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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.
1901
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 4:52pm
Subject: Fw: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
For your information.
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dorota Ostrowska"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 5:29 AM
Subject: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
*******************************************************************
New Cinemas:
Journal of Contemporary Film
Volume 2 (2004) edited by World Cinema Group,
University of Leeds
CALL FOR PAPERS
New Cinemas is a refereed academic journal devoted to the
study of contemporary film around the world. Recent
developments have brought about a renewal of film industries in the
Far and Middle East, Europe, Africa and America. However, there
is a marked tendency to focus exclusively upon issues of 'otherness'
and 'marginality', ignoring the specificities of these films. New
Cinemas challenges this value judgment to explore approaches that
posit the egalitarian value of cinema.
There is a strong focus on what is happening now. The focus is
on work being produced and new ways of approaching evaluation of
this work - not as if the work is done in a historical vacuum, but on
current work: We recognise filmmakers in Argentina or in Iran
always have behind them a tradition they can use or react against: we
believe the whole experience of 'avant-garde' film-making and the
explosion of styles to come out of the 1960s is relevant to - and
accounts for - the work of contemporary film-makers. This journal
breaks down barriers and places World cinema on an equal footing
with the 'mainstream' by creating a space where 'marginal' voices
can find a vehicle for expression.
The journal invites contributions from a wide and diverse
community of researchers. It seeks to generate and promote
research from both experienced researchers and to encourage those
new to this field. The aim is to provide a forum for debate arising
from findings as well as theory and methodologies. A range of
research approaches and methods is encouraged. The research field
of New Cinemas will include first the specificities of current work in
the New Cinemas, across the broadest possible geographic range,
furthering understanding of the specific through the articulation of an
egalitarian view of all Cinemas and second the specificities of the
New Cinemas, including evaluations through the histories, societies,
politics, cultures and other works that may bring influence and
definition.
Submissionsshould be in the following:
. Full Articles (5000-6000 words) should include original work of
a research or developmental nature and/or proposed new methods
or ideas which are clearly and thoroughly presented and argued.
. Notes (2000-5000 words) should include reports of research in
progress, or reflections on the research process or research
evaluations.
. Reports (1000-2500 words) include perspectives on conferences,
seminars and events pertaining to the subject matter of the
journal.
. Reviews (500-1500 words) include any published work (print or
electronic) relevant to a further understanding of the subject
matter
of the journal.
We are seeking suitable papers for consideration by the
editorial group. In the first instance, manuscripts should be submitted
in two printed hard copies, double-spaced. All style conventions
and further details of the journal can be found at:
<http://www.intellectbooks.com/journals/>
(See 'Information and Submissions' and 'Notes for Authors')
Please send manuscripts to: New Cinemas, C/o School of Modern
Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT,
U.K.
Forthcoming deadlines for submission:
Volume 2:1 - 1 November 2003
Volume 2:2 - 1 February 2004
Volume 2:3 - 1 May 2004
For further information and article submission, please contact:
Song Hwee Lim (General Editor). Email: s.h.lim@l..., or
Claire Taylor (Volume 2 Number 1 Co-Editor). Email:
c.l.taylor@l...
Dorota Ostrowska, DPhil
Research Fellow in European Film Production
Louis Le Prince Centre for Cinema, Photography and Television
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
--
Dorota Ostrowska
ostrowska@f...
--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Accessible with your email software
or over the web
1902
From:
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 5:07pm
Subject: Re: Fashion, Beauty and Film
No, sorry you missed my point. I was writing about the Fascist imagery in Fashion photography. Everything from Herb Ritts to maybe even Calvin Klein ads - Cecil Beaton's photography are not fascist at least not to my eyes... in fact he's one of my favorite photographers. But besides that point, I was commenting on fascist imagery in fashion photography - and therefore I feel Riefensthal was perhaps the first artist that certain fashion photographers picked up on.
tosh
-----Original Message-----
From: MG4273@a...
Sent: Sep 11, 2003 9:40 AM
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [a_film_by] Fashion, Beauty and Film
With all due respect to other writers, I do not belive that Leni Riefenstahl
had anything to do with the rise of fashion photography, fashion in film, or
the worship of beautiful people by the camera.
Fashion images in still photography have a long history in magazines. Many
great photographers have specialized in fashion photos, such as Cecil Beaton.
This was long before the 1930's and Riefenstahl (an evil director whose hideous
Nazi propoganda films have rightly earned her a place of infamy and loathing).
Fashion shows regularly appeared in silent newsreels in the 1920's, and as
episodes in silent films, such as the society ladies in the latest fashions
Lillian Gish encounters at the party in Griffith's "Way Down East" (1920). Some
fashion shows in movies are delightful, including those which also appeared in
the sound era. One thinks of the fashion show that ends "Roberta" (1935). Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rodgers dance to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", as the film
soars off into emotional ecstasy!
During the 1920's, famous fashion designers were lured to Hollywood, to dress
the stars. One thinks of Clare West's spectacular costumes for the ladies in
Cecil B. De Mille films. Who can ever forget movie vamp Bebe Daniels' red
"queen of the spiders" outfit West created for her in "The Affairs of Anatol"
(1921) (you can see it in two-color Technicolor in the movie). Greatest of all was
Travis Banton, who arrived in Hollywood in 1924 after a career in New York.
His feathers dress for Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express" (1932) is one of
the screen's most beautiful images. Marlene wore countless Banton outfirs in
her films.
Women were not the only ones who duded up for the camera. I just saw King
Vidor's "Love Never Dies" (1921), a rare silent, and posted earlier about how its
star Lloyd Hughes made 95 films but is largely forgotten today. Hughes was
the clean cut Arrow Collar Man type that was so popular in the 1920's. Writers
on the IMDB are quite startled by him, calling him "a gorgeous hunk" and "an
amazingly beautiful man". Vidor has him change well-tailored suits roughly every
two minutes. "Love Never Dies" is as much a fashion show as it is a movie.
People all over the world went to movies to see the latest styles. Even
before that, they went to the theater to see fashions. Maria Falconetti, the great
star of "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), helped set fashion in France.
People went to her stage shows on opening night to see what she was wearing.
Mike Grost
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1903
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 5:19pm
Subject: Swamped
It'll take me a year to catch up with all the great recent posts.
Mike, the real problem with mystery criticism is spoilers. I am
struggling with this as I gear up to write my serial killers in the
cinema book next year, because a lot of the roots of the genre
are in novels, and both films and novels often have surprise
endings.
There is much that hasn't been made available yet in recent
French criticism that speaks to questions like
abstract/representational and the good old auteur theory.
Biette's "What is a filmmaker?" is absolutely required reading
after our recent debates; I'll try to summarize as much as I can in
my eulogy for him for Senses of cinema. Jacques Ranciere's
new book La fable contrariee is the most important new book of
film criticism and theory since Deleuze. I'll try to do a summary of
the main thesis at least when I have a second. - it brilliantly
speaks to the questions of narration, represntation, etc.
Right now, I haven't even gotten my post on Cinecom done!
Ishould never have rented the "24" DVDs.
Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her work at one
point as part of its program? Fred?
1904
From:
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 1:27pm
Subject: Re:Writers and Film
My URL is listed in the Links section of a_film_by, along with other
contributors.
If people have web sites, please list them! It is really interesting to visit
the web sites of a_film_by members - they tend to be full of good stuff.
My film web site is:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/film.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/film.htm
The Lang article is at:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/lang.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/lang.htm
True Confessions time:
Reading over the Lang article, it certainly has more to say about some
writers than others. There is much on Nunnally Johnson, but nothing on Sidney Boehm
or Vera Caspary. This is due to my ignorance. Some writers I have insight on,
others are still mysterious to me. This can easily give the impression that I
think these writers are unimportant. Not so! Once again, my ignorance is
tripping me up. Cinema and literature are vast, understanding them, very difficult.
Please give me a little indulgence. I will try harder in the future, and
improve coverage!
On Cinematograhers and editors, following up the interesting post of Henrik
Sylow.
There is not a word about cinematographers in the Lang article. This despite
the fact (for example) that Stanley Cortez' personal style is instantly
recognizable in "Secret Beyond the Door", just as it is in "The Magnificent
Ambersons". This is clearly a major flaw in the piece. Once again, I'll try better in
the future.
About editors: I know nothing about film editing. They are "mysterious
persons of talent" who I respect, but who I understand not at all. This is plainly
horrible. My apologies once again!
Mike Grost
1905
From: iangjohnston
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 6:04pm
Subject: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
>
> That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> PROBLEMATIC!
>
> "his best-known novels
> > were published
> > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from TRIUMPH
> > OF THE WILL."
>
> So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
There's surely a major difference between, on the one hand,
Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part of the Nazi
propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun, who, decades
after producing his major work, emerged as a pro-Fascist (although
not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is the reason for
the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease she generates:
unlike other collaborationist artists of the time, Nazi ideology is
central to her work, and her work is a product of that ideology. On
the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may dislike the
occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not define the work.
Ian Johnston
1906
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 6:15pm
Subject: Editors, cameramen
Mike, don't apologize - you're great! Just one note: Stanley Cortez
is the credited cinematographer on Ambersons, but he was
slow, and I was told by Dick Wilson that Welles used Harry
Stradling - pardon my Alzheimer's, I think that's the name - to
speed things up when he had to get to Rio to shoot the Carnival,
and then took Stradling with him to shoot It's All True - otherwise,
they'd still be in Rio.
