feel comfortable sharing with you. These are things that don't
change with my mood, my age, my experiences, etc. And I believe these
are the things that make us "the same". There is a truth
about us
that is "beyond personality" and "beyond good and evil".
What I like about good/great art is that it captures these truths in
some form.
Obviously, all of my argument falls apart if you do think that there
is a "universal criteria for good and evil". I believe we can
"not
care" about our moral judgments if we really are trying to find
the
essential and I know a few people who achieved that.
Yoel
950
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 0:55pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Today on the local Chicago public radio station, WBEZ,
...
> Sarris said something like, "The auteur theory was born because people
> saw a lot of all these films and wondered why they liked a number of
> films...
Sarris may have coined the term "auteur theory" but auteurism has a
flourishing record both in American and French film criticism from the
teens all through the 1920s and 1930s. One could re-publish thousands
of page. The notion regarding some directors as the prime artistic
creators of their movies was in no way invented (or innovated) by
either Sarris or Truffaut.
951
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 1:03pm
Subject: Re: Friedkin, Clouzot
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote: Giulia d'Agnolo Vallan is preparing a complete retrospective
> for Torino
I caution all on this group against getting involved with this
organization, unless you wish to work for months without pay and then
be slandered behind your back and emerge bloody.
952
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 2:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: Friedkin, Clouzot
Oooh, sounds like a fun experience.
g
Alas, where is human nature so
weak as in a bookstore?
-Henry Ward Beecher
----- Original Message -----
From: Tag Gallagher
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 9:03 AM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: Friedkin, Clouzot
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote: Giulia d'Agnolo Vallan is preparing a complete retrospective
> for Torino
I caution all on this group against getting involved with this
organization, unless you wish to work for months without pay and then
be slandered behind your back and emerge bloody.
Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
ADVERTISEMENT
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
953
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 3:10pm
Subject: Re: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
> Sarris may have coined the term "auteur theory" but auteurism has a
> flourishing record both in American and French film criticism from the
> teens all through the 1920s and 1930s. One could re-publish thousands
> of page. The notion regarding some directors as the prime artistic
> creators of their movies was in no way invented (or innovated) by
> either Sarris or Truffaut.
Hello, Tag - welcome.
The exaltation of the director is certainly not new to auteurism. In
the American press, at least, you can see the fascination with the
figure of the director going back to the teens: there is something
intriguing about the man with the megaphone, telling stars what to do.
I have trouble thinking of any writer who caught the public's fancy as
did Griffith, DeMille, and others. Sometimes the powerful producer
would be lionized also, and sometimes people got confused about who did
what. But the mere fact that the director is a figure of authority
guarantees that he or she will fascinate and draw attention.
I don't think of the auteurist movement as just a celebration of the
director. It was a new aesthetic that tried to overthrow an existing
canon and replace it with a new one; and a serious proposal that
directors submerged in the bowels of a little-respected entertainment
system might be putting together bodies of work that could be considered
art. And other things. But I don't think that auteurism is what led to
the prestige enjoyed by the Coppolas and Spielbergs of the world, any
more than it had to do with the deification of Bergman and Fellini in
the 50s and 60s. I think those phenomena are the result of other
forces. - Dan
954
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 3:28pm
Subject: Re: Morality
>>Do you mean that you recognize the morality of the author, but not to
>>the credit or detriment of the film? Or are you saying that your
>>opinion of the film may be affected?
>
> I am in pretty close agreement with Preminger's morality, as
> expressed in In Harm's Way, for historical reasons
> On the other hand, even though I think any man who would sacrifice
> his son on orders from God is committing an evil act, I consider the
> story of Abraham and Iasaac, as told in the Hebrew Bible, to be an
> incommensurably greater work of art than "In Harm's Way."
> To me politics and morality are THEMES we
> can infer from the film, but they are not the whole film
I am concerned that my position might be misunderstood, because the
arguments that you put forth aren't anything I'd disagree with.
It wasn't me who brought the word "morality" into the discussion, as I
am uncomfortable with the concept in recent years. Ditto "politics" -
even a rudimentary experience of auteurist ideas practically forces one
to come to terms with the fact that artists' personalities aren't wholly
determined by their political beliefs. If you can deal with MY SON
JOHN, you should be able to deal with the story of Abraham and Isaac.
Yoel's Ionesco quote strikes me as a pretty reasonable attempt to deal
with the issue of morality, but it leaves the individual with desires
that sometime conflict with other things in the universe. And the films
we watch are part of the universe, and sometimes we come into conflict
with them!
What I was asking about your filmgoing is whether you ever feel
alienated by a director's sensibility, or whether every bad reaction you
have to a film is due to the film's aesthetic failures as you perceive them.
- Dan
955
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:04pm
Subject: Morality
If we agree, we agree. I can't recall ever having been bothered by
something that was said or "demonstrated" in a film I liked. I often
see dumb or destructive ideas in films I DON'T like, but that's just
icing on the shit burger when it happens.
956
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:05pm
Subject: Auteurism (plus morality)
Dan:
> I guess I'd like more clarification on this last, interesting
> paragraph.
> Are you talking about, for instance, the fact that simply putting a
> frame around something and hanging it on a wall creates a context
> for experience that defines much of what goes on in the viewer's
> head? Or are you talking more about the disconnect between, for
> example, Hitchcock and "Hitchcock," between the person making the
> film and the set of filmmaking devices that we experience? Or
> something else altogether?
The 'personal-impersonal' distinction is more an intuitive one that I
have and is not something I've ever tried to define even to myself
before now, and perhaps I should not have brought it up for this
reason.
I'm probably talking a little more about the quote/no-quote
distinction you suggest in my first ('personal') definition - though
I should say that I'm actually pretty firmly in favor of
discussing "Hitchcock" before Hitchcock. The a posteriori auteur one
constructs from the evidence of film is the one I like to think
about, though of course the closer the "auteur" is to the auteur, the
more valuable biographical information is.
The impersonal is proving a bit harder for me to articulate, but I
keep drafting this response because I think my definitions are
unsatisfactory. Perhaps this, simpler than what I've tried thus far:
personal cinema has the artist and viewer looking at each other in
communion, impersonal cinema has the artist and viewer looking at a
common object. Both are tendencies in 'auteur' cinema, however -- as
far as I'm concerned anyway.
I have to stress (as I might have already, and as I know I did when
trying to write a few previous drafts of this post) that these
distinctions apply better to momentary experiences within a film
rather than to films or directors overall. However, in the interest
of trying to communicate myself, I should probably name filmmakers
for whom I have a sizable cumulative association with one type of
cinematic experience. 'Personal' seems like Ray, Tashlin, a lot of
the big 50's Cahiers auteurs (not necessarily Hawks or Preminger - or
Ford). 'Impersonal' seems like Mulligan, Techine, some Renoir, and
the majority (if not per se the overwhelming majority) of avant-garde
work I've seen.
These concepts occur, to me, in much looser and more ephemeral ways
than what writing a theory of them necessitates. I simply have
noticed that when I'm perceiving auteur issues in a film, they're
usually along these two lines. But I doubt my introduction of these
two types of experience is, in fact, very helpful. Maybe they will
be workable devices after I've dwelled on the issue much more.
***
As for the issue of morality: I'm more on the side of Yoel and Dan
for this one. Then again, I often find that the directors I like are
ones of whom I approve in terms of ethics ... I usually link my
understanding of a filmmaker's ethical complexity with his or her
aesthetic complexity.
And God in Abraham & Isaac is a puppy dog compared to God in the Book
of Job.
--Zach
957
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:05pm
Subject: Torino
My experiences with Torino have all been good. Perhaps Tag should
elaborate on his if he wants the group to embargo that useful
festival.
958
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:32pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
Dan, I wasn't referring to exaltation or publicity given star
directors, but rather to the notion that the director was the prime
creative/artistic responsible for the aesthetic qualities of the movie.
I am totally unaware of any "new aesthetic" introduced by auteurists
during the 1950s and 1960s. What are you referring to?
I am also unaware of any "canon" existing prior to 1968. Or after it,
for that matter. What canon are you referring to?
Yes, there have always been people everywhere who deplored movies, and
that situation has certainly not been altered. TV Guide still does
not list directors (except occasionally). Academia still regards film
as popular culture rather than high art.
But there have always been advocates of cinema as high art, and even
of minor directors as artists. These ideas were advanced constantly
in American and French criticism during the 1920s and 1930s.
Bergman and Fellini were deified in America for diverse reasons that
had little to do with their innate values. It was assumed that they
wrote their films and had complete authority. The films were
incomprehensible to most people and therefore assumed to be important.
They were in languages people couldn't understand, which increased
their profundity, because they were read rather than experienced. For
these reasons they were not entertaining in the way American movies
were, and this was assumed to be another mark of artistry since there
has always been the premise that great art must not be fun. By
cheering for them, one struck a blow against "Hollywodd." These
filmmakers were not notable successes in their own countries. Their
livelihood depended on the export trade. Antonioni is a good example
of this kind of snobbery. He was revered as long as he remained
incomprehensible to most people; as soon as he made a film in the US,
his career came to an end.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> The exaltation of the director is certainly not new to auteurism. In
> the American press, at least, you can see the fascination with the
> figure of the director going back to the teens: there is something
> intriguing about the man with the megaphone, telling stars what to do.
> I have trouble thinking of any writer who caught the public's fancy as
> did Griffith, DeMille, and others. Sometimes the powerful producer
> would be lionized also, and sometimes people got confused about who did
> what. But the mere fact that the director is a figure of authority
> guarantees that he or she will fascinate and draw attention.
>
> I don't think of the auteurist movement as just a celebration of the
> director. It was a new aesthetic that tried to overthrow an existing
> canon and replace it with a new one; and a serious proposal that
> directors submerged in the bowels of a little-respected entertainment
> system might be putting together bodies of work that could be
considered
> art. And other things. But I don't think that auteurism is what
led to
> the prestige enjoyed by the Coppolas and Spielbergs of the world, any
> more than it had to do with the deification of Bergman and Fellini in
> the 50s and 60s. I think those phenomena are the result of other
> forces. - Dan
959
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:54pm
Subject: Re Auteurism discussion on the radio
Tag Gallagher wrote"
Antonioni is a good example
of this kind of snobbery. He was revered as long as he remained
incomprehensible to most people; as soon as he made a film in the US,
his career came to an end.
