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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.
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emailing them from that Web site.
1001
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:56am
Subject: Re: Morality
David wrote:
"But Duchamp proved that anything can be art."
I think Duchamp proved that anything someone chooses to present as
art is art, something that could be experienced as an object that has
the potential to give esthetic pleasure. I never heard, Osama, "the
creator of the work", claiming to have created a masterpiece. If you
see September 11 as art then anything can be considered art just
because somebody says so: Every war, every conflict, everything that
happen in daily lives, every gesture, every human being, nature,
universe, microcosmos, etc. Well I believe if something
is "everything" then it ends up being "nothing at all". Besides, I
don't take any esthetic pleasure from the "fact" of the
Two Towers
collapsing. The coverage on TV has a "potential" to be
aesthetic, at
least in theory, but that is something totally different.
Theoretically, it is possible that a crazy artist will personally
hire people who will crush the planes to a skyscraper when there are
people inside and say it is a work of art. Then, I would have to
evaluate the act as two separate things: as art and as an act
that "directly" affected other lives. It could be good art or not,
and I would have to see the actual work in order to decide.
Regardless, I would ask the government to do anything in their power
to prevent the artist from creating his next piece. The "morality"
does not enter the way I experience the artwork.
Of course, what is above is very theoretical, and I know that if one
day THAT happens I would be so angry that I wouldn't be able to
see the beauty even if the "artist" created something greater than
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, even though I know I should, ideally.
However, this is such an extreme case and also its effects are
so "direct" that it is not even relevant to a discussion on "Triumph
of the Will" (that I haven't seen yet), or its likes.
And by the way, good artists unfortunately don't have enough
money to create things like September 11. After David's post I
came
to the conclusion that maybe it's not such a bad thing after all!
Yoel
1002
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:58am
Subject: Royal Tenenbaums
Can't say I
> had that bad reaction to TENENBAUMS that you had, though. - Dan
I didn't think THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS was a 'bad' film -- it wound up
on my best-of-the-year list -- but I'm still trying to analyse my
intensely ambivalent response to it. Part of this was to do with the
way the main plot events -- the attempted suicide, near-incest, etc --
felt grotesquely at odds with the busy, decorative surface style,
which in turn wound up seeming like an manic, vastly elaborate denial
mechanism, as if the only way to deal with trauma were to reduce it
to the cutesy terms of a children's book. Which I found quite
unsettling, especially since I couldn't tell how far the effect was
deliberate.
I haven't encountered anyone (in person or in print) who had quite
this reaction, so I wondered if it was just me.
JTW
1003
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 10:23am
Subject: Re: Auteurism discussion on the radio
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Damien Bona"
wrote:
> --- 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."
>
The Dec. 1959 Cahiers contains interesting articles in which
Louis Marcorelles and Claude Gauteur comment on the 1958 Brussels
referendum on the most important films. The articles show some
of the ways Cahiers' evaluations differed from prevailing opinion.
I summarized the articles here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a8oto7%24mcb%241%40panix3.panix.com
I think the differing evaluations reflect different aesthetics or at
least different sensitivities.
Paul
1004
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 0:18pm
Subject: Re: The Royal Tenenbaums
Jake T. Wilson said,
I didn't think THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS was a 'bad' film -- it wound up
on my best-of-the-year list -- but I'm still trying to analyse my
intensely ambivalent response to it. Part of this was to do with the
way the main plot events -- the attempted suicide, near-incest, etc --
felt grotesquely at odds with the busy, decorative surface style,
which in turn wound up seeming like an manic, vastly elaborate denial
mechanism, as if the only way to deal with trauma were to reduce it
to the cutesy terms of a children's book. Which I found quite
unsettling, especially since I couldn't tell how far the effect was
deliberate.
I agree with you Jake. I didn't think Wes Anderson found the proper visual style for his characters and story. He imposed too many Kubrick symetrical compositions that didn't address what his film was about. Has anyone noticed that many young directors are employing Kubrick's centered, counterbalanced manner of framing into their films. I find it is often distracting because the visual style doesn't properly interpret the material. It works in a Kubrick film because the compositional style cannot be separted from his point of view, the story and his directorial approach to the material.
Vinny LoBrutto
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1005
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 0:27pm
Subject: Warhol and "relative nature of realism"?
Dan wrote (981):
"...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..."
I only saw one film by Warhol, BlowJob, and thought it was absolutely
great. I think the film has many, many layers. "The relative nature
of realism" is one of them but the film would not work for me if
there wasn't an amazing formal beauty in there. Watching the rhyhtm
of the light and shadow on the guy's face together with the simple
moves of his head create an experience that does not depend only on
one's questioning of the reality of what's in front of the camera.
I know the statement above is not enough for me to understand what
you really think about Warhol but it seemed like you put other things
above the formal beauty of his images. Sorry if I'm wrong!
Yoel
1006
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 1:41pm
Subject: Re: The Royal Tenenbaums
Vinny:
> I agree with you Jake. I didn't think Wes Anderson found the proper
> visual style for his characters and story. He imposed too many
> Kubrick symetrical compositions that didn't address what his film
> was about. Has anyone noticed that many young directors are
> employing Kubrick's centered, counterbalanced manner of framing
> into their films. I find it is often distracting because the visual
> style doesn't properly interpret the material. It works in a
> Kubrick film because the compositional style cannot be separted
> from his point of view, the story and his directorial approach to
> the material.
I just accidentally deleted a response that I had written and don't
have time to write it all out again, but the gist of it was this: I
can see the Kubrick connection you mention (I hadn't thought about it
in terms of Anderson's work before, so it's interesting), but I don't
share your opinion that this affects the story negatively. In a film
like TENENBAUMS whose predominant experience is the very personal,
subjective sense of maturation, Anderson's penchant for precise
framing and his liking for group compositions, are a device that
increases the sophistication of the process. If TENENBAUMS were
a 'magnetized' film (everything running the same direction), then we
would be left with a less complex work that put a premium on
emotional subjectivity. Instead what we have is a work that exploits
the disconnect between private emotional attachment and detached
observation. I read the 'gap' as intentional (if only intuitive,
maybe), and as productive.
--Zach
1007
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 2:51pm
Subject: Re: Royal Tenenbaums
Zach Cambell wrote:
I
can see the Kubrick connection you mention (I hadn't thought about it
in terms of Anderson's work before, so it's interesting), but I don't
share your opinion that this affects the story negatively. In a film
like TENENBAUMS whose predominant experience is the very personal,
subjective sense of maturation, Anderson's penchant for precise
framing and his liking for group compositions, are a device that
increases the sophistication of the process. If TENENBAUMS were
a 'magnetized' film (everything running the same direction), then we
would be left with a less complex work that put a premium on
emotional subjectivity. Instead what we have is a work that exploits
the disconnect between private emotional attachment and detached
observation. I read the 'gap' as intentional (if only intuitive,
maybe), and as productive.
Zach,
You make an excellent point that the framing and staging strategy directly speaks to the emotional detachment of the characters. I would totally agree that Anderson accomplishes that. Of course most filmmakers use cinematic grammar in a way that may intentionally or intuitively resemble the technique of another. If something works, and it does here - it should definetly be used. My concern which probably goes back to Bogdanovich's direction of The Last Picture Show in which he referenced or worked in the style of Hawks, Ford, Welles and others he admired. At the time (I have since changed my view on this) this homage although appropriate for the film seemed self-conscious and there for insiders to pick up on. Scorsese references and uses stylistic techniques from other directors all the time but he is almost always able to incorporate them within his signiture style and the specific approach to the film at hand. I have only seen Tenenbaums once, I must see it again, but during that
screening I was so aware that he was imitating or referencing or paying homage to Kubrick or trying to work in his style that it didn't allow me to engage in the relationship between the visualization, characters, text and the director's point of view. Of course to the general audience who may be unaware of the compositional similarity - the point is mute. Then we have Brian De Palma who has referenced Hitchcock for practically his whole career but has fashioned into his own combination of Studio style and his point of view towards the world and time in which he lives in. One could argue that all director's are subject to being indentified with another filmmaker's style - what is important is to connect the style to the content and narrative and characters in the way the director sees the material - then any intuitive influences find their natural place.
Vinny
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1008
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 3:33pm
Subject: Re: Re: Morality etc.
To Dan, the musical analogy is one I have used myself: that film form
functions a bit the way music does. But though I like a lot of popular
music, and have since my teens, I don't listen to it all that much, and
in fact I think it's the wrong metaphor to use. Mine would be so-called
"classical" music, whose form is in general far more complex. And I've
noted that among people much younger than myself this is a far less
common taste than it was a generation ago, and I think that's a great
loss. Focusing on the kind of intense attention to detail, and to
relationships between many different elements within a piece, that
classical music requires, and the complex reactions produced, are an
excellent way of learning to focus one's attention aesthetically without
escapist involvement in obviously manipulative structures. The ecstatic
complexity of Bach, the interrelationships between the parts (and by
"parts" I mean polyphonic lines that are playing at the same time, not
"sections), would be the right comparison. In fact I sometimes explain
my criteria for films with my "Bach test": Does the effect of the
compositions, editing, rhythms, camera movements, sound, and
subject-matter, and narrative if any have some of the expressive
complexity and formal integrity of Bach? And Bach's cantatas are for me
not a bad comparison narrative film, though others have also quite
reasonably offered opera. There are words (in German) and music, but you
don't have to know what the words mean at all to be incredibly moved,
and on the first listen I almost never look at the text. Then when I
discover that the flowing violin phrases in one movement relate to a
river metaphor in the text, or that the structure of an opening fugue is
a way of articulating the reciprocity of the "do unto others" Golden
Rule, I'm even more moved.
The reason that I think this is important is that a lot of films that
would pass the pop music test would fail the Bach test. Of course this
is all highly subjective and I can't prove anything. But you mention
Fassbinder. I remember rather liking "Veronika Voss." I liked the way
the pathos of the story combined with the, I don't know, passivity of
the black and white cinematography to produce a strong mood. This is
what a lot of films that a lot of people like and I don't really accept
as art do for me. I liked the "mood" of "Hour of the Wolf," even though
I'd reject Bergman as a film artist. But what I miss is a sense of
anything more. The imagery evokes emotions in the same way that a story,
or a pop song, or even a narrative effectively told but without much
"film form," might, but it doesn't do much more than that, it doesn't
really take me out of myself. There's a difference between manipulating
my emotions and providing a complex form. And, without going into detail
here, I think of Hawks as a great "formalist," not in the sense that
Lang is -- in that sense Hawks is an anti-formalist -- but in the way
that his imagery really does do what I "want." It's hard to see this or
explain it because it's so subtle -- whatever is there would not survive
in stills, or even sequences of stills. But in answer to Damien, it's
expressive of an ethos that is not particularly psychological in the way
you're thinking. "Deep psychological problems" are not really the issue
for Hawks -- it's a the poetry of tiny gestures that redeems everything,
and "social order" is not really a category for Hawks, even if it
appears as a category in some of his stories.
To Jaime, I wasn't consciously remembering your comments, but I'm sure
they factored into my response, even though I know you didn't take the
position I was caricaturing. It's not that the person doesn't inform the
work, and vice versa, it's just that I think the effect of a great work
is very different in kind from the effect of meeting any person. And
"pleasure" is the main point for me, but pleasure of a certain kind, not
the pleasure of reacting to superficial stimuli or narrative or
charcter-identification cues, but something more.
To David, there's a limit case for everything. I mean, you've reminded
me that no statement that I can make is going to be true in all cases.
If someone tells me that a dumb-looking set of index cards tacked to a
gallery wall is better conceptual art than I had thought, that I should
read something about the artist, see her other work, and reconsider, I
might be willing to do that. I'm simply not interested in going through
the mental processes that might allow me to reconceive of acts of mass
murder as performance art, even though I agree with Yoel that it's a
theoretical possibility. But not everything in life is art because
someone declares it so; I don't think that's what Duchamp proved.
Anyway, the fact that people were killed in the making of this movie is
enough to cause me to reject it from the beginning. I'm sure I would
have a similar reaction if I could use a time machine to travel back to
the Aztec era and see the great sculptures of the rain god Tlaloc that
I've admired in museums used for their intended purpose, or one of them,
which was receiving blood from children sacrificed in religious rites.
So I'm perhaps even a little less liberal than Yoel here, in that I just
don't want to consider the possibility that a "work" that includes
murder might be art. I suppose some might say that is no different than
the PETA fanatics who judge films on how animals were treated in their
making, but I make a big distinction, unlike them, between humans and
horses.
- Fred
1009
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 3:56pm
Subject: Re: Royal Tenenbaums
> I didn't think THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS was a 'bad' film -- it wound up
> on my best-of-the-year list -- but I'm still trying to analyse my
> intensely ambivalent response to it. Part of this was to do with the
> way the main plot events -- the attempted suicide, near-incest, etc --
> felt grotesquely at odds with the busy, decorative surface style,
> which in turn wound up seeming like an manic, vastly elaborate denial
> mechanism, as if the only way to deal with trauma were to reduce it
> to the cutesy terms of a children's book.
Well, you could think of it the other way around, as a children's book
(maybe a teen-age child's book) invaded by trauma. Anderson leads with
the fable, the mythology - and he closes things up with it too, but I
don't get the feeling that the trauma never happened or didn't change
our view. Sounds as if I'm saying something similar to what Zach said.
- Dan
1010
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:09pm
Subject: Re: Morality
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
> 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?)
I'd certainly give it one "creepy" at least. I rejected the request to sloppily embrace a character as dubious, in some respects, as Royal (the admittedly superb Hackman). His racist remarks about the Glover character illustrate one issue that seemed not only unresolved, but unexplored and (surprisingly), practically unacknowledged. (Having seen the film only on DVD, though, I could have missed some ironic framing devices or the like..)
1011
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:18pm
Subject: Re: My Dinner With Andre (De Toth); also concepts versus ideas
> 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?
Yeah, I think so. It's really hard to write something good about a film
one dislikes - or, rather, you never really know whether you've written
anything good, because you're just shooting in the dark.
> 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?
One has to be open to this possibility, eternally.
> 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.
I wonder what the consensus is here on the great Naruse. He got only a
few votes in the 2002 Sight and Sound poll. Did that traveling retro in
1985 convert many of you?
> 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.
As far as evaluating films go, it's everything. I mean, sometimes I'll
let my intellect try to push me toward pleasure; and sometimes I'll blow
the whistle on some kinds of pleasure that I don't want to credit to the
film's account. But ultimately, I won't call a film great or good if I
don't feel pleasure from it.
And then with the assessment, evaluation, interpretation, etc., the
pleasure is a guide to keep my thoughts on the right track.
- Dan
1012
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:26pm
Subject: Re: Morality and Red River
> 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."
That kind of ending is very Hawksian, actually - it's just that in RED
RIVER he wandered into different areas of moral conflict than usual.
There was some talk about the ending of THE CROWD ROARS on That Other
List recently, and I said that Hawks often ends a film with a bit of
pleasure aimed directly at the audience. It's almost a reflexive
acknowledgement of the filmmaking, a wink.
I have problems with RED RIVER too, and they're the same problems I have
with other Borden Chase scripts. Maybe I won't go into it right now,
but all that "You was wrong, Dunson" stuff creates a loaded moral system
that, among other things, makes it harder for Hawks to pull off that
winking ending. - Dan
1013
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:29pm
Subject: Re: Warhol and "relative nature of realism"?
> "...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..."
>
> I only saw one film by Warhol, BlowJob, and thought it was absolutely
> great. I think the film has many, many layers. "The relative nature
> of realism" is one of them but the film would not work for me if
> there wasn't an amazing formal beauty in there. Watching the rhyhtm
> of the light and shadow on the guy's face together with the simple
> moves of his head create an experience that does not depend only on
> one's questioning of the reality of what's in front of the camera.
>
> I know the statement above is not enough for me to understand what
> you really think about Warhol but it seemed like you put other things
> above the formal beauty of his images. Sorry if I'm wrong!
No, I think you're right! I don't remember the shot in question, but in
general I think that Warhol is intentionally neglectful of the beauty of
the image. - Dan
1014
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 4:42pm
Subject: Re: Re: Morality etc.
> To Dan, the musical analogy is one I have used myself: that film form
> functions a bit the way music does. But though I like a lot of popular
> music, and have since my teens, I don't listen to it all that much, and
> in fact I think it's the wrong metaphor to use. Mine would be so-called
> "classical" music, whose form is in general far more complex.
I chose pop music, not because of its complexity, but because many pop
music fans require a meaningful interaction between lyrics and music,
and I don't, really. Classical music doesn't provide me with the same
analogy to your approach to film. - Dan
1015
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 5:00pm
Subject: Re: Re: Morality etc.
Dan Sallitt wrote:
>I chose pop music, not because of its complexity, but because many pop
>music fans require a meaningful interaction between lyrics and music,
>and I don't, really. Classical music doesn't provide me with the same
>analogy to your approach to film. - Dan
>
>
Yes, but many opera fans, and presumably many of the original Bach
Cantata hearers, do and did require a meaningful interaction between
lyrics and music, whereas I don't.
I think I'm suggesting to film lovers that repeated listening to great
pieces by Bach, or Ockeghem, or Webern, or Nancarrow (there's a longer
list of favorite composers buried in my bio in the files section) can
help one's appreciation of time based "high art" in general, by helping
one learn a certain kind of focused attention to formal details and
relationships between parts. And I take the great films of classical
Hollywood to be "high art," despite the context in which they were made.
Also, much of my writing on narrative film *is* about the interaction
between story and style, theme and camera angles. It's not that I think
those relationships aren't there. It's just that I don't see style as
the container for a good story, the proper embellishment for it, the
syrup that makes it palatable. Rather, the story is an excuse for a
great filmmaker to blast off into the outer galaxies, or something like
that.
About "Red River," isn't the line actually, "You was wrong, MISTER
Dunson," and wasn't it spoken by the inimitable Walter Brennan? Those
two factors considerably reduce one's sense of a "loaded moral system"
and considerably raise one's awareness of the characteristics of
individuals.
My biggest problem with "Red River" is Tionmkin's music -- especially in
the Indian-stabbing scene. If I hatred all Hollywood films I would start
my essay, "Why Hollywood is Aesthetically Evil," with a brief discussion
of the way the music functions in that scene. Tiomkin should have stuck
to films like "High Noon" -- where his music is arguably a little better
than the direction.
- Fred
1016
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 5:36pm
Subject: Red River
> About "Red River," isn't the line actually, "You was wrong, MISTER
> Dunson," and wasn't it spoken by the inimitable Walter Brennan? Those
> two factors considerably reduce one's sense of a "loaded moral system"
> and considerably raise one's awareness of the characteristics of
> individuals.
I feel as if the presentation of the moral issues in RED RIVER is full
of cracks and fissures, to use the quaint lit-crit phrase. Brennan
helps Dunson gun down the mutinous cowhands (very Hawks-like), but still
becomes a voice in the moral chorus against Dunson (very Chase-like).
Dunson is more than open and honest in laying out the dangers of the
drive and excusing the timid (a very Hawksian scene), but then he is
judged by the movie for the rules that he laid out so carefully early
on, without the fact being much noted.
I imagine one can look at the film's moral system as meaningfully
complex instead of contradictory. The real problem for me is the
Chase-like way that that moral chorus is invested with the film's
authority. Maybe it would have worked for me within a Hitchcockian
pattern of reversals of identification, but Hawks seems to me not
completely aware of what's going down. - Dan
1017
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:14pm
Subject: Re: Re: Morality etc.
Fred Camper wrote:
> the story is an excuse for a
> great filmmaker to blast off into the outer galaxies, or something like
> that.
Right on. Which is why I have trouble trying to grasp what everyone
means by "experimental film" as opposed to what the great filmmakers do
in the outer galaxies.
>
>
> About "Red River," isn't the line actually, "You was wrong, MISTER
> Dunson," and wasn't it spoken by the inimitable Walter Brennan? Those
> two factors considerably reduce one's sense of a "loaded moral system"
> and considerably raise one's awareness of the characteristics of
> individuals.
I am curious what Dan and other Hawks people here think of my take on
Hawks -- which indirectly addresses the problems of Red River.
Vidor, Hawks, Ford ("American Tryptych"): http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html
>
>
> My biggest problem with "Red River" is Tionmkin's music -- especially in
> the Indian-stabbing scene. If I hatred all Hollywood films I would start
> my essay, "Why Hollywood is Aesthetically Evil," with a brief discussion
> of the way the music functions in that scene. Tiomkin should have stuck
> to films like "High Noon" -- where his music is arguably a little better
> than the direction.
It's probably not relevant to your hate, Fred, but, as you know, the
"book" and the "voice" versions of Red River differ not only in that one
is more grandiose and the other more folksie, but in the former having
beefier music -- whether because of different scoring or different
soundmix, I don't know. The Big Sky's music also got beefier when it
was cut from 138 to 122 minutes.