There are a lot of mysteries in the Ambersons production reports
which Carringer doesn't address in his book. One is that while
Welles was shooting with his fast guy, he had Cortez working
with Dolores Costello on the library set all by himself! I think RC
also missed the fact that they shot the original ending on
Christmas eve when the studio was theoretically closed - just
snuck on the lot and shot it.
Certainly Cortez - and Welles - established the style of
Ambersons before the other guy was brought in. One of the
astonishing things about really good camermen is that they are
chameleons who can shoot it any way you want, including
imitating another cameraman's style.
As for editors, they are geniuses in their own right if they're good
- one of my best friends is Ed Marx, who edited It's All True after
Monte Hellman left. I sat for days on end watching him solve
problems and just write with the Avid. Basically, he might need
me to tell him where something went, or create a sequence, but
once I did that, he would do it and make it even better than I had
imagined with a flick of the wrist, or pigheadedly do it some other
way than I had said, which I had to admit was right (usually)
when I saw it.
Ed discovered, and articulated, in the Welles footage the
structural motif of "convergence" that Welles developed in
shooting the Decision to Go to Rio sequence, and used as well
in Finding the Body, Arriving in Rio (already shot before the bulk
of the film was shot in Fortaleza) and others. The great canard
about It's All True was that OW shot stuff that didn't cut together,
but all it took was a brilliant modern-day editor sitting down and
conversing with the footage to give the lie to that - what OW shot
not only cuts together, but cuts together beautifully.
I have a good head for that part of filmmaking, but I could no
more do what Ed does than I could fly. I supect that many real
filmmakers were like that, although OW was an exception; he
could light and cut once he got the hang of it. He could do just
about everything.
1907
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 6:21pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
--- iangjohnston wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
>
> wrote:
> > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> >
> > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> > PROBLEMATIC!
> >
> > "his best-known novels
> > > were published
> > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> TRIUMPH
> > > OF THE WILL."
> >
> > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
>
> There's surely a major difference between, on the
> one hand,
> Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part
> of the Nazi
> propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun,
> who, decades
> after producing his major work, emerged as a
> pro-Fascist (although
> not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is
> the reason for
> the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease
> she generates:
> unlike other collaborationist artists of the time,
> Nazi ideology is
> central to her work, and her work is a product of
> that ideology. On
> the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may
> dislike the
> occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not
> define the work.
>
> Ian Johnston
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
1908
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 7:44pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in Nazi imagery?
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
> Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
>
> He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
>
> --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
> >
> > wrote:
> > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > >
> > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > >
> > > "his best-known novels
> > > > were published
> > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > TRIUMPH
> > > > OF THE WILL."
> > >
> > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> >
> > There's surely a major difference between, on the
> > one hand,
> > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part
> > of the Nazi
> > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun,
> > who, decades
> > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > pro-Fascist (although
> > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is
> > the reason for
> > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease
> > she generates:
> > unlike other collaborationist artists of the time,
> > Nazi ideology is
> > central to her work, and her work is a product of
> > that ideology. On
> > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may
> > dislike the
> > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not
> > define the work.
> >
> > Ian Johnston
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
1909
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 7:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Semiotics is not a belief system.
and
href="http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/bride/g001/b_kennethanger.shtml"
target="_blank">Kenneth Anger
is quite a character.
--- George Robinson wrote:
> How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in
> Nazi imagery?
>
> Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
>
> --Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Ehrenstein"
> To:
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
> Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead
> at 101
>
>
> > Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
> >
> > He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> > reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
> >
> > --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David
> Ehrenstein
> > >
> > > wrote:
> > > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > > >
> > > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi,
> just
> > > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > > >
> > > > "his best-known novels
> > > > > were published
> > > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > > TRIUMPH
> > > > > OF THE WILL."
> > > >
> > > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> > >
> > > There's surely a major difference between, on
> the
> > > one hand,
> > > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as
> part
> > > of the Nazi
> > > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand,
> Hamsun,
> > > who, decades
> > > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > > pro-Fascist (although
> > > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This
> is
> > > the reason for
> > > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the
> unease
> > > she generates:
> > > unlike other collaborationist artists of the
> time,
> > > Nazi ideology is
> > > central to her work, and her work is a product
> of
> > > that ideology. On
> > > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we
> may
> > > dislike the
> > > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does
> not
> > > define the work.
> > >
> > > Ian Johnston
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> design software
> > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> > a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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1910
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:23pm
Subject: Re: Visual style
Mike Grost wrote
Fred Camper has
emphasized
again and again in his writings the greatness and artistic importance of visual
style. Visual style is still deeply neglected in much critical writing on
film. We need to do much more in this direction!
Bravo Mike. This is an extremely important point. Filmmaking is visual storytelling. The narrative and characters are expressed by the use of camera, sound, design, editing and all of the cinematic crafts available. Since the late 1980s I have interviewed hundreds of cinematographers, editors, sound craftspeople, and production designers for six books, American Cinematographer and CinemaEditor. Visual style is a very complex issue vital to understanding the medium. The visual style of a movie comes from the collaboration between the director and these crafts people. Investigation proves that some of the stylistic elements historically attributed to directors come from the collaboration with the specific crafts people they have worked with.
There are so many examples but I'll present one. Some time back Peter selected several films photographed by Gordon Willis by different directors to make the point that it was the director who should be attributed with the style. For my interview with Willis I screened every film and took notes. This question that leads off the interview was the sum of my findings of Willis' approach in every film he shoots regardless of director.
Q: Over the course of your long career which covers many different directors and film genres, several visaul characteristics become apparent. You often capture entire scenes in a single shot. Many times your camera shoots directly into a bright light source in the background and the characters in the foreground are dramatically modeled in shadow. You are known to work with extremely low light levels, and frequently position your camera directly in front of your subject as opposed to employing angles. Whey do you apply this philosophy of cinematography so consistently to your work?
Willis: It essentially comes out of the way one sees and things. The trick is to take a sophisticated idea and reduce it to the simplest possible terms so it's accessible, not only visually but philosophically, which I think is the most beautiful. But what happens is people usually take a simple idea, blow it up to a very sophisticated form, and get it all bent out of shape because they feel compelled to do something. Something within the frame has to hold an audience glued to the screen. If that's not happening, you can turn everything upside down, sideways - it's not going to work. So I just approach films that way and most of the directors I've worked for feel the same way.
Vinny
---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1911
From:
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:56pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Kenneth Anger is not a nazi. In fact he's a great filmmaker!
-----Original Message-----
From: George Robinson
Sent: Sep 11, 2003 12:44 PM
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in Nazi imagery?
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
> Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
>
> He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
>
> --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
> >
> > wrote:
> > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > >
> > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > >
> > > "his best-known novels
> > > > were published
> > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > TRIUMPH
> > > > OF THE WILL."
> > >
> > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> >
> > There's surely a major difference between, on the
> > one hand,
> > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part
> > of the Nazi
> > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun,
> > who, decades
> > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > pro-Fascist (although
> > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is
> > the reason for
> > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease
> > she generates:
> > unlike other collaborationist artists of the time,
> > Nazi ideology is
> > central to her work, and her work is a product of
> > that ideology. On
> > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may
> > dislike the
> > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not
> > define the work.
> >
> > Ian Johnston
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
1912
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:35pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Nice suit, though.
g
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
> Semiotics is not a belief system.
>
> and
> href="http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/bride/g001/b_kennethanger.shtml"
> target="_blank">Kenneth Anger
> is quite a character.
> --- George Robinson wrote:
> > How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in
> > Nazi imagery?
> >
> > Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
> >
> > --Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "David Ehrenstein"
> > To:
> > Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
> > Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead
> > at 101
> >
> >
> > > Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
> > >
> > > He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> > > reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
> > >
> > > --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > > > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David
> > Ehrenstein
> > > >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > > > >
> > > > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi,
> > just
> > > > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > > > >
> > > > > "his best-known novels
> > > > > > were published
> > > > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > > > TRIUMPH
> > > > > > OF THE WILL."
> > > > >
> > > > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> > > >
> > > > There's surely a major difference between, on
> > the
> > > > one hand,
> > > > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as
> > part
> > > > of the Nazi
> > > > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand,
> > Hamsun,
> > > > who, decades
> > > > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > > > pro-Fascist (although
> > > > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This
> > is
> > > > the reason for
> > > > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the
> > unease
> > > > she generates:
> > > > unlike other collaborationist artists of the
> > time,
> > > > Nazi ideology is
> > > > central to her work, and her work is a product
> > of
> > > > that ideology. On
> > > > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we
> > may
> > > > dislike the
> > > > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does
> > not
> > > > define the work.
> > > >
> > > > Ian Johnston
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > __________________________________
> > > Do you Yahoo!?
> > > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> > design software
> > > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> > >
> > >
> > > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> > > a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> > http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
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>
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>
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>
>
>
>
1913
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:14pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
> Re critical innovations, my rule no. 1 is that artists are smarter
> than critics. If Hitchcock and Rossellini were up to something new
in
> the '50s -- which I guess we agree they were
Do people agree? If people say there's nothing fundementally new in
criticism, it seems to imply there's nothing fundamentally new in art
(it's all been done before (and better)).