After Zabriskie Point, which most critics and audiences also found incomprehensible Antonioni directed The Passenger with Jack Nicholson, The Oberwald Mystery and Identification of a Woman. All of these films bear Antonioni's distinctive visual and narrative style - it seems unfair to say his career came to an end.
Tag, I am a big admirer of your John Ford book, it is a perfect balance of biography and critical analysis.
Vinny LoBrutto
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
960
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 4:57pm
Subject: Re: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
> I am totally unaware of any "new aesthetic" introduced by auteurists
> during the 1950s and 1960s. What are you referring to?
>
> I am also unaware of any "canon" existing prior to 1968. Or after it,
> for that matter. What canon are you referring to?
There was a list of respectable French directors that Truffaut dissed in
his "A Certain Tendency" article, and a list of Cahiers-favored
directors that he thought should get respect instead of the others.
Sarris did something similar in that passage of "Toward a Theory of Film
History" that starts, "Is anyone likely to believe that KISS ME DEADLY
is more profound than MARTY..." The list of films and filmmakers that
Sarris implicitly trashed looks a lot like the list of Academy Award
winners in the 50s, which is also not too different from the list of
important American directors that Mankiewicz inserts into the script of
THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, if my memory holds up. Movie magazine in the UK
targeted certain well-regarded British directors as well; like Sarris in
THE AMERICAN CINEMA, they came up with a ranked list of directors they
admired and disliked. It seems to me that one of the most tangible
aspects of the auteurist movement is that it proposed to demote the
reputations of a lot of well-known filmmakers, and proposed other
directors to take their place.
> Bergman and Fellini were deified in America for diverse reasons that
> had little to do with their innate values. It was assumed that they
> wrote their films and had complete authority. The films were
> incomprehensible to most people and therefore assumed to be important.
> They were in languages people couldn't understand, which increased
> their profundity, because they were read rather than experienced. For
> these reasons they were not entertaining in the way American movies
> were, and this was assumed to be another mark of artistry since there
> has always been the premise that great art must not be fun. By
> cheering for them, one struck a blow against "Hollywodd." These
> filmmakers were not notable successes in their own countries. Their
> livelihood depended on the export trade. Antonioni is a good example
> of this kind of snobbery. He was revered as long as he remained
> incomprehensible to most people; as soon as he made a film in the US,
> his career came to an end.
Sure there was snobbery and misunderstanding involved, but you can say
that about almost any significant trend, no? I don't see the art-film
movement of the 50s and 60s as particularly false.
BLOWUP wasn't made in the US, but it was completely comprehensible to
American audiences, and they liked it. So maybe Antonioni's decline
wasn't specifically keyed to audiences understanding the language. - Dan
961
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 5:07pm
Subject: Re: Friedkin, Clouzot
Up there with the two or three worst, most painful, most traumatic,
most damaging experiences of my life!
Abusive, criminal organization.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "George Robinson" wrote:
> Oooh, sounds like a fun experience.
>
>
962
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 5:27pm
Subject: Re: Morality
> I can't recall ever having been bothered by
> something that was said or "demonstrated" in a film I liked. I often
> see dumb or destructive ideas in films I DON'T like, but that's just
> icing on the shit burger when it happens.
Here we might have located an area of difference. Seems to me that
talented directors display bothersome attitudes pretty often. Guess
that leaves me with more fillmgoing dilemmas.... - Dan
963
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 5:28pm
Subject: Re: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
> But there have always been advocates of cinema as high art, and even
> of minor directors as artists. These ideas were advanced constantly
> in American and French criticism during the 1920s and 1930s.
By the way, are you thinking of particular critics? - Dan
964
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 5:40pm
Subject: JAPANESE STORY
The Australian film JAPANESE STORY is playing at Toronto this year.
Jake, do you know anything about it, or its director Sue Brooks? - Dan
965
From:
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 6:00pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism on the Radio
May I offer some comments on the discussion?
Please feel free to disagree vehemently with the stuff below, or correct any errors!
Canons
Sarris' The American Cinema served as an unofficial canon for many budding auteurists after 1968. The italicized films in the first four sections, from Pantheon Directors to Fringe Benefits, were the films Sarris recommended. This is not quite a true canon. For one thing, no one was ever penalized for liking a film not recommended by Sarris. For example, Peter Bogdanovich's books were full of films by Dwan and Ford not in italics in Sarris. Everyone thought this was just swell, and an indication of Bogdanovich having a pioneering approach to film history. By contrast, true canons are enforced by mob-like hit men out to penalize anyone who attempts to praise anything outside of them. You might admire Emila Lanier as a poet, but just try to write about her for an academic journal. John Donne is in the canon and Lanier is out of it, and don't you ever forget it! Donne WILL be taught to college undergrads, and Lanier will NOT! Auteurists have never tried to enforce this sort of party discipline, which is greatly to our credit.
For most Americans, the book version of the American Cinema was their first exposure to most of these directors. It was totally new. I for one had unfortunately never read or even heard of Cahiers du Cinema, or Positif or the British journal Movie. But The American Cinema was in paperback in every college bookstore.
An unfamiliar aesthetic
The ideas that Hollywood films could be art, that camera movement and composition were artistic, and that genre films were full of classics, were completely new and shocking to most Americans in the 1960's. Most American university people agreed with F. R. Leavis, who regarded all popular art as worthless junk. This idea was treated as a core belief by almost all academics and educated people in the US in that era.
Whether auteur ideas in the 1960's were new, or whether they have roots in the writings of the 1920's on silent cinema, is a fascinating question. But they were certainly utterly unfamiliar to US academics in the 1960's.
Admittedly, most people had heard of Gilbert Seldes, and his 1920's book praising popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts. Seldes' praise of the comic strip Krazy Kat is still a key moment in critical history.
Absolutely NONE of the academics I met in the 1960's had ever heard of camera movement, or knew what it was. You could have offered a prize of a million dollars to US academics in 1963 to write a one page essay on camera movement, and no one would have been able to do it.
Ignorance about popular culture still runs deep. Most educated people today could not write a paragraph about Jerry Siegel, and his contribution to culture. Or an essay about Big Town. Unfortunately, I do not have a million dollars to offer as a prize!
Fellini and Resnais
8 1/2 (Fellini, 1962) and Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961) introduced experimental Modernism for the first time into commercial films. This was a genuine change for people. In Film Culture in the early 1960's, Curtis Harrington hailed these films as the first commercial film exemplars of experimental film concepts. This was not new aesthetically – experimental films had been made largely non-commercially since around 1920 – but it was new for the commercial film industry. Up till that time, such techniques in Hollywood films had largely been limited to dream sequences: see The Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940), Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948), Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1949), The Marrying Kind (George Cukor, 1952).
Mike Grost
966
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 6:30pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
Tag wrote:
>Bergman and Fellini were deified in America for diverse reasons that
>had little to do with their innate values. It was assumed that they
>wrote their films and had complete authority. The films were
>incomprehensible to most people and therefore assumed to be important.
> They were in languages people couldn't understand, which increased
>their profundity, because they were read rather than experienced. For
>these reasons they were not entertaining in the way American movies
>were, and this was assumed to be another mark of artistry since there
>has always been the premise that great art must not be fun. By
>cheering for them, one struck a blow against "Hollywodd." These
>filmmakers were not notable successes in their own countries. Their
>livelihood depended on the export trade. Antonioni is a good example
>of this kind of snobbery. He was revered as long as he remained
>incomprehensible to most people; as soon as he made a film in the US,
>his career came to an end.
Let's not forget, however, that Antonioni's biggest international hit
was also in English (BLOWUP).
The excitement back in the 1950s and '60s about Fellini, Bergman,
Antonioni, let's add Godard, Resnais et al, was certainly
international, not dependent on deification in America where the
languages weren't native. I'd also argue for the quality of the
films themselves, even Antonioni's much maligned ZABRISKIE POINT,
which at the time seemed way "off" but now plays much better than it
ever did back then. LA STRADA, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and 8 1/2 are all
entertaining and moving and don't need any critical defense from me.
Almost every month it seemed that there was some new film from
overseas that expanded one's ideas of what a movie could be about and
how things might be expressed. It wasn't snobbery so much as a
general sense among many cineastes of excitement, of challenge.
Today movie directors almost always cite 8 1/2 as the best film about
movie making. Also, if they're not too terrified to admit a liking
for him because of the fear that they'll be pegged as too arty,
modern American directors I've talked to will almost without
exception say how important Bergman is to them.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
967
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 6:45pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism on the Radio
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
>
> Canons
> Sarris' The American Cinema served as an unofficial canon for many
budding auteurists after 1968.
It certainly did for me! Except that I already knew a great many of
the movies, having grown up with them on tv and NEVER paying attention
to anyone in the credits (not even the star actors). Around 1963 I
encountered someone who knew about "directors" (and Sarris) and I'd
name my favorite movies and he'd tell me who directed them. Weird,
they were mostly by the same guy!
But, as you say, Sarris was not a canon, even among auteurists,
certainly not among the rest of the population. But he did serve as a
standard against which one disagree (or agreed), so in that sense
served as an auteurist canon.
> The American Cinema was in paperback in every college bookstore.
Well, eventually, but usually because professors ordered it. It was
only about a year after it was published, 1968, that British critics
and American academics started chorusing that the auteur theory was an
outdated, disproved notion that no serious person could any longer
entertain for even an instant.
>
> An unfamiliar aesthetic
> The ideas that Hollywood films could be art, that camera movement
and composition were artistic, and that genre films were full of
classics, were completely new and shocking to most Americans in the
1960's.
Yes and it still is. But perhaps we should pay more attention to the
tremendous diversity between Eastcoast and Westcoast opinion. I think
what you write pertains mostly to the Eastcoast. People weren't so
shocked in California, and a lot more Californians knew who Ford and
Hawks were.