1018
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:24pm
Subject: Re: Red River
Often in Hawks, I think, Dan, it's the woman who's the boss. Not
Dunson, not Matt, not Brennan, not the chorus.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> I feel as if the presentation of the moral issues in RED RIVER is full
> of cracks and fissures, to use the quaint lit-crit phrase. Brennan
> helps Dunson gun down the mutinous cowhands (very Hawks-like), but
still
> becomes a voice in the moral chorus against Dunson (very Chase-like).
> Dunson is more than open and honest in laying out the dangers of the
> drive and excusing the timid (a very Hawksian scene), but then he is
> judged by the movie for the rules that he laid out so carefully early
> on, without the fact being much noted.
>
> I imagine one can look at the film's moral system as meaningfully
> complex instead of contradictory. The real problem for me is the
> Chase-like way that that moral chorus is invested with the film's
> authority. Maybe it would have worked for me within a Hitchcockian
> pattern of reversals of identification, but Hawks seems to me not
> completely aware of what's going down. - Dan
1019
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:15pm
Subject: Gigli
Anybody see it?
1020
From: Steve Polta
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:41pm
Subject: Re: Warhol and "relative nature of realism"?
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > "...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..."
> >
> > I only saw one film by Warhol, BlowJob, and
> thought it was absolutely
> > great. I think the film has many, many layers.
> "The relative nature
> > of realism" is one of them but the film would not
> work for me if
> > there wasn't an amazing formal beauty in there.
> Watching the rhyhtm
> > of the light and shadow on the guy's face together
> with the simple
> > moves of his head create an experience that does
> not depend only on
> > one's questioning of the reality of what's in
> front of the camera.
> >
> > I know the statement above is not enough for me to
> understand what
> > you really think about Warhol but it seemed like
> you put other things
> > above the formal beauty of his images. Sorry if
> I'm wrong!
>
> No, I think you're right! I don't remember the shot
> in question, but in
> general I think that Warhol is intentionally
> neglectful of the beauty of
> the image. - Dan
I'm not sure if I'm following this discussion
accurately but I'd like to point out that Warhol's
"intentionally neglectful" approach to cinematography
(I assume you mean the seemingly arbitrary framings
and exposures, the seemingly unmotivated camera moves)
*may* have been the result of carelessness (or
whetever) but it resulted in a body of work which
intensely explored unconventional cinematographic
beauty. I've never seen BLOW JOB but the 6 hour SLEEP
sounds very much like what you are describing-contrary
to most reports, SLEEP consists of shortshots which
are looped excessively (like for an hour at a
time)-the viewer becomes very familiar witheach tiny
gesture and exposure change and the black and white
image becomes fascinating.
In other words, I belive Warhol was , on some level,
interested in "amplifying" mistakes and that which is
conventionally accepted as "wrong" and turnign it into
something new and fascinating.
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1021
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 3:42pm
Subject: Re: Gigli
In a message dated 8/8/03 3:17:39 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>Anybody see it?
No, but I'm starting to think maybe I should. I've heard from like half a
dozen people over the past week that it's either really good or pretty good or
at least not nearly as bad as its rep (of course, what could be?) I could care
less about BenA and JLo, but Martin Brest has done some worthwhile work in
years past. Have you seen it?
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1022
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 7:56pm
Subject: Re: Warhol and "relative nature of realism"?
Steve Polta wrote:
>
>I'm not sure if I'm following this discussion
>accurately but I'd like to point out that Warhol's
>"intentionally neglectful" approach to cinematography
>.... *may* have been the result of carelessness (or
>whatever) but it resulted in a body of work which
>intensely explored unconventional cinematographic
>beauty.
>
Yes, yes, yes, Warhol's films (and paintings) are, at their best, *very*
beautiful. It's a beauty of color (or blacks and grays and whites) and
surface and texture and gesture, and in some films, a beauty of watching
time unfold with an agonizing slowness that changes the nature of one's
attention. Warhol's choice of subjects was not as random as people
think, and his working methods often involve more care than he's given
credit for. My case for the beauties of "Sleep" is at
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/0400/000428_1.html
I recently saw a recently restored and released Warhol that actually
fits his reputation as a maker of visually uninteresting random films of
weird people doing stupid things. This was actually a "bad" Warhol film.
My capsule is at
http://65.201.198.5/movies/capsules/23711_SINCE_ANDY_WARHOLS_SINCE
But it's the first and only totally bad Warhol that I've seen, and I've
seen a *lot* of Warhol.
Not insignificantly, he never finished or released this film, "Since,"
in his lifetime. It is not, in other words, a "real" Warhol film at all.
He was an artist who really *did* know what he was doing.
- Fred
1023
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:30pm
Subject: Gigli
I saw it last night. It's not Brest's film at this point - I recognize the
directorial personality of my old boss Tom Sherak, head of
marketing at Revolution, in the ending, the score and the
restaurant scene. (I'm guessing on the latter two, but it's a matter
of record that Affleck's character was originally gunned down at
the end, either by the gangsters or the cops - since the film is set
in Los Angeles, it could've been either.)
It's still an odd duck - for the obvious plot reasons, but also for
something that keeps happening with the acting, which was
summed up by an amateur posting on Rotten Tomatoes: "I
couldn't believe in any of the characters." Actually, that's only true
part of the time: there's this strobe effect going on, which even
affects the cameos.
The most noticeable case of it is Banarth, whose choices in the
Rain Man role do a complete 180 as the film progresses. But it
happens in other ways with the leads, who do their own 180s,
and then the cameos...it's as if Pacino and Walken suddenly
lost track of their characters halfway through their turns. Some of
it has to do with the dialogue, which is also not consistent in
style. Lopez certainly deserves something for her Vagina
Monologue, which is delivered while doing yoga exercises. The
only character who doesn't warp in some way - content,
execution, actor's Alzheimer's - is the nasty hood, who is never
believable to start with. The minimum you can say is that the
script and the performances are highly artificial.
Visually it's workmanlike, scene by scene, with the occasional
odd choice about who's in focus that may have been part of
some larger plan - you can't talk about overall visual plans when
there has been as much forced reshooting as there was here.
That may also account for some of what's happening with the
performances - maybe someone said in a focus group that
they'd like to see the autistic get better? I have no idea...
You may have missed it if you haven't gone yet. The word is that
Sony was going to pull it after yesterday. I was at the last show at
the Arclight - me, a friend who was railing against the actors and
the script all the way through, and three young Chicanas who
were laughing their asses off behind us. I enjoyed it, too, and
thought about it afterwards, obviously.
Let me also cast my tentative vote against the director who made
The Royal Tannenbaums. I found it pretty forgettable, and later
shut off my tape of Rushmore after about 20 minutes. I still
haven't seen Bottle Rocket, but I will. One widely unnoticed movie
reference in Tannebaums: to Suspicion, when Danny Glover
goes up the steps clutching the bottle of pills. But I'll have to say
that what's left of Gigli stayed with me longer, weirdly enough.
1024
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 8:45pm
Subject: Naruse, Plot
Jaime and Dan asked for opinions on Naruse:
Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954) is a good movie. It has features that remind one of Ozu: 1) It deals with daily life 2) the action is punctuated by vividly composed exterior street scenes from which the characters are absent 3) the rectilinear patterns of Japanese architecture help create the compositions. Oddly enough, it also reminds one a bit of Hawks. Its leads are three retired middle-aged former geisha, now getting by in a working class district in Tokyo. Their determination reminds one a little bit of the gutsy characters in Hawks. Of course, they are three women, not the largely male groups in Hawks. This is only one of two Naruse films seen here. Would love to see Floating Clouds!
Plot
I love movies with good plots! A recent example: the British mystery spy thriller, Enigma (Michael Apted, 2001). Its characters are mathematicians working as code breakers in World War II Britain. The film respects the intelligence of the audience, and has a complex plot involving cryptography. This is a pleasant film, low on violence, high on plot. Thunderheart (Apted, 1992) is also a highly literate mystery.
What this plot needs is a good final twist – Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels (a movie with a great plot).
Morality and Camera Movement.
Doesn't Contempt (1963) open with a quote on this, attributed by Godard to Bazin?
1025
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 9:20pm
Subject: Re: Red River
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Tag Gallagher" wrote:
> Often in Hawks, I think, Dan, it's the woman who's the boss. Not
> Dunson, not Matt, not Brennan, not the chorus.
>
My other main problem with Red River is in the narrative strucrure --
the wonderfully Hawksian Joanne Dru doesn't shows up quite late in
the film, and when she does her presence becomes so powerful that she
throughs off the picture's equilibrium. The tone of the film also
changes, as the brooding morality play turns into a playful battle of
the sexes.
1026
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 9:33pm
Subject: Re: morality, "travellings," etc.
My impression is that the quote about "une affaire de travelling"
comes from an article by Jacques Rivette on Kapo. I'll check.
I also promised to look into "moralite de cineaste," but I think we
already got a pretty good definition/translation from Jake. As
used by Cahiers reviewers in the post-Maoist era, it seems to
have been a highfaultin' way of saying "integrity."
1027
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 9:38pm
Subject: Red River
There are lots of films with sudden happy reversals at the end:
Street Angel, The Searchers and The Indian Tomb come to
mind. What's odd about the one in Red River is that it is so
consciously artificial. As I recall, I always liked that about it.
Personally, I never really thought Hawks was endorsing Wayne's
behavior - that certainly isn't the main thrust of the film. Someone
- Daney? - once said that the difference between Wayne in Ford
and Hawks was that he always sensed Hawks was a little afraid
of Wayne - you feel that about the way he portrays the sudden
displays of violence in Rio Bravo.
1028
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:01pm
Subject: Re: Gigli, Wes Anderson
Thanks for the rundown, Bill. As a friend of mine said on another list,
there might exist the tendency among some auteurists to overcompensate for the way
this film has been trashed by overselling its virtues. I'd warn against
that, since the way you describe it makes it sound profoundly compromised by
studio interference. That being said, I'm now curious to see it - for the shards
we get of Brest's vision - before it departs to the land of "At Long Last
Love"/"Heaven's Gate"/"Ishtar"/"Howard the Duck" oblivion (and, hey, three out of
four of those are really good films!)
I never saw "Meet Joe Black," but given its running time, I'd bet Brest had
final cut. And the mutilation of "Gigli" is the price he paid for that film's
commercial failure. A shame. I think "Midnight Run" is brilliant.
I'm on record as being a big Wes Anderson fan, I must say. I think "Bottle
Rocket" is just a warm-up to "Rushmore" and "Tenenbaums," so I don't know that
it'll convince you, Bill, though plenty of people love it. Kent Jones wrote
what I take to be the major piece on "Tenenbaums" in Film Comment two years
ago; I'd point any skeptics to that piece. Anderson himself has expressed as
well as anyone the incompatibility of his fairy tale-like aesthetic with 'real
world' events, like death, and viewed "Tenenbaums" as an attempt at a
reconciliation between those two impulses. For reasons already explicated by Dan and
Zach, I'd say he pretty much succeeds, though admittedly it's a tough combo.
Things like Royal's racism seem even tougher to pull of in the context of
Anderson's cinema than Royal's death.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1029
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 10:14pm
Subject: Re: Gigli (re: Tenenbaums)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> One widely unnoticed movie
> reference in Tannebaums: to Suspicion, when Danny Glover
> goes up the steps clutching the bottle of pills.
Anderson himself points this out on the audio commentary track on the DVD, so I guess it's official. These tracks often remind me how much I'm missing in even the most relatively routine films -- I only hope that's the result of watching them on video. (In the case of TENENBAUMS, one does, it's true, lose a lot of detail.) At the same time, I'm sometimes surprised by directors' readiness to deconstruct the illusions they've created.
1030
From:
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 6:15pm
Subject: Re: Re: Morality etc.
Fred, then Tag:
>> the story is an excuse for a
>> great filmmaker to blast off into the outer galaxies, or something like
>> that.
>
>Right on. Which is why I have trouble trying to grasp what everyone
>means by "experimental film" as opposed to what the great filmmakers do
>in the outer galaxies.
Right on to your right on. I always wondered how meaningful categories like
experimental and narrative are for formally oriented auteurists. I mean, I
think they are, but it seems that the sort of stuff we pay attention to in both
categories of film art are rather similar.
Here's a question. How many of you find it useful to sometimes "turn off"
the part of your brain which is following the story, and the interaction between
form and story and so on, and just let yourself be taken in by a filmmaker's
space? I'm not suggesting this is a way I'd recommend viewing narrative films
as a rule, but I find it can be a pretty instructive activity because you get
such a clean sense of what a film's aesthetic is all about. I recently
re-watched "The Immortal Story" and paid no attention to the story, just to the
framing (that shot of Moreau standing against the gate!), the amazing use of
color, the way Welles' edits flit across screen, and on and on. It was really
pretty cool inhabiting this world for 60 minutes.
Usually, I do this with films I know really well and have seen many times, so
the story, the tale, is already embedded in my consciousness. It's a kind of
ultimate test of how great they are.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1031
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2003 10:38pm
Subject: Screening for content and form
Peter Tonguette said,
How many of you find it useful to sometimes "turn off"
the part of your brain which is following the story, and the interaction
between
form and story and so on, and just let yourself be taken in by a filmmaker's
space? I'm not suggesting this is a way I'd recommend viewing narrative films
as a rule, but I find it can be a pretty instructive activity because you get
such a clean sense of what a film's aesthetic is all about. I recently
re-watched "The Immortal Story" and paid no attention to the story, just to the
framing (that shot of Moreau standing against the gate!), the amazing use of
color, the way Welles' edits flit across screen, and on and on. It was really
pretty cool inhabiting this world for 60 minutes.
Peter,
This is a very good insight and a useful method to understand a director's use of story and craft, and to see how editing, camera, design, sound and music are contributing to the way we receive a film. This became a revelation to me after doing a series of projects on the film crafts. In many cases I have screened the same film in preparation for interviews with cinematographers, production designers, editors, and sound designers. Each time (over a series of years) I watch the film in question for the contribution of a specific craft I see the narrative tendencies of the craft and the way in which the director utilizes them to impart narrative, psychological, and atmospheric qualities which inform the story. Eventually content and form become insepartable to a large degree.
Vinny LoBrutto
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1032
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 0:14am
Subject: Re: Red River & fear
> Someone - Daney? - once said that the difference between Wayne in
> Ford and Hawks was that he always sensed Hawks was a little afraid
> of Wayne - you feel that about the way he portrays the sudden
> displays of violence in Rio Bravo.
This fear is projected onto Robert Mitchum in EL DORADO ("Let me hear
you LAUGH!" *thonk*). And onto nobody at all in RIO LOBO, which is
one of the reasons it's so bland.
Jaime
1033
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 2:22am
Subject: Re: Re: Red River
Perhaps this is less a "problem" than a "feature." In Hawks a brooding
morality play IS a playful battle of the sexes.
Damien Bona wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Tag Gallagher" wrote:
> > Often in Hawks, I think, Dan, it's the woman who's the boss. Not
> > Dunson, not Matt, not Brennan, not the chorus.
> >
>
> My other main problem with Red River is in the narrative strucrure --
> the wonderfully Hawksian Joanne Dru doesn't shows up quite late in
> the film, and when she does her presence becomes so powerful that she
> throughs off the picture's equilibrium. The tone of the film also
> changes, as the brooding morality play turns into a playful battle of
> the sexes.
>
1034
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 3:48am
Subject: Re: Warhol and "relative nature of realism"?
> SLEEP consists of shortshots which
> are looped excessively (like for an hour at a
> time)-the viewer becomes very familiar witheach tiny
> gesture and exposure change and the black and white
> image becomes fascinating.
>
> In other words, I belive Warhol was , on some level,
> interested in "amplifying" mistakes and that which is
> conventionally accepted as "wrong" and turnign it into
> something new and fascinating.
I buy this. - Dan
1035
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 5:12am
Subject: Erratum: The Kapo Dolly Shot
The phrase IS by Godard. I was thinking of the following passage by
Rivette, which could have inspired the famous phrase, but doesn't
contain it:
'Concerning the shot in Kapo where [Emmanuelle] Riva commits suicide
by throwing herself on the electrified barbed wire: the man who
decided[d], at that moment, to dolly in so as to reframe the face
from a low angle, being careful to precisely inscribe the raised hand
in an angle within his final shot, is deserving of nothing but the
deepest contempt.' ("De l'abjection," CdC 120)
I found both pieces of information in Serge Daney's last article for
Trafic, "On the Kapo Dolly Shot" (Trafic 4), where he reveals that
even though he never saw Kapo, which he describes as an obscure 1960
film about the camps by Gillo Pontecorvo (who later made The Battle
of Algiers), the Kapo Dolly Shot became, when he first read Rivette's
article at age 17, a kind of "grigris" by which he subsequently
judged films, critics and theories of cinema. "On the Kapo Dolly
Shot" is a very dense reflection on what happened to his "grigris"
after that, beginning with the observation that "it was because Night
and Fog existed that Kapo was rotten at birth and Rivette could write
his article." Night and Fog, of course, is also full of dolly shots,
but he doesn't go into that - the point of comparison is the subject
of the camps, and how Resnais and Pontecorvo represented that subject.
I was struck again, reading Serge's article, by the unique historical
position Night and Fog occupies in the minds of French writers on
film who first saw the camps in film-club screenings of that 1955
Resnais film. It was 4 years later, of course, but the tv airing of
Abby Mann's Judgement at Nuremberg (dir. George Roy Hill) had the
same impact on me. That was the first time I saw footage from the
camps, and everyone who saw the broadcast also remembers the
ridiculous attempt at censorship by the sponsors, almost like a gaffe
unconsciously motivated by the enormity of what the broadcast was
unveiling for a national audience. For those who don't remember it,
here's the account on the Playhouse 90 web site: "This episode is
known as one of the most censored moments on TV. Being sponsored by
The American Gas Co., they wanted all references to gas chambers
removed from this drama about accountability for the Holocaust.
Claude Rains conspired with fellow cast members to defy the idiotic
censorship and say 'gas chamber' as originally written in the script.
(which was deleted by a flip of a switch.)" My recollection is that
the line, as broadcast, was "untold millions killed in [bleep]
ovens."
When I say "unveiled," I have no idea how often and widely the camp
footage had been seen before that. I do know that my research on
Hitchcock showed that references to I. G. Farben were snipped out of
prints of Notorious at some point in the 50s, although that is really
more akin to the industrial censorship practiced by the Gas Co.
Anyway, I told the story of that broadcast in a piece for the Cahiers
on early American tv when Serge was still editor, but in the version
of history he tells in "On the Kapo Dolly Shot" America was out of
the audiovisual loop on the subject until we "reclaimed" it from
Resnais with the Marvin Chomsky miniseries Holocaust - which he liked
at the time (1979), but provocatively associated, retrospectively, in
that article about the intellectual adventures and misadventures of
his beloved "grigris," with the first publications of the Holocaust
deniers. A very Godardian move on Serge's part, recalling JLG's
observation (?) that the first appearance of pubic hair in Playboy
coincided with the start of the Vietnamese peace conference in Paris
- "because the butchery had changed camps." When Godard was showing
Serge around his tape library, Serge reports, he pulled out a couple
of examples of "concentration camp porn" and wondered why they were
allowed to be circulated. Serge replied that the real pornography was
The Kapo Dolly Shot and its estheticizing descendants, like The Night
Porter. After Serge's death, I believe Godard used some of
those "concentration camp porn" images in Histoire(s) du cinema,
which is haunted by World War II and the camps from start to finish.
Summing up the purpose of this post: to correct my misstatement, to
offer a possible point of reference for the Godard quote, and to show
how deeply French that whole context is.
1036
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 5:50am
Subject: Re: morality, "travellings," etc.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote: > My impression is that the quote about "une affaire de
travelling" > comes from an article by Jacques Rivette on Kapo.
I'll check. >
I think Luc Moullet wrote it first, in 'Sam Fuller -- sur les
brisés
de Marlowe,' Cahiers du Cinma 93, March 1959.
Godard inverted the statement in a round-table discussion on
Hiroshima, mon amour in Cahiers du Cinma 97, July 1959.
I don't have the originals with me, but here are the translation in
Jim Hillier's book.
First, Moullet:
Fuller above politics
For non-conformity, Run of the Arrow beats all records: immediately
after the Southern defeat, the Confederate O'Meara goes off to
fight with the Sioux against Northern oppression. Half convinced
by Captain Clark, the Yankee liberal who shows him the futility
of his hatred, and influenced by the unfortunate example of the
Yankee fascist, Lieutenant Driscoll, he returns home. Fuller
himself, in the New York Times in July 1956, was quite explicit
about the meaning of this fable which, in his view, explained
the difficulties faced by present-day American governments: an
administration's political adversaries, at whatever moment in
history, seek to hasten their revenge by allying with the country's
enemies. That is open to several possible interpretations, and
Fuller suggests that the alliance with the Indians after the
Civil War corresponds, in terms of the Southern question, to an
alliance with the most violent elements in the Black Power
movement. Contrary to what has been said about Fuller, he is not
in any way Manichean, even less than Brooks, since there are two
types of Northerner, two types of Southerner, plus four types of
Indian. Humanite Dimanche may well be surprised by such confusion:
'The Southerners are anti-racist, the Northerners racist, the
Indians pro-American and some of the Americans pro-Indian.' When
the renegades are led to contradict themselves, i.e. by having to
massacre their fellow citizens, they do an about-turn: 'The end of
this story can only be written by you', or, if you prefer, since
the date is July 1956, the life of the United States depends on
the voting paper you drop into the ballot box next November.