> -- then finding words
> for their activities inevitably called for new techniques of
> description. But good as Rohmer's criticism is (what I've read of
it
> in translation) it's of infinitely less value than his films.
>
> JTW
That reminds: the attitude of the critic to the director (respect or
condescension, etc.) is discussed in this passage by Raymond Durgat.
It's an interesting account of the history of film criticism in
England, which helps explains why the early auteur approach feels
different from most other critics, and why these critics seemed to be
offering something new. I can anticipate the response, however:
these are not substantive differences, only matters of taste or
sensitivity.
Also, I noticed that some of Durgnat's criticisms of Bazin and the
"Hitchcocko- Hawksiens" are similar to the criticisms of auteurism
that have been offered on this group.
----
Auteurs and Dream Factories
Questions of style bring us to the so-called auteur theory and the
debates about it that sprawl through French, British and American film
magazines. Our concern is not to discuss these controversies in all
their aspects, but to concentrate on those which concern the issue of
style and personal vision.
At the same time, it may be helpful to enlarge the field of
reference a little, so as to see how, behind the specific
disagreements, many assumptions have been operating which have
confused what only seems a `purely' aesthetic disagreement.
The auteur theory is the assumption that most films can be
interpreted in terms of their director's artistic personality just as
intensively as a novel can be interpreted in terms of its authors'. It
is obviously true of, for example, Dreyer and Bresson, so that much
discussion has cente`red on the question of how far, if am all, such
an approach is relevant or adequate to Hollywood directors.
We may perhaps usefully contrast limited and extended applications
of auteur theory. A limited theory was central to the tenets of whay
may may be called the '30's school' of British criticism, running from
Paul Rotha and John Grierson through to Richard Winningmon, Roger
Manvell and the Penguin Film Review (1946-49). Their auteurs were such
artists as Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Flaherty, Disney, Capra,
Carne, Welles, Sturges, Huston, Lean and so on. But side by side with
this appreciation of the artist, these critics generally had a special
interest in a film's reflection of social reality, and a special
antipathy to Hollywood `glamour' (which was tolerated, or not, but
generally felt to be antithetical to seriousness, with the occasional
exception, as for Garbo). Thus the documentary movement was felt to
beextremely meritorious, because it showed docks and post offices
and all the exterior paraphernalia of `social realism', whereas
Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich were felt to be more or less
meretricious (distinction between these and the Garbos was assumed
rather than explained). The critics were very sympathetic to the
auteur struggling to be individualistic and honest within of the
Hollywood system (which indeed attained a peak of rigidity in the
early 40's). Their lively awareness of the negative Hollywood system
constituted a powerful check toauteur theory. Another check came from
their advocacy of the documentary movement and its themes and
qualities. It was assumed that a director might make one or two good
films, or come up with a brilliant fluke then yield to pressures, or
stray after false gods, and be lost to serious filmmaking. Even the
films of obvious auteurs would be related to general aesthetic
directives or social issues with little exegesis and less close
linking with their creators' artistic personalities. All this
constituted a limited form of auteur theory.
A new spirit appeared when a group of Oxford undergraduates. notably
Gavin Lambert, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, founded their
magazine Sequence (1948-52) which, without reacting against the older
critics, moved a little way towards a less earnest tone, and to more
probing exegeses, after the model of the undergraduate English essay.
Lindsay Anderson's enthusiasm for Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(1949) and Gavin for Jean Cocteau signalled an increase in interest in
what Sequence called `the poetic vision', as against the documentary
and realist virtues, which were in no way decried. Nonetheless Richard
Winnington, who had initially encouraged these young critics,
repudiated them just before his death, for having regressed to a
precious aestheticism.
Gavin Lambert, aided by the Sequence team, had by then become an
editor of Sight and Sound and of its sister journal, The Monthly Film
Bulletin, which had fallen into a dismal academicism. Lambert and Ken
Tynan, who contributed excellent appreciations of gangster films and
Tom and Jerry cartoons, looked like continuation of appreciative
criticism that had been so positive a factor of Sequence. But Lambert
and Tynan left, and the magazine began a period of slow stagnation,
all the more marked by contrast to the convulsive transformations of
French criticism. It maintained a sufficiently authoritative tone to
be accepted both here and abroad as `the' organ of English
intellectual opinion, which is why we pay attention to it here.
.The range of auteurs was scarcely widened from that which they had
inherited from the '30's school'. Indeed, by the late 50's, John
Grierson reproached the magazine for having neglected the discovery of
new talent (it promptly discovered Richard Quine, and then left
Hollywod at that for the next few years).
Condescension
While the old established auteurs were treated with consistent
respect, and an uncritical adulation for Ford prefigured the excesses
of extended auteur theory, there was a group of directors who were
held to have had their time as auteurs, but to have lapsed into the
Hollywood ruck. These included Fritz Lang, King Vidor and Alfred
Hitchcok (auteurs for some of their pre-war films), Frank Capra (for
his `socially conscious comedies of the 30's), Minnelli (for his
flirtatation with populism and for his musicals). Red River (1948) was
the last Hawks film to have an enthusiastic review. Nicholas Ray,
Robert Wise, Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey earned short-lived
reputations for early films (They, Live by Night, The Set- Up, The
Naked City and The Dividing Line)
I v.r) which were in accepted traditions, but were dismissed when they
grouped for new idioms and attitudes. Veterans like Raould Walsh and
Allan Dwari were as unnoticed as a relative newcomer like Otto
Preminger, and none of the new directors to emerge in the 1950's
provoked enthusiasm comparable to the old auteurs. Thus Richard
Brooks, Sam Fuller, Elia Kazan, Frank Tashlin and Budd Boetticher
were scarcely distinguished from the Hollywood `ruck.'
Interest in `social realism' itself underwent a change. In
theory, at
least, a special importance was attached to `social consciousness'
whether documentary or neo-realistic in type, or inclining more to the
`poetic vision,' like Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). A
tense
cynicism was accepted, but only within certain limits of tone and
topic. Thus Preston Sturges' edgy comedies were securely within the
pale, whereas Billy Wilder's aroused a faint distaste. The
`Raymond
Chandler' mood was welcomed for its lyrical astringency, but there
seemed to be an increasing deprecation or resentment of those films
which brought this astringent, questioning mood into relation to
social issues, or with the American social climate as a whole, notably
Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953). The idyllic, `Ford' Western was
still enjoyed, but not the new bitter tone of Sam Fuller's Run of the
Arrow (1957) or Anthony Mann's Man of the West (1958). Now Richard
Winnington's denunciation, which at the time had seemed excessive,
began to justify itself as a shrewd insight. Films such as Richard
Brooks' The Blackboard Jungle (1955) or Nicholas Ray's Rebel
Without a
Cause (1955) were damned with faint praise. Lindsay Anderson denounced
Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront as
"implicity, if unconsciously, Fascist ... hopeless, savagely
ironic…
fundamentally contemptuous ... without either grace, joy or
love,' but
his vehemence was, in a way, more worthy a response than the
supercilious shrug which greeted many equally `concerned' American
films. Unusually gracious was P.H.'s description of Nunally
Johnson's
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955) as `uneasily fascinating.'
But whether such films were condemned, tolerated, or adduced as
evidence of moral decay, their auteurs were credited with little
ability to think about, or make any interesting comment on, either the
topics in particular, or human nature in general. They were
spiritually depersonalized, they were merely `Hollywood', and the word
`Hollywood' was used with a quiet, but firm, dismissiveness.
Hollywood
had slickness, yes, but intelligence, never. The only exegeses of such
films was destructive; Penelope Houston attempted to prove Stanley
Kramer's On the Beach (1959) made fallout glamorous.
Gradually this derisive approach extended even to obvious auteurs.
The first Bergman film to be shown here, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) was
denounced as a neurotic throwback to the tricks of Germanic
expressionism. Even after Bergman's increasing celebrity had modified
this attitude, Peter John Dyer saw in The Virgin Spring only
`consulting-room horrors ... exhibitionism ... at its most
pathological'. The same article dismissed Visconti too; his Rocco and
his Brothers (1960) was `the boldest example of fraudu1ent conversin
since Ossessione'. It displayed `self-indulgence' (a trait which this
school of criticism was quick to notice, perhaps because it bears so
close a resemblance to self-expression), and Eric Rhode, writing about
Visconti's La Terra Trema, concurred in this hypochondriac approach to
the auteur: `There is something wrong somewhere (context implies: with
Visconti's emotional health) `when a nobleman makes a film entirely
about Sicilian fishermen' (presunably we should each keep to our own
class?). To the first Bunuel film to reach this country for several
years, La Mort En Ce Jardin (1956), Dyer conceded a 'a workable
script' and some interesting ingredients, but concluded 'What is
missing is the barest competence in direction.'
Whatever one's opinion of these films may be (mine is that only the
last three are anywhere near `materspieces') it was difficult
not to
be startled by the contrast between the between the brutal, summary
tone adopted by the English magazine, and the thoughtful, complex
exegeses characteristic of the wide variety of continental approaches.
The Sight and Sound team seemed unreflexively to identify the most
concerned and vital directors with an `unhealthy' American
climate
while castigating distinguished European artists for an equally
unhealthy individualism. In England only `Free Criticism'
(intimately
connected with the magazine itself) earned more than a token
appreciation.