And I think American puritanism has to be taken into account. I
remember Sam Donaldson introducing a Nightline segment: "Tonight we're
going to have fun! We're going to talk about the movies!" He would
not have started a discussion of classical music, opera, ballet,
literature, poetry, painting or architecture on that note. And the
more's the pity. Because Americans are convinced that if something is
fun it is probably worthless.
Thus, unlike Europe, we do not have a "museum" culture in America for
movies. But BECAUSE of this lack, our movie culture is living in ways
it has not been in Europe (until just recently). Every week there are
five or six John Ford movies on cable tv, with potential audiences of
50 million. In Europe, it's a great success if 30 people come to such
pictures in museums. But if, say, 10,000 people watch one of those
Fords, probably only a handful bother to note the director's name.
> Most American university people agreed with F. R. Leavis, who
> regarded all popular art as worthless junk. This idea was treated as
> a core belief by almost all academics and educated people in the US
> in that era.
Still true. But the bias is that pop art is the domain of sociology.
Thus academia since the 1930s has always pushed "film studies" into a
sociological context, and thus of course has resisted treating it as
personal art -- if for no other reason than that it was difficult if
not impossible to demonstrate (particularly to unsympathetic
academics) that a preference for one movie over another was anything
but simple individual opinion. That's still the problem. "Academic"
and "scholarly" are defined pretty much by how many footnotes there
are, not the wisdom or value of the main text.
> Whether auteur ideas in the 1960's were new, or whether they have
roots in the writings of the 1920's on silent cinema, is a fascinating
question. But they were certainly utterly unfamiliar to US academics
in the 1960's.
"Utterly" is too strong. I knew many academics in the 1960s who knew
a great deal about Ford and Hitchcock et al.
I'm not sure the sitch is better today. On most internet newsgroups,
all anyone talks about are films made within the last five or six
years. I doubt that most film-studies academics today have seen more
than a handful of movies made before 1960, and a good percentage would
be "canonic" silents. They simply are far less acquainted with
American cinema 1930-68 (Sarris's book) today than people were in 1968.
> 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1962) and Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
> introduced experimental Modernism for the first time into commercial
> films.
What is "experimental Modernism"?
> This was a genuine change for people. In Film Culture in the early
> 1960's, Curtis Harrington hailed these films as the first commercial
> film exemplars of experimental film concepts.
I'm sure Curtis Harrington would have included von Sternberg if
someone had mentioned him at the moment. (I'd of course include Ford,
Murnau, Vidor...)
> Mike Grost>
968
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 6:56pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Joseph Kaufman wrote:
>
> The excitement back in the 1950s and '60s about Fellini, Bergman,
> Antonioni, let's add Godard, Resnais et al, was certainly
> international, not dependent on deification in America where the
> languages weren't native. I'd also argue for the quality of the
> films themselves, even Antonioni's much maligned ZABRISKIE POINT,
> which at the time seemed way "off" but now plays much better than it
> ever did back then. LA STRADA, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA and 8 1/2 are all
> entertaining and moving and don't need any critical defense from me.
I'm not arguing against these filmmakers. (I adore Zabriskie Point.)
But, yes, to a great degree these filmmakers careers were dependent
on their success in the American market. Fellini and Antonioni would
not have worked much in Italy without America.
>
> Almost every month it seemed that there was some new film from
> overseas that expanded one's ideas of what a movie could be about and
> how things might be expressed. It wasn't snobbery so much as a
> general sense among many cineastes of excitement, of challenge.
I am not contesting this excitement. But is was also snobbery,
because when Hollywood did things similar (or much better: The
Searchers, Vertigo, 7 Women, etc., etc., etc.) they were routinely
sneered at my the SAME critics who were lauding European films.
It was a bit like with "experimental film" today. The chief argument
of the European cinema's advocates was that it was "not Hollywood."
>
> Today movie directors almost always cite 8 1/2 as the best film about
> movie making. Also, if they're not too terrified to admit a liking
> for him because of the fear that they'll be pegged as too arty,
> modern American directors I've talked to will almost without
> exception say how important Bergman is to them.
But if you talk to Europeans, they will moan and groan about the
conformity and lack of experiment in European cinema, compared to the
great glories and independently minded Hollywood directors...
969
From:
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 7:32pm
Subject: Re; Auteurism on the Radio
Experimental Modernism
The above is not a standard term – my apologies. It was trying to convey films such as Entr'acte (Rene Clair), Un Chien andalou (Luis Bunuel), Fall of the House of Usher (Watson and Webber), Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid), At Land (Maya Deren), Fireworks (Kenneth Anger), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Anger), Fragment of Seeking (Curtis Harrington). These are films that use avant-garde techniques to create a dream like, surrealistic experience.
Harrington argued that that techniques of such films were seen for the first time in commercial cinema in 8 1/2 and Last Year at Marienbad. I think many other people had a similar perception in the early 1960's, but did not write about it with the clarity and precision Harrington brought to the subject. There was a widespread perception among many cinephiles that 8 1/2 and Marienbad were Something New.
Harrington always totally revered the genius of Sternberg, and wrote about him with deep insight. But he did NOT claim that Sternberg was part of the above experimental tradition. Nor are such great, great directors as Murnau, Vidor, Ford. They are great artists – but not part of this PARTICULAR experimental tradition.
Harrington never argued that Hollywood films were bad. He simply said that 1) that films made by Maya Deren and others were a valid approach and 2) that such techniques were now emerging in commercial film in Fellini and Resnais.
I also agree that there is lots of experimentation in Hollywood films. Look at The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963). It is extraordinarily experimental. But in different ways from Maya Deren et al.
The critical reception given the final films of John Ford was a scandal to the jaybirds! We had this great, great poet in our midst, and morons treated him like dirt.
By the way, I have read Tag Gallagher's book on John Ford many times.
Mike Grost
970
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 10:03pm
Subject: Erratum re: Morality
You're right, Dan - you're absolutely right. I started thinking about
it this morning as I was stuck on the 101: Start with Birth of a
Nation, or even earlier, and keep going - you'll find lots of
examples. I was narrowly focused on the examples we had been
talking about, like Preminger and Wilder, but obviously as you
start going back in time, you encounter more and more attitudes
that are strange to you. My own example - the Abraham and
Isaac story - which I rated above all films I've ever seen, contains
material I find appalling. But I'm so used to overlooking that stuff
when I like something that I tend to forget it.
To return to the original discussion, a filmmaker's morality or
politics would would have to be pretty bad for me to make that
the basis for not liking the films, if they were good films. The
example everyone cites is Leni Reifenstahl, but like Peter, I don't
much care for her kind of filmmaking anyway. If Triumph of the
Will were about FDR, the person who made it would be right at
home in Strained Seriousness.
Much of the "ouch" factor has to do with our being "in history."
Manny Farber pointed out in a Cahiers interview that parts of
Hawks - "the racism in Rio Bravo" - have aged more than others,
and it's silly to pretend that we can still write about the films as if
the world around them hasn't changed, and our perceptions with
it. Personally I'd pick another example. When I saw Rio Bravo on
Times Square I realized what the comic Mexican character was
doing in there - the people in the balcony (many of the Hispanic)
loved him, even though I had always found him kind of dumb. I
would cite instead the gratuitous slap on the ass Randolph Scott
gives to Karen Steele in Decision at Sundown. I always wince.
But that's not something I'd base an esthetic or a theory of
cinema on.
That would be more likely to involve "mise en scene as a moral
act," which still needs discussing. By the way, after abandoning
politics in the 80s the Cahiers often wrote about so-and-so's
"moralite de cineaste," another interesting idea that was
straining to become an esthetic. As I recall, the examples were
too simplistic to be convincing to me, but I'll flip back through
some of those stories and see if I can figure out what - if
anything - they meant. As you say, the heritage is there: "A
tracking shot is a moral act," to translate loosely. The magazine
kind of went from that to "making political films politically" to
"making moral films morally"...to raving about Friends and
skinflicks. Oh well.
Aside: My friend Bob saw the much-decried Death Wish (what a
great title) on Times Square with a mostly black audience, who
were having a great time. I asked him how (given what was
being written in the press about the film) he explained their
reaction. He said, "They love watching white people act crazy."
971
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 10:28pm
Subject: Erratum re: Erratum re: Morality
"A dolly shot is a moral act." (Still loose)
972
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Aug 7, 2003 11:24pm
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
Tag wrote:
>I am not contesting this excitement. But is was also snobbery,
>because when Hollywood did things similar (or much better: The
>Searchers, Vertigo, 7 Women, etc., etc., etc.) they were routinely
>sneered at my the SAME critics who were lauding European films.
I can't speak for critics, but my film-going friends and I saw and
loved Ford, Hawks and Hitchcock as religiously as Antonioni and
Fellini. CAHIERS celebrated both camps, as did SIGHT AND SOUND.
The problem, and it's perhaps a general one, is that sometimes
greatness is only recognized over time. Some of us will remember
how cautiously Robin Wood voiced his opinion that VERTIGO was an
important film. I think that's both a problem with critics and
audiences, that what ultimately seems resonant isn't always
immediately apparent. However I wouldn't say that the acknowledged
greats of those days were emperors without clothes.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
973
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 0:44am
Subject: Re: Erratum re: Erratum re: Morality
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> "A dolly shot is a moral act." (Still loose)
I suspect I'm not alone in having always associated this line with, and remembered it from, my one-time favorite film, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION -- proclaimed by the same character who said "One cannot live without Rossellini"? The line, which I find attributed to Luc Moullet, but also apparently to Godard, also appeared in the film as graffiti on a wall, according to Bertolucci, quoted at http://www.javari.com/bertolucci.html :
"'Le travelling c'est une affaire de morale'. One cannot understand how this sentence could be written on the walls of Parma, but anyway!"
http://www.javari.com/bertolucci.html
974
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 1:51am
Subject: Morality and the French
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> "A dolly shot is a moral act." (Still loose)
Doesn't "travelling"--at least in the pre-Steadicam era that this
quote comes from (1959, I think)--refer to any camera movement,
tracking or dolly (though I guess not handheld or crane, probably), so
isn't "dolly shot" a little too restricting?