Apparently, then, what we have here is a nationalist, reactionary,
Nixonian film. Could Fuller really be the fascist, the right-wing
extremist who was denounced not so long ago in the Communist press?
I don't think so.
He has too much the gift of ambiguity to be able to align himself
exclusively with one party. Fascism is the subject of his film,
but Fuller doesn't set himself up as a judge. It is purely an
inward fascism he is concerned with rather than with any political
consequences. That is why Meeker's and Steiger's roles are more
powerfully drawn than Michael Pate's in Something of Value: Brooks
is far too prudent to feel directly involved, whereas Fuller is
in his element; he speaks from experience. And on fascism, only
the point of view of someone who has been tempted is of any
interest. It is a fascism of actions rather than of intentions.
For Fuller does not seem to have a good head for politics. If he
claims to be of the extreme right, is that not to disguise, by
a more conventional appearance, a moral and aesthetic attitude
which belongs to a marginal and little respected domain?
Is Fuller anti-Communist? Not exactly. Because he confuses,
partly no doubt for commercial reasons, communism and
gangsterism, Communism and Nazism. He invents the representatives
of Moscow, about whom he knows nothing, on the basis of what
he does know, through his own experience, about Nazis and gangsters.
We must not forget that he only talks about what he knows. When
he depicts the enemy (and in The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets
and Hell and High Water, he usually tries just to avoid doing
so), it is a very abstract, conventional enemy. Only the dialogue
dots the i's, and it is really unfortunate that Pickup on South
Street and China Gate should remain verboten to us for such an
unjustified reason.
Morality is a question of tracking shots. These few characteristics
derive nothing from the way they are expressed nor from the
quality of that expression, which may often undercut them. It
would be just as ridiculous to take such a rich film simply as
a pro-Indian declaration as it would be to take Delmer Daves for
a courageous anti-racist director because there is a clause in
each of his contracts which stipulates that there will be love
affairs between people of different races. The unsuspecting public
is taken in and he always ends up on the right side of the fence.
Then Godard:
Rohmer: And on the grounds that I found some elements in Hiroshima
less seductive than others, I reserve judgment. There was something
in the first few frames that irritated me. Then the film very
soon made me lose this feeling of irritation. But I can understand
how one could like and admire Hiroshima and at the same time find
it quite jarring in places.
Doniol-Valcroze: Morally or aesthetically?
Godard: It's the same thing. Tracking shots are a question of
morality.
1037
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 5:59am
Subject: viewing habits, invisibility
A number of things said here recently, and particularly Fred's posts,
have made me think about some of the ways that I look at film that in
the past I've taken for granted. My experience is that usually when I
see a narrative film, I'm primarily concerned with the story being
told. My awareness of the formal elements that go to make up this
story – acting, camera movement, music and so forth – fluctuates: I'm
conscious of them, but not all of them equally, and not all the time.
Normally when I want to write about or study particular films it's
because I had some kind of compelling initial experience, but I have
to go back and look at them multiple times to try and see how that
experience was created. Of course, I then run into a version of the
Heisenberg Principle: the more closely I try to look at my
experience, the more that experience changes.
Whether or not you buy the idea that Hollywood film style
is `invisible' (I don't) the concept of a style that isn't meant to
be noticed does seem to have some currency among filmmakers
themselves. I recall an interview with Preminger, for example (quoted
in V.F. Perkins' book Film As Film) where he says that his ideal film
would be one where audiences got so caught up in the story that they
never noticed a cut or a camera movement. Which is not to say they
wouldn't be affected by these things – my point is that form affects
us all the time whether or not we're aware of it. I'm curious what
others feel about this – as I'm sure we agree that there remains a
basic, unbridgable gap between the primary experience of art and the
type of analysis carried out in criticism.
JTW
1038
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:33am
Subject: Re: Royal Tenenbaums
> Well, you could think of it the other way around, as a children's
book
> (maybe a teen-age child's book) invaded by trauma. Anderson leads
with
> the fable, the mythology - and he closes things up with it too, but
I
> don't get the feeling that the trauma never happened or didn't
change
> our view.
Sure, but I still feel like there's something hysterical and
unresolved at the film's core. In a lot of ways I feel like its
secret twin is MAGNOLIA - wilfully eccentric stylisation, upbeat yet
gruelling concept of narrative-as-therapy, totemic attachment to pop
music, child abuse obsession, overall mix of overweening ambition,
baffling tenderness and sheer amateurism (particularly re narrative
structure).
As I say I liked it. Sort of.
JTW
1039
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:48am
Subject: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
I think ultimately each person has to do what works best for him or her.
But for the sake of discussion:
Preminger's remark is ridiculous if taken literally. If no one "notices"
a camera movement, then what was the point of the camera movement?
What Preminger means is that he does not want audiences to be pulled OUT
of the movie by technical tricks.
A good analogous case is the final tracking shot in LOLA MONTÈS, which
was originally one long take and which, shortly after release, Ophuls
(himself, not his producer) shortened by the use of dissolves. Why?
Because audiences were distracted by it, were bored, were puzzled; it
created unnecessary problems. So Ophuls, like a good show man, "fixed"
it. And Ophuls would have argued that what he originally wanted to do is
much better accomplished with the dissolves than without them.
Some posts ago, someone questioned my saying Mizoguchi resembles Brecht,
the objection being that Mizo gets us emotionally involved whereas
Brecht alienates us. But this is an Anglo-American corruption of what
Brecht wanted, which was to increase emotional involvement.
One is certainly not less involved with music by being conscious of the
rhythm, the meter, the phrase structures, the harmonic motion, the
contrapuntal lines, which instrument is playing, how the instrumentalist
chooses to phrase and articulate. Quite the contrary, the more we are
consciously aware of these elements, the more we shall become engulfed
in the emotions, in the world, of the music.
So too with movies. Not being aware of cuts is just being oblivious,
cutting oneself off from actual sensual contact with cinema. It's a
denial of pleasure, of experience. It's stupid.
I don't think it's true that things affect us without our being aware of
it. Experiencing art is not like being etherized for an operation. It's
above all a physical and emotional awareness. If you're not intelligent,
you're not aware.
jaketwilson wrote:
> A number of things said here recently, and particularly Fred's posts,
> have made me think about some of the ways that I look at film that in
> the past I've taken for granted. My experience is that usually when I
> see a narrative film, I'm primarily concerned with the story being
> told. My awareness of the formal elements that go to make up this
> story . acting, camera movement, music and so forth . fluctuates: I'm
> conscious of them, but not all of them equally, and not all the time.
> Normally when I want to write about or study particular films it's
> because I had some kind of compelling initial experience, but I have
> to go back and look at them multiple times to try and see how that
> experience was created. Of course, I then run into a version of the
> Heisenberg Principle: the more closely I try to look at my
> experience, the more that experience changes.
>
> Whether or not you buy the idea that Hollywood film style
> is `invisible' (I don't) the concept of a style that isn't meant to
> be noticed does seem to have some currency among filmmakers
> themselves. I recall an interview with Preminger, for example (quoted
> in V.F. Perkins' book Film As Film) where he says that his ideal film
> would be one where audiences got so caught up in the story that they
> never noticed a cut or a camera movement. Which is not to say they
> wouldn't be affected by these things . my point is that form affects
> us all the time whether or not we're aware of it. I'm curious what
> others feel about this . as I'm sure we agree that there remains a
> basic, unbridgable gap between the primary experience of art and the
> type of analysis carried out in criticism.
>
> JTW
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
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> <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>.
1040
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 7:12am
Subject: The Kapo Dolly Shot
So actually, the Rivette review of Kapo came later (Serge D. gives it
as "CdC 120"). Interesting succession: Moullet to Godard to Rivette,
who gives the first concrete example of something that was a
polemical statement with no concrete example when Moullet wrote it
and Godard improved on it by turning it around.
Moullet: Morality [in film] is about dolly shots, not about all this
silly political stuff.
Godard: [All] dolly shots are about morality. (Strange, given what
Godard said in "Defense and Illustration of Clasical Decoupage" about
the fallacy of equating a technique [Preminger's all-in-ones] with
a "view of the world.")
Rivette: The Kapo Dolly Shot is immoral.
That in turn became a touchstone for Serge Daney, a touchstone used
to elaborate a theory of the morality or immorality of dolly shots
and other formal devices based on the idea that must be a "just"
representation, in this case of the camps, the ultimate reality
confronted by the postwar cinema. He actually says in the article he
never could see the difference between beauty and "justice." The Kapo
Dolly Shot, which ironically he never saw, but which Rivette's
description made him see so vividly that it became his touchstone,
was an "unjust" representation of the camps; Night and Fog was
a "just" representation.
For what it's worth, that is of one critic's moral theory of mise en
scene and where it came from - a theory that depends on a French play
on words: "Just" in French means both what it means in English
and "accurate." It was Serge's substitute for esthetics: "just"
=/replaces "beautiful," a shallow artistic aim can that result
in "unjust" representation, like The Kapo Dolly Shot, which was done
because Pontecorvo wanted to make a pretty shot of a camp inmate
committing suicide. It's at heart a Bazinian theory, because it
substitutes judgements about the relationship between cinema and
reality, cinema and the world, for esthetics - not naively, as in
judgements about painting that come down to "That sure looks like an
x." That's a given in film - good or bad use of film is
about "justice," and that is about the right or wrong use of dolly
shots, among other things.
Dan, Is that anything like what you mean when you talk about film in
moral terms? It seems a little reminiscent of what I've been reading
in some posts about a filmmaker I barely know, Andy Warhol.
1041
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 8:25am
Subject: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
I was originally going to email Zach about this, since he's pretty
much the only dedicated De Palma-phile I know, but I think it's of
general interest to the group.
Who has seen this film? After a dazzling animated title sequence and
a strange meta-something-or-other film-within-a-film opening with
Kirk Douglas, I started to think that had to be De Palma's worst
movie, period. And given where it falls on the timeline of his
filmography, after major projects like CARRIE, OBSESSION, and THE
FURY and before major projects like DRESSED TO KILL, SCARFACE, and
BLOW OUT, it's difficult to understand why it looks like a movie that
was made for two hundred bucks and shot on the cheapest stock
around. Almost everything about it is a little inept, or a lot:
lighting, framing, direction, plus the little moments of artifice
(slo-mo, self-conscious mugging), sound recording, and acting. But
then it starts to get really interesting, and (without going into
great detail) the film becomes really exciting.
Where auteurism is concerned, HOME MOVIES emerges as something of a
surprise. While it's possible that, out of all the movies De Palma
made after SISTERS, this one is talked about the least (next to WISE
GUYS, maybe), but it seems to me that in HOME MOVIES, a cheap,
amateur stunt that the director made with students from Sarah
Lawrence College, we can see and analyze the purest essence of "De
Palma," and that it contains links - thematic, visual,
dramatic, aesthetic - to almost every other De Palma film I can think
of, even CASUALTIES OF WAR. And the fact that it's a light comedy
might lead one to overlook the intricate layering of De Palma's
themes, starting with the act of looking, being looked at, the male
ego and the exploitation/objectification of women, plus "home
movies," home life, family unit, integrity of, and that's just for
starters. This is very exciting stuff.
Also it's very funny and despite what I said about the acting just
now, the cast is uniformly superb. I especially liked Gerritt Graham
and Keith Gordon (who was excellent in John Carpenter's CHRISTINE).
Incidentally, does anyone have any strong feelings for Keith Gordon's
own films? His filmography is nothing to sneeze at: the SINGING
DETECTIVE remake, MOTHER NIGHT, A MIDNIGHT CLEAR, WAKING THE DEAD,
work on 'Wild Palms' and 'Homicide: Life on the Street,' etc.
Lots of great posts lately, I'm a little overwhelmed.
1042
From: Tristan
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 8:41am
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
I haven't seen Home Movies, but I've seen a few De Palma films. Does
anyone else think he is the most uneven director in the history of
cinema? How is it possible for someone to make so many masterpieces
and so many Turkeys? The De Palma's I like that I've seen are Carrie,
Sisters, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, and Femme Fatale.
1043
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 1:01pm
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
> Who has seen this film?
I have, quite a while ago. I wasn't wild about it, but for some reason
I often have a difficult time with De Palma when he's not doing a
commissioned project. Not to deny his enormous talent.
> Incidentally, does anyone have any strong feelings for Keith Gordon's
> own films?
I think someone here is a fan: Peter, perhaps? I had a negative
reaction to THE CHOCOLATE WAR, I must admit. - Dan
1044
From:
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 9:16am
Subject: Camera Movement, De Palma
The two De Palma films I liked most were Get to Know Your Rabbit (1970), and
The Untouchables (1987). Have not seen Home Movies. Keith Gordon gave
excellent backup to Rodney Dangerfield in that sweet comedy, Back to School (Alan
Metter, 1986). This was one of the best-loved films of the 80's, among the general
public (me too!).
The opening long take in Snake Eyes was interesting, but the film as a whole
did not gel. Have also seen a fascinating 15 minute long take on an episode of
The X-Files, with Scully going up and down many floors of FBI headquarters in
an elevator.
Stedicam has snuck up on us. It has made many beautiful shots possible that
would have been way too expensive to do years ago. The late 1990's TV series
Pacific Blue was full of moving camera shots that would be famous today if they
had occurred in 1940's movies. Just beautiful. There was also lots of
interesting moving camera on the TV series version of The Big Easy. We should be
celebrating this new era of camera movement.
Am greatly impressed with Fred Camper's recent posts on attentiveness to
visual aspects of cinema. The comparison of film to music, especially classical
music, is also profound. Am hoping to gather thoughts on these topics, and
respond more at length. (Hint to everybody: Ockeghem is one of the greatest of all
composers. Now that his nearly complete works are available on CD's, the world
is a more beautiful place.)
Tag Gallagher's recent post on paying close, full attention to all visual
aspects of cinema also seems dead on target. It echoes the closing section of his
Ford book, which has fascinating ideas on the same topic.
Mike Grost
1045
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 1:27pm
Subject: Re: The Kapo Dolly Shot
> It's at heart a Bazinian theory, because it
> substitutes judgements about the relationship between cinema and
> reality, cinema and the world, for esthetics - not naively, as in
> judgements about painting that come down to "That sure looks like an
> x." That's a given in film - good or bad use of film is
> about "justice," and that is about the right or wrong use of dolly
> shots, among other things.
>
> Dan, Is that anything like what you mean when you talk about film in
> moral terms?
I try not to use the M word too much lately, but it's hard to talk about
personal aversion without giving people the idea that you disapprove.
Whatever we call it, I'm more sensitive to formal expressions of it,
just because I tend to think of form as the director's real
communication. I'm certainly not quick to jump on politics I disagree
with, sexual or racial codes that have changed, etc.
I felt pretty comfortable with Jake's post on the subject in #980, where
he located problems in what a film shows and how it shows it.
Haven't seen SCHINDLER'S LIST, but here's an example that has stayed
with me all my life. In MEAN STREETS, Keitel and DeNiro are having one
of their quarrels when Amy Robinson has an epileptic fit. Keitel,
forced to choose between his convulsing girlfriend and DeNiro, who has
just walked out angry, chooses the latter, and leaves Robinson jerking
around on the floor. I have no problems with showing this behavior in a
character, and I don't see a need for Scorsese to condemn it explicitly.
But I was really struck at how the editing of the film seemed to
forget Robinson just as easily as Keitel did: we cut to the scene
outside where Keitel catches up with DeNiro, and it plays out as if
nothing bad were happening to Robinson. Next time we see the Robinson
character, she's fine, and no reference is made.
This is a 20-year-old memory and could be faulty, but I remember
thinking that Scorsese, or some random projectionist with a scissors,
had expressed more than he wanted to.
In general, I tend to rely pretty heavily on how and where I sense that
the filmmaker is giving pleasure to the audience. It's extremely
common, I think, for a filmmaker to set up a confusing communication by
giving the audience pleasure from something that is held at arm's length
on some other level. - Dan
1046
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 1:30pm
Subject: Brecht
> Some posts ago, someone questioned my saying Mizoguchi resembles Brecht,
> the objection being that Mizo gets us emotionally involved whereas
> Brecht alienates us. But this is an Anglo-American corruption of what
> Brecht wanted, which was to increase emotional involvement.
Could you elaborate on what Brecht really wanted? What I said was,
"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." But I'm no expert
on the subject. - Dan
1047
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 1:47pm
Subject: Re: Brecht
Dan Sallitt wrote:
>>Some posts ago, someone questioned my saying Mizoguchi resembles Brecht,
>>the objection being that Mizo gets us emotionally involved whereas
>>Brecht alienates us. But this is an Anglo-American corruption of what
>>Brecht wanted, which was to increase emotional involvement.
>>
>>
>
>Could you elaborate on what Brecht really wanted? What I said was,
>"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." But I'm no expert
>on the subject. - Dan
>
>
I am not an expert on Brecht. I never saw a spectacle produced and
directed by Brecht personally, nor have I had the good fortune to
discuss these questions with anyone who has. My sense is that
"Brechtian" became an adjective in the 1970s that was routinely used (by
academics, naturally) in ways that went diammetrically counter to Brecht
himself.
What I believe Brecht meant is, I think, summed up in my post, right
after the words you quote above: that "alienation" or "distance" is not
supposed to make us less emotionally involved, but more emotionally
involved. The analogy to music is my own, but I hope Fred Camper will
endorse it.
My point is that I am using Brecht within the problems posed on this
group between "form" and "content" and to what degree we should be
consciously aware of framing, cutting, camera movements, etc.
In response to your invitation to elaborate, may I quote a long footnote
from my book about John Ford, dealing with Jean-Marie Straub's assertion
(to the fury of Richard Roud, who loathed Ford and adored Straub) that
Ford is more Brechtian than Brecht? This was written in reaction to the
"diammetrically-counter" academics.
Here we go:
When Straub made this remark to the author in 1975 (after seeing
Pilgrimage and Donovan's Reef) he was referring not so much to Ford's
acting style—in that sense no films are truly Brechtian—as to Ford's
manner of stripping naked social ideologies that are elsewhere
unacknowledged. To Joseph McBride, Straub said Ford is the most
Brechtian offilmmakers, "because he shows things that make people
think...by [making] the audience collaborate on the film" (McBride and
Wilmington, John Ford, p. 108). McBride analyzes Fort Apache in this
light, pointing out how Captain York donning Colonel Thursday's hat at
the end is a Brechtian device [like the cardinal donning the pope's
robes in Brecht's Galileo], and that we see clearly that an insane
system needs the dedication of noble men to perpetuate itself.) Less
simply, one might call Ford Brechtian because every element in his
cinema is engaged diaIectically with every other element (whether one
speaks of elements of—or between—style, content, myth, ideology, or
whatever), with the result that Ford's films are self-reflexive and
transparent in their workings.
This notion—essentially the thesis of this book—flies violently in
the face of a recent critical tendency to regard the “classical” cinema
of Hollywood as a monolithic system that sought to mask its "codes"
(e.g., its montage) in order to create an apparently unmediated
representation of the real world; it sought to entertain passively and
left unacknowledged its own governing ideology. (Cf., Stagecoach: my
argument with Browne ("Spectator-in-the-Text"); also Burch, Distant
Observer; Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye [New York: Oxford,
1983]; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres [New York: Random House, 1981]).
“Modernist” (i.e., some post-1960) cinema, on the other hand, subverts
our absorption in emotion, story, or character, and exposes its "codes"
(e. g., by showing the camera, discordant editing, having an actor speak
directly to us), in order to force us to relate intellectually rather
than through emotional identification.
In these circles, Straub is admired as epitomizing 'modernist'
cinema, while Ford is often derided (although not by most of the
above-named critics) as a sentimental reactionary. Thus Straub's
comparison of Brecht and Ford caused considerable head-shaking. It is,
of course, generally agreed that many films cater exclusively to an
audience's desire for passive spectacle (e.g.. Star Wars, some of
Hitchcock); and all research shows that audiences generally watch movies
in order not to think. Nonetheless, the fallacies of "modernist"
critics are multitudinous (even including their arrogation of the label
"modern"). Firstly, their premise of a monolithic classical system is a
pure fantasy that reveals little sensibility for the complexity of
pre-1960 cinema and almost no acquaintance with the actual films
themselves. Secondly, they naively assume that audiences can be forced
to think, whereas "modernist" techniques soon lose their initial shock
and audiences happily re-immerse themselves into the fictional worlds of
even the most determinedly antipathetic movies. Thirdly, because their
basis is exclusively materialist, they, like Grierson and Aristarco
before them, distrust emotions and aestheticism and would destroy the
art of cinema in favor of a cinema of political propaganda.