What seemed an attitude of complacent contempt set the tone for
bitterness with which Sight and Sound was attacked by the younger
English critics, notably the `new wave' of undergraduates who were
associated first with the Liberal magazine Oxford Opinion and later
with Movie, and who were generally felt to be English proponents of
auteur approach. (Note: Not at all as rigid as that of Cahiers in
theory, though most of their writing centred round auteurs.)
The main dispute was not whether a film had to be by an auteur in
order to merit critical opinion, but, which directors were the
auteurs. The younger critics accepted most of the orthodox
`elect,'
and the dispute centred largely on the status of directors whom Sight
and Sound had consigned to the Hollywood `ruck'. The Movie critics
accorded particularly high places in their canon to the post-war films
of Hitchcock, Hawks, Preminger and Ray. In America, Andrew Sarris, the
most thorough Anglo-Saxon exponent of auteur theory, went on to
postulate as auteurs some fifty Hollywood directors, thus, if not
actually denying, at least sharply diminishing, the significance
traditional criticisms of the Hollywood system. In this respect Movie
and Sarris concurred with the `second generation' (ca 1954-58) of
critics of Cahiers du Cinema. These critics, dubbed the
'Hitchcocko-Hawksiens', included such Nouvelle Vague directors-to-be
as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques
Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. Thus, by the time the controversy came to
England, they were possessed of immense prestige, for their stylistic
and thematic innovations as for their international success.
The supposed indebtedness of the younger British critics to Cahiers du
Cinema gave rise to many a merry jest, though I doubt whether Cahiers
was more to them than a signpost to some directors, and, otherwise, a
flag to rally round. There was certainly little emulation of its
approach or thought. Movie offered, instead of Cahiers'
characteristically `philosophic' approach to style (of which more
later), something between 'exegesis' and `functional analysis'.
Its
critics often restricted themselves to clarifying the relations of
stylistic details to the whole, and they generally refrained from
judging the quality of the view of life in the films of their
favourites. Ian Cameron wrote, coat-trailingly, 'To judge a film on
anything other than its style is to set up the critics' own views on
matters outside the cinema against those of its maker. This is gross
impertinence. This, surely excessive, limitation on the scope of
criticism become more understandable when one bears in mind the
cavalier dismissal which had become the rule in Sight and Sound. The
younger critics, while capable of summary writing-off, wrote at length
only about the films they had enjoyed.
There can be little doubt that this critical line, however
controvsersial in detail, had the excellent result of extending
critical interest and respect to the films of many interesting
directors, who for decades had been relegated to the outer darkness.
For as we have seen Sight and Sound had become rather more rigorous in
its disdain of Hollywood than the 30's school had been. And incapable
of extended appreciative exegesis, restricting itself to, not
interpreting, but 'evaluating', a film in a rather piecemeal way (the
acting was 'sensitive', the direction was 'imaginative', the film a
'poetic vision' and so on). Indeed Movie and Film both showed that
many criticisms were virtually paraphrases of criticisms by *other*
members of the team of *other* films-identical phrases recurred, no
'specific' points were made. The equivalent French magazines had never
adopted such 'negativity'. (Note: Not, at least, on aesthetic
grounds. L'Ecran Francais, while dominated by French Stalinists, had
embarked on a systematic denigration of Hollywood films, but the
movies there were political, rather than 'supercilious'. The Sight and
Sound attitude was of course helped by a confluence of two attitudes:
a general sympathy for the left, and the cultured English disdain for
vulgar Americana.) From 1928 to 1931, and again from 1945 to 1950, La
Revue du Cinema, under the editorship of Jean-George Auriol, was
devoting major reviews to such films as Dassin's Brute Force (1947)
Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) and William Dieterle's Love Letter
(1945). (Note: During its earlier period, it had an English
equivalent in Close-Up, which however, was much less interested in
American films.) There was nothing specifically new, youthful or
'rebellious' about Cahiers' responsiveness towards American
films.
Indeed, the majority of French magazines were also exploring Hollywood
extensively. Positif (founded 1952), with its Marxist and Surrealist
tendencies, soon asserted its predilection for, notably, Robert Wise,
Richard Brooks, John Huston and Frank Tashlin. And Henri Agel, doyen
of the Roman Catholic school of film criticism, had also been paying
serious attention to such refreshingly unexpected films as Hawks'
Monkey Business and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun.
Indeed, it is possible to regard the Cahiers version of the extended
auteur theory as a `dogmatized' degradation of this general
tradition.
To understand this one must refer briefly to the figure of Cahiers'
`senior wrangler' Bazin.
Bazin was a left-wing Catholic, completely unpuritanical,
broad-minded and generous in his attitudes to the cinema. With his
passionate responsiveness to the cinema as an authentic 'humanism', as
an essentially `impure' art, went a sensitivity to the cinema
as a
culture whose nuances and sensitivities could be as non-literary, as
specifically cinematic, as those of music were specifically musical.
He had two particular interests which were to be over-developed by
younger writers. There was his concern with the philosophical
implications of stylistic nuance, implications which he expressed in
terms bordering on the metaphysical. This was partly a natural result
of his Catholicsm, partly because he often wrote as if style expressed
the auteur's attitude to the character's experiences (whereas I
would
argue that it more often expresses nuances in these experiences)
Schematically rather than accurately, one may say that Bazin the
director, and the director with a very kindly God blowing a kind of
spiritual life into his subject-matter, much as God breathes life into
Adam. A very kindly God, but also a rather vague one. For Bazin, in
his very kindness, often dissolved the specific personal or social
issues of a film into a spiritual generalization, rather after this
pattern : 'Of course, Bicycle Thieves is, 'about' this workman in this
society. But this predicament is only an image for something deeper:
the universal human predicament…'
The, not so much flaws, as limitations, of such an approach must be
evident. Soon, no film is felt to be 'about' its subject-matter. Its
specificity, concreteness, and consequently its richness of detail,
dissolve into a sort of
spiritual soup, which itself makes nonsense of all the differences
between one culture and another, one person and another, one film and
another. Without some sort of specificity through which any
'universality' can be attained, as a sort of none-too-important
'bonus', 'art' sinks back into something like
religious-generalization-in-individualistic-metaphor. And much of
Bazin's criticism is quite different from exegesis. It is about
the
relationship of an auteur-God to his Creation. Bazin's 'collected
works read like one long stream of theological rumination, all the
more amiable, perhaps, for centring on man rather than God. They
sometimes sound like tentative prologomena to "Honest to
God," and,
however full of solipsisms, have, not only their own cinematographic
interest, but a quite theological tension and flow.
Bazin certainly makes the point that in the films of a genuine auteur
every detail can be taken as 'meant', and is neither accidental nor
'pure form'; and also that style 'is' content.
But some of Bazin's successors in Cahiers made of his approach a
Procrustean bed. They sometimes denied that an auteur's films could
validly be related to anything other than its creator's attitudes.
Once they accepted a director as an auteur (and only directors were
auteurs), then he could be no more deposed, or fall below himself than
God. The auteur had a quality of 'efficacious grace' that enabled him
to score repeated triumphs, down to the minutest detail, over the
Hollywood system. If an auteur's film was dramatically trite and
boring, they shifted their interest to its 'allegorical' level. Or
they felt that the auteur had, if not deliberately chosen, at least
seized upon so `empty' a subject, so as to give carte blanche
to his
nuance-laden style, through which the critic could apprehend, by
camera movement or other subtle means of stimulating reflection, the
`spiritual generality' of which the film was an illustration. Or,
again: only so 'banal' a subject could enable style to be its own
subject-mmater; so that a trite film could be talked about in a jargon
verging on that used of abstract painting (surprisingly, it never did
more than on it, perhaps because the critics' real interest iterest
was philosophical.) They occasionally argued that poor technical
quality (e.g., of back projection) showed a director was interested
only in the `deep' (allegoral, philosophical) aspects of his
plot. Or
he might be speaking to those connoisseurs who knew how to 'decode'
the inner content of his films.
In itself, none of these principles is far-fetched or absurd. They
are used every day in criticisms of the other arts. The much ridiculed
idea of auteurs speaking through an esoteric symbolism is relevant in
certain films, notably, of course, those which the Cahiers went on to
make. The idea of offering 'special' meanings to one's amis
inconnus
is common in all the arts, and quite compatible with the idea of the
work of art communicating before it is understood. The Idea of
'meaning through style' is very fruitful in the case of, for example,
Max Ophuls or Joseph von Sternberg. This essay has advocated virtually
this approach to the films of Bresson and Dreyer, by suggesting that
the spectator understands them best when he `plays the game'
of
assuming that every detail in a film is `meant.'
But the application of these principles was often disquieting. What
might seem that most sympathetic of critical aberrations, the
`delerium' of interpretation,' soon revealed itself as
not at all
generous. For it was used out the film's differences from the
critic's
own sensibility. Thus Ophuls, Hitchcock and Bunuel were all mashed to
crypto-neo-Platonic-Catholics-despite-themselves. And Bazin's own
indifference to social significance hardened among his followers into
something like resentment of it, with the implication that this aspect
of a film could be only 'obvious' or `banal', `a party
line', as it
were. Thus a concentration on 'the philosophy of style' too often
went
with quick evasions or dismissals of a a film's literary or
dramatic
components. A cabbalistic subtlety was attributed to films which
showed no other sign of deep thought, or of being more than
entertainments of moderate competence. Since the `esoteric' meanings
weren't very profound either, there seemed neither a prima facie case,
nor a reward, for all this complicated decoding. Indeed, many of the
directors celebrated had made it amply clear that they were very
rarely in complete control of their films, that they made many
potboilers for `alimentary' reasons, that em promises, concessions,
unwanted scripts and stars, were forced upon them.