PWC
975
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 2:43am
Subject: Re: JAPANESE STORY
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> The Australian film JAPANESE STORY is playing at Toronto this year.
> Jake, do you know anything about it, or its director Sue Brooks? -
Dan
It has problems, but when I saw it recently at the Melbourne Film
Festival I was quite moved. It takes some interesting risks with tone
and pacing -- I can't say much more without giving away the plot.
Sue Brooks has done one other feature (ROAD TO NIHIL) which I haven't
seen.
JTW
976
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 3:25am
Subject: Re: Morality
Since I got way behind I have wound up replying to a number of posts in
the "Morality" and related threads as I've read them. The result is a
series of not particularly well organized comments. Read at your own
risk -- and please don't feel obligated to read at all.
JTW, disagreeing with my saying that my interest in TV soaps one summer
was non-aesthetic:
"...if a fictional work interests me deeply (pornography apart) then it
must offer an aesthetic experience of some kind," and " I don't see why
the fascination of soap opera narrative can't be analyzed in formal terms."
Well, I have to keep reminding myself that there are no rules in art;
anything can be great. So I can't disallow the possibility that a soap
that's completely uninteresting visually could be somehow aesthetically
great for some other set of reasons.
This theoretical possibility has nothing to do with what I experienced,
though, in those soupy inarticulate TV images that collapse themselves
into their actors. I found myself wondering (mostly inventing plots now,
but with snippets of remembered plots) if Bill would cheat on Lisa, and
feeling a slight thrill and also a bit of anger when he did; wondering
if John would ever uncover the source of his weird short flashbacks (and
rather moved when a long flashback revealed the war experienced that
haunted him), and so on. All of this involved the mechanism that
escapist entertainment plays on: hooking you by involving you with the
characters, but doing little more than that. Unlike most filmgoers, I
don't see the process by which a film gets you involved with the lives
of its characters in a purely escapist way as a particularly positive
one. I might even argue that it's a negative one. And as Wood pointed
out decades ago, Hitchcock's audience manipulations serve his larger
themes.
JTW:
"I'd imagine that what I like about, say, Vertigo is pretty close to
what any `ordinary' viewer might like about the film. Hitchcock to me is
great partly BECAUSE he was able to make his art so accessible..."
Nope, don't agree. How accessible a work of art is has, in my view,
absolutely nothing to do with how good it might or might not be. There
are great and terrible obscure works, and great and terrible popular and
accessible works. But what for me is the core of the achievement of
"Vertigo," a certain mix of rapture and extreme instability in the space
that the film's images produce, is not something that anyone was talking
about back then, at least in the U.S. (Patrick Ciccone pointed me to an
excellent contemporary review by the Cuban critic G. Canberra Infant
writing in Havana at the time; collections of his writing in English and
Spanish can be found at a reasonable price used). If so many people were
seeing what I was seeing, why was the U.S. writing on the film so
impoverished at first (and I don't know that it is, maybe the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch printed a brilliant review; I'm just assuming it was --
didn't Dwight Macdonald pan it, calling the colors "distracting"?).
"Personally, I can't get very interested in the possibility of moving
beyond the 'superficial' to appreciate film style on a purely abstract
basis, since what interests me in most narrative and even non-narrative
films includes particular moral codes, styles of physical behavior...."
A student who was in that first class that I taught that I mentioned
here, the one on von Sternberg and Hawks and Borzage and Sirk, recently
wrote me that while he loves a lot of films for a lot of reasons,
including (I presume) ordinary entertainment, he understood me to be
saying that directors who have "an extra dimension to them formally"
thus "create a form of art unique to cinema" -- and that on that level
of filmmaking Brakhage and Hawks "are basically the same kind of
director!" It made me very happy to read this. I think that where I
differ from many auteurists is that the "human" dimensions and the
audience involvement and escapist dimensions don't matter to me hardly
at all if there isn't a form there, a real sense of visual space, though
they are what you fall back on when there isn't -- and they don't even
matter all that much when there is a form there. It's from the point of
view that Brakhage and Hawks are partly doing the same thing that I speak.
"Billy Wilder might be a good test case."
And that may be why while I've enjoyed some of his films, and been
occasionally moved, I ultimately don't think of him as a particularly
good filmmaker.
"To reiterate, my guiding principle would be that anything an artist can
do which holds our attention is valid."
Hmmm. I remember reading that at the Berlin Film Festival in 1991 a
petition was circulated asking that CNN be given a special award for
their ongoing work, "The Gulf War."
My attention was riveted to the TV, which I have hardly ever watched in
the years before or since, on September 11, 12, and 13 or so of 2001. It
was certainly riveted by the endless replays of the planes smashing into
the Twin Towers. That wasn't art.
Jess:
"I invoked Tag Gallagher's essay in an attempt to suggest a deeper
humanity in OHARU, but speaking more generally, I don't know why one
should necessarily have to love aspects of a film one really considers
humanly objectionable."
I'm not here to tell people what they "have to love." I would never tell
the Shoah survivors in Israel who had Wagner piped at them at Auschwitz
that they now have to go listen to Wagner in a concert hall. The point
is that for me, aesthetic merit doesn't have a lot to do with how much I
agree or disagree with a film's values.
Actually, as a self-described eco-extremist who thinks we all are
altogether too accepting of the industrial culture that is destroying
the planet and that the world of human affections that is the first
layer of meaning in many films is something that we humans pay, in our
self-absorption, altogether too much attention to, I find *most* films
that I love morally objectionable. I mean, "Red River," number four on
my top ten list? Dunson steals some land and murders its owners' agents
in order to put it to his own uses, and then much of the film's second
half is under the shadow of his threat to murder his adopted son, and
the framing and editing has very much to do with the style infecting the
land we see with his presence, and subjugating the other characters to
his will, and vice versa. The film's whole way of thinking is something
I'm very much opposed to.
Dan:
"....it seems that you're aware of the characteristics of the drama,
even if they don't govern your experience of the film. Do those dramatic
characteristics simply vanish in your experience? Or are they
transformed by form into something else? When you respond to TRIUMPH OF
THE WILL, you presumably don't feel the same pleasures that a naive
fascist would feel. Does Riefenstahl use form in such a way that you can
experience these fascist feelings in a more useful, constructive way
than a fascist would? Or does form lead you toward something other
feeling altogether?"
Sorry to turn Zen on you, but it's all of the above and none of the
above. I mean, I'm not unaware of the swastikas in "Triumph" and what
they meant then and what they meant later. That alone makes the film
deeply unpleasant. The fascist editing adds to that. At the same time
there's a terrible beauty there, a beauty that makes me, as I think
someone said in parodying my earlier statement of this, "discover my
inner fascist." I don't think there's anything "useful" and
"constructive" about the film in the sense you mean it -- it's an evil
film in both style and form. But so are a lot of other great films. So,
by my lights, as I said above, is "Red River" -- Not as evil, to be
sure, but still evil. But I guess I don't think of myself as good and
others as evil. The meaning of Hitler is not that he was some beast that
we can't comprehend, but that he was a human being like us who was able
to do the things he did. Back to Mizoguchi: I recognize the qualities
you're talking about, and I guess I would respond the way you did if a
barely-competent director shot the same script, but Mizoguchi's style
changes the meaning of those things in part, turns them into something
else in part, and makes the part of them that annoys you but still
remains seem irrelevant.
A camera movement on the level of Mizoguchi's sweeps away my ability to
respond to things on the ordinary "human" level that you seem to be
addressing.
Bill:
"...moral ideas play a preponderant role in our debates: Is a director a
good person or a bad person?"
This shouldn't have much of a role, in my view; lots of artists in many
fields are pretty baaaad, or at least, have strong bad sides.
Dan:
"....it's a running theme of auteurism that we should sense a person
behind a movie, and think of him or her much as we think of people we
know. Obviously auteurists might disagree about that...."
You said it! I agree with your second sentence very very much. And to
the first, I'd say, no, no, no, no. This is indeed a problem I have with
much of "auteurism" -- the notion that seeing an auteur film is like
having dinner with the director, or something. (I realize Dan wasn't
saying this, but others have come close.) The only great narrative
filmmaker I met for any length of time was Sirk, and the time I spent
with him was not at all like seeing his films. I know (or have known)
many of the avant-garde filmmakers whose work I love reasonably well,
and while there are certainly connections between their personality and
their films, what makes their films great goes so far beyond knowing
them, or what knowing any person is like, that I reject this analogy
completely. It all comes back to my love of impersonal form. I'm not
expecting to convince others here, but I just wanted to get that on the
table.
Bill's reply in post 930 I agree with just about completely. Part of
fully watching a film is making judgements about the characters, about
the film's ideas, and hence about the director's ideas. A great film
that articulates horrible ideas is not a worse film aesthetically for
that -- but rather a film that can help you think things through,
perhaps lead you to opposing its positions even more deeply. Unlike Dan,
I don't need to feel I'm "with the program" of a film because the form
of a great work takes me out of myself and at least for a short time
puts me right into the program.
On the other hand, I'd reply to Bill's invocation of "In Harm's Way" in
947 that I *did* see the film on its initial release, several times, and
at a few years younger than Bill is (17). It was the first Preminger I
saw in "real time." And I totally loved it, I thought it was completely
amazing. And it never would have occurred to me, back then, to worry
about what its moral stance may have been. Such a line of thinking,
which perhaps comes rather naturally to most of us, was something that
it took maybe a decade of film viewing for me to start thinking about.