An examination of Brecht’s 1930 table, in which he gave cursory
comparison between the (bad) "dramatic" and the (good, Brechtian) "epic"
theaters, will, in the light of Straub and this book, show Ford very
much on the "epic" side—the "modernist":
Dramatic Theater Epic Theater
plot narrative
implicates spectator into drama makes spectator an
observer
wears down his capacity for action arouses his capacity
for action
provides him with sensations forces him to make
decisions
provides experience provides a
picture of the world
involves the spectator confronts the
spectator
suggestion argument
feelings are preserved feelings are
propelled into perceptions
man is assumed known man is the object
of inquiry
man unalterable man alterable
and altering
suspense about the outcome suspense about the
progress
each scene exists for another each scene for itself
linear development in curves
evolutionary determinism evolutionary leaps
the world, as it is the world, as
it becomes
what man ought to do what man is
forced to do
man as a fixed point man as a process
his instincts his
motivations
thought determines being social being
determines thought
(Brecht did not intend, obviously, that epic theater be absolutely one
way and not at all the other way; it is a question more of tendency.)
>
>
1048
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 1:57pm
Subject: brecht chart -- 2nd try
The chart got distorted so here's a second try.
It's a series of oppositions. I have marked the EPIC qualities with *.
DRAMATIC THEATER * EPIC THEATER
plot * narrative
implicates spectator into drama
*makes spectator an observer
wears down his capacity for action
* arouses his capacity for action
provides him with sensations
*forces him to make decisions
provides experience
* provides a picture of the world
involves the spectator *confronts the spectator
suggestion *argument
feelings are preserved
*feelings are propelled into perceptions
man is assumed known *man is the object of inquiry
man unalterable * man alterable and altering
suspense about the outcome
* suspense about the progress
each scene exists for another
* each scene for itself
linear development * in curves
evolutionary determinism *evolutionary leaps
the world, as it is * the world, as it becomes
what man ought to do
*what man is forced to do
man as a fixed point * man as a process
his instincts * his motivations
thought determines being
*social being determines thought
(Brecht did not intend, obviously, that epic theater be absolutely one
way and not at all the other way; it is a question more of tendency.)
1049
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 2:19pm
Subject: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
> Experiencing art is not like being etherized for an operation. It's
> above all a physical and emotional awareness. If you're not
intelligent,
> you're not aware.
By analogy: when we interact with another person, what we're affected
by and respond to includes body language, intonation, clothing, etc,
whether or not we make conscious mental notes of these things or can
recall them afterwards.
So maybe there are (at least) two types of noticing: we can notice an
actor's gestures, or we can notice that a character seems edgy and
confused, without realising or even thinking to ask what creates this
effect.
I agree that we have everything to gain as viewers and critics by
striving to be explicitly aware of as much as possible.
JTW
1050
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 3:37pm
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
Jaime:
> And the fact that it's a light comedy
> might lead one to overlook the intricate layering of De Palma's
> themes, starting with the act of looking, being looked at, the male
> ego and the exploitation/objectification of women, plus "home
> movies," home life, family unit, integrity of, and that's just for
> starters. This is very exciting stuff.
I haven't seen HOME MOVIES yet but I think it's generally regarded as
an important film among DP fans - the film where he lays bare the
biographical grounding for all the obsessions in movies. Your
description of it seems to confirm this.
You know, it was great of Pauline Kael to acknowledge De Palma's
talent, but her constant thrust of "He's like Hitchcock, but better"
served to pigeonhole and sort of ruin him among many circles of film
enthusiasts. It's ironic that the early films from when he got this
reputation are the ones that most clearly can destroy it: the late
60s and 70s films by De Palma are major evidence that De Palma is one
of our most politically concerned filmmakers and that he's worlds
away from Hitchcock. (DP detractors can use this cue to snicker, "He
sure is.") Jaime, you've seen HI MOM, right? The easiest way to
crack the notion of De Palma as a 'talented copycat' is to bring up
the Be Black Baby sequence, which is brilliant and corrosive, and
which plainly can't be dismissed as "copying" another of De Palma's
allegedly straightforward influences.
The filmmaker I think of most with respect to De Palma is (early)
Godard - I think they approach material in very similar ways: they
have similar spins on how to do genre narratives (which they love and
yet which they are unable to truly ever replicate), they incorporate
openly political (but sometimes ambiguous) commentary, they push more
into the viewer's mind through use of overloaded pictures and
soundtracks (Godard's montages with primary-color words are cousin to
DP's split frames that can often analyze the same moment from
different perspectives). De Palma is stealthier (not meant as a
value judgment) and has a more symbiotic relationship with
commercialism, perhaps because he's American and the system
necessitated it.
--Zach
1051
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 3:51pm
Subject: Hawks, etc.
> I am curious what Dan and other Hawks people here think of my take on
> Hawks -- which indirectly addresses the problems of Red River.
>
> Vidor, Hawks, Ford ("American Tryptych"): http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html
It's a very good article, with a lot of insights. I'm especially
interested in your idea (via Zanuck) that Ford's shots somehow suggest a
comprehensive picture of the world, and that the collision between these
shots can be jolting. Partly this is a result of Ford liking to work
with archetypes, but there is of course more to it - it will be
interesting to think about when I resee the films. One of my favorite
moments in all of cinema is the sequence in FORT APACHE where Wayne says
goodbye to the doomed troops before the climax - there's something
amazing about the way each of those shots interacts with the next, as if
we were being ripped again and again into a different instance of the
universe.
I'm also impressed with your short paragraph that shows the
complications in Chaplin's self-presentation.
I do wonder whether you overstate the case in making Ford sound like a
critic of society. The ending of FORT APACHE is very striking, for
instance, but I don't register it as a statement about nice people
becoming killers. There is absolutely a kick to Ford holding the full
shot as Wayne puts on Fonda's headdress: a conventional film would cut
to medium-close-up at this moment. The matter-of-factness of the full
shot is certainly disorienting and leaves us in an unresolved state.
But I don't think the long shot qualifies as a judgment on Wayne's
transformation, or on the cavalry's mission. The moment is still
suspended somewhere between expose and endorsement, I'd say. Which is
enough for me.
The Hawks section is quite good also. I have a way of looking at Hawks
which I've become accustomed to, and so I tend to filter everything
through it: namely, that Hawks sets up a familiar level of movie realism
keyed to conventions, and then plays the action out at a different,
faster and more detailed level of realism that releases some of the
energy stored in the dramatic conventions.
Therefore, instead of observing that Hawks doesn't add a lot to genre or
use it very interestingly, I'd say that he has a stylistic interest in
reproducing genre elements in a familiar form, as they are the backdrop
that makes his style work. Hawks without genre is hard to imagine, even
if he doesn't transform genre from the inside - he is constantly working
against genre expectations, making actors talk a little more casually
and move a little faster, making action unfurl without the abstraction
of dramatic buildup.
Similarly, instead of saying that there's "no world" in Hawks' films,
I'd say that there's a movie world, movie sets.
And, in addition to emphasizing the importance of gesture, I'd observe
that what's really striking in a Hawks film is the *scale* of the
gesture, and that this microcosmic scale is part of Hawks' attempt to
contrast the action with our expectation of what the action would
normally be.
Your point about the destabilizing effect of women on Hawks' men is of
course accurate, but I think the male and female forces in his world are
a bit more balanced than that account suggests. Bogart, Wayne, Grant
are disoriented by the women in the films, but Hawks also gets pleasure
from watching them maintain equilibrium, and in some cases assert dominance.
Hawks' comedies tend to put a comic, devastating, larger-than-life id
figure next to a representative of normality who registers the
outlandish nature of the comic character, expresses exasperation as the
comic figure leads the film away from sanity, devotes energy to
reestablishing sanity in the face of this challenge. (In other words, a
character from a more abstract movie is confronted with a character from
a less abstract one.) This dynamic accounts for at least part of the
disorienting nature of the woman in the Hawks universe. Note, for
instance, that the male has the disorienting role in HIS GIRL FRIDAY,
and the female has the stabilizing role - and things play out much the
same as they do in other Hawks comedies.
- Dan
1052
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 4:11pm
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
Tristan:
> How is it possible for someone to make so many masterpieces
> and so many Turkeys? The De Palma's I like that I've seen are
> Carrie, Sisters, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, and Femme Fatale.
Have you seen THE FURY, which is in the same vein as CARRIE? Or
CARLITO'S WAY (my favorite De Palma film)? Which films of his are
turkeys to you - hopefully not MISSION TO MARS!
--Zach
1053
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 4:14pm
Subject: Re: Re: Morality etc.: replies to Peter, JTW, Mike, & Tag
ptonguette@a... wrote:
>Here's a question. How many of you find it useful to sometimes "turn off"
>the part of your brain which is following the story,
>
Responding to Peter:
In most of my early post-discover-of-avant-garde-film viewing
experiences, I paid only marginal attention to the plot. Nor was I being
analytical exactly, trying to notice exactly how long each take was,
though I certainly was looking at composition, editing, and camera
movement. I was going for the essential feel of the images, or something
like that, a kind of time-and-space image-and-rhythm abstraction created
by the style. This included ignoring many of the subtitles in foreign
films. This is how I learned to see narrative films. As I started to
write about them, I started to notice the story more than I had been,
and connecting it to that other stuff. And I wonder, because I know I've
certainly read this more than once, how many of the young French
cinephiles who created auteurism knew enough English to understand the
sound tracks of the unsubtitled prints of Hollywood films the
Cinematheque Francaise showed. I certainly remember reading a bittter
critique of their tastes that was on the level of, "If they understood
the dialogue they would have realized how idiotic these films were," but
of course this could be taken the other way.
Bill, or anyone else, comments?
To JTW: We don't have to look at Hollywood films the way the director
tells us to. If I didn't know anything about him, I'd think a director
who spoke of trying to make "two or three good scenes" and then "not
annoy the audience for the rest of the picture" (inexact quotes" as
someone whose work would be so bland as to not interest me at all, and I
might have missed discovering Hawks.
To Mike Grost: Anyone who agrees with me that Ockeghem is one of the
greatest composers (my fanciful list of ten, culled rather arbitrarily
from my 30 in my bio: Perotin, John Browne, Dufay, Ockeghem, Obrecht,
Lasso, Bach, Beethoven, Ives, Webern -- but it is rather arbitrary --
could also be reduced, if I had to, to two, Bach and Ockeghem) can do
little wrong in my book. So if you want to post that Brakhage is a
cinematic dufus, go ahead, I'll let it slide.
To Tag: Of course I agree about music. I'm a very poor reader of musical
notation, but I've sometimes followed Bach with the score, and while
that changes my awareness of the music as I'm hearing it doing so
certainly doesn't decrease the emotional effect of the music.
- Fred
1054
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 4:15pm
Subject: Re: Brecht
I'm no Brecht expert either, and like Tag I've never seen a play
directed by him or his successors. I have seen a number of American
productions, decades ago, and they almost all had things that you
wouldn't find in a Ford film, such as actors holding up written signs
commenting on the action, things that suggested a stronger and more
obvious break with passive involvement with the narrative than Ford's
devices. Now, let me hasten to add, one could make a pretty good case
that Ford is more profoundly Brechtian than these devices were, for
causing a more complex form of awareness at least among viewers more
susceptible to it. But the way "Brechian" has been used in the US in
recent decades, perhaps in grotesque oversimplification, is a kind of
very conscious pushing away of the audience.
There was even a period when almost every British avant-garde filmmaker
would introduce his film by saying that his goal was to deny the
audience an escapist involvement with the fictive world on the screen.
That's what Peter Wollen said was the goal of his long-take style, and
that's how Anthony McCall described his abstract installation film "Line
Describing a Cone." However elegant McCall's film may have been, one of
the first things I did in the movies as a very young child was watch the
projector beam's changing patterns of color, much more visible then in
the days when smoking was allowed in theaters, and which often seemed
much more fascinating to me than the action on the screen, so I hardly
needed McCall's "lesson."
[As I said in a 1987 article in Millennium Film Journal called "The End
of Avant-Garde Film," the problem with Wollen's self justification was
that Brecht created these wonderfully human and deeply compelling
characters which he *then* proceeded to alienate us from -- Where is
Mother Courage when we need her?]
Anyway, this is along way of saying that while I'd certainly not
disagree with an argument about Ford being Brechtian, the way the word
was typically used was to denote much more conscious alienating devices.
How true that usage was to Brecht, I don't know. I do know that when I
submitted my long article on Sirk to Screen for their 1971 Sirk issue
(eventually broken into three parts, the first two of which appeared
there), I got a letter back saying that it sounded like I was describing
"Brechtian" things in Sirk and asking if I could make that reference
explicit by using the word "Brechtian." Having already seen (and loved)
some Brecht plays, and having read quite a few more, I said no, and that
was the end of that, for me but not for screen.
I recently saw an avant-garde film that I thought really *was*
Brechtian, in a great sense of the word's common usage, and that really
does make "man the object of inquiry," "provide a picture of the world,"
"confront the spectator," and proceed in "curves" rather than linearly.
It's I think starting to get some attention, but my tiny capsule at
http://65.201.198.5/movies/capsules/23672_INJURY_TO_ONE is doubtless one
of the first. The title is "An Injury to One," and the director, Travis
Wilkerson. And it has NO narrative with actors playing roles in the
usual sense. A lot of it is stills and printed titles. I hope people
here can see it. I mean, it's actually starting to bother me that we
only seem to be talking about dramatic-narrative films. There are great
things that have been and can be done with that mode, but there are also
pretty great reasons for rejecting it. The writings and filmmaking of
Brakhage and Kubelka and Vertov provide some pretty good examples, and
I'm actually not the world's biggest Vertov fan.
- Fred
1055
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 5:01pm
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
> Jaime:
> > And the fact that it's a light comedy
> > might lead one to overlook the intricate layering of De Palma's
> > themes, starting with the act of looking, being looked at, the
male
> > ego and the exploitation/objectification of women, plus "home
> > movies," home life, family unit, integrity of, and that's just
for
> > starters. This is very exciting stuff.
I'm a De Palma fan, on the whole. I think that he's probably a more
uneven director within individual films than between them – nearly
all his work seems to be made according to the same basic recipe,
which has positive and negative aspects.
Home Movies is one of the few I haven't seen, but it sounds like it
would compare interestingly with Greetings, which I just caught up
with recently. That's probably the De Palma film I've liked least –
it looks and feels like a student project, as though it were made
before he really developed his stylistic concepts (even Hi Mom!,
which came right after, is much more sophisticated). Still, it has a
couple of fantastic scenes – I'm thinking of the static long
take `directed' by de Niro from offscreen, and then the finale in
Vietnam. These seem like templates for just about all De Palma's
later work, specifically the way he builds everything on point-of-
view and the notion of voyeurism – his definition of cinema might
be `watching from a distance.' But now I have to go back and see
Casualties of War again, because the reference to TV coverage of the
Vietnam War gives this notion a political basis from the outset, and
I'm guessing that what happens to the Vietnamese woman in the later
film is a replay of this same `primal scene' in tragic rather than
flippant terms.
It's obvious that De Palma was influenced by Godard when starting
out, but I think the contemporary he's closest to is Spielberg –
Gregory Solman pointed out the De Palma influence on Minority Report,
but the connection is visible long before that. Both of them are sons
of Hitchcock in that they push `identification' to an extreme, and
both set the pace for `80s Hollywood by making these machine-tooled
films that relied on the viewer instantly perceiving very definite
meanings from very clean, simplified, hyperreal images. The
difference is that Spielberg genuinely believes in clarity as the
basis for art, while De Palma exaggerates and undercuts it to the
point where most of his films seem like satires of what David
Bordwell calls the `excessive obviousness' of Hollywood cinema.
(Bring the two together, and you might get Robert Zemeckis – not
claiming that Zemeckis is particularly interesting.)
I agree it's inadequate to say that De Palma `imitates' Hitchcock.
Rather it's as if, for De Palma, Hitchcock (or rather, an
ideal `Hitchcock' defined almost entirely by Vertigo, Rear Window and
Psycho) sums up everything worth knowing about the cinema, so you
might as well acknowledge this before trying to move on from there.
JTW
1056
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 5:14pm
Subject: Brecht, subtitles
Fred, that's a funny story about Screen. You seem to have had a lot
of interesting experiences with those folks.
To answer your question, some of the French critics probably
understood English, but a) I'm fluent in French and still have
trouble following the dialogue in French films without subtitles, and
b) they didn't speak Danish, Russian etc., and they saw lots of films
from all over without subtitles at the Cinematheque. If Langois had a
print, he showed it, with or without.
Like everyone I was incensed when Bosley Crowther advocated dubbing
all foreign films in the early 60s, but one of the the things I like
about DVDs is that you can choose between dubbing, subtitles and no
help at all. (It has opened a new world for my ex-wife, who can now
see American films dubbed in French - many Hollywood DVDs have French
tracks as an option.)
As Dan knows, I recently got over an aversion to Bergman, who is
unquestionably now one of my favorite filmmakers, when I accidentally
rented Scenes from the Life of Marionettes dubbed, and realized that
all my problems with him had to do with my aversion for the sound of
Swedish. That started a mad quest for dubbed tapes and discovering
that Cinefile, of all people (a local very cutting-edge videotheque),
had my Great White Whale, Winter Light in English. I then proceeded
to watch it three times in a row without budging from the couch, and
of course noticed what we all know, that if you want to SEE a
dialogue-heavy film like that, you can't be reading subtitles.
As for amputating part of a film, not knowing what's going on etc.,
those are always useful experiements, and I've done all of them.
Here's my version of the projector beam story: I loved The Power
(based on one of my favorite scifi books) and went back to see it a
second time, forcing myself to "watch" with my eyes closed all the
way through, so I could hear the audience's reaction. What I do
strongly recommend trying, if you're at all into two-way attention
exercises, is to watch a film while feeling your body's responses to
it.
The whole question of identification and consciousness in film-
viewing is overwhelming, but I do have a story that may contribute to
the Brecht discussion: When Welles was touring with his ill-fated
stage production of Around the World in Eighty Days - the one that
never made it to Broadway - he was playing Peoria or someplace on a
day when he was slated for a matinee and an evening show. The matinee
was old ladies in cherry hats, and not many of them. He and Dick
Wilson, who told me the story, were in Welles' dressing room trying
to decide a) whether Welles should take off his Passepartout makeup
to go out and eat or have a steak sent in and b) how they were going
to skip town without paying their hotel bill, because they were
broke. A knock on the door. Dick opened it. It was a little German
guy, very excited, who asked to speak to Welles. "Mr. Welles, that is
the most exciting theatre production I've ever see. We have to work
together. I want you to direct my play, Galileo." It was Brecht, and
after shaking hands all around he left.
Dick told Myron Meisel and me that story in the middle of a very
depressing strategy meeting - one of the many times Paramount had
made it clear they absolutely weren't going to let us finish It's All
True - and it bucked us up to think that a theatre production by the
guy whose film we were trying to save, in a nothing matinee in a one-
horse town with a bunch of old ladies for an audience, was the most
exciting theatre production Bertolt Brecht ever saw. I tell it now
because although I've never seen it, by all accounts that play, and
the others, were very much like the Welles' films and had the same
electrifying effect on audiences. (I have seen two Welles stage
revivals which purported to follow his staging closely: The Cradle
Will Rock and Moby Dick Rehearsed.)
Another example in film that I consider informed by Brecht's theories
is The Night of the Hunter - Simon Callow, in his BFI booklet on the
film, makes several good points about that. (He also compares
Mitchum's Preacher to Moliere's Tartuffe: a character who
is "naturally Brechtian" because he is acting for other characters
who are his helpless dupes.) Laughton, of course, had actually done a
production of Galileo with Brecht, although in that case it was
Brecht's turn to get out of town one step ahead of the sheriff
(HUAC), and he never made it to opening night. Callow says that the
Brecht experience was decisive for Laughton, whose subsequent theatre
productions (which sound a bit like Welles') were all marked by it.
He disliked the word "psychology" for talking about a character,
prefering the word "dramaturgy."
1057
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 5:40pm
Subject: Re: Brecht
Fred Camper wrote:
>I'm no Brecht expert either, and like Tag I've never seen a play
>directed by him or his successors. I have seen a number of American
>productions, decades ago, and they almost all had things that you
>wouldn't find in a Ford film, such as actors holding up written signs
>commenting on the action,
>
But there are equivalents. For example, the flags and uniforms and
formalities work exactly the same way (if one concedes their operative
presence). A shame you missed all of this in When Willie Comes Marching
Home.