One willingly grants `total meaning' to Bresson and Dreyer because
they give ample evidence, internal and external to their films, of
having achieved their extraordinary degree of control. But it isn't a
dogmatic assumption made before every film, nor an assertion that
every artist has equal control over his own experience, his medium,
mod his creative circumstances.
The attribution of `secret meanings' to otherwise unremarkable
craftsmen looked suspiciously like (a) a way of treating films as
objects troeves, rather than as part of a communicating situation (so
distorting them), and (b) a way of enjoying the Hollywood film while
giving it an apparent, but basically distortive, congruence to `high
cultural' ideas about authors and creative personalities.
For all this, it would be misleading to overlook the more 'moderate'
positions always characteristic of the best writing in Cahiers. It
would be most inaccurate to equate French criticism as a whole with
Cahiers, or Cahiers as a whole with all that was most extreme and
limited in Cahiers. Unfortunately, this last was taken virtually
granted throughout the auteur controversy in Britain, largely as a
result of Sight and Sound's own, defensive reflex. Sarcastic as its of
dismissals of Bergman, Visconti, Losey, Ray et al. had been, the
magazine felt wronged when attacked itself, in exactly similar terms
by the rising generation, and replied in terms which seemed to aim
less at a genuine understanding of the issues at stake than at a
crushing polemical victory. Thus Penelope Houston and Richard Rood
both chose to identify French criticism as a whole with the extrenw
trend in Cahiers. They seized on its repudiation of social
significance. and on its acceptance of style as its own
subject-matter, so as to contrast their own `humanism' with the
'non-humanist aestheticism' which Roud presented as The French Line.
Penelope Houston even went on to equate the younger English critics
with something like a `hoodlum' view of life. `To the generation which
has grown up during the last few years, art is seen as something for
kicks; films which stab at the nerves and emotions; jazz and the
excitements surrounding it.... Violence on the screen is accepted as a
stimulant....' Not surprisingly, the younger critics disliked being
called kicks-crazy when all they were asking for was for more
directors to be treated with critical respect and for more attention
to be paid to subtleties of style.
The Sight and Sound team proposed two solutions to the `style v.
content' issue. Miss Houston settled matters peremptorily: `Cinema is
about human relationships, not about spatial relationships.' But this
rules out the possibility, surely obvious, since the cinema is a
visual medium, that spatial relationships might themselves be
metaphors for human relationships. Richard Roud's conclusion seemed
more conciliatory. `We would gain ... by adopting. .. the firm belief
that form is at least as important as content.' But the persisting
separation of form and content which `as important as' implies,
reveals its consequences when Roud, commenting on the spatial
relationships in L'Avventura, sees its visual qualities as only `an
additional, non-representative element for our pleasure; a formal
choreography of movements which accompanies the films, providing a non
conceptual figure in the carpet'. Yet this formulation itself falls
into precisely that 'non-humanist aestheticism' so derided in Cahiers:
`A film's style is not about human relationships, but about its
style.'
To criticize this non-response to the eloquent visuals of L'Avvenura
is in no way to deny the possibilities of visual abstraction in films,
nor of a possible layer in L'Avventura itself, of aesthetic interest
for its own sake (a layer to which I would myself attach little
'cultural' importance). But what is curious is the difficulty in
seeing that the spatial relationships might be connected with the
story.
Also worth remarking is the hardening attitude towards the auteur.
The 30's school of social awareness of the Hollywood `system' went
with a certain sympathy for the artist who was trapped within it;
Sight and Sound made little or no attempt to distinguish, in the
current films of Hitchcock, Lang, Losey, Hawks, and so on, anything
that wasn't 'system'. The extended auteur theory, on the other hand,
makes little no allowance for the `imposed' aspects of a film. It is
content to 'decode' meanings and experiences from cryptic hints,
imaginary or real, and, in so doing, to accept, for the full emotional
picture of an aperience or attitude, a rather cerebral `notation'. No
distinction is made, or felt, or respected, between the `sign' for an
experience from the 'symbol' for it. But before we look at some
consequences of this non-distinction, its origins can perhaps be
clarified.
The Sight and Sound critics were heirs to an upper-middle-class
climate of cultural habit and opinion exemplified, at its best, by the
novels of E. M. Forster, at its most mediocre, by the complacent
pessimism of the remarks on the popular cinema by Palinurus in The
Unquiet Grave, and, at its least pleasant, by disdainful assumpions of
superiority over, and censorious defensiveness towards, the 'popular'.
They brought to the task of film criticism a philosophical
infrastructure which, felt rather than stated, and certainly never
examined, included such axioms as that the civilized few must proam
the humanism of a minority art-culture against an unthinking and
vaguely unpleasant world, which was exemplified by, variously, "the
moguls', the `mass media', the `undiscriminating public' or an
undefined, sensed `ruck' of inferiority. Further, since art is a
`sensitive individualism', then if a film isn't by an artist with an
obviously sensitive feel for the moods and nuances of human
relationships, i.e., it is probably an insensitive, impersonal film;
i.e. it is a product of the `ruck', unthinking, a specious substitute,
and therefore unpleasant.
Now, these nuances are sensed only when expressed by literary and
dramatic elements (because in Britain literature and the theatre are
facets of general culture, whereas the appreciation of the visual
arts' is more specialized), and furthermore the critic can recognize
quality and sensitivity 'intuitively'. He brings no ideological nor
intellectual dogma to a film, he 'senses' whether it is true or not to
his own experience of life. If there isn't this immediate
'recognition' effect the film is probably untrue, therefore
unthinking, therefore cheap and contemptible, like Kazan's, Bergman's,
or Visconti's; it has nothin to offer.
Indeed, under the pressure of these assumptions, the stress on,
`social consciousness' steadily receded throughout the 50's. Mere
'social realism' took second place to 'sensitive nuance', lack of
which relegated, for example, John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages
(1961), to the untrue-unthinking-contemptible category. (Note: Hence
in the mid-50's Definition's young critics, taking their inspiration
from the post-Suez New Left, attempted to reverse this trend,
reproaching Sight and Sound for making vaguely progressive noises
while rejecting all ideological interests. For this criticism Miss
Houston denounced them as `cultural gauleiters'. Lindsay Anderson,
whose discovery of Ford in Sequence days had contributed to the
eclipse of 'social consciousness', had, by the late 50's, become a
champion of the New Left, and, enjoying prestige in both camps, was
spared both their broadsides. He has now decided that he was a
'romantic' all along.)
However, this whole tradition had begun to lose hold on the younger
critics. For them, the 'sensitive nuances' of relationships were only
parts of human relationships, which were primarily determined by
strong, basic drives and attitudes. Marxism, psychoanalysis,
sociology, the war, the new social mobility, a general cultural
requestioning, had shifted attention from 'nuances' to 'fundamentals'.
Thus the 'sensitive nuance', though still a factor, had ceased to be
the touchstone for a film's quality. From this view, E. M. Forster's
novel A Passage to India, without in any way disputing its positive
qualities, is uncongenial, in so far as it tends to present racial
tensions, sexuality, national cultures, religious prejudices, and so
on, in terms of 'nuances', rather than as strong, driving, insistent
urges, and so we never get a clear, 'dynamic' view of their play and
interplay. On the other hand, Nicholas Ray's film Rebel Without, a
Cause may be 'stylized', it may fall into rhetoric, it may be rather
less sensitive in its study of mood and nuance than E. M. Forster's
novel. But it is likely to be more congenial to those who see life in
trims of 'basic' drives and their intricate relationships. For its
(relative) lack of sensitivity, its rhetoric, its concessions to
melodrama, are compensated for by the central place which it allots to
basic tensions and their interaction: the relationships of mother,
father and son (Freud), its complacent evasions (middle-class
culture), the insidhous blend of toughness and conformism in
peer-group morality, which the hero gradually renounces as he comes to
equate virility with tenderness (to the heroine) and moral
responsibility (he adopts A paternal role to another teenager). Thus
he is freed from the state of alienation and nihilism whose cultural
origins are mediated through such lyricized symbols as the
planetarium, the ruined house and so on.
This contrast between the limitations of E. M. Forster's novel and
the structure of Ray's film is meant only to stress that the film has
a quite direct and valid appeal to a new common kind of sensibility.
But it is also arguable that the 'resonance' of these basic clich6s
shakes Ray's a more sensitive and disturbing film than a study which,
though more 'sensitive' ('truthful to conscious experience'), in a
Forsterian way, has little or nothing to say on this more 'dynamic'
level.'
The assumption that the critic is one of the cultured few who must
defend his sensitivity against mass crudity has also undergone
alteration. The younger critics have grown up with the mass
media-films, comics, records and so on. They are used to picking their
way through them, and for them the 'superficial' film is in no way a
'specious' substitute for an 'authentic' work of art; it is a 'fun'
film that one sees once and enjoys, more or less: 'superficial'
doesn't in imply 'contemptible'. There are films to which one returns
again and again, but no Manichean polarity as between the 'elect' and
the 'philistine'. Nor is a film that criticizes society felt to be
ipso facto more 'salutary' or true or brave than a film that accepts
it.