I may be repeating myself if I saw that for me the aesthetic experience
is multivalent, chaotic, ecstatic, orgasmic, and fundamentally beyond
"meaning." Oh, sure, there's also meanings there, but they tell only a
small part of the story. And for me there's an "impersonal" element in
every great work, so I couldn't come up with a list of Zach's if I
tried. (I'm not sure what avant-garde work he's seen, but some of it is
relentlessly, even embarrassingly "personal" -- some of Jack Smith, say,
to some extent Brakhage.) It's the sense of a form, the sense that shots
are colliding in a way that articulates space with some of the
"objectivity" of a mathematical proof, the sense that *what* is being
expressed amounts to so much more than we ever mean by "personality,"
that is what allows each viewer who "gets" it a fundamentally
transpersonal experience. In a way I agree with Yoel, or perhaps it's
with Ionesco, that it's the things beyond specific judgements of good
and evil that unite us, and what aesthetic form does is create a kind of
structure that can move any mind, whether you agree with the "moral"
implications of, oh, the story or not.
Dan:
"Yoel's Ionesco quote strikes me as a pretty reasonable attempt to deal
with the issue of morality, but it leaves the individual with desires
that sometime conflict with other things in the universe. And the films
we watch are part of the universe, and sometimes we come into conflict
with them!"
Ah, but you can be ecstatically moved by a great work of art and *also*
conflict with it. You're speaking in the sense of not really thinking a
film is great and wondering if it's a failure of form or just your own
failure to connect with a different sensibility. In my terms the failure
to connect would always be a result of an imperfect viewer, if the form
was there, because the viewer's "job" is to as much as possible forget
his unique "sensibility." And I don't that level of form is in Wilder.
But when I watch any great film I'm partly arguing, and have been doing
so ever since about age 22 (so, not right at first), saying in my inner
ear to many different films: I don't agree with this way of seeing, I
object to that cut, I'm irritated by this plot twist, I wonder if the
implications of the form aren't as much evil as they are good. These
"arguments" are among the richest experiences of my flim-viewing life.
I'm wondering why the universe doesn't always conform to my desires; I'm
understanding my essential human limits; I'm discovering how utterly
different I am from another person (the filmmaker).
I've always taken the "dolly shot is a moral act" and similar claims as
a cinephile's hyperbole -- a little poem made by someone as enraptured
by cinema as I was by "In Harm's Way," forgetting most of movies are
about in favor of intoxication with dolly shots. In other words, the
statement doesn't so much elevate dolly shots as says that we don't want
any kind of morality which excludes the ecstasy of a great dolly shot.
- Fred
977
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 3:58am
Subject: Re: Morality
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
If you can deal with MY SON
> JOHN, you should be able to deal with the story of Abraham and Isaac.
I realise I go against the grain of the way people generally interpret
MY JOHN SON, but I do feel that McCarey is decrying the red scare and
denouncing its effect on John's parents. I try to argue the point in
my McCarey piece,
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/tgfr13a.htm
978
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:02am
Subject: Re: Morality
> This is indeed a problem I have with
> much of "auteurism" -- the notion that seeing an auteur film is like
> having dinner with the director, or something. (I realize Dan wasn't
> saying this, but others have come close.) The only great narrative
> filmmaker I met for any length of time was Sirk, and the time I spent
> with him was not at all like seeing his films. I know (or have known)
> many of the avant-garde filmmakers whose work I love reasonably well,
> and while there are certainly connections between their personality and
> their films, what makes their films great goes so far beyond knowing
> them, or what knowing any person is like, that I reject this analogy
> completely.
Maybe it's not necessary, but I just wanted to point out that I wasn't
arguing at all that there is any correspondence between a director's
personality on screen and off, nor do I feel sad about that. - Dan
979
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:08am
Subject: Re: Re Auteurism discussion on the radio
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, vincent lobrutto
wrote:
>
> After Zabriskie Point, which most critics and audiences also found
incomprehensible Antonioni directed The Passenger with Jack Nicholson,
The Oberwald Mystery and Identification of a Woman. All of these films
bear Antonioni's distinctive visual and narrative style - it seems
unfair to say his career came to an end.
>
> Tag, I am a big admirer of your John Ford book, it is a perfect
balance of biography and critical analysis.
Thanks, Vinny.
Zabriskie Point is one of my favorite pictures. I also like very much
The Passenger and Identification. (I don't find many people who share
my love for Identification!)
But critics almost unanimously THOUGHT they understood Zabriskie Point
when it came out, and they loathed it. The Passenger was pretty much
dumped by its distributor. Oberwald was made for Italian tv, and I
don't think it's been shown in America subtitled (I have a tape from
Australian tv) outside of recent Antonioni series. Identification was
set up for US distribution when Canby junked it at the NY Film
Festival and so the distributor pulled out. Perhaps we can say that
Identification ended Antonioni's career -- but I think the hostility
was a result of Zabriskie Point.
980
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:08am
Subject: Re: Morality
Presumably, linking dolly shots and morality is a shorthand for
saying that a relationship exists between the filmmaker and the
reality he or she purports to address, and this inevitably raises
moral issues, though not of a simple kind. It would be easy to say
that John Woo's use of blood-spurting bodies as decorative
compositional elements is immoral, but I can't deny part of me gets
excited when he does it, because rather than despite of the sense of
moral blasphemy. A shot that makes a `humanist' point, such as Wes
Anderson's showy embrace of all his characters at the end of The
Royal Tenenbaums, can register as equally morally dubious, in this
case by glossing over unresolved issues with a soothing notion of
community that hasn't been earned. (Aside: did anyone else think this
was a creepy, creepy film?) For me, Spielberg's last-minute swerve
away from filming the gas chambers in Schindler's List feels immoral
in retrospect, in that it reduces the Holocaust to a backdrop for the
latest version of his personal myth.
For me, morality IN art, understood in terms of `themes' and
messages, is a kind of secondary derivative of the morality OF art,
which I'd tentatively define as `integrity,' or as commitment to a
vision that goes beyond the self and the self's desires (e.g. a
desire to appear shocking, or profound, or politically correct).
Both `abstract' and representational works, by this reckoning, have a
moral basis, and the question isn't whether we can give a banal
thumbs-up to the attitudes expressed in a particular work, but
whether an artist is skilful, thoughtful and dedicated enough to
create an object that can CHALLENGE our understandings of the world
(on all levels, from the most philosophically abstract to the most
perceptually immediate). I mean, we can stand up and cheer for what
opinions we like, but who would be dumb enough to think the only
people who have anything worth saying are those we agree with? Fred
says this beautifully in his last post, though he also says a lot of
other things that reflect an experience of cinema which is very, very
different from mine.
There is certainly an `abstract' level to all successful art – this
is true of the shapes of stories as much as the shapes of images –
but I have to admit that more often that not my starting-point for
appreciating a movie involves being concerned with things like
characters, what will happen next, and a specific fictional world
(the diegesis, as they say in the textbooks). And maybe this is why,
to go back to one of Dan's earlier examples, I don't see much
difference between the statements `Capra is a bad director'
and `Capra's films piss me off.' Both are subjective judgements:
either you like Capra's films or you don't, and if the content fails
then the form fails too. And surely Capra is the kind of director
whose mise-en-scène, direction of actors and so on can't be discussed
usefully aside from his overall aim of making us feel various (quite
complex) emotions about what happens in the story. In Mr Smith Goes
To Washington, for instance, part of his gameplan is that we as
viewers should begin by sharing some of Jean Arthur's city-slicker
amusement at Jimmy Stewart's wholesomeness, before being shamed into
a feeling that this pseudo-sophistication is trivial next to
Stewart's real integrity. If we fail to respond in some such fashion,
or if the force of Capra's special pleading diminishes in the light
of rational scrutiny, it makes little difference whether we say that
his stylistic rhetoric isn't strong enough to bring his worldview to
life, or that his worldview is so unreal his rhetorical gestures lack
authority and come to nothing. Worldviews, incidentally, aren't
philosophies, though philosophies spring from them
(maybe `sensibility' is another word for the same idea?).
Incidentally I think that Capra is often a fine director, most
interesting when prepared to examine the costs of his commitment to
moral simplicity, as in It's A Wonderful Life and the very atypical
Bitter Tea of General Yen. As this indicates, a more paradoxical test
of `integrity' in a work of art might be its willingness to push its
formal and ideological premises to the breaking point and thus, in a
sense, annihilate itself (as I understand it, this is
what `deconstruction' is partly about).
JTW
981
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 5:17am
Subject: Re: Morality
> I don't think there's anything "useful" and
> "constructive" about the film in the sense you mean it -- it's an evil
> film in both style and form. But so are a lot of other great films. So,
> by my lights, as I said above, is "Red River" -- Not as evil, to be
> sure, but still evil. But I guess I don't think of myself as good and
> others as evil.
Which strikes me as a wise position. But a lot of people who see both
good and evil in themselves still reject evil things, whereever they
emanate from. I'm not getting moralistic here, just trying to use your
own terminology.
> Back to Mizoguchi: I recognize the qualities
> you're talking about, and I guess I would respond the way you did if a
> barely-competent director shot the same script, but Mizoguchi's style
> changes the meaning of those things in part, turns them into something
> else in part, and makes the part of them that annoys you but still
> remains seem irrelevant.
>
> A camera movement on the level of Mizoguchi's sweeps away my ability to
> respond to things on the ordinary "human" level that you seem to be
> addressing.
> I may be repeating myself if I saw that for me the aesthetic experience
> is multivalent, chaotic, ecstatic, orgasmic, and fundamentally beyond
> "meaning." Oh, sure, there's also meanings there, but they tell only a
> small part of the story. And for me there's an "impersonal" element in
> every great work, so I couldn't come up with a list of Zach's if I
> tried. (I'm not sure what avant-garde work he's seen, but some of it is
> relentlessly, even embarrassingly "personal" -- some of Jack Smith, say,
> to some extent Brakhage.) It's the sense of a form, the sense that shots
> are colliding in a way that articulates space with some of the
> "objectivity" of a mathematical proof, the sense that *what* is being
> expressed amounts to so much more than we ever mean by "personality,"
> that is what allows each viewer who "gets" it a fundamentally
> transpersonal experience. In a way I agree with Yoel, or perhaps it's
> with Ionesco, that it's the things beyond specific judgements of good
> and evil that unite us, and what aesthetic form does is create a kind of
> structure that can move any mind, whether you agree with the "moral"
> implications of, oh, the story or not.