I'm not claiming that Ford grabs you by the next the way we are led to
believe that Brecht does, and that he pushes a sign in your face. But I
do claim that when you experience Ford the way Straub and I do, the
effect is more similar than different. Dan, for one, isn't quite ready
to concede this, even in Fort Apache, but...
>things that suggested a stronger and more
>obvious break with passive involvement with the narrative than Ford's
>devices.
>
I would argue that Brecht makes concessions to that passivity by
screaming at the audience, whereas Ford does in such a way that a
passive audience will not be disturbed during the movie (except to
scream silently that Ford is a racist, militarist, etc., etc.). But
audiences have to learn to stop behaving like carrotts and just sitting
there and BEING entertained.
>Now, let me hasten to add, one could make a pretty good case
>that Ford is more profoundly Brechtian than these devices were, for
>causing a more complex form of awareness at least among viewers more
>susceptible to it. But the way "Brechian" has been used in the US in
>recent decades, perhaps in grotesque oversimplification, is a kind of
>very conscious pushing away of the audience.
>
Yo. *
(* I'm quoting from Rio Grande.)
>
>
1058
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:02pm
Subject: Re: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
> jaketwilson wrote:
>
> By analogy: when we interact with another person, what we're affected
> by and respond to includes body language, intonation, clothing, etc,
> whether or not we make conscious mental notes of these things or can
> recall them afterwards.
But more often than not, we do NOT notice these clues and body langauge,
or else we do so hurriedly and get into big trouble.
>
>
> So maybe there are (at least) two types of noticing: we can notice an
> actor's gestures, or we can notice that a character seems edgy and
> confused, without realising or even thinking to ask what creates this
> effect.
Now, were we discussing an oil painting, I think you would agree that,
over time, we shall notice many gestures and emotions in the characters
(and elsewhere, of course) AND we shall eventually realise and think
about what creates these effects.
Yes?
1059
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:17pm
Subject: Home Movies, Brecht
Boy, my post is full of errors. Don't post late at night, folks, it
just doesn't pay. Zach, HOME MOVIES is out on DVD now, a cheapie
release but it's pretty satisfactory. I think, with all the
constellations in De Palma's filmography, HOME MOVIES acts as kind of
a hub, around which everything else spins - for the reasons I talked
about, not because it's his best, or most interesting, or even his
most characteristic film. Just that it seems to contain keys to
understanding most of his other movies, sometimes in surprising ways -
not a lot of other directors have a "text" that works like that.
If someone isn't a fan of De Palma, I don't know if I would recommend
HOME MOVIES as a way to give him another look. But certainly, to me,
it announces that he's a great deal more complex than the "he's just
copying Hitchcock" commentators give him credit for being. (I never
said that myself, but I've also never quite been a convert, although
I like many of his films. Looking forward to re-seeing CARLITO'S WAY
at the Lincoln Center later this month.)
Interesting that when people talk of "Brechtian," they are referring
almost exclusively to his theater work. I have little experience
with Brecht aside from being well aware of his titanic status in
Western culture, but I have read a collection of his short stories
and they were for the most part completely delightful and very well-
written. Also they don't have the devices we refer to when we
say "Brechtian," unless I am missing some subtleties.
Jaime
1060
From: Tristan
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:20pm
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
Well, I guess I haven't seen that many. I haven't seen the ones you
mention. I don't think I have seen any of his "turkeys", because I'm
trying to see the ones that people like. From talking to people, most
hate Bonfire of the Vanities, Mission to Mars, Snake Eyes, and a
bunch of others. The reason I say he is uneven is because I have
never heard of a filmmaker that has caused so many people to love
some of his movies with such a passion while hating others with an
extreme passion. I find it fascinating. I will try and see Fury and
Carlito's Way. Any other recommendations from anyone?
1061
From: Tristan
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:24pm
Subject: Re: Royal Tenenbaums
A few more references mentioned in the commentary:
*The opening title card was inspired by The Red Shoes.
*The opening sequence was influenced by The Magnificent Ambersons.
*The idea of only showing Chas's wife through a picture is an idea
from Paris, Texas.
Anyway, Royal Tenenbaums was my favorite movie of 2002. I would like
to discuss it more if anyone else could think of a topic regarding it.
1062
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 6:30pm
Subject: Re: Hawks, etc.
Dan Sallitt wrote
> <http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html>
>
> One of my favorite
> moments in all of cinema is the sequence in FORT APACHE where Wayne says
> goodbye to the doomed troops before the climax - there's something
> amazing about the way each of those shots interacts with the next, as if
> we were being ripped again and again into a different instance of the
> universe.
Precisely. I urge you to watch early 30s Ford with this in mind,
particularly when close shots of people are being exchanged. e.g., AIR
MAIL (a really supergreat movie that passes most people by ompletely).
>
>
>
>
> The Hawks section is quite good also. I have a way of looking at Hawks
> which I've become accustomed to, and so I tend to filter everything
> through it: namely, that Hawks sets up a familiar level of movie realism
> keyed to conventions, and then plays the action out at a different,
> faster and more detailed level of realism that releases some of the
> energy stored in the dramatic conventions.
My problem with what you write is that I wish you would not use words
like realism and genre.
I do not think they have meaning.
"Genre" simply does not exist -- other than as an academic conspiracy.
It's an artistic form of racism... Croce damned "genre" as a
"pseudo-concept" (along with a bevy of other cherished academicisms,
like "myth"). You'd be fascinated by this, I think. Try Gian N.G.
Orisni, "Benedetto Croce" (Southern Illinois Press).
>
> Hawks without genre is hard to imagine,
Not for me!
What I cannot imagine is "genre." "Hawks" is infinitely easier! I
suspect what people mean is that they imagine genre without Hawks.
> even
> if he doesn't transform genre from the inside - he is constantly working
> against genre expectations, making actors talk a little more casually
> and move a little faster, making action unfurl without the abstraction
> of dramatic buildup.
Do you really believe that someone writing a story or directing a scene
or playing a part is studiously contemplating what everyone else has
done and deliberately striving to do it differently? Isn't this a
shoddy kind of "originality," "being yourself" or "being unqiue" --
when actually one is simply conforming to conventional models?
The problem is that this sort of thinking assumes that poetry is a sign,
whereas (says Croce) a sign stands for something other than itself,
poetry stands only for itself. It's the uniqueness of the poetic that
attracts us in art; not its location within a nexus of superficial
similarities with "conventions" (also a pseudo-concept, for Croce).
>
>
> Similarly, instead of saying that there's "no world" in Hawks' films,
> I'd say that there's a movie world, movie sets.
That's probably what I meant when I said a stage backdrop. But
"realism" is more your bottleneck than mine.
>
>
> And, in addition to emphasizing the importance of gesture, I'd observe
> that what's really striking in a Hawks film is the *scale* of the
> gesture,
Yes!
> and that this microcosmic scale is part of Hawks' attempt to
> contrast the action with our expectation of what the action would
> normally be.
No!
Can you imagine, in real life, having a conversation with a beautiful
woman who constantly consciously strove to contrast her actions with our
expectations of what she was going to do? How long before the game gets
stale?
>
>
> Your point about the destabilizing effect of women on Hawks' men is of
> course accurate, but I think the male and female forces in his world are
> a bit more balanced than that account suggests. Bogart, Wayne, Grant
> are disoriented by the women in the films, but Hawks also gets pleasure
> from watching them maintain equilibrium, and in some cases assert
> dominance.
When? I mean: okay, maybe they "assert," but do they ever do dominance?
Am I wrong, or don't they all fall down rather frequently?
>
>
> Hawks' comedies tend to put a comic, devastating, larger-than-life id
> figure next to a representative of normality
Who? for example? Usually such reps are also outrageous, no?
> who registers the
> outlandish nature of the comic character, expresses exasperation as the
> comic figure leads the film away from sanity, devotes energy to
> reestablishing sanity in the face of this challenge.
Is sanity truly a goal or even a desideratum in Bringing Up Baby, The
Big Sky, Red River ... ?
> (In other words, a
> character from a more abstract movie is confronted with a character from
> a less abstract one.) This dynamic accounts for at least part of the
> disorienting nature of the woman in the Hawks universe. Note, for
> instance, that the male has the disorienting role in HIS GIRL FRIDAY,
> and the female has the stabilizing role - and things play out much the
> same as they do in other Hawks comedies.
I've always felt that Hawks was a bit gay. In His Girl Friday isn't the
girl perpetually destablizing the boy?
>
>
> - Dan
>
>
>
>
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1063
From:
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 2:58pm
Subject: Keith Gordon
In a message dated 8/9/03 9:01:50 AM, sallitt@p... writes:
>> Incidentally, does anyone have any strong feelings for Keith Gordon's
>> own films?
>
>I think someone here is a fan: Peter, perhaps? I had a negative
>reaction to THE CHOCOLATE WAR, I must admit.
I'm a big fan, I must say. I'm actually in the middle of conducting a career
interview with him (we covered everything from his acting jobs up to "Waking
the Dead" last December; once I'm able to screen "The Singing Detective,"
we'll talk about that one.)
I think Gordon has gotten better with each film. "Waking the Dead" felt to
me like a masterpiece, or a few steps short of one. It actually reminded me a
tiny bit of "Blow Out" and that film's dovetailing of politics and tragic
romance, though I don't want to overstate this: Gordon is very much his own guy,
visually, thematically, and otherwise. He was also a leader in "The New
Sincerity" long before the days of Wes Anderson. Even his two darkest, least
"redemptive" films - "The Chocolate War" and "Mother Night" - allow room for the
sublime and very often the sublime takes the form of a female character who
functions as a way out and/or reason to live for the male protagonist.
About "Home Movies": to echo what some others have written, I think it's a
key De Palma and maybe my favorite of his before "Blow Out."
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1064
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 7:24pm
Subject: Re: Hawks, etc.
> My problem with what you write is that I wish you would not use words
> like realism and genre.
>
> I do not think they have meaning.
>
> "Genre" simply does not exist -- other than as an academic conspiracy.
Interesting.
I'd certainly go as far as saying that realism is a relative concept:
that there's no such thing as an absolute standard of realism in any
representation. There's a well-known book called MIMESIS by Erich
Auerbach that goes through the history of literature and examines the
impact of successive concepts of realism. It constitutes a pretty good
demonstration of how realism only seems to have meaning relative to
existing standards. But it also shows that art does feel the impact of
these shifts in representational convention.
As for genre, I guess I need more info from you or Croce. Academics
didn't invent genre. People say, "Let's go to a Western." And then
they go and say, "That was a good Western," or "That was a strange
Western," of "I've never seen that in a Western before."
> Do you really believe that someone writing a story or directing a scene
> or playing a part is studiously contemplating what everyone else has
> done and deliberately striving to do it differently? Isn't this a
> shoddy kind of "originality," "being yourself" or "being unqiue" --
> when actually one is simply conforming to conventional models?
Well, yeah, people think about what went before. But I'm not really
interested in getting into Hawks' head - God knows what you'd find
there. Looking at the films, I see a collision between a background
that is a bunch of signs that say "genre," and a more playful, reflexive
set of actions in the foreground. I think this is what David Thomson
was referring to when he compared THE BIG SLEEP to a home movie, and
made a connection between Hawks and cinema verite.
Certainly there's nothing conformist about this. No one else does it,
except maybe for people influenced by Hawks (Tarantino, Dan O'Bannon).
> The problem is that this sort of thinking assumes that poetry is a sign,
> whereas (says Croce) a sign stands for something other than itself,
> poetry stands only for itself.
Poetry isn't just a representation of something else, of course. But it
uses signs, it's full of signs. Everything is. The idea of poetry is
to arrange them so you haven't just wound up representing when you're done.
> Can you imagine, in real life, having a conversation with a beautiful
> woman who constantly consciously strove to contrast her actions with our
> expectations of what she was going to do?
This happens to me all the time....
> How long before the game gets
> stale?
There's infinite variety in the ways one can play off of other things.
It certainly doesn't diminish one's individuality. Hawks is a quirky
guy, and he gets opportunities to indulge all his quirky pleasures when
making films.
> When? I mean: okay, maybe they "assert," but do they ever do dominance?
> Am I wrong, or don't they all fall down rather frequently?
Sure they fall. But Bogart takes complete charge of the action in TO
HAVE AND HAVE NOT; Grant never stops calling the shots with Jean Arthur
in ONLY ANGELS; etc. There are various male-female motifs in Hawks, and
they aren't all to the male's disadvantage.
>>Hawks' comedies tend to put a comic, devastating, larger-than-life id
>>figure next to a representative of normality
>
> Who? for example? Usually such reps are also outrageous, no?
Sometimes they have an aspect of the outrageous. David Huxley in BABY
starts out as an eccentric comic type, but he quickly develops into a
Hawks hero using exasperation and humor to keep himself level against
Susan's destabilizing effect. Henri Rochard in MALE WAR BRIDE is more
or less exclusively concerned with self-stabilization; Hildy in HIS GIRL
FRIDAY knows that Walter Burns is a force of nature and narrates the
conflict for us.
In TWENTIETH CENTURY, I'd say the reps are both outrageous. And so a
whole lot of weight is thrown on Roscoe Karns and Walter Connelly -
because they are trying to cling to sanity, they become more important
to the film.
> Is sanity truly a goal or even a desideratum in Bringing Up Baby, The
> Big Sky, Red River ... ?
I'm talking about a model for the comedies, so I'd like to throw RED
RIVER and THE BIG SKY out of court. In BABY, I'd say yes, absolutely -
what makes the film feel like Hawks is the way David Huxley reacts to
his plight.
> I've always felt that Hawks was a bit gay. In His Girl Friday isn't the
> girl perpetually destablizing the boy?
You mean Hildy destabilizing Walter? Not much, I'd say. What are you
thinking of? - Dan
1065
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 7:46pm
Subject: "genre" and other "words"
Tag, you've been mentioning how you think many of our commonly used
terms "have no meaning," starting with categories
like "experimental." While I can see where you're trying to take us -
after working in an academic environment like the NYU Cinema Studies
program, I'm well aware of the value of this kind of dialogue - I
don't agree that these terms are meaningless. It may be that the
terms are artificial, arbitrary, rooted in commerce, and that the
boundaries that get set up by commentators and viewers are a great
deal more dynamic than people would often like to think, if they
exist at all.
But that's not the same as saying they have no meaning, right?
In getting rid of these terms, we'll be eliminating a lot of
the "terms of discussion" that we have to analyze our most treasured
auteurs. I think these terms are useful.
1066
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 9:24pm
Subject: Re: "genre" and other "words"
I think getting rid of these terms would do us all a world of good.
Even academia might redeem itself!
Alchemy had its defendors in its day, and witch burning was considered
useful.
Jaime N. Christley wrote:
> Tag, you've been mentioning how you think many of our commonly used
> terms "have no meaning," starting with categories
> like "experimental." While I can see where you're trying to take us -
> after working in an academic environment like the NYU Cinema Studies
> program, I'm well aware of the value of this kind of dialogue - I
> don't agree that these terms are meaningless. It may be that the
> terms are artificial, arbitrary, rooted in commerce, and that the
> boundaries that get set up by commentators and viewers are a great
> deal more dynamic than people would often like to think, if they
> exist at all.
>
> But that's not the same as saying they have no meaning, right?
>
> In getting rid of these terms, we'll be eliminating a lot of
> the "terms of discussion" that we have to analyze our most treasured
> auteurs. I think these terms are useful.
>
1067
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 9:49pm
Subject: Re: "genre" and other "words"
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> Alchemy had its defendors in its day, and witch burning was
> considered useful.
Okay, let me see if I follow you.
Major premise: Presently, genre and other categorical terms are
considered by some to be useful in discussing film aesthetics,
auteurism, etc.
Minor premise: In the past, alchemy and witch burning, now seen to
be silly and destructive, were taken seriously and considered useful.
Conclusion: As we look back on genre and other categorical terms the
way we now look back on alchemy and witch burning, we will see that
they were (are) actually silly and destructive.
I'm not sure...something seems to be missing. Can anyone help?
Jaime
1068
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2003 11:57pm
Subject: NYC: The Fierce One
Anyone in NYC tomorrow (Sunday) at 7 pm is strongly encouraged by me to
see Kirghiz director Tolomush Okeev's excellent THE FIERCE ONE at
Anthology. It's always fascinating to see an obscure film from a
little-known part of the world and discover a master director. There's
no reason to believe this film will come around again. - Dan
1069
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 0:50am
Subject: Brest, Rudolph, Gordon
If Gigli get some sort of release here
(I'll not be surprised if it come
straight to video), I'll probably
seeing it. I usually like Brest's film
(with the exception of Scent of
Woman). Peter, Meet Joe Black is
pretty good, I really don't know why
it get such bad rep, the running time
isn't overlong at all and it has some
very good moments. Brrest's get the
final cut and after it flop, everyone
blame him as if the only reason people
didn't go to see it was the 3 hour
running time.
I'm never quite sure what to do with
Rudolph one of the most uneven
filmmakers I know, haven't seen either
Trixie or Investigating Sex (none of
which get any sort of release around
here), but Breakfast of Champions is
really very good (glad to know I'm not
the only one who like it), his best
since Trouble in Mind.
Peter, I didn't care to Waking the
Dead, but I like Gordon's three early
films a good deal, specially A
Midnight Clear, one of my favorite
american films from the 90's.
Filipe Furtado
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1070
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 1:36am
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
Jaime,
I've seen Home Movies (even wrote a
not specially well-written article on
it), like it a good deal. I think it's
very important work to understand De
Palma, his more autobiographical film,
and curiously the one were some of his
preoccupations are more verbalized
(which may be a flaw, but a very
useful one to clarify some points). As
with most De Palma's comedies, it's
not as funny as it seems intended to
be, which is probably one of the
reasons were it's not well known. Also
i think De Palma makes a great use of
the limitations that he have to work
with. The sequence where Gordon's sees
Nancy Allen for the first time is one
of my 4 or 5 favorite moments in a
dePalma film.
Tristan, I don't think De Palma is
uneven at all. I've seen everything
after Sisters (and a few of the
earlier works) and with the exception
of Wise Guys and The Wedding Party, I
think all has merits (but I'm not much
of a fan of either Carrie nor
Scarface). Mission to mars may not be
one of De Palma's best, but it's a far
more successful and interesting film
than almost anyone give it credit for
being. As for Snake Eyes, I think it's
one of his best, everybody get in the
usual copycat thing and compared it
negatively with Rashomon, but I think
it makes a far better use of the
format than the Kurosawa film (and
nobody bother to notice that the film
it resemble the most was Fuller's
House of Bamboo).
By the way, Wise Guys is great case to
discuss differences of form and theme,
George Gallo's script has many of the
usual DePalma's themes, but the film
feels complete impersonal as if he
have lost all his interest in it,
somewhere during the production (it
could've been direct by Arthur
Hiller). The thmes are written, but
not expressed.
Zach, I think the two filmmakers that
influenced DePalma the most are Godard
and Welles (Hitchcock is also a big
one, specially some notion about the
perfect image and the perfect woman
that he seems to have pick off out of
Vertigo, but not as much as these
other two). His use of architecture is
very in debt to Lang too. And of
course there's Dario Argento, but in
this case the relationship works both
ways. Last January Contracampo made a
DePalma special edition with articles
on every film from Get to Know Your
Rabbit on, and I wrote four (on
Obsession, Home Movies, The Bonfire of
Vanities and Femme Fatale), I friend
complained to me that I only bother to
mention Hitchcock once, and keep
mention Godard over and over again, a
decision I made consciously. The way
DePalma plays with the conventions he
is working and with his audience is
very similar to early Godard (Femme
Fatale can be seeing as a series of
annotations on film, to get one
example) and his taste of play with
audiences and make tricks with them
can be easily traced to Welles (and
like Welles he likes to make us
self-aware of it).
Filipe
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1071
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 2:12am
Subject: Re: Re: "genre" and other "words"
Sorry, you don't follow me. My fault.
I do not feel that certain terms are useful. I feel they do a great
deal of harm and are actually a way of avoiding thinking and discourse.
Why? Because they substitute conventional theory for your own
experience. They block thought.
I understand what is intended by a term like "genre" when it is used
informally. But when it is used in supposedly serious writing, the
result for me is almost always that the writing becomes
incomprehensible. Genre gets raised to the level of a theory; an
abstraction becomes a Platonic idea. Cavell, for example, is not
content to say that he wants to talk about films with themes of
"re-marriage." He maintains again and again that there is an actually
existing Platonic Idea, "Re-Marriage," that he has discovered it, and is
revealing it to us.
And most academics seem to me far worse. There are genre "laws." There
are conventions that are being "defied." Etc., etc., etc. This is all
utter blarney, IMHO.
I think the idea should be for academics (and for all of us) to
communicate our insights and thoughts with the maximum amount of
clarity, grace and beauty. Terms which essentially have no meaning
(like "genre") are not useful. That some people THINK they are useful
(outside of informal conversation, if there) suggests to me the degree
to which "theory" destroys and inhibits experience.
I've been waiting for someone to quote Fritz Lang on theory. Seems to
me he got it right.