There seems also to be a difference between the very quick and total
dismissals characteristic of the 'sensitive nuance' school, and the
perhaps more cerebral, but also more thoughtful and adaptable,
responses of the younger critics. For the absence of 'dogma' on which
the `sensitive nuance' school prides itself is not without its
narrowmindedness. After all, one may be very sensitive to the sorts of
nuance that are relevant to the feeling-tones of upper-middle-class
English liberalism (and its currently favourite 'exoticisms', notably,
American sophisticated comedy of the 30's, Kurosawa, Ford Westerns,
Satyajit Ray's India, Raymond Chandler); and yet be very insensitive
to anything uncongenial to those feeling-tones. A film which is
immediately `plausible' to one's sensibility may be far less accurate
in its picture of alien sensibilities, and far less rich in insights,
than a film which one learns, almost against one's will, to trust. To
take only one example: Lindsay Anderson attacked Kazan's On the
Waterfront for its `Fascism', using as his implicit standard of
comparison either the attitudes of London dockers towards trade-union
solidarity or nebulous notions that working-class solidarity must be
the same all over the world. Yet Daniel Bell's account of the specific
labour disputes on which Kazan's film is based convincingly vindicates
it against most of Anderson's criticisms.
The issue is not so much one of the critic's knowledge of the world,
as of the extent to which he is willing to try to lend himself to a
film, on its own terms, before he decides whether to accept or reject
it as a whole or in part. The younger critics have the advantage in
that, adapted as they are to a time of cultural fluidity and change,
they often find more relevance to their own problems in American or
foreign films than they do in English tradition. In the same way,
Belmondo in Godard's A Bout de Souffle turns, not as his father might
have done to his age, to the novels of Gide, but to a photograph of
Humphrey Bogart (who is of course an 'intellectual's' star). This very
flexibility tends to go with a more 'cerebral' approach, an acceptance
of 'sign' for 'symbol', of 'idea' for 'experience'. One may regret, as
I do, that so many young critics reacted against a too-arrogant
attitude towards the artist's vision of life into a refusal to
criticize it, an opposite, if more amiable, excess. Yet for critics to
think of themselves as artists' friends and accomplices is surely more
responsive and constructive, a better beginning for eventual
evaluation, than the assumption that a critic can judge works of art
'off the cuff', from some stratospheric impartiality of his own.
(Note: In the event of course the brutal tone had to be at least
partly abandoned in the face, not only of European critical attitudes,
and of the younger criticism here, but of the extent to which the
English 'literary' and intelligent public became interested in films.
The subsequent course of Sight and Sound was erratic. There were a few
ventures into criticism in which philosophical terms were used freely,
and sometimes incoherently, in an effort to sound as profound as Bazin
was thought to be. The tone (exemplified by Rhode's feeling that
Visconti must be mentally sick to be interested in the proletariat)
lacked Bazin's generosity, and continued what was in the old, hostile
complacency. At the same time, Pauline Kael was 'importer' from
America to 'debunk' various sorts of intellectualizing about movies of
(one of her articles is cited later).
These destructive rearguard actions were followed by a general
elevation of Hawks, Ray, Mann, Losey and others to the realms of
critical goodwill, an elevation not extended to those auteurs who
hadn't been forcefully pushed into the limelight by the younger
generation. The influence of younger or French critics was never
acknowledged.
There was a notable change in the attitude to 'pulp' movies. Thus is
the magazine's pseudonymous columnist, Arkadin (reputedly John Russell
Taylor) asked, 'Why don't we take horror films more seriously - well,
not seriously seriously,' as if unaware that the rest of the world had
been taking them seriously for some years. Since then the floodgates
have opened and for the last two years the magazine has been dabbling
in an ostentatiously hedonistic acceptance of, for example, Don
Sharp's The Face of Fu Manchu. One of the excellences which T.M.
advances as evidence of this being 'a really good film' (my italics)
is that 'when a sinister hand coils round the edge of her door, Karin
Dor doesn't just scream, she very commendably slams the door on it'.
John Russell Taylor is also staggered by such creativity: 'when the
young heroine is threatened by a sinister oriental hand sliding round
her living-room door with a missive, she wastes no time in helpless
wails, but smartly slams the door on it...'
It's hard to believe that people of these critics' culture and
intelligence could have been so impressed by such 'innovations' (which
aren't), if they weren't forcing themselves to 'be jolly'. Yet the
whole point of appreciating a good film which happens to be couched in
the idiom of a pulp thriller is that you don't lower your normal
standards an inch, you're no more indulgent to Bond than you have been
to Liberace or Rin-Tin-Tin. The partial volte-face from critical
'superiority' to uncritical acquiescence is more than an example of
the aestehtic upsets generated by the current confluence of 'high
culture' and popular art. Tnervous strivings to keep up with
'festival opinion' on one hand and high camp on the other are the
vacillations of a stiffly classbound 'liberalism' in a cosmopolitan
world.)
The difference, in the end,less between `humanists' and `aesthetes',
than between reviewers who feel it their job to taste and judge, and
critics who try to understand and explore.
At any rate, it is not so much the French influence as the importance
traditionally attached to a `personal vision' in art, that has proked
the younger generation to feel particularly concerned to show that,
for example, Hawks and Preminger are each valuable for their qualities
of personal vision and style. But I should like here to question the
centrality of this issue, and to reassert an attitude more that of La
Revue du Cinema.
....
There's much more, but this is probably alreaedy too much for most!
1914
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:19pm
Subject: Re: Re: Return of the Repressed
Glad you reprinted that here. Ray was a great critic
and a superb literary stylist.
--- Paul Gallagher wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson"
> wrote:
>
> > Re critical innovations, my rule no. 1 is that
> artists are smarter
> > than critics. If Hitchcock and Rossellini were up
> to something new
> in
> > the '50s -- which I guess we agree they were
>
> Do people agree? If people say there's nothing
> fundementally new in
> criticism, it seems to imply there's nothing
> fundamentally new in art
> (it's all been done before (and better)).
>
> > -- then finding words
> > for their activities inevitably called for new
> techniques of
> > description. But good as Rohmer's criticism is
> (what I've read of
> it
> > in translation) it's of infinitely less value than
> his films.
> >
> > JTW
>
> That reminds: the attitude of the critic to the
> director (respect or
> condescension, etc.) is discussed in this passage by
> Raymond Durgat.
> It's an interesting account of the history of film
> criticism in
> England, which helps explains why the early auteur
> approach feels
> different from most other critics, and why these
> critics seemed to be
> offering something new. I can anticipate the
> response, however:
> these are not substantive differences, only matters
> of taste or
> sensitivity.
>
> Also, I noticed that some of Durgnat's criticisms of
> Bazin and the
> "Hitchcocko- Hawksiens" are similar to the
> criticisms of auteurism
> that have been offered on this group.
> ----
>
>
> Auteurs and Dream Factories
>
> Questions of style bring us to the so-called auteur
> theory and the
> debates about it that sprawl through French, British
> and American film
> magazines. Our concern is not to discuss these
> controversies in all
> their aspects, but to concentrate on those which
> concern the issue of
> style and personal vision.
> At the same time, it may be helpful to enlarge the
> field of
> reference a little, so as to see how, behind the
> specific
> disagreements, many assumptions have been operating
> which have
> confused what only seems a `purely' aesthetic
> disagreement.
> The auteur theory is the assumption that most
> films can be
> interpreted in terms of their director's artistic
> personality just as
> intensively as a novel can be interpreted in terms
> of its authors'. It
> is obviously true of, for example, Dreyer and
> Bresson, so that much
> discussion has cente`red on the question of how far,
> if am all, such
> an approach is relevant or adequate to Hollywood
> directors.
> We may perhaps usefully contrast limited and
> extended applications
> of auteur theory. A limited theory was central to
> the tenets of whay
> may may be called the '30's school' of British
> criticism, running from
> Paul Rotha and John Grierson through to Richard
> Winningmon, Roger
> Manvell and the Penguin Film Review (1946-49). Their
> auteurs were such
> artists as Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Flaherty,
> Disney, Capra,
> Carne, Welles, Sturges, Huston, Lean and so on. But
> side by side with
> this appreciation of the artist, these critics
> generally had a special
> interest in a film's reflection of social reality,
> and a special
> antipathy to Hollywood `glamour' (which was
> tolerated, or not, but
> generally felt to be antithetical to seriousness,
> with the occasional
> exception, as for Garbo). Thus the documentary
> movement was felt to
> beextremely meritorious, because it showed docks and
> post offices
> and all the exterior paraphernalia of `social
> realism', whereas
> Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich were felt to
> be more or less
> meretricious (distinction between these and the
> Garbos was assumed
> rather than explained). The critics were very
> sympathetic to the
> auteur struggling to be individualistic and honest
> within of the
> Hollywood system (which indeed attained a peak of
> rigidity in the
> early 40's). Their lively awareness of the negative
> Hollywood system
> constituted a powerful check toauteur theory.
> Another check came from
> their advocacy of the documentary movement and its
> themes and
> qualities. It was assumed that a director might make
> one or two good
> films, or come up with a brilliant fluke then yield
> to pressures, or
> stray after false gods, and be lost to serious
> filmmaking. Even the
> films of obvious auteurs would be related to general
> aesthetic
> directives or social issues with little exegesis and
> less close
> linking with their creators' artistic personalities.