I'm suddenly grasping your way of looking at films a little bit. I'm
using the analogy of how I respond to popular music. Lyrics are pretty
much irrelevant to me, and the reason for that is not that I don't care
about literary things, but rather that the power of the music is so
intense and self-sufficient that I can't imagine rejecting it because of
lyric content, which I barely pick up on in the first place. I have the
feeling that, for you, the flow of images functions a lot the way music
does for me, and plot, character, etc. the way lyrics do for me:
interesting on some level, but overwhelmed by the intensity of the main
act, which seems autonomous. This analogy of course fits with your love
of non-narrative cinema (I'm pretty happy with songs where someone just
hums the melody).
There's probably no need for me to try to justify why images don't work
like that for me. They are somehow more transparent to me, a refraction
of something else. I suspect that Bazin's way of talking about the
image probably resonates with me more than with you. Anyway, this gives
me something to think about for a while.
Now if only I understood better your particular reactions to
filmmakers.... Hawks is my favorite director, but I actually don't
think his visuals have great plastic beauty, the way Ford's or Keaton's
do. He's a little careless sometimes with where the cut comes, or how
close the camera is: personally, I don't register these as defects, but
as an indication of the kind of artist he is, one who works primarily
with, through, and about cinema conventions and the relative nature of
realism. In some ways I think he's more like Warhol than like Ford....
And then, I'm completely perplexed at some of the directors that you
find visually uninspired - Fassbinder in particular. I feel as if I'm
almost on the verge of grasping your very musical concept of visuals,
but there's still a gap of understanding even on that level. - Dan
982
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 5:31am
Subject: Re: Re: Morality
> Incidentally I think that Capra is often a fine director, most
> interesting when prepared to examine the costs of his commitment to
> moral simplicity, as in It's A Wonderful Life and the very atypical
> Bitter Tea of General Yen.
Capra is such a bother, because he looked as if he was going to be an
amazing director before he took that turn into "demagoguery," as Sarris
put it. It's just remarkable what he did with the slight stories he was
working with in the late 20s and early 30s. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is
hard for me to swallow whole, but there are excellent things in it that
no one else could do, moments of total emotional conviction that still
somehow push us outside even as they sweep us up. It's odd to realize
that Capra is not naive, that he's actually quite sophisticated about
identification.
Your take on morality in cinema is probably the one I feel most
comfortable with, in that you attach the concept to the process of
making formal decisions, rather than to the subject matter. Can't say I
had that bad reaction to TENENBAUMS that you had, though. - Dan
983
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 1:47am
Subject: Re: Morality
In a message dated 8/7/03 9:03:48 PM, sallitt@p... writes:
>Maybe it's not necessary, but I just wanted to point out that I wasn't
>arguing at all that there is any correspondence between a director's
>personality on screen and off, nor do I feel sad about that.
My own take is something similar. You know, I think I have a pretty good
idea of what "Preminger" is and what "Hawks" is in terms of cinema; they're
distinct, reflexive of different outlooks, forms and styles. And I think we can
characterize these differences very frequently as amounting to differences in,
if not personality, then artistic temperament, personal sensibility and taste,
and so forth. So it's a tough question, as I also agree with Fred that
watching a film which is the byproduct of a personal vision and sitting down to
dinner with the director of that personal vision are not at all necessarily
analogous experiences. If anything, it seems to me that artists often share parts
of their soul in art which they don't consciously reveal in their real lives.
Thus knowing Robert Mulligan and knowing what a Robert Mulligan film is like
are two vastly different things.
Admittedly (and somewhat parenthetically) I find the category of criticism as
a form of biography pretty interesting at times. It's intriguing to me that
Leo McCarey used the name "Lucy" and "Lucille" so often and I'd be interested
to know what, if any, personal relevance the names had for McCarey. It's not
the "answer" to McCarey; the keys to his cinema are right there on the screen.
But it's "extra" material which seems (potentially, in this case) valid and
useful - and ultimately tied to the films themselves. I don't know the man
Leo McCarey any better, but I might know what went into his cinematic
personality a little more thoroughly.
There's a thin line between dimestore psychology and real insight, of course,
but I think great cases have been made for the personal basis of many themes
present in Welles' cinema. I've made some myself (I'm not saying mine are
"great," just that I've made them.)
It's an interesting issue - one of many in this discussion - and I'm really
just testing out some ideas rather than espousing any real philosophy or
approach I might have.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
984
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 2:04am
Subject: Re: Morality
In a message dated 8/7/03 8:26:20 PM, f@f... writes:
>I don't think there's anything "useful" and
>"constructive" about the film in the sense you mean it -- it's an evil
>film in both style and form. But so are a lot of other great films. So,
>by my lights, as I said above, is "Red River" -- Not as evil, to be
>sure, but still evil. But I guess I don't think of myself as good and
>others as evil. The meaning of Hitler is not that he was some beast that
>we can't comprehend, but that he was a human being like us who was able
>to do the things he did.
I think Fred makes a great point here and it's one I was trying to tease out
of this discussion earlier. I don't go to films to see an idealized version
of myself reflected on the screen, either in characters and actions portrayed
on screen or in artistic style and form. In fact, as an occasional videomaker,
I don't think my sensibilities have much at all in common with my favorite
directors: I don't think you'd catch on to any Wellesian or Premingeresque vibes
if you saw my work - in fact, Welles and Preminger themselves are completely
different! I go to films to experience visions of life through other people's
eyes. Most of the time the differences between their eyes and mine have to
do with formal sensibility. Often, though, there's a clash between ideological
sensibility too. But I think that itself is useful and healthy, even with a
film as extreme as "Triumph of Will"; sensing our inner Hitler, our inner
monster seems to me to be something that's desirous because it permits things like
the Holocaust to be a little more understandable.
Of course, the terms of disagreement are often - for me - a lot more friendly
and related to my ideas about the necessity for pluralism; I think it's
healthy to have one's mind engaged by things which conflict with and complicate our
own views. So maybe even it's good that, as auteurists, we regularly come
into contact with great films which contain philosophies with which we mildly or
passionately disagree. I'll try to write more on this a bit later.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
985
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:26am
Subject: My Dinner With Andre (De Toth); also concepts versus ideas
Fred:
"the notion that seeing an auteur film is like having dinner with
the director, or something. (I realize Dan wasn't saying this, but
others have come close.)"
I think you might be referring to me, but on the other hand, I hope
you aren't. Because I thought there was more to it, even in my
simplistic remarks on the subject. Because I tried to elaborate
on what I talked to you about earlier, how a lot of art represents
(in part) an instance of contact between the viewer and the artist
(-ic sensibility behind the work). And there's a lot of places one
might go with this. I might say, for instance, that a lot of films
(enough to warrant notice and analysis) might be seen as, for
better or worse, explicitly or abstractly, a personal statement, a
personal essay, an autobiography or autobiographical fragment,
etc. Often in ways that may surprise us, etc. This is one
dimension of what we do, I think.
But anyway, my original (here remarked upon, possibly mocked
a little?) observation was that the way we come to "know" an
artist through his art is very similar to how we might come to
know them in real life. I think we are "meeting" Sirk, a part of
him, very briefly, when we see one or more of the films he made.
The signals received in these instances of contact (films) may
carry different messages, may be of a different character entirely
than in the other instances of contact (having dinner with
Douglas Sirk, etc.), and most importantly, it's awfully difficult to
respond "in kind" with a "reply" film, although we may very well do
that. But what am I saying: I say something, or better yet, write
something, film something, make a signal with my eyebrows or
my shoulders, record a song or a message, so on - these
actions affect physical matter, the air, plastic, wax, silver
hallides,
light, and so on. And then the receiver takes what s/he can from
these artifacts. And so on. (Although one probably doesn't
consider a raised eyebrow an artifact, unless one is very
strange, like me.) And these things are not nearly as simple as
I'm sure I've made them sound...
I've been thinking off and on about something Dan wrote about a
few weeks ago, about concepts and how they may not be
complex, and how excitement arises from things not being
articulated bluntly, etc. So a lot of my three-in-the-morning
thinking for the past, I don't know how long, has dealt with one of
two subjects:
1) Liking or Not Liking a movie: This shouldn't be keeping me
awake, but it is. Doesn't our dislike of a movie override the
potentially complex things about a movie and allow us to reduce
it to a set of easy concepts? I know a lot of people like or love
FEMME FATALE, but if Zach - god forbid - disliked it, I wouldn't
expect him to write something like "He's concerned with looking
as both a sexual and a political act, he's always got himself
working on a bunch of imbricated layers." A very intelligent critic
who disliked FEMME FATALE would use the film as a means to
argue something that may be very meaningful, but at the same
time we may picture this critic wearing gloves and goggles as he
handles the movie like a hazardous chemical. I don't think this
FEMME FATALE-panning critic wants to look for an "in," or to
explore the movie at all. And a less intelligent critic would slag
off the movie with a lot of sarcasm and smirking: picture Jeffrey
Lyons, who must reduce *all* of the movies he reviews to a set
of stock phrases.
So I think our dislike of a movie may act as a block to our
interpretive faculties. After all, why spend more time with these
movies (that we dislike) than we have to?
But this leads to complications that I pick up on, but few people
seem to take seriously. That is: you can reduce *anything*, even
the most complex works of art (*especially* them, I would say)
with a little time and effort. But is it that the work doesn't have
the
potential to excite, or are you just not seeing it? We would all
(unless we have a more mature sense of self-awareness and
self-examination) like to believe that we are attentive to what
treasures may be found in an artwork, but if that were so, I would
understand Mizoguchi and a lot of a-g/experimental films better,
and Dan would like a lot more Tati, Chris Marker, and Steven
Spielberg films, and on the whole we would all go around
agreeing with each other. But that isn't the case, and therefore
you all simply have to work your way towards my point of view,
because I'm right and all of you are "almost like Jaime, but not
enough." (Just kidding. It's late.)