Jaime N. Christley wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
>
> > Alchemy had its defendors in its day, and witch burning was
> > considered useful.
>
> Okay, let me see if I follow you.
>
> Major premise: Presently, genre and other categorical terms are
> considered by some to be useful in discussing film aesthetics,
> auteurism, etc.
>
> Minor premise: In the past, alchemy and witch burning, now seen to
> be silly and destructive, were taken seriously and considered useful.
>
> Conclusion: As we look back on genre and other categorical terms the
> way we now look back on alchemy and witch burning, we will see that
> they were (are) actually silly and destructive.
>
> I'm not sure...something seems to be missing. Can anyone help?
>
1072
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 2:15am
Subject: Re: Morality
There's so much interesting things to
answer, so many actually I have no
time to do it. So I'll try to make
some general remarks on the subject.
This a theme that interest me a lot,
because I've being trying to deal with
it for a long time and never come up
with any sort of answer. I never want
to see movies that only resemble my
own particular positions, so I never
have any problem with movies with
different takes than mine on
everything. On the other hand I can't
say that I was ever able to take some
moral (or political) positions
completely out of how I've seen films.
That because I was never able to take
films out of the world. There's a
great comment by Daney that I always
loved: "Cinephilia is not only a
private relationship with the cinema,
it is, before, a relationship with the
world through the cinema". I must add
that my biases are always
aesthetically based (and when I add
politics it's not through the always
ridiculous right/left dichotomy). I
didn't have any sort of perfect idea
of what a film should be or what it
should say, and I'm always open to
differents approaches by the filmmaker
and the limitations it may bring (for
example, I was reading Rosenbaum's
review of Bird today, and it keep
annoying me how he was writing about
the film Eastwood didn't want to make,
I'm almost as big Charlie Parker fan
as he is, but if the film Eastwood
start to make didn't pretend to deal
with the issue of how it was to be a
interracial couple in the 50's why use
it against it?). I will try to
elaborate an example: Both Brian
DePalma and Lars Von Trier enjoy
themselves in manipulating their
audiences, I'm a big DePalma fan, and
I pretty much hate every Von Trier
film that I've seen. I know part of I
love and hate about them have to do
with it. How? DePalma's may enjoy to
push the carpet out of his audience,
but he does that with a great respect
from the viewer. On the other hand,
Von Trier's sadistic relish in doing
the same always stuck me as if he has
deep contempt from his audience. More
than one friend already told me that
that's the key to understand his
films, but honestly I didn't have any
interest.
Filipe
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1073
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 2:24am
Subject: Varia
All, Tag presented an earlier version of his position on genre in an
article called "Shootout at the Genre Corral," published in The Film
Genre Reader, ironically. Highly recommended.
Felipe, What is the connection between Snake Eyes (which I like, too)
and House of Bamboo? 'Splain, please.
Dan, Since most of us don't stand a fart's chance in a whirlwind of
seeing The Fierce One, could you tell us more about it?
Just saw Basic on DVD - kind of de Palmaesque, in some ways. (I'm
waiting for creepy Brian to discover Connie Neilsen, a Hitchcock
heroine for our time in demonlover and also pretty good in the
McTiernan.) Good commentary track by McTiernan - these gadgets are
going to revolutionize film criticism.
In the meantime, I'm buying every marked-down VHS tape on the flooded
market. Most recent finds: Susumu Hani's First Love, Infernal
Version, which I didn't even think existed on tape, in a bin at
Odyssey Videos for $3.99, with no case - I'm still shaking! And Best
Seller (group tip) at Amoeba for $2.99. As technology advances I
follow along behind, scooping up the leftovers. (Facets release of
the Antonioni-Cocteau video, $4.99 at my local 20/20. Read it and
weep, comrades!)
Sample of the disconnect between the author in the film and outide it
(a distinction roundly endorsed by all of us): Red River! The
fistfight-reconciliation at the end is in part a Hawksian statement
against revenge, right? Well, Hawks had eyes for Joanne Dru when they
were making it, and John Ireland won her heart. (Stop me if you've
heard this one - I'm sure it's in Todd's book.) So Hawks visually
buried "Cherry Vallance," Ireland's character, who was supposed to be
a power-broker in the Wayne-Clift dispute, saying in dramatic closeup
when Clift leads the mutiny, "I like what the man says!" Hawks let
him keep the line but stuck him in the back row, where he is barely
visible in a wide shot when he says it.
Obviouly, Hawks liked vengeance plenty - maybe he just didn't like
climaxes!
1074
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 2:41am
Subject: Re: Hawks, etc.
Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > My problem with what you write is that I wish you would not use words
> > like realism and genre.
> >
> > I do not think they have meaning.
> >
> > "Genre" simply does not exist -- other than as an academic conspiracy.
>
> Interesting.
>
> I'd certainly go as far as saying that realism is a relative concept:
> that there's no such thing as an absolute standard of realism in any
> representation. There's a well-known book called MIMESIS by Erich
> Auerbach that goes through the history of literature and examines the
> impact of successive concepts of realism. It constitutes a pretty good
> demonstration of how realism only seems to have meaning relative to
> existing standards. But it also shows that art does feel the impact of
> these shifts in representational convention.
So can you give me a short concise definition of "realism" à la
Auerbach, one which I can repeat the people on the street which they'll
all understand quickly?
And is this the same as "realism" in Méliès or Ford? Is Rossellini's
realism the same as De Sica's? Is there anyway to tell what you meant
when you spoke of realism in regard to Hawks? Is realism in cinema when
you have real things in front of the camera? or does it refer to the
sense that there is someone real looking through the camera? Is a film
about an historical event realistic if it convinces people or conveys
some truth, despite having the facts wrong?
Is there not a better way to say what you mean than to use a word whose
meanings shift like desert sands, never to be defined ever, anywhere?
>
>
> As for genre, I guess I need more info from you or Croce. Academics
> didn't invent genre. People say, "Let's go to a Western." And then
> they go and say, "That was a good Western," or "That was a strange
> Western," of "I've never seen that in a Western before."
Most people who talk about "westerns" have never heard of genre. Genre
is an academic invention. The concept didn't exist in French until
Anglo-Americans took over the word.
I have never found anyone who can define what a "western" is.
Everyone's denotation seems to be completely different. I've spent my
life going around pissing people off like Socrates trying to get them to
define western and in EVERY case it ends up with them growling
defiantly: "I can't put it into words. But I KNOW WHAT IT IS!!!" This
is the state of academia.
About Croce, I gave you a great source, Orsini's book, which takes
somewhat of a lit crit approach; he has a lot about pseudo-concepts. I
think you would find it extremely exciting and useful.
>
>
> > Do you really believe that someone writing a story or directing a scene
> > or playing a part is studiously contemplating what everyone else has
> > done and deliberately striving to do it differently? Isn't this a
> > shoddy kind of "originality," "being yourself" or "being unqiue" --
> > when actually one is simply conforming to conventional models?
>
> Well, yeah, people think about what went before.
Sure. But people who are truly original don't become so simply by
perversion. There is a great difference between wearing a white hat
simply because everyone else wears a black hat; and wearing a white hat
because you like it and don't care what everyone else wears. That's my
point. Be yourself.
> But I'm not really
> interested in getting into Hawks' head - God knows what you'd find
> there.
Especially with the state of things these days!
> Looking at the films, I see a collision between a background
> that is a bunch of signs that say "genre," and a more playful, reflexive
> set of actions in the foreground. I think this is what David Thomson
> was referring to when he compared THE BIG SLEEP to a home movie, and
> made a connection between Hawks and cinema verite.
Oh, I can see cinéma vérité in anyone who points a camera at anything.
Can't you?
Do you think Hawks ever heard the word genre before, say, 1970?
>
>
> > The problem is that this sort of thinking assumes that poetry is a
> sign,
> > whereas (says Croce) a sign stands for something other than itself,
> > poetry stands only for itself.
>
> Poetry isn't just a representation of something else, of course. But it
> uses signs, it's full of signs. Everything is. The idea of poetry is
> to arrange them so you haven't just wound up representing when you're
> done.
That's one way of looking at it. The trouble with academia is that they
assume this is a religious truth certified by the pope and NASA combined.
Croce denies all of this. To repeat: a sign stands for something other
than itself, poetry stands only for itself. I cite this because by
analogy a piece of art, like a genuine person, is not art (or a person)
because of its differences or commonalities, but because of its
uniqueness.
Croce admits signs into prose, which he does not regard as language but
as a degeneration of language into a sign system. "Born as poetry,
language was afterwards twisted to serve as a sign."
I suggest to you that this is quite inspiring and exciting to
investigate, to liberate people's minds from the shackles and chains of
academic slavery which, like the guys in Plato's cave, they don't even
know are binding them.
Incidentally, I'd go so far as to say that about 99 percent of what's
good in "Culture Theory" is basically Croce's "historicism."
>
>
> > Can you imagine, in real life, having a conversation with a beautiful
> > woman who constantly consciously strove to contrast her actions with
> our
> > expectations of what she was going to do?
>
> This happens to me all the time....
>
> > How long before the game gets
> > stale?
>
> There's infinite variety in the ways one can play off of other things.
> It certainly doesn't diminish one's individuality. Hawks is a quirky
> guy, and he gets opportunities to indulge all his quirky pleasures when
> making films.
Yes. But is there life beyond quirkiness? Is art only an indulgence in
the grotesque?
My point is that I think your adhearance to genre THEORY does what Fritz
Lang claimed theory does to him.
>
>
>
> ?
>
> Sometimes they have an aspect of the outrageous. David Huxley in BABY
> starts out as an eccentric comic type, but he quickly develops into a
> Hawks hero using exasperation and humor to keep himself level against
> Susan's destabilizing effect.
He doesn't succeed, does he?
> Henri Rochard in MALE WAR BRIDE is more
> or less exclusively concerned with self-stabilization; Hildy in HIS GIRL
> FRIDAY knows that Walter Burns is a force of nature and narrates the
> conflict for us.
She does? Have you come up with an unexpurgated edition of the movie
I've not heard of?
>
>
> In TWENTIETH CENTURY, I'd say the reps are both outrageous. And so a
> whole lot of weight is thrown on Roscoe Karns and Walter Connelly -
> because they are trying to cling to sanity, they become more important
> to the film.
I'm not sure that people are trying to cling to sanity, but I suspect
that sanity is an illusion in Hawks, and that biology rules all, and
from a male point of view (Hawks's) that's the power of women. Sanity
may be a possibility, but it's irrelevant ultimately.
>
>
> > Is sanity truly a goal or even a desideratum in Bringing Up Baby, The
> > Big Sky, Red River ... ?
>
> I'm talking about a model for the comedies, so I'd like to throw RED
> RIVER and THE BIG SKY out of court. In BABY, I'd say yes, absolutely -
> what makes the film feel like Hawks is the way David Huxley reacts to
> his plight.
Red River is a comedy. So is Big Sky. You may wish they were not. But...
David reacts to his plight by clinging to Hepburn no matter what.
>
>
1075
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 4:14am
Subject: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
> Now, were we discussing an oil painting, I think you would agree
that,
> over time, we shall notice many gestures and emotions in the
characters
> (and elsewhere, of course) AND we shall eventually realise and
think
> about what creates these effects.
>
> Yes?
Yes?
Yes, absolutely.
I do think intuitive perception comes first (we notice something, and
then notice that we've noticed) but equally that the more self-aware
we are, the more scope we leave for intuition. Though it seems to me
that many people – inside and outside the arts, and including
artists themselves – have complex experiences which they are of
course `aware' of but don't try to analyse verbally, and that this is
a different type of awareness from the kind we aim for in criticism.
I wasn't defending lazy viewing habits, but was angling towards
another point, which I propose here as a hypothesis:
A cut never means `this is a cut.' In fact strictly speaking a cut
doesn't `mean' anything, because `it' is not an object. `Noticing a
cut' means registering a perceptual shift between two images, or two
positions in imaginary space, that has occurred in a particular way.
And this shift is potentially significant precisely because of the
effect it has on us, an effect which is not predictable according to
any general rule, since it occurs as one of the unique series of
events making up any given work of art.
So no element of form either exists `in its own right,' or functions
as a code to be deciphered in the sense of `X means Y.' Techniques
matter because they give rise to experiences, and it's because we're
already having the experience that we grow interested in the
technique. If a director is cutting between Cary Grant and Katherine
Hepburn, I may or may not be thinking about his editing strategies,
but I certainly know which performer I'm looking at in any given
moment.
JTW
1076
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 4:46am
Subject: Re: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
I agree. But add:
(1) cuts need to be experienced physically, not just intellectually.
(2) "I may or may not be thinking about his editing strategies": In most
moviemakers whom I find interesting, such "strategies" cannot be
separated from the physical impact of the cut: e.g., how one camera
angle relates to another; how space is thus constructed. These matters
are amazingly neglected in most film analyses.
(3) No, there are no absolute "meanings" for things. But interesting
moviemakers create "rules" within the context of a single movie (or
oeuvre). Thus while "cinema" can never be defined as a whole (or an
abstraction), cinema necessarily gets defined in any great movie -- but
only for that movie. Ditto techniques.
jaketwilson wrote:
> > Now, were we discussing an oil painting, I think you would agree
> that,
> > over time, we shall notice many gestures and emotions in the
> characters
> > (and elsewhere, of course) AND we shall eventually realise and
> think
> > about what creates these effects.
> >
> > Yes?
>
> Yes?
>
> Yes, absolutely.
>
> I do think intuitive perception comes first (we notice something, and
> then notice that we've noticed) but equally that the more self-aware
> we are, the more scope we leave for intuition. Though it seems to me
> that many people . inside and outside the arts, and including
> artists themselves . have complex experiences which they are of
> course `aware' of but don't try to analyse verbally, and that this is
> a different type of awareness from the kind we aim for in criticism.
>
> I wasn't defending lazy viewing habits, but was angling towards
> another point, which I propose here as a hypothesis:
>
> A cut never means `this is a cut.' In fact strictly speaking a cut
> doesn't `mean' anything, because `it' is not an object. `Noticing a
> cut' means registering a perceptual shift between two images, or two
> positions in imaginary space, that has occurred in a particular way.
> And this shift is potentially significant precisely because of the
> effect it has on us, an effect which is not predictable according to
> any general rule, since it occurs as one of the unique series of
> events making up any given work of art.
>
> So no element of form either exists `in its own right,' or functions
> as a code to be deciphered in the sense of `X means Y.' Techniques
> matter because they give rise to experiences, and it's because we're
> already having the experience that we grow interested in the
> technique. If a director is cutting between Cary Grant and Katherine
> Hepburn, I may or may not be thinking about his editing strategies,
> but I certainly know which performer I'm looking at in any given
> moment.
>
> JTW
>
>
>
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> ADVERTISEMENT
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1077
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 5:16am
Subject: Re: Hawks, etc.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> Genre
> is an academic invention. The concept didn't exist in French until
> Anglo-Americans took over the word.
>
> Do you think Hawks ever heard the word genre before, say, 1970?
Do you mean this literally? He would have heard it in the (possibly unlikely) event that he'd read, say, V.F. Perkins' pre-'65 review of HATARI! (later collected in "The Movie Reader"): "...equally noticeable is the way in which Hawks has, on occasion, destroyed genre. In _Hatari!_ sequences which (according to the rules of the African genre) ought to be menacing are played as comedy...", etc. Also, Perkins is expanding here on a passage from Rivette: "...if he has ennobled each genre by making in turn the best gangster film (_Scarface_), the best air film (_Only Angels Have Wings_), the best war film (_Air Force_), the best western (_Red River_), and finally the best comedies ... it is because he has always known, in each case, how to take what is essential and great from the genre and to mix his personal themes with those which American tradition had already deepened and enriched." (Was the French word for "genre" something else?)
> > > Do you really believe that someone writing a story or directing a scene
> > > or playing a part is studiously contemplating what everyone else has
> > > done and deliberately striving to do it differently?
Wasn't RIO BRAVO supposed to have been a response to HIGH NOON?
1078
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 5:43am
Subject: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
I buy all this completely. Part of my point was that the physical
experience has to precede the intellectual one. Can I add that while
we can't do without analysis, it's necessarily reductive in that
it `notices' some aspects of experience ahead of others? In a
way `editing' is as much an abstraction as `genre.'
In the `50s or early `60s Sight And Sound said something dumb along
the lines of `Film is about human relationships, not spatial
relationships.' We can all see the problem there, but the answer is
that human relationships ARE spatial relationships, because humans
exist in physical space. If I'm locked up and you're the jailer, what
we have is literally a human relationship and a spatial relationship
at the same time. And if someone makes a movie about us, the audience
can look at it either way, or go from one way of looking to the
other. This is close to the core of what I love about cinema.
JTW
Tag Gallagher wrote:
> I agree. But add:
>
> (1) cuts need to be experienced physically, not just intellectually.
>
> (2) "I may or may not be thinking about his editing strategies": In
most
> moviemakers whom I find interesting, such "strategies" cannot be
> separated from the physical impact of the cut: e.g., how one camera
> angle relates to another; how space is thus constructed. These
matters
> are amazingly neglected in most film analyses.
>
> (3) No, there are no absolute "meanings" for things. But
interesting
> moviemakers create "rules" within the context of a single movie (or
> oeuvre). Thus while "cinema" can never be defined as a whole (or an
> abstraction), cinema necessarily gets defined in any great movie --
but
> only for that movie. Ditto techniques.
>
> jaketwilson wrote:
>
> > > Now, were we discussing an oil painting, I think you would agree
> > that,
> > > over time, we shall notice many gestures and emotions in the
> > characters
> > > (and elsewhere, of course) AND we shall eventually realise and
> > think
> > > about what creates these effects.
> > >
> > > Yes?
> >
> > Yes?
> >
> > Yes, absolutely.
> >
> > I do think intuitive perception comes first (we notice something,
and
> > then notice that we've noticed) but equally that the more self-
aware
> > we are, the more scope we leave for intuition. Though it seems to
me
> > that many people . inside and outside the arts, and including
> > artists themselves . have complex experiences which they are of
> > course `aware' of but don't try to analyse verbally, and that
this is
> > a different type of awareness from the kind we aim for in
criticism.
> >
> > I wasn't defending lazy viewing habits, but was angling towards
> > another point, which I propose here as a hypothesis:
> >
> > A cut never means `this is a cut.' In fact strictly speaking a cut
> > doesn't `mean' anything, because `it' is not an object. `Noticing
a
> > cut' means registering a perceptual shift between two images, or
two
> > positions in imaginary space, that has occurred in a particular
way.
> > And this shift is potentially significant precisely because of the
> > effect it has on us, an effect which is not predictable according
to
> > any general rule, since it occurs as one of the unique series of
> > events making up any given work of art.
> >
> > So no element of form either exists `in its own right,' or
functions
> > as a code to be deciphered in the sense of `X means Y.' Techniques
> > matter because they give rise to experiences, and it's because
we're
> > already having the experience that we grow interested in the
> > technique. If a director is cutting between Cary Grant and
Katherine
> > Hepburn, I may or may not be thinking about his editing
strategies,
> > but I certainly know which performer I'm looking at in any given
> > moment.
> >
> > JTW
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
> > ADVERTISEMENT
> > Click Here!
> >
<http://rd.yahoo.com/M=244522.3656190.4921519.1261774/D=egroupweb/S=17
05021019:HM/A=1595054/R=0/SIG=1246b0b92/*http://ashnin.com/clk/muryuta
itakenattogyo?YH=3656190&yhad=1595054>
> >
> >
> >
> > 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
> > <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>.
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1079
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 5:44am
Subject: Re: Re: Hawks, etc.
jess_l_amortell wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> > Genre
> > is an academic invention. The concept didn't exist in French until
> > Anglo-Americans took over the word.
> >
> > Do you think Hawks ever heard the word genre before, say, 1970?
>
>
> Do you mean this literally? He would have heard it in the (possibly
> unlikely) event that he'd read, say, V.F. Perkins' pre-'65 review of
> HATARI! (later collected in "The Movie Reader"): "...equally
> noticeable is the way in which Hawks has, on occasion, destroyed
> genre. In _Hatari!_ sequences which (according to the rules of the
> African genre) ought to be menacing are played as comedy...", etc.
> Also, Perkins is expanding here on a passage from Rivette: "...if he
> has ennobled each genre by making in turn the best gangster film
> (_Scarface_), the best air film (_Only Angels Have Wings_), the best
> war film (_Air Force_), the best western (_Red River_), and finally
> the best comedies ... it is because he has always known, in each case,
> how to take what is essential and great from the genre and to mix his
> personal themes with those which American tradition had already
> deepened and enriched." (Was the French word for "genre" something else?)
So we can date "genre" to the time of HATARI in both languages. Now:
how far back can we date it in either language? As applied to movies.
>
>
>
> > > > Do you really believe that someone writing a story or directing
> a scene
> > > > or playing a part is studiously contemplating what everyone else has
> > > > done and deliberately striving to do it differently?