> All this
> constituted a limited form of auteur theory.
> A new spirit appeared when a group of Oxford
> undergraduates. notably
> Gavin Lambert, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson,
> founded their
> magazine Sequence (1948-52) which, without reacting
> against the older
> critics, moved a little way towards a less earnest
> tone, and to more
> probing exegeses, after the model of the
> undergraduate English essay.
> Lindsay Anderson's enthusiasm for Ford's She Wore a
> Yellow Ribbon
> (1949) and Gavin for Jean Cocteau signalled an
> increase in interest in
> what Sequence called `the poetic vision', as against
> the documentary
> and realist virtues, which were in no way decried.
> Nonetheless Richard
> Winnington, who had initially encouraged these young
> critics,
> repudiated them just before his death, for having
> regressed to a
> precious aestheticism.
> Gavin Lambert, aided by the Sequence team, had by
> then become an
> editor of Sight and Sound and of its sister journal,
> The Monthly Film
> Bulletin, which had fallen into a dismal
> academicism. Lambert and Ken
> Tynan, who contributed excellent appreciations of
> gangster films and
> Tom and Jerry cartoons, looked like continuation of
> appreciative
> criticism that had been so positive a factor of
> Sequence. But Lambert
> and Tynan left, and the magazine began a period of
> slow stagnation,
> all the more marked by contrast to the convulsive
> transformations of
> French criticism. It maintained a sufficiently
> authoritative tone to
> be accepted both here and abroad as `the' organ of
> English
> intellectual opinion, which is why we pay attention
> to it here.
>
> .The range of auteurs was scarcely widened from that
> which they had
> inherited from the '30's school'. Indeed, by the
> late 50's, John
> Grierson reproached the magazine for having
> neglected the discovery of
> new talent (it promptly discovered Richard Quine,
> and then left
> Hollywod at that for the next few years).
> Condescension
>
> While the old established auteurs were treated with
> consistent
> respect, and an uncritical adulation for Ford
> prefigured the excesses
> of extended auteur theory, there was a group of
> directors
=== message truncated ===
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1915
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:40pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein wrote:
> Glad you reprinted that here. Ray was a great critic
> and a superb literary stylist.
He was a wonderful writer!
"Auteurs and Dream Factories" originally appeared in a 1965 issue of
Films and Filming, and it was reprinted in "Durgnat on Film" and
"Films and Feelings."
I didn't realize the formatting of the text would be so bad! I've been
posting messages on the web
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/post).
I think I should format the text on my own before posting.
Paul
1916
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 11:31pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
Here's a speech by Roger Leenhardt that might complement Durgnat's
article. Another view on how film criticism had changed.
AMBIGUITY OF THE CINEMA
Cahiers du Cinema No. 100
(The following is a speech delivered by Roger Leenhardt at the
19th Congress of Philosophical Societies of the French Language,
on September 2nd, 1957 at Aix-en-Province. )
I will consider the word "cinema" in the limited sense of
cinematographic art. Undoubtedly the cinema is more often a means
of expression, a language. The savant using the camera for
experimentation, the pedagogue making a film for instructional
purposes, are not involved in an artistic activity. A film becomes
a work of art only when made by an artist, to the end of expressing
a style or a vision of the world and of producing in the spectator
a moral effect accompanied by aesthetic pleasure. It is not that
I minimize the extra-artistic aspect of cinema - but with a
subject so vast as Man and Cinematographic Works one must limit
himself from the start.
As soon as one wants to reflect upon the cinema with any rigor
one is faced with a major difficulty. Unlike the classical arts, it
was born quite recently, and its evolution - still in progress - has
been so rapid and so considerable that one hardly knows how to
grasp the cinema-in-itself. The insistence by its theoreticians on
speaking of the "specificity" of the cinema is a direct betrayal,
I believe, of the ambiguous and equivocal nature of screen art.
For the vagaries of critical thought, as peremptory as they are
unstable, have not followed the evolution of cinematographic
style and technique in a parallel way.
AN INFLATION OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC THOUGHT
During the epoch that some still call the golden age of movies,
between 1920 and 1930, philosophy was not yet interested in the
screen, and academic aesthetics even refused to call it art. They
called it simple reproduction and claimed it was not a transposition
of reality. In opposition to this, a young avant-garde group
discovered and baptized the seventh art, calling it the universal
language of image and the privileged expression of the modern
world. It was in a literary mode, effusive and quite baroque and
constituted less a philosophy than a mystique. It should have
collapsed with the advent of sound but, in spite of the bugbear
of filmed theatre, this curious art of the image, proud of its
muteness, integrated the word with the greatest of ease.
The power of words - like that of photogeneity, for example - is such
that this primary (at least in the historical sense) concept of
the cinema reappears even in contemporary cinematic studies -
enterprises of scientific strictness for all that. After the
war in effect - I was stationed in France - the discovery of the
new American and Italian films provoked a renewal, a stirring-up,
I'd say almost an inflation of cinematographic thought. The number
of texts and works on the film was abruptly multiplied by twenty.
The movement occurred on two axes. One was termed the New Criticism
and the other Filmology.
From 1949 on, the ardent and erudite voting group at Cahiers du
Cinema abandons impressionistic, psychological and even historical
criticism in favor of a technical and one might even say
philosophical criticism. Andre Bazin, leader of this generation,
proved to what level of thought precise problems of cutting and
shooting such as flash-backs and deep focus could be analyzed.
Certain of his disciples have pushed the method a bit far. And
one cannot help feeling a certain uneasiness when the slightest
account of a curious Western (for these young turks prefer "B"
films to obviously major works) leads to a discussion of ontology
and alienation, this genre of terms being at times handled very
casually.
Of course one is reassured to find this vocabulary
coming from the filmologists as well, but at times one feels the
opposite sort of uneasiness. Certainly one must praise Cohen-Seat
for having led great specialists in intellectual disciplines such
as aesthetics, sociology or psychology, with their own familiar
scientific precision, to the world of film. And we shouldn't be
astonished if, the realities of the screen being less familiar
to them, the results are, uncertain at first. An article by Andre
Bazin, entitled annisingly enough (if my memory is correct)
"Prolegomena for All Filmology," explains this phenomenon admirably.
I must admit that I am, unfortunately, rather ignorant of the
development of filmology - having ceased of activity as critic
after its birth. But I don't doubt that the method, now that it
is more organized, has produced and is producing remarkable works.
A recent study which I have just finished reading - and I don't
know whether it belongs to orthodox filmology - that is, in any
case, a model type of dense and brilliant philosophical analysis
of cinema by an informed man, has, however, renewed in me a
feeling of equivocation that it would be useful to dispel.
It is the "Essay on Sociological Anthropology" by Edgar Morin
entitled "The Cinema and Visionary Man." I am sorry to speak
in a somewhat unpleasant critical fashion for a few moments,
but at times it is necessary to clear the air in order to
arrive at a clean, concrete statement.
What is Morin's central thesis? It consists
of demonstrating that the cinema, born dialectically out of
the movie camera's simple optical and objective reproduction of
reality, establishes a subjective vision, relative to the visionary,
to onirism, to magic. It amounts to a "virtual surrealizing of the
screen." Valentin's formula, which he cites, is characteristic :
"The lens confers an air of legend to whatever it approaches ;
transports everything that falls within its field outside of
reality."
I do not propose to dispute this thesis. In one sense it is
evident. Any aesthetic vision, whether it is painting or literature,
consists of transposing a given reality, of affecting a certain
coefficient of subjectivity, of super-reality.
THE EVOLUTION OF STYLE
It is interesting to analyze the specific cinematic elements that
determine this transfiguration. With respect to the author, it
is worth the trouble of turning to technique for a moment. He
studies successively the "phantomness" of the cinematic image -
airlike, transparent, with the first stylization of black and
white; the importance of playing with time - accel erated or slow
motion - or with space - dissolves or superimpositions ; the
necessary accompaniment of the succession of images by an expressive
and affective music; the fragmentation of time and space by montage;
cutting for scenes with fascinating angles ; the framing
itself - that arbitrary composition within the screen's rectangle
and finally, the macroscopic - that is to say, the systematic
use of close-ups, psychological when it involves a face and
animistic when objects are shown.
Well, what is extraordinary is that all of these elements,
undoubtedly current usage for the silent films of 1928, correspond
to modalities of expression that the evolution of cinematic style
has gone beyond and even abandoned. I'll go over them quickly.
All technical effort for the past twenty years has tended to be
more and more fixed, clean and dense. And if people are still
making films in black and white, it's not for aesthetic reasons
- no matter what they say - it's purely a question of budget.
One would be hard put to cite, with the exception of documentaries,
a single recent film that uses speeded-up or slow motion in the
course of a story. I pass on to music. You A I 44 know that
important films are now being made without music, or with briefer
and briefer musical intrusions - and it is generally justified. I
am thinking of an example : shortly you are going to see a film by
Clouzot (Mystere Picasso). Well! My friend Georges Auric was very
upset by the fact that a critic who liked the film attacked the
music Auric had written at Clouzot's request and in the style
demanded. I believe that it has nothing at all to do with the nature
of the music but rather with its very existence - it was put in
out of habit and was not only inessential to the film but foreign
to it.