2) Most of the critical/theoretical books, reviews, and papers I
read of my own volition, I read prior to arriving at NYU -
Eisenstein, Kracauer, Farber, Sarris, Kael, and stuff written by
Tarkovsky and other artists. So these writers are, for better or
worse, the foundation of my understanding of film and film
aesthetics. That is, if they don't guide my thinking, then they form
a base against which I react, so even in that sense I am
dependent on them.
But given that, it's still amazing that I keep returning to
Eisenstein
when considering the things that are written here. I wish I had
my books by him with me (I'm away from the city right now), but
he wrote very brilliantly on the subject of pathos in movies. Very
clinically and almost, I would say, impersonally (suggesting a
certain level of sadism), but still his ideas stay with me.
Basically, without going back and looking, he describes the
process of "being moved" as being quite literal, at least
psychologically: we are actually "moved" from one place to
another. (And then he described how he constructed POTEMKIN
as a long series of such "movements.")
It occurs to me, reading Dan's remarks on Hawks, how this
applies to the properties of the films we love. Dan talked about
the interaction between foreground and background. But there is
much more: I recall the pleasure I feel when I simultaneously [a]
drive a car at great speeds while [b] listening to music that
seems to interact with what is moving about in my field of vision,
the cars, the road, and also the landscape. Or on a different
plane entirely: I remember that some of what I like about the
films of Jean-Pierre Melville (LE CERCLE ROUGE, LE
SAMOURAI) has to do with the interaction between different
spheres of society (mainly The Crooks and The Cops), and how
Melville and his script-writers go to inordinate lengths to
illustrate
the private worlds of its main characters (i.e. the main detective
in LE CERCLE ROUGE, the one with the cats, or Yves Montand
and his bizarre alcoholic hallucinations). So that what produces
excitement is often an interaction of planes, or spheres, or lines,
or what have you.
But anyway it's a temptation for me to look at a popular film, one
that I have not fallen for, and to say, Well, everyone is merely
falling for a set of hooks (a pop music term), and that the movie
isn't actually a great work of art. But the great films of my
viewing
history, in my opinion, are *by virtue of the fact that I think they
are
great* not reducible to one concept or a set of concepts, that
instead they are a set of provocative, useful, and complex ideas,
worthy of the "reframing on the cactus flower" section of THE
MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, as discussed by Fred
here and elsewhere. I wish I could explain, or at least begin to
explain, the similar (and rare) power that FLOATING CLOUDS
has had on me during the two times I've seen it; perhaps one
day. And it seems that, while I've made feeble attempts at
explaining the devastating effects of SCHINDLER'S LIST or
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a lot of writing (and occasionally,
scholarship) has been built around the notion that the Spielberg
films I think are great have actually (unbeknownst to stupid,
stupid me) played me for a sucker, etc. "Oh well," the narrator
sighs, "nothing is easy."
There's more, I'm sure. But I must stop. Hopefully this was less
tiresome to read than it has been exhausting to write. Shall I
leave you (the board) with a question? What role does pleasure
play in your analysis, interpretation, assessment, evalution, etc.,
of films and works of art? And I mean any and all forms of
pleasure.
Jaime
986
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:36am
Subject: Re: Re Auteurism discussion on the radio
Tag wrote:
>Zabriskie Point is one of my favorite pictures. I also like very much
>The Passenger and Identification. (I don't find many people who share
>my love for Identification!)
Can I say that I think it's one of Antonioni's most sublime works?
>Oberwald was made for Italian tv, and I
>don't think it's been shown in America subtitled (I have a tape from
>Australian tv) outside of recent Antonioni series.
It ran with subtitles at least at the AFI Fest in L.A. back in 1988.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
987
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:59am
Subject: Re: Spielberg's Morality
> For me, Spielberg's last-minute swerve
> away from filming the gas chambers in Schindler's List feels
> immoral
> in retrospect, in that it reduces the Holocaust to a backdrop for
> the
> latest version of his personal myth.
I don't want you to think I was projecting some of my
in-the-Spielberg-camp resentment onto you at the end of my
long, rambling post (see message #985), but this point about
the film is raised often by critics of SCHINDLER'S LIST, the most
vehement of whom claimed that Spielberg made his film
"boring" by not showing the deaths in the gas chamber, and
chickening out. But I think the key to seeing that scene not as a
cop-out but as (in my interpretation) very moving is brougt up in
Chris Marker's THE LAST BOLSHEVIK. Marker deconstructs a
scene from Medvedkin's HAPPINESS, in which a peasant thinks
he's going to be killed by a soldier, but instead is offered a
cigarette (he's just hid, very hopelessly, in a coffin). The narrator
points out, very accurately I feel, that the although we may feel a
sweet sting of relief, what we should remember is the fear on the
face of the peasant. Which is, I think, key to how I am moved by
SCHINDLER'S LIST and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: I am partly a
"sucker" for the scenes of relief, of salvation, and happy endings,
whatever you wish to call it, but...what stays with me is the fear,
the unease, and so on. Actually it's a complex mix of emotions,
but I just wanted to put that out there.
Jaime
988
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:08am
Subject: Morality and Red River
Fred wrote:
"I mean, "Red River," number four on
my top ten list? Dunson steals some land and murders its owners'
agents
in order to put it to his own uses, and then much of the film's
second
half is under the shadow of his threat to murder his adopted son, and
the framing and editing has very much to do with the style infecting
the
land we see with his presence, and subjugating the other characters
to
his will, and vice versa. The film's whole way of thinking is
something
I'm very much opposed to."
I watched Red River again the other night, and what is for me
problematic with the film is not so much Dunson's psychotic behavior
as, rather, the way that his behavior is excused after a good
fistfight with Monty Clift's character and then some laughter. It
makes me just want to say, "Whoa -- there are deep psychological
problems here that are getting excused way too easily."
989
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:09am
Subject: Anonioni's Mystery of Oberwald
If anyone is interested, I have a subtitled review copy of
OBERWALD, which was released by Facets a few years ago and
is undoubtedly very expensive right now. I think it's really
interesting (I have the opportunity to see Cocteau's version of the
story, his own play, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS, in the coming
months at the Museum of Modern Art), if not a complete success.
I would be happy to loan the tape, please email me off-list.
Also I have a tonne of other items in my video library, some more
interesting than others:
http://filmwritten.org/tapelist.htm
Also my cat has taken to attacking toy stuffed animals. Ah, cats.
Jaime
990
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:22am
Subject: Re: Morality and Red River
Damien:
> I watched Red River again the other night, and what is for me
> problematic with the film is not so much Dunson's psychotic
behavior
> as, rather, the way that his behavior is excused after a good
> fistfight with Monty Clift's character and then some laughter. It
> makes me just want to say, "Whoa -- there are deep
psychological
> problems here that are getting excused way too easily."
Some folks on another board were complaining of this, too, and
although I think RR is Hawks' greatest film (well...), I don't have
an answer for you. I think part of the reason why this doesn't
bother me is that the rift between the two is "supposed" to be
repaired, much like Murnau's SUNRISE is chiefly about the
repair of a damaged marriage. But - as with Murnau's film - this
relief can't come easy, there has to be a period in which the
relief/repair is held in suspense, for maximum payoff. Some
might register the complaint that both the temporary suspense
(the fistfight and the close shooting in RR, the storm that
capsizes the boat in SUNRISE) and the payoff (the laughing,
manly reunion in RR, the rescue in SUNRISE) are phony and
arbitrary. Some have made these complaints. Maybe these
scenes are phony - I don't know. But I'm not complaining, and I
don't think I'm copping out. I honestly think something else is at
work in these cases...
(I mean, are we to believe that A PLACE IN THE SUN, in which
the wife dies, and the hero is punished, is more righteous, more
truthful, than SUNRISE? Cue Dan with a plug for Sternberg's
version of the story.)
Jaime
991
From: David Westling
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:26am
Subject: Re: Morality
Fred Camper:
> My attention was riveted to the TV, which I have hardly ever watched in
> the years before or since, on September 11, 12, and 13 or so of 2001. It
> was certainly riveted by the endless replays of the planes smashing into
> the Twin Towers. That wasn't art.
I could not help but be reminded of the infamous statement by Karlheinz
Stockhausen reported in the Sept 19 '01 _NYT_. He said,
What happened there is--they all have to rearrange their brains now--is the
greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what
we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for 10 years,
completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest
work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not to that. Against that, we
composers are nothing.
He immediately retracted this statement, and even asked that it not be
reported, and then reportedly left Hamburg "in distress".
Fred was saying that one shouldn't make judgments on the worth of an artwork
on the basis of whether the effort was good or evil. A valid work of art
can be motivated by evil intentions. Well, here's the supreme test. I can
see why Stockhausen wanted to retract that statement, but I believe it
brings up an important question. Actually the destruction of the towers
does have some things in common with an "avant-garde" artwork--the
difference is a matter of degree and not of kind--and Stockhausen rightly
pointed this out when he said "they will have to rearrange their brains
now". Truer words were never spoken. This feature of _dislocation_ might
even be said to be the hallmark of avant-garde art. It's hard to argue that
we are better people now because of it, if one would want to bring that kind
of figure into the mix. It seems to me that we are far worse off now. But
Duchamp proved that anything can be art. I don't think that Stockhausen was
narrowly focusing on the merely visual aspect of the event, either. I mean,
it did have a terrible beauty from a strictly visual point of view. I like
Norman O. Brown's statement--"Art invites us to partake in the struggle
against repression." From the perpetrators' point of view, they were
following this dictum, weren't they? Even as we were perceiving it the
opposite way. But our _moral_ reaction to the event won't let us think of
it in more neutrally configured terms. The horror trumps any impulse we
might have to regard this event from an "artistic" viewpoint. Is this a
mark of moral superiority or a mere artifact of our morally-based
convictions?