>
> Wasn't RIO BRAVO supposed to have been a response to HIGH NOON?
I'm not suggesting that moviemaking occurs in a vacuum of influences and
reasons! I am sorry if I gave this impression. Emails.
I'm saying that the art of the thing, when there is art, is not
prompted in order to do something just to be different, but rather to do
something to do what one wants to do. Are you saying that the big
reason Hawks made Rio Bravo was to counter High Noon? (He must have had
great faith in the perspicacity of American film criticism.) Are you
saying that he needed Zinnemann for inspiration? Or that the
inspiration for the movie is to show that a hero doesn't go it alone?
If so, arguably Rio Bravo was a response to Sergeant York, with the
same Gary Cooper going it alone and making the High Noon Cooper look
like a pip-squeak, no?
I concede that artists are in a dialogue with a zillion things, and that
Rio Bravo relates to everything that ever happened in the world prior to
its existence, and that artworks personify in some way their
civilization and culture, etc. But I do not think artists do art simply
by "defying" conventions. MTV always seems that way to me: films by
filmmakers who think they're genuine and aren't. The point is to go
your OWN way, not to imitate others in "defiance."
,
1080
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 5:52am
Subject: Re: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
jaketwilson wrote:
> I buy all this completely. Part of my point was that the physical
> experience has to precede the intellectual one. Can I add that while
> we can't do without analysis, it's necessarily reductive in that
> it `notices' some aspects of experience ahead of others? In a
> way `editing' is as much an abstraction as `genre.'
>
I don't see why it's necessarily reductive. Music is not reductive,
even though it based entirely on physcial sensation and intellectual
analysis of relationships between events (e.g., following a tune).
There is an almost ontological relationship between a perception and
our conceptualization of that perception even extended in time (the
tune). The point is to open ourselves to our sensations. To often
theory aborts us ("fucks" us, said Lang). One of the many pernicious
qualities of genre criticism is that it avoids entirely the individual.
Genre criticism is like an orphan asylum which classifies orphans by
age, sex, weight, etc., and never relates to any of them as an
individual. Genre criticism is an academic conspiracy to run away from
experiencing art. Art is something individual. Unique. It is not a
nexus of conventions and anti-conventions.
>
1081
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:05am
Subject: Re: Hawks, etc.
> And most academics seem to me far worse. There are genre "laws." There
> are conventions that are being "defied." Etc., etc., etc. This is all
> utter blarney, IMHO.
If we stopped using all words that academics abuse, we'd have to talk in
monosyllables.
> Terms which essentially have no meaning
> (like "genre") are not useful. That some people THINK they are useful
> (outside of informal conversation, if there) suggests to me the degree
> to which "theory" destroys and inhibits experience.
I don't think we're talking theory here. Filmmakers know about genre
and use it. When Mann starts THE NAKED SPUR with Stewart moving in on
his prey, he knows that he doesn't have to explain why people are
settling disputes with guns, or why people are in the middle of nowhere;
when Stewart takes Ryan prisoner, he expects people to understand that
Stewart is a law officer (which eventually proves false). He could have
done all the same things outside of a set of genre expectations, but the
scene would play differently, be more of a mystery, with lots of loose
ends to tie up. Genre affords Mann the opportunity to start a story in
the thick of the conflict, for his own artistic reasons, while swimming
under the surface of accessible storytelling. You're missing out on an
analytical tool if you ignore genre.
> So can you give me a short concise definition of "realism" à la
> Auerbach, one which I can repeat the people on the street which they'll
> all understand quickly?
Auerbach's point is that the particulars of what feels realistic changes
with context. Homer made readers feel he was rendering unvarnished
reality because he did one thing differently than authors before him,
and so on.
> And is this the same as "realism" in Méliès or Ford? Is Rossellini's
> realism the same as De Sica's? Is there anyway to tell what you meant
> when you spoke of realism in regard to Hawks? Is realism in cinema when
> you have real things in front of the camera? or does it refer to the
> sense that there is someone real looking through the camera? Is a film
> about an historical event realistic if it convinces people or conveys
> some truth, despite having the facts wrong?
>
> Is there not a better way to say what you mean than to use a word whose
> meanings shift like desert sands, never to be defined ever, anywhere?
You can get a definition out of the dictionary, and it won't satisfy
you. What's the definition of art? Of religion? To pick just two
words that you are not boycotting. Abstract nouns are generally used in
a cloud of connotations.
I stated expressly that I thought realism was usable only as a relative
term, and yet you ask me if realism is the same in Hawks, Melies and
Ford. You don't seem to be paying attention to me.
> Most people who talk about "westerns" have never heard of genre. Genre
> is an academic invention. The concept didn't exist in French until
> Anglo-Americans took over the word.
Most people who die of diseases don't know the medical terms for them
either. That doesn't mean that diseases are an invention of the medical
profession.
> I have never found anyone who can define what a "western" is.
> Everyone's denotation seems to be completely different. I've spent my
> life going around pissing people off like Socrates trying to get them to
> define western and in EVERY case it ends up with them growling
> defiantly: "I can't put it into words. But I KNOW WHAT IT IS!!!" This
> is the state of academia.
No, it's the state of life. I think the fact that everyone feels they
know what a Western is should make you think twice. Maybe you're trying
to make definitions do something that they're not meant to do. They
don't determine the border conditions of a concept.
> Sure. But people who are truly original don't become so simply by
> perversion. There is a great difference between wearing a white hat
> simply because everyone else wears a black hat; and wearing a white hat
> because you like it and don't care what everyone else wears. That's my
> point. Be yourself.
So you feel that if I were right and Hawks were in fact reacting to
genre, he would be a conformist and unoriginal? Some people would
consider this a level of formal sophistication beyond most other filmmakers.
> To repeat: a sign stands for something other
> than itself, poetry stands only for itself.
I can't figure out how this branch of the conversation got started. I
gather you are taking me for some postmodernist.
> Croce admits signs into prose, which he does not regard as language but
> as a degeneration of language into a sign system. "Born as poetry,
> language was afterwards twisted to serve as a sign."
>
> I suggest to you that this is quite inspiring and exciting to
> investigate, to liberate people's minds from the shackles and chains of
> academic slavery which, like the guys in Plato's cave, they don't even
> know are binding them.
You know, I do find this interesting, and would like to know more
someday, at a calmer time. You're aware that this flies in the face of
what almost everyone believes about language? That a word is the first
example people usually give to illustrate the concept of what a sign is?
I'd feel more comfortable if you acknowledged this discrepancy.
>>Sometimes they have an aspect of the outrageous. David Huxley in BABY
>>starts out as an eccentric comic type, but he quickly develops into a
>>Hawks hero using exasperation and humor to keep himself level against
>>Susan's destabilizing effect.
>
> He doesn't succeed, does he?
Oh, he does pretty well, I'd say. Better than most people would.
>>Henri Rochard in MALE WAR BRIDE is more
>>or less exclusively concerned with self-stabilization; Hildy in HIS GIRL
>>FRIDAY knows that Walter Burns is a force of nature and narrates the
>>conflict for us.
>
> She does? Have you come up with an unexpurgated edition of the movie
> I've not heard of?
You mean you haven't seen the "voice" version? Just kidding. Hildy
gives Bruce a running commentary on what to expect from Walter in the
first part of the film, a commentary that serves as exposition for us.
> Red River is a comedy. So is Big Sky. You may wish they were not.
It won't ruin my life if they are. MONKEY BUSINESS is a comedy, and
BALL OF FIRE, and I wouldn't try to fit them into my little thesis.
It's a pattern, not a rule.
You know, when Robin Wood proposed SCARFACE as a comedy, he acknowledged
that it wouldn't sound right at first hearing. I find it odd that you
seem to assume that everyone understands that RED RIVER and THE BIG SKY
are comedies. Anyway, whenever you have time, I'd be interested in
hearing why. - Dan
1082
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:16am
Subject: Fort Apache Fade-Out
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
>
>
McBride analyzes Fort Apache in this
> light, pointing out how Captain York donning Colonel Thursday's hat
at
> the end is a Brechtian device [like the cardinal donning the pope's
> robes in Brecht's Galileo], and that we see clearly that an insane
> system needs the dedication of noble men to perpetuate itself.)
I think that, most obviously, the ending scene of Fort Apache is a
precursor to Liberty Valence's "Print The Legend," particularly in
that it is to newspapermen that Wayne is speaking. To me, the scene
is imbued with irony. Ford is acknowledging that history needs its
heroes -- however bogus -- to perpetuate the mythmaking that may have
been essential to America's continued growth, but that the reality is
that it's the likes of the rowdy and intended-to-be-lovable Mulcahy
(Victor McLaglen), Quincannon (Dick Foran) and Schattuck (Jack
Pennick) -- and, of course John Wayne's York and George O'Brien's
Collingwood -- who brought human values to the military. As such,
they were the ones responsible for making it the cohesive community
it needed to be in order to suceed.
Wayne's putting on Fonda's hat is shorthand of having him say that
the legend must be accepted. But to take the final scene at face
value, as Sarris did (Wayne's eulogy "tends to glorify command
decisions to the point of incompetence and even insanity") is to
negate everything that went before it.
1083
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:28am
Subject: Re: Re: Hawks, etc.
Tag Gallagher wrote:
>So we can date "genre" to the time of HATARI in both languages. Now:
>how far back can we date it in either language? As applied to movies.
>
"With regard to the genre, I am of the opinion that an English audience
will not relish it so well as a more characteristic kind of comedy."
- C.
Jenner, 1770:
"It is a genre little interesting when the works of the great Italian
artists are at hand."
- A.
Young, 1790
These are the first two citations for the word "genre" in the sense we
are using it here in the 1987 supplement to the First Edition of the OED.
Some college students on this list may have free access to the online
in-progress third edition, which, outrageously, is $500 a year for
individuals, and may wish to see if there are earlier or additional
citations of interest. Warning: if I learn who you are, I may email you
very occasionally for a current set of definitions and citations for a word.
Tag, sometimes your opposition to fixed ideas can itself seem like a
fixed idea. There's a pretty long history of artists in all fields
making works in response to, and under the influence of, other artists.
Bach literally based many composition on works by others. One of the
biggest trends in contemporary art has to do with artists commenting on,
or trying to "humanize," the forms of minimalism in a variety of ways.
There's a hilarious video called "Bouncing in the Corner #36DDD" that's
a takeoff on Bruce Nauman's hour long repetitive body movement videos,
such as one of the same title (and which are really good, by the way,
even if tedious in the extreme), by Dara Greenwald, in which by doing
the same thing Nauman did with a similarly bare chest she injects her,
um, bouncing breasts into the picture, thus disrupting the monotony. But
this is only one of many, many examples -- growing plants arranged in a
grid, for example. Part of the meaning of such things is offering
commentary on other art. And it happens in film all the time too.
Cezanne is supposed to have said that he was oriented to the
intelligence of God -- but he also said that he wanted to "make of
impressionism" something as lasting as the art of museums, and mentioned
Poussin in particular. Yeats began his great last poem, "Under Ben
Bulben," in angry response to Rilke's thoughts about death. And I
thought Hawks was pretty clear in interviews that he made "Rio Bravo" in
part in response to "High Noon." There are many, many films that take
other films as their starting point, Ken Jacobs's "Tom, Tom, the Piper's
Son" for one.
Just keep repeating, there are no rules in art. An art work can be made
primarily in response to another, partly, or not at all. And this is one
reason that I share your dubiousness about synoptic theories of film,
and art. But you're making one in denying the possibility that a film
may be responding to a set of conventions that have accrued over the
decades in films with similar subjects, or perhaps even commenting on
those conventions.
- Fred
1084
From: Paul Fileri
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:39am
Subject: Re: OED genre definition
Fred:
> These are the first two citations for the word "genre" in the sense
we
> are using it here in the 1987 supplement to the First Edition of
the OED.
>
> Some college students on this list may have free access to the
online
> in-progress third edition
I have access to the online edition and there aren't any earlier
citations for this entry in the sense you're talking about. No
update.
- Paul
1085
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:41am
Subject: Re: Hawks, etc.
Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > And most academics seem to me far worse. There are genre "laws."
> There
> > are conventions that are being "defied." Etc., etc., etc. This is all
> > utter blarney, IMHO.
>
> If we stopped using all words that academics abuse, we'd have to talk in
> monosyllables.
So?
And who said "all words that academics use"?
How many words did I fault? Two? Three?
Now suddenly according to you I'm against all words that aren't
monsyllabic. If this is an example of polysyllbbic communication, we
should go back to monos.
>
>
> > Terms which essentially have no meaning
> > (like "genre") are not useful. That some people THINK they are useful
> > (outside of informal conversation, if there) suggests to me the degree
> > to which "theory" destroys and inhibits experience.
>
> I don't think we're talking theory here. Filmmakers know about genre
> and use it. When Mann starts THE NAKED SPUR with Stewart moving in on
> his prey, he knows that he doesn't have to explain why people are
> settling disputes with guns, or why people are in the middle of nowhere;
> when Stewart takes Ryan prisoner, he expects people to understand that
> Stewart is a law officer (which eventually proves false). He could have
> done all the same things outside of a set of genre expectations, but the
> scene would play differently, be more of a mystery, with lots of loose
> ends to tie up. Genre affords Mann the opportunity to start a story in
> the thick of the conflict, for his own artistic reasons, while swimming
> under the surface of accessible storytelling. You're missing out on an
> analytical tool if you ignore genre.
"Genre" does not exist. So you might as well be discussing diddles.
The events you describe above could equally begin a scifi film on
another planet, a gangster melodrama in NYC, a toga story in Troy, a
musical, etc. I guess you are referring not to a particular genre but
to any movie, right?
Do you have any evidence to suggest that THE NAKED SPUR is NOT
intelligible to someone who has never seen a "western" before?
>
>
> > So can you give me a short concise definition of "realism" à la
> > Auerbach, one which I can repeat the people on the street which they'll
> > all understand quickly?
>
> Auerbach's point is that the particulars of what feels realistic changes
> with context. Homer made readers feel he was rendering unvarnished
> reality because he did one thing differently than authors before him,
> and so on.
The street won't understand this. What does it mean "to feel
realistic"? How can you "render" "unvarnished reality"? And what is
"reality? And what is "varnish"?
Is a Beethoven piano sonata realistic? Is a given performance an
unvarnished reality?
>
>
> > And is this the same as "realism" in Méliès or Ford? Is Rossellini's
> > realism the same as De Sica's? Is there anyway to tell what you meant
> > when you spoke of realism in regard to Hawks? Is realism in cinema
> when
> > you have real things in front of the camera? or does it refer to the
> > sense that there is someone real looking through the camera? Is a film
> > about an historical event realistic if it convinces people or conveys
> > some truth, despite having the facts wrong?
> >
> > Is there not a better way to say what you mean than to use a word whose
> > meanings shift like desert sands, never to be defined ever, anywhere?
>
> You can get a definition out of the dictionary, and it won't satisfy
> you.
I don't expect satisfaction. Simply sentences I can understand. Maybe
I'm particularly stupid. But I do not understand. I have been thinking
about realism and reality all my life and with each passing year the
actual reality is that I recognize I understand much less than I thought
I did the year before. Perhaps you are young and have the advantage.
> What's the definition of art? Of religion? To pick just two
> words that you are not boycotting. Abstract nouns are generally used in
> a cloud of connotations.
Art is when the cloud dissipates.
>
>
> I stated expressly that I thought realism was usable only as a relative
> term, and yet you ask me if realism is the same in Hawks, Melies and
> Ford. You don't seem to be paying attention to me.
I admit I do not follow you. It's not that I'm not paying attention. I
don't understand what you mean when you write "realism was usable." I
don't understand what it is that is being used -- or for what.
>
>
> > Most people who talk about "westerns" have never heard of genre. Genre
> > is an academic invention. The concept didn't exist in French until
> > Anglo-Americans took over the word.
>
> Most people who die of diseases don't know the medical terms for them
> either. That doesn't mean that diseases are an invention of the medical
> profession.
Ah, so you too believe that "genre" is a Platonic Idea, and that only
the Ideas are really real? Is this what you mean by "realism"?
>
>
> > I have never found anyone who can define what a "western" is.
> > Everyone's denotation seems to be completely different. I've spent my
> > life going around pissing people off like Socrates trying to get
> them to
> > define western and in EVERY case it ends up with them growling
> > defiantly: "I can't put it into words. But I KNOW WHAT IT IS!!!"
> This
> > is the state of academia.
>
> No, it's the state of life. I think the fact that everyone feels they
> know what a Western is should make you think twice. Maybe you're trying
> to make definitions do something that they're not meant to do. They
> don't determine the border conditions of a concept.
Concepts sans frontières!
If you admit we cannot define "western," then what meaningful definition
can we give to "genre"?
I can invent the cigarette genre -- movies in which people smoke
cigarettes -- and I can go on for pages about conventions in how to
hold, how to manipulate, how to blow, how John Wayne throws a cigarette
away, Bogart's snuff. I can write something just as intelligent as
what's been written about westerns. So what?
Imagine the possibilities of the genre of films containing the color red.
>
>
> > Sure. But people who are truly original don't become so simply by
> > perversion. There is a great difference between wearing a white hat
> > simply because everyone else wears a black hat; and wearing a white hat
> > because you like it and don't care what everyone else wears. That's my
> > point. Be yourself.
>
> So you feel that if I were right and Hawks were in fact reacting to
> genre, he would be a conformist and unoriginal? Some people would
> consider this a level of formal sophistication beyond most other
> filmmakers.
I never implied Hawks does not relate to other movies. I asked when he
would have heard the word genre for the first time.
>
>
> > To repeat: a sign stands for something other
> > than itself, poetry stands only for itself.
>
> I can't figure out how this branch of the conversation got started. I
> gather you are taking me for some postmodernist.
It's not a branch. It's an argument against genre criticism. Genre
criticism is based on signs; art is not. I thought this would appeal to
you.
>
>
> > Croce admits signs into prose, which he does not regard as language but
> > as a degeneration of language into a sign system. "Born as poetry,
> > language was afterwards twisted to serve as a sign."
> >
> > I suggest to you that this is quite inspiring and exciting to
> > investigate, to liberate people's minds from the shackles and chains of
> > academic slavery which, like the guys in Plato's cave, they don't even
> > know are binding them.
>
> You know, I do find this interesting, and would like to know more
> someday, at a calmer time. You're aware that this flies in the face of
> what almost everyone believes about language? That a word is the first
> example people usually give to illustrate the concept of what a sign is?
> I'd feel more comfortable if you acknowledged this discrepancy.
Croce is a discrepancy. He's wonderful.
If you want to know more, get hold of the Orsini book. It's well
written. If you want to know more about Croce as a historist, begin
with the chapter in R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History -- which shows
up in every used book store an Oxford paperback, a really great book!
>
>
>
> You know, when Robin Wood proposed SCARFACE as a comedy, he acknowledged
> that it wouldn't sound right at first hearing. I find it odd that you
> seem to assume that everyone understands that RED RIVER and THE BIG SKY
> are comedies.
They have happy endings. Everybody gets what they want.
Scarface doesn't get what he wants, but we do, don't we?
But I'd call Scarface a tragedy -- Tony has a tragic flaw, no?
1086
From:
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 2:53am
Subject: Home Movies, Friedkin, McTiernan
In a message dated 8/9/03 6:37:07 PM, filipefurtado@u... writes:
>The sequence where Gordon's sees
>Nancy Allen for the first time is one
>of my 4 or 5 favorite moments in a
>dePalma film.
Yes! I love this moment so much that, as reading Filipe's sentence, I was
prepared for him to write "one of my 4 or 5 favorites moment in film."
Interesting to read Bill sing the praises of Connie Neilsen. I thought she
was quite good in "The Hunted"; it's a kind of thankless part as Friedkin's
focus is elsewhere, but she serves her role quite efficiently. I haven't seen
"Basic" or, for that matter, most of John McTiernan's films from the past five
or six years. But I know he has an auteurist standing and that Damien even
placed "Rollerball" on his Top 10 from last year, so I probably owe myself a trip
to the video store.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1087
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:59am
Subject: Re: Re: Hawks, etc.
Fred Camper wrote:
>
> Just keep repeating, there are no rules in art. An art work can be made
> primarily in response to another, partly, or not at all. And this is one
> reason that I share your dubiousness about synoptic theories of film,
> and art. But you're making one in denying the possibility that a film
> may be responding to a set of conventions that have accrued over the
> decades in films with similar subjects, or perhaps even commenting on
> those conventions.
>
> - Fred
I think that a film is a reponse to, possibly, everything that has gone
in the world prior to its existence. I never said anything to the
contrary. I've written about movies influencing each other all my life!
I simply said that art isn't prompted by a desire to be different but
rather by a desire to be oneself.
The question was when "genre" was used in regard to film.
In trade journals as early as 1907, westerns were divided into distinct
subgenres, each of which was known to possess its own specific
conventions.among them, frontier dramas, Indian dramas, Civil War
dramas, western comedies. Films were made by quasi-indepentent
production units (same director, stars, writers), one film a week or
more, clearly in these genres. And they knew what their rivals were
doing because of long plot summaries in the journals. Instruction
booklets were available by mail order for nascent scenarists, in which
all the basic plots and their many variations within each genre were
carefully outlined.
>
1088
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 7:44am
Subject: Re: viewing habits, invisibility
Tag Gallagher wrote:
>I don't see why it's necessarily reductive. Music is not reductive,
even though it based entirely on physcial sensation and intellectual
>analysis of relationships between events (e.g., following a tune).
There is an almost ontological relationship between a perception and
>our conceptualization of that perception even extended in time (the
tune). The point is to open ourselves to our sensations.
I don't know what music is based on. Some would say it brings us in
touch with a higher, spiritual order which we can grasp emotionally
but not intellectually. Others (Fred, maybe?) would
say `explanations' must have a stop in the truth that humans
are `hard-wired' to respond to certain stimuli.
Regardless, when we hear a simple tune, we don't have to think before
we can grasp the relationship between the notes, nor do we have to
have any `formal' knowledge of music. I may know hundreds of tunes
before I learn that a particular interval is a major third. And the
only way I can grasp the concept of a `major third' is by perceiving
it as an unchanging element which appears in many tunes, rather than
experiencing each tune as a unique entity separate from any other.
This is what I mean by saying that `editing' is an abstraction
like `genre.'
Open us to our sensations…yes, yes.
I'd say that the goal of aesthetic education is to turn our awareness
of form into a `second nature,' so we can have this experience of
immediate apprehension in relation to more and more complex objects.
>Genre criticism is like an orphan asylum which classifies orphans
>by age, sex, weight, etc., and never relates to any of them as an
individual.
I understand the pointlessness of arguing about whether a particular
film is a Western or not, but I think there are useful and non-
prescriptive ways of using the term `genre.' One is simply as a
synonym for `type of film.' The other has to do with particular types
of film, or fiction more generally (e.g. the Western, SF, fantasy)
which presume on our knowledge of a previously familiar mythology
that allows the creators to avoid awkward questions and move on to
the stuff that interests them. This would be a reasonable way to
describe what happens in Hawks, except he takes it to another level
by emphasising the `throwaway' nature of his backgrounds, often to
comic effect. There's a great moment in To Have And Have Not (wish I
could remember the dialogue) where Bogart starts explaining the
political underpinnings of the story and Bacall cuts him off after a
couple of sentences. It's as if Hawks is saying `Yeah, yeah -- you've
seen Casablanca, you know the drill.'
I think this latter notion of `genre' is specifically modern, or at
least reflects an unstable society, because it presumes that any
particular set of conventions is finally arbitrary.
I agree with you about women in Hawks. I can't see that Bogart `takes
control' in To Have And Have Not. He keeps trying to take control and
Bacall keeps throwing it back in his face.
JTW
1089
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 3:08pm
Subject: Realism
> I don't expect satisfaction. Simply sentences I can understand. Maybe
> I'm particularly stupid. But I do not understand. I have been thinking
> about realism and reality all my life and with each passing year the
> actual reality is that I recognize I understand much less than I thought
> I did the year before. Perhaps you are young and have the advantage.
I was made aware of the problems with the word "realism" when I was
young. After a hesitation, I started using it again, because I think
there's something important behind it, and I can't find other words that
address the same issues.
I'm not enjoying this conversation, but I think I want to put down a few
thoughts about realism.
Any movie relies on many conventions. A filmmaker might, for instance,
labor mightily to reproduce the exact intonation and phrasing of a
real-life sentence, and yet not try at all to reproduce the spacing and
overlapping in most real-life conversations. It doesn't work well to
talk about a film being realistic or not (assuming one believes in a
reality outside the film): every film seems to be striving at different
levels both to approximate reality and to abstract it. I don't believe
you can isolate any part of a film and say that it's realistic or not -
some form of abstraction seems to cling to every fragment.
Imagine two films that adhere pretty much to the same sets of filmmaking
conventions. Maybe the actors in both make their voice quaver when they
say "I love you," the way old-style actors sometimes do - we mostly know
the convention from Groucho making fun of it, but you can see it in 30s
movies sometimes. The second film does everything like the first except
that the quaver is gone from big emotional declarations. Both films
still feature a huge number of abstractions, but a great many audience
members will think that the second film is more realistic, whether or
not they like this perceived realism.
In fact, someone can go out with a tape recorder, get a good statistical
sample of people talking, quantify the amount of vibrato in people's
voices, and make a reasonable case that the one film's acting style is
in fact closer to reality at a certain time and place. In a way that
person is barking up the wrong tree, but it's very understandable that
he or she is tempted to resolve the matter by repairing to reality. In
fact, the impression in an audience member's mind is probably more the
point.
This seems to have something to do with our awareness of conventions.
When the late sixties and early seventies saw a big change in Hollywood
craft conventions, Westerns started to look browner, dirtier, more
washed out. It struck people as closer to reality, because they were
made aware that old Hollywood favored more vibrant color schemes, and
they all had a sense that the real West is sort of brown. So there was
talk of a new realism in Westerns. It's possible that the real West was
more colorful than a lot of these movies, but that didn't matter, in a
way: we saw a convention being exposed as an abstraction. Eventually
the new cinematographic style hardened into new conventions, at which
point a bit of color to break up a sepia production design could begin
to seem like a blow for reality.
Auerbach ends MIMESIS with a chapter on Virginia Woolf, and writers like
Woolf, Joyce, and Proust were sometimes called realistic for their
attempt to render the complications of consciousness by breaking with
factual description. Obviously the word needs a lot of context to have
any force.
I'm more tempted to use the word to describe something within the
boundaries of a single movie than I am in most other cases, because
there is so much context there: usually a filmmaker playing with realism
will vary only a few elements within a set of style conventions that
have already been established by the film itself.
- Dan
1090
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 3:34pm
Subject: Re: Realism
Dan:
> Auerbach ends MIMESIS with a chapter on Virginia Woolf, and writers
> like Woolf, Joyce, and Proust were sometimes called realistic for
> their attempt to render the complications of consciousness by
> breaking with factual description. Obviously the word needs a lot
> of context to have any force.
Exactly - context is just what gives the term 'realism' force.
Realism denotes a set of formal devices and conventions that give the
impression, or intend to give the impression, of reality: it's not
that one image is ever "more real" than another image, but in certain
situations it is necessary, even, to discuss which image might go in
a more realist vein, or the ways in which each image utilizes
realism. (The concept is heavily dependent on cultural and
historical context.) This doesn't make the concept of realism
instantly palatable and beyond reproach - we can still argue about
all its problematic aspects - but the term quite simply does (or at
least can) have definite and useful meaning.
--Zach
1091
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 3:40pm
Subject: Re: Home Movies (Brian De Palma, 1979)
Tristan:
> From talking to people, most
> hate Bonfire of the Vanities, Mission to Mars, Snake Eyes, and a
> bunch of others.
These have their defenders. Briandepalma.net is a cool site that has
a message board full of DP fans located all over the globe, and they
can give plenty of recommendations. I haven't seen BONFIRE or SNAKE
EYES yet, actually, but MISSION TO MARS was the film that began to
change my mind about De Palma. It's really beautiful, if not to
everyone's taste. You may want to see more of his more widely-loved
films first, and if you develop a special taste for the movies,
you'll be likely to tune in to the beauties of M2M.
> I will try and see Fury and
> Carlito's Way. Any other recommendations from anyone?
HI, MOM! It actually might be best to see this one first.
--Zach
1092
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 3:48pm
Subject: Re: Realism
Dan, if you're not enjoying this, there's no reason to drag it out.
We're not getting anywhere, because I keep telling you that I don't know
what YOU mean when you use realism, and you don't tell me. Now, for
myself, I spent fifteen years writing about Rossellini, which was in
many ways fifteen years researching notions of "realism," not to mention
reality. And the fifteen years included a lot of collateral
considerations, chiefly the notion of realism/convention within art
(medieval; renaissance in particular). No I am aware that what is
thought of as realism is often absolutely not realism; and that a nose
that looks "real" in 1250 did not not look "real" (to some people) in 1350.
Since people don't agree, even this notion of realism becomes rather
meaningless.
Those of us who go around showing "old" movies to college-age people --
meaning any movie made before 1990 or so -- are well aware that the
inevitable response of students, even of most "film students," to "old"
movies is that they don't like them as much as "new" movies, because the
old ones aren't "realistic." And by this they mean simply that they are
aware of artifice, whereas with current films they aren't -- no matter
how many ostentatious camera/editing tricks there are.
I don't think these are meaningful responses in terms of defining
"realism," because the very same students will, most of them, reverse
their opinion after seeing a few "old" movies.
I said last time that when you use the phrase "using realism," I have no
idea what you mean. You did not favor me with a response to this
question. Some directors like to switch from studio to location, maybe
just once in a movie, in order to shock. But I don't think they would
say this is "using realism," because there is nothing inevitably
realistic about a location.
Maybe you mean that "realism" means you're not conscious of watching a
movie. Well, I myself have never had this experience and have never
meant anyone else who has.
So I honestly do not know what you mean by realism. If you wish to
suggest that I am being difficult, that's your right. But I am being
honest. I do understand what people like Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini
and Visconti meant, even though they each of them used it in ways that
flatly contradicted the other three. I can understand them because they
go to the trouble of explaining what they mean. You do not.
If nonetheless you personally find it useful to use this term, fine.
But I do not understand you.
Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > I don't expect satisfaction. Simply sentences I can understand. Maybe
> > I'm particularly stupid. But I do not understand. I have been
> thinking
> > about realism and reality all my life and with each passing year the
> > actual reality is that I recognize I understand much less than I
> thought
> > I did the year before. Perhaps you are young and have the advantage.
>
> I was made aware of the problems with the word "realism" when I was
> young. After a hesitation, I started using it again, because I think
> there's something important behind it, and I can't find other words that
> address the same issues.
>
> I'm not enjoying this conversation, but I think I want to put down a few
> thoughts about realism.
>
> Any movie relies on many conventions. A filmmaker might, for instance,
> labor mightily to reproduce the exact intonation and phrasing of a
> real-life sentence, and yet not try at all to reproduce the spacing and
> overlapping in most real-life conversations. It doesn't work well to
> talk about a film being realistic or not (assuming one believes in a
> reality outside the film): every film seems to be striving at different
> levels both to approximate reality and to abstract it. I don't believe
> you can isolate any part of a film and say that it's realistic or not -
> some form of abstraction seems to cling to every fragment.
>
> Imagine two films that adhere pretty much to the same sets of filmmaking
> conventions. Maybe the actors in both make their voice quaver when they
> say "I love you," the way old-style actors sometimes do - we mostly know
> the convention from Groucho making fun of it, but you can see it in 30s
> movies sometimes. The second film does everything like the first except
> that the quaver is gone from big emotional declarations. Both films
> still feature a huge number of abstractions, but a great many audience
> members will think that the second film is more realistic, whether or
> not they like this perceived realism.
>
> In fact, someone can go out with a tape recorder, get a good statistical
> sample of people talking, quantify the amount of vibrato in people's
> voices, and make a reasonable case that the one film's acting style is
> in fact closer to reality at a certain time and place. In a way that
> person is barking up the wrong tree, but it's very understandable that
> he or she is tempted to resolve the matter by repairing to reality. In
> fact, the impression in an audience member's mind is probably more the
> point.
>
> This seems to have something to do with our awareness of conventions.
> When the late sixties and early seventies saw a big change in Hollywood
> craft conventions, Westerns started to look browner, dirtier, more
> washed out. It struck people as closer to reality, because they were
> made aware that old Hollywood favored more vibrant color schemes, and
> they all had a sense that the real West is sort of brown. So there was
> talk of a new realism in Westerns. It's possible that the real West was
> more colorful than a lot of these movies, but that didn't matter, in a
> way: we saw a convention being exposed as an abstraction. Eventually
> the new cinematographic style hardened into new conventions, at which
> point a bit of color to break up a sepia production design could begin
> to seem like a blow for reality.
>
> Auerbach ends MIMESIS with a chapter on Virginia Woolf, and writers like
> Woolf, Joyce, and Proust were sometimes called realistic for their
> attempt to render the complications of consciousness by breaking with
> factual description. Obviously the word needs a lot of context to have
> any force.
>
> I'm more tempted to use the word to describe something within the
> boundaries of a single movie than I am in most other cases, because
> there is so much context there: usually a filmmaker playing with realism
> will vary only a few elements within a set of style conventions that
> have already been established by the film itself.
>
> - Dan
>
>
>
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1093
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 4:22pm
Subject: McTiernan
> I haven't seen "Basic" or, for that matter, most of John
> McTiernan's films from the past five or six years. But I know he
> has an auteurist standing and that Damien even placed "Rollerball"
> on his Top 10 from last year, so I probably owe myself a trip
> to the video store.
BASIC is fair, but not worth too much effort - the twisty RASHOMON
business never really gels and there's nothing in the bulk of the
movie to match the great flying shots (mostly CGI, I'm sure, but they
look great) from the opening scenes.
It may have been eclipsed by THE HUNTED, which oddly enough I saw
directly afterward and was v. impressed by, but on the other hand
other JMcT movies are better. Not sure if I want to re-evaluate 13TH
WARRIOR, but I've been meaning to give ROLLERBALL a shot.
Good movies by that director:
DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (probably my favorite)
THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR
DIE HARD
PREDATOR
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER
Haven't seen:
MEDICINE MAN
ROLLERBALL
NOMADS (What the heck is this? It's on a fancy-schmancy MGM/UA DVD
and everything!)
LAST ACTION HERO
Jaime
1094
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 4:46pm
Subject: Re: "genre" and other "words"
> I do not feel that certain terms are useful. I feel they do a
> great deal of harm and are actually a way of avoiding thinking and
> discourse.
> Why? Because they substitute conventional theory for your own
> experience. They block thought.
I'm pretty convinced at this point (in my life, not "at this point"
on the list) that words create thought, at least in the "nothing
meaningful exists outside discourse" sense of things. It seems to me
that, to strike a word from our discourse is to strike a note from
the scale.
I agree with 99% of what you're saying, about the words shifting and
never really meaning any one thing. But in saying this, we
acknowledge that they exist - hell, in wishing them destroyed, you're
acknowledging that they exist, because how can you destroy nothing,
etc.
> And most academics seem to me far worse. There are genre "laws."
There
> are conventions that are being "defied." Etc., etc., etc. This is
all
> utter blarney, IMHO.
I'm with you on this. But to my ears this is a different argument
than:
> "Genre" does not exist. So you might as well be discussing diddles.
I don't agree. But then, I view the dictionary as a descriptive,
rather than prescriptive, tool.
Jaime
1095
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 4:48pm
Subject: Re: Realism
> We're not getting anywhere, because I keep telling you that I don't know
> what YOU mean when you use realism, and you don't tell me.
Geez, I was trying. Those last few paragraphs were an attempt to get at
how and when I thought the term might have meaning, with examples. I
might be able to go back, rip some sections out, and rearrange them in
some approximation of a definition, but I have a feeling that's not the
way to go.
Your definition of art - "when the cloud dissipates" - is not the kind
of definition that dictionaries use. I presume that behind that
sentence is a philosophy of definition. Would you like to talk about
this? - Dan
1096
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 5:05pm
Subject: Re: Realism
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > We're not getting anywhere, because I keep telling you that I
don't know
> > what YOU mean when you use realism, and you don't tell me.
>
> Geez, I was trying.
Tag, is it possible that Dan's exploration of the terms at hand
("realism," "western") are unsatisfactory to you because he isn't
allowing you to play the Socrates-gadfly role, wherein you would
catch him giving concrete (deified, fascist) definitions of the words
and proceed to Method him towards your argument? Because, god love
you, your reputation precedes you, etc., but Dan's as good as almost
anybody I know at carrying on a productive discussion using tricky,
goes-back-and-bites-you-on-the-ass terms and conceptual matters.
Also this isn't a board where people call themselves stupid, if I can
be so bold as to speak for the founding members...besides, I don't
think Dan would sound so exasperated if you were stupid.
Jaime
1097
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:26pm
Subject: Realism, McTiernan
The new Kevin Costner western, OPEN RANGE, is full of flowers, I'm
told.
The high-angle copter shots in Basic were done in Panama, but the
Rangers rappelling down to the jungle aren't doing it the way real
Rangers would. "We knew," says JM on the commentary, "but this looked
better." He rejects the Rashomon comparison, saying that people would
be acting differently in each new version of what happened if it were
like Rashomon. One of the few times that happens, he notes, is when
the girl Ranger starts acting like she's in a Las Vegas show (as he
told her to do). It's really a good commentary! He doesn't say that
he used Bolero under Connie Neilsen's pre-credit voiceover because of
the pseudo-Bolero at the start of Femme Fatale, but I think he did.
NOMADS was JT's first. It was screened for the marketing department
at Fox to see if we should pick it up and distribute it, and I left
after 10 minutes, noting in my report that the vaseline-on-the-lens
subjective shots weren't my cup of tea. Then Joel Silver hired him to
do Predator. Happily, I missed the pickup screening of Crocodile
Dundee (which went to Paramount and grossed $250 million), or I would
have recommended against that one, too. I bought a tape of NOMADS
when the discounted video sales started a couple of years ago at a
place in Hollywood called Tower outlet, but I haven't watched it yet.
1098
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 6:40pm
Subject: Re: Realism, McTiernan
> The new Kevin Costner western, OPEN RANGE, is full of flowers, I'm
> told.
Is that a slang for "it's bad?" Or is it literally full of flowers?
I wouldn't mind seeing this. I have no strong pro or con feelings
w/Costner, and it looks fantastic (from the TV spots).
> He rejects the Rashomon comparison, saying that people would
> be acting differently in each new version of what happened if it
> were like Rashomon.
Fair enough, but that doesn't invalidate the comparison. Either way,
though, I don't think it was that interesting, in concept or
execution.
Jaime
1099
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 7:14pm
Subject: Re: Realism, McTiernan
> > The new Kevin Costner western, OPEN RANGE, is full of flowers, I'm
> > told.
>
> Is that a slang for "it's bad?" Or is it literally full of flowers?
I believe it's an illustration of Dan's remarks in #1089 on changing notions of realism in westerns.
1100
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Aug 10, 2003 7:58pm
Subject: Re: Genres and Realism
Tag,
You seem to admit tragedy exists as a category -- you wrote, "But I'd
call Scarface a tragedy -- Tony has a tragic flaw, no?" This is of
course a, let's say, type of fictional story that predates film by, oh,
a couple of years, right?
Then you write, "In trade journals as early as 1907, westerns were
divided into distinct subgenres..."
And we know that scriptwriters decades ago considered the conventions of
the Western when writing scripts, and also started to play against those
conventions; hence the emergence of Wayne as a divided figure, not fully
a hero, on "Red River" and later in "The Searchers."
"Genre studies" have never interested me very much. I've always been
more interested in what you're advocating for, the uniqueness that a
great filmmaker brings to a work. But it seems clear to me that Westerns
have a set of characteristics that, while not rigidly definable at the
margins, make it pretty easy to tell that some films are westerns and
other films are war films -- I mean, "They Were Expendable" is a war
film and "Wagonmaster" is a Western, as the phrases are commonly used,
and it wouldn't be too hard to list a series of characteristics that
allow you to tell which is which, not at the margins but at those
genres' centers, such as that one is set in the west and a film
centering on a war after 1914 usually qualifies.
I think there's a lot of truth in what you write, but by pushing it to
extremes and saying that there is no such thing as genre you wind up in
a position that I don't think is justifiable.
Similarly, you wrote to Dan:
"Maybe you mean that "realism" means you're not conscious of watching a
movie. Well, I myself have never had this experience and have never
meant anyone else who has."
The problem with a lot of your formulations is that they're rigidly
Manichean. I think in popular usage people mean "realistic" when they
are *less* aware of watching a movie than they are in most movies. This
doesn't mean that "realism" isn't still a troubled term. I could argue
that Peter Kubelka's "Arnulf Rainer" is the most "realistic film" of all
time because it uses only the most primary elements of cinema, frames
that are solid black and white. But I also wouldn't recommend the film
to someone who didn't know what it was on those terms, unless I wanted
to be intentionally provocative, because I know "realism" does have to
do with the illusion that one is looking past filmmaking conventions to
the depicted world. As Dan points out, the illusion of greater realism
sometimes really *is* an illusion, because it sometimes is created
simply by fresh conventions, and this is one reason why the word is so
troubled. "Troubled" is not the same thing as utterly meaningless,
though. You may find as a film writer that it's a good idea not to use
it, and I think I hardly ever use it, and that's true of my art reviews
too, for precisely these reasons. But when other people use it, I
usually have a rough idea of what they mean.
Fred
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