I guess what I am saying is that it could be viewed as art--a deplorable
artwork, ultimately a horribly mentally ill one, based on a supreme
delusion, the delusion that such an act would be smiled on by God (not the
first time atrocities have been committed with this conviction
operative)--which was probably what Leni Riefenstahl thought when she made
_Triumph of the Will_. Hitler was an artist, after all. He seems to have
thought of his various campaigns as artistically executed. Don't all those
long straight columns of German-helmeted soldiers at the Rallies look
pretty? I think it might be said that the explosion of the towers was art
in the same way that the Nazi rallies were art. An art of supreme ugliness
and massive mental delusion. I believe we would do well to shed the last
vestiges of our prejudices and follow out our beliefs to their ultimate
conclusions; but do we really want to abandon the conviction that art is
somehow connected with nobility?
David Westling
992
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 3:31am
Subject: Re: My Dinner With Andre (De Toth); also concepts versus ideas
I'm picking up one small point out of Jaime's fascinating and passionate
post, but, as the man says, it's late.
>What role does pleasure
>play in your analysis, interpretation, assessment, evalution, etc.,
>of films and works of art?
For me, there is real satisfaction in expressing what I find beautiful and
interesting about a film. I think that satisfaction derives from the very fact
that it is frequently very difficult to find not only the right words, but the
right ideas and approaches.
To get needlessly self-reflexive, one of the things I cringe at when reading
some of my older pieces is the degree to which I seem to ignore mise en scene
and form; I cringe because I know I personally paid as much attention to those
things as I do now, but somehow it was easier to describe the themes which
mise en scene and form evoke than the tools by which help shape them. It's easy
to say, oh, "Lester enjoys challenging our notions of heroes." It's more
difficult to say the means by which he does this because those means, as far as
I'm concerned, are located in a big way in aspects of his form: the way he
implies distance from the subject by shooting with long lenses, the throwaway
dialogue, the willingness to interject little bits of comic business within the
template of a dramatic scene, and so on.
So is there pleasure in conducting this sort of analysis? I think there is,
at least for me, because it enables me to better understand what I'm being
moved by - and I don't find that to be a destructive process at all as a viewer;
and, as a critic, I find it to be an essential process. In Bogdanovich's
"Mask," it's not really the story or the characters which moves me - at least not
on their own terms; it's the way he breaks up space by crosscutting between
his characters' faces in silence.
Somehow the thumbnail descriptions I've just given of some aspects of Lester
and Bogdanovich still seem so woefully inadequate and incomplete; but I think
they're more adequate and more complete than just talking about what emotional
or intellectual effects their formal approaches achieve.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
993
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:38am
Subject: NYC: Come Laugh at Me
After the early screening of Orson Welles' THE TRIAL on
September 22nd, at the Makor Center, I will be discussing the
film with the audience. Please attend if you are able! Bring
tomatoes, etc.
Link:
http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?catalog=92y%5Fcatal
og&category=Makor+%2F+Steinhardt+Center&category=Makor&
category=Makor+%2D+Film&category=September+Screenings&
productid=T%2DMM5FS05
Tickets to come see me cost an additional $6.00, added to the
regular ticket price of $9.00! That arouses me, somehow!
Although I probably won't see a dime, it's the principle, etc.!
Jaime
994
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:49am
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Tag Gallagher" wrote:
> I am also unaware of any "canon" existing prior to 1968. Or after
it,
> for that matter. What canon are you referring to?
>
I think clearly there was an established canon among what were
considered serious film critics (who, essentially were liberal
humanists, both intellectual and middle-brow). It can be gleaned in
the films championed in the National Board of Review and in the 1952
and '62 Sight and Sound polls. This canon also makes up the contents
of Bosley Crowther's book, which I think was called "The Great
Films."
Included would be Potemkin, All Quiet On The Western Front, Grand
Illusion, The Informer (the only Ford that would qualify, and
adherents to this canon would lament that he became a director of
John Wayne westerns), Intolerance, Nanook of the North, On The
Waterfront, The Third Man, Brief Encounter, Children of Paradise, The
Best Years of Our Lives, Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, In Which We
Serve, lots of Bergman and Fellini, and almost any Chaplin but not
including Limelight, A King In New York or The Countess From Hong
Kong.
The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes would be part of this canon, but
none of Hitchcock's Hollywood films. In Sidney Lumet's 1968 film
Bye, Bye Braverman, at one point somebody says (paraphrasing because
it's been 30 years since I've seen it), "We'll see some Hitchcock
movies. But the good ones, the ones he made in England."
This canon has, of course, since been displaced, but what I find so
interesting is that there are now two canons, one auteurist-based and
one not (for lack of a better term it might be called Paulette). The
Paulette list brings us the Godfather movies, Pather Panchali, 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Sunset Boulevard, Seven Samurai, Casablanca, Raging
Bull, Singin' In The Rain and Lawrence of Arabia; the auteurist The
Searchers, Vertigo, The Earrings of Madame D, and any number of films
by Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles and Keaton, and no Kurosawa, but Ozu and
Mizigouchi. Citizen Kane, of course, makes both lists.
There's also a third canon, which, I suppose, can be called the Movie
Buff list, where you'll find The Wizard of Oz, Saving Private Ryan,
West Side Story, It's A Wonderful Life, Gone With The Wind and a
whole lot from the Paulette list.
-- Damien
995
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:59am
Subject: Re: Morality
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
I don't agree with in the collected canons of Clint
> Eastwood, Michael Cimino, Don Siegel, and Leo McCarey. But I find
their best
> work so great that I'm not going to let what essentially amount to
ideological
> differences cloud my appreciation of said work.
Actually, Siegel was politically very liberal.
996
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:04am
Subject: Re: Re: Morality
In a message dated 8/8/03 3:59:55 AM, damienbona@y... writes:
>Actually, Siegel was politically very liberal.
Good point; I guess I was mainly thinking of "Dirty Harry" (which I like
quite a bit.) But Siegel's purported comment, "I can't imagine what my
[left-wing] friends will think of this..." bears this out, that his personal politics
were liberal.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
997
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:12am
Subject: Re: Morality and Red River
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Jaime N. Christley"
wrote:
>
> Some folks on another board were complaining of this, too, and
> although I think RR is Hawks' greatest film (well...), I don't have
> an answer for you. I think part of the reason why this doesn't
> bother me is that the rift between the two is "supposed" to be
> repaired, much like Murnau's SUNRISE is chiefly about the
> repair of a damaged marriage. But - as with Murnau's film - this
> relief can't come easy, there has to be a period in which the
> relief/repair is held in suspense, for maximum payoff>
I think the distinction is that in Sunrise, it's a personal
relationship tht had been damaged and is relying on the emotional
ties of the two individuals in the relationship to heal the rift. In
Red River, Wayne's character upsets the social order and a viewer
feels the need for a communal reconciliation.
998
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:21am
Subject: Re: Morality
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
>
> Good point; I guess I was mainly thinking of "Dirty Harry" (which I
like
> quite a bit.) But Siegel's purported comment, "I can't imagine
what my
> [left-wing] friends will think of this..." bears this out, that his
personal politics
> were liberal.
Dirty Harry was extremely controverial in the wonderfully-polarized
Nixon years. I know Siegel took great umbrage when Kael called the
film something like "a great piece of fascist art" and, although the
film was released in 1971 and the Presidential election was '72,
Siegel did make it known that he was a strong supporter of George
McGovern (and since at age 17 I canvassed houses for McGovern, this
meant that, apart from the quality of his films, I would always love
Siegel).
999
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:35am
Subject: Re: My Dinner With Andre (De Toth); also concepts versus ideas
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Jaime N. Christley"
wrote:
I might say, for instance, that a lot of films
> (enough to warrant notice and analysis) might be seen as, for
> better or worse, explicitly or abstractly, a personal statement, a
> personal essay, an autobiography or autobiographical fragment,
> etc. Often in ways that may surprise us, etc. This is one
> dimension of what we do, I think.
>
> But anyway, my original (here remarked upon, possibly mocked
> a little?) observation was that the way we come to "know" an
> artist through his art is very similar to how we might come to
> know them in real life. I think we are "meeting" Sirk, a part of
> him, very briefly, when we see one or more of the films he made.
> The signals received in these instances of contact (films) may
> carry different messages, may be of a different character entirely
> than in the other instances of contact (having dinner with
> Douglas Sirk, etc.), and most importantly, it's awfully difficult
to
> respond "in kind" with a "reply" film, although we may very well do
> that.
I do think it's self-evident that we can comprehend a lot about an
individual director's sensibility from his or her films. It's his or
her real-life personality that is less forthcoming from their art.
To use a parallel example, I think Susan Sarandon and Tim Robins have
pretty great politics (a little to the right of me), but I've heard
any number of stories of how horrible they are in their day-to-day
lives, ranging from Robbins's dealing with extras on the set of The
Cradle WIll Rock to Sarandon's treatment of domestic help. So the
social personality a movie person exudes in his or her work may have
nothing at all to do with interacting with that person on an
individual level. Michael Moore's another one who the grapevine
tells you is a real shit, while Charlton Heston is supposedly a real
pussycat.
1000
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:44am
Subject: Re: Spielberg's Morality
> I don't want you to think I was projecting some of my
> in-the-Spielberg-camp resentment onto you at the end of my
> long, rambling post (see message #985), but this point about
> the film is raised often by critics of SCHINDLER'S LIST, the most
> vehement of whom claimed that Spielberg made his film
> "boring" by not showing the deaths in the gas chamber, and
> chickening out.
I won't get into the Schindler's List question right now, but I'll
say for the record that I think A.I. is a masterpiece, and that
looking at a bunch of Spielberg films recently has made me think a
whole lot harder about the role played in film by empathy, and what
critics think they're doing when they distinguish between legitimate
and illegitimate forms of it. I find Spielberg just as fascinating as
I find, say, Scorsese or De Palma, which is not to say I can swallow
him (or them) whole.
I like the way you bring in Eisenstein on pathos. I'd say it's film's
ability to 'move' us (in all senses) that makes form dynamic -- i.e.
forms exist by virtue of the way they act ON us, rather than sitting
there like objects we can move round and examine at our leisure.
a_film_by Main Page
Home Film
Art
Other: (Travel, Rants, Obits)
Links About
Contact