As for special effects, although black-outs and dissolves etc.
are still used, these so-called filmic punctuation marks have
practically disappeared. Superimposition, once called "essential
to stylistic cinematography," nowadays produces a profoundly
uneasy sensation in any spectator of taste.
Montage itself has become a secondary cinematic element. We know
that for the past ten years the montage of successive sequences, such
as long-shot followed by close-up, tends to be replaced by
mise en scene
in depth - utilizing deep focus and supplying in a single sequence
of long duration a kind of vision in which the spectator, as when
faced with reality, does the job of selecting that which, one used
to think, devolved on the camera ... But today we see that both
methods may be employed concurrently without anything essential
being changed. Five years ago, Hitchcock achieved a tour de
force: Rope, in a single sequence. Although the film retains its
feeling of tone and atmosphere, it appears in retrospect no
different than it would had it been made with a classical
cutting technique. This seems to me to lessen the interest of
Kuleshov's famous experiment
(the same shot of Mosjoukine's assuming different expressions in
relation to a coffin, a little girl or a bowl of soup) which is
ritualistically cited in every work on the cinema.
Of course, as far as shooting angles are concerned, the director
continues to calculate them carefully but, except for rare effects,
only neophytes and the rear guard use extraordinary angles.
THE SACROSANCT CLOSE-UP
To tell the truth, the creators themselves (for we must always
be suspicious of statements by artists)
are very much responsible for the perpetuation, among their
exegetists, of points of view that are basically out of date. In
their declarations, and not in their comportment, they are constantly
mistaken about the evolution of the cinema. When "talkies" appeared,
they unanimously prophesized the end of the art of the image and
at the same time they plunged into experiments with sound.
When color came, each declared that he would use it only in a
stylized way, like painters do, but that went by the boards as
soon as it became sufficiently true-to-life.
Only four years ago, after the first showing of Cinemascope
in Paris, Figaro asked several French directors how they felt
about the future of the process. The majority, from Becker to
Rene Clair, downgraded the wide screen on the ground that it
rendered plastic composition too difficult. I believe I was,
along with Alexander Astruc, one of only two directors to
think that the wide screen would become a permanent fixture -
part of the inevitable progress in the inevitable evolution
towards an ever more realistic screen vision.
The following was one of the major argument, against
Cinemascope: it would do away with the closeup, the sacrosanct
close-up. They were simply forgetting that the close-up, as a
major element in cinematic expression, has in fact disappeared
of its own accord - just like special angles, rapid montage and
superimposition - a completely abandoned sty_ le, definitively
abandoned because it was, in fact, extremely limited : powerful
but poor.
The analysis of the face in close-up, they said and
still say, is for the cineaste the means of psychologically delving
into a character, of going into the soul with the camera. A total
error. Certainly the physical comportment, the expression of the
actor, is the equivalent of the novelist's commentary on the
character but precisely when he is seen on the screen normally, as
today. on a medium shot. An exaggerated close-up of a face is not
psychological and complex but lyrical and elementary. Any woman's
face, seen from very close, looks like - if the face is without
make-up and the texture of the skin is a thousand times
enlarged - Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, and,
if it is taken in shimmering sunlight against a flesh-
colored background it looks like Greta Garbo. While
sculptors never grow weary of translating an infinite reality
onto a marble face, the cineastes are tired of
putting the same face on film, are tired of what is called pure
cinema. For all classical style is the same. For example, any rapid
montage of a dance scene expresses, in a surprising way, the fact
of dance - but treats a Spanish, Russian or Scottish dance in
identical fashion. There is no leeway for anything new. Briefly,
these are the limitations of what has been called the specifics of
cinematic expressions, its rigidly defined domain, out of which
the art of the screen has evolved.
We will pass now to the second point of view from which we may
examine the cinema, like any creation or work - that of content,
to the extent that one can, in art, separate it from form.
I recall, in 1946, having tried, at Sartre's request, in the first
issue of Tenips llodernes, to draw tip a balance-sheet; it was
an attempt with no preoccupation about aesthetic and formal
problems, to find out what the cinema had brought that was new
and profound to our knowledge of the cosmos and of Man. The list
of the cinema's conquests didn't go very far. It consisted,
essentially, of simple landscapes on a grand scale : the desert,
mountains, snow, the sea (but, for example, try and find the
subtlety and humanity of the countryside near Aix presented on
the screen!) And then you had the City, the Machine, the Crowd,
the Child, the Animal . . . the great elementary sentiments,
violence, terror, sublime love, some forays into the categories
of lyricism and the epic, while as far as psychology and a nttanced
metaphysical vision of the world were concerned, the cinema
continued to remain behind literature and the theatre. Well, I
wouldn't say the same things today because as soon as it freed
itself from a formal style that was limiting its possibilities,
cinematographic creation progressed in depth in its apprehension
of the world and the spirit.
A PERSONALIZATION OF CREATION
It is for this reason that I was obliged to go on at such length
in my analysis of a conception of cinema that is still too
frequently accepted (not only among philosophers, but among the
most fervent screen adepts, notably the film societies )-in order
to cleanly reject it. It somewhat resembles a novelistic philosophy
that takes off from the epic, its ancestor. People still talk
about meter, an essential coinponent of the Romantic style, and
you see the principal romantic function, the creation of the hero
tending to become myth. This language of the image. which is
universal, was a popular art, finding itself again in contact
with the public at large-something that was lost by the other
individualized arts adapted to the bourgeoisie.
Well, we should make it clear that, whether one dislikes it or
not, it seems that all forms of artistic expression tend to move
from a formal art with precise canons, well-defined genres, a simple
but powerful inspiration that appeals to the collective
emotions, towards polymorphous arts with freer style, a more
complex and subtle message designed for the aesthetic pleasure
of an individual reader or listener or spectator. You have
this evolution from the rigorous religious fresco offered to
the crowd to the easel painting destined to delight the amateur.
The same occurs with the passage from lyric recitation to the
poem in blank verse, from the amphitheatre to the small stage
or bourgeois comedy, from the epic to the novel.
The cinema has evolved in the same way. Certainly, many popular
films have not obeyed this law just as the adventure novel, a
residue from the epic recitation, has subsisted side by side
with the modern psychological novel. But the new worthwhile
films correspond closely to the forms of contemporary art. I am
thinking of the ten best films of last year (1956) according to
a referendum made up by a group of critics, running from Senso
to Smiles o f a Summer Night, from A Man Escaped to Mystere
Picasso. I believe that eight out of ten of these films are
difficult and designed for the individual, informed spectator;
all of them are somewhat ambiguous and a melange of genres.
We have come a long way from the three antique masks, from the
way we classified films twenty years ago (the way my concierge
still does)-as drama, comedy or cops-and-robbers. And if I am
asked about the most important new thing in films in the past
ten years, I answer, perhaps : the utilization of the flash-back
and the introduction of narration. They have given the suppleness
and complexity of literature to cinematic construction. The most
subtle nuances of personal expression are now open to the
film-maker.
This general movement of the arts I spoke of just
now has been simultaneously an individualization of the public
and a personalization of the creation (not mentioning the personal
genius of Homer) of the creators themselves. More, it tends
toward the expression, pushed by the creator more and more, not
of what values have in common but their differences.
The actual evolution of the cinema thus occurs in a general
sense as a personalization of creation. Certainly Stroheim and
Murnau did personal work. But aren't we deluding ourselves
about certain great names of the classical cinema - or the
primitive cinema, if you will - who were stronger on technique
than on an original world-view? Don't Eisenstein and Pudovkin,
in spite of their different temperaments, express above
all a certain formal style - that of post-World War I Russia?
Whereas, on the contrary, after World War II, Italian
neo-realism's pretention to express an essentially social
reality and to be founded on a communal
method, as well as the abandonment of actor's cinema, very
quickly disintegrated to permit the appearance of irrepressible
personalities, such as Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini.
Since we have come from the work to the man, before attempting to
describe the creator of the contemporary cinema, in control of
a highly evolved technique and making use of this supple instrument
in order to deliver an interior message - very much like the
novelist who is not preoccupied first of all or essentially with
literary technique - I must however express a reservation and more
or less go back on what I just said.
It has occurred to the from time to time to define the conception
of cinema I have just presented and which holds true objectively,
at least as I believe it. in the sense of the evolution of the
seventh art, with a somewhat provocative formulation: the cinema
is not a spectacle.
Well, if aesthetically, in its best efforts,
cinema seeks in effect not to be a spectacle ; practically.
socio- logically, economically it actually remains a spectacle.
This is where the drama of the cineaste comes in. I'd like to
give an example here. I worked recenth- for several months with
Rene Clement on the screen adaptation of Giono's Hussard sur le
toit. The story is somewhat picaresque, constructed, Giono says,
like an Italian opera. Well, Clement, who has great finesse and
sensitivity, really wanted to retain the unexpected aspect of
the story and the originality of tone but he wanted at the same
time - and this was the origin of our conflict - a tight
construction, a dramatic progression, suspense ... etc. "You
understand," he said to me, "my film must be applauded in Tokyo
and Buenos Aires, too." There you see that the creator of cinema
is torn, not only between art and commerce. but more exactly
between the desire for the freedom and depth of expression
possessed by the novel and the necessity for immediate efficacity
that any spectacle must have.
"And then, the film would be too long," Clement told me, and he
was right. I believe it was Thihaudet who made the distinction
among the arts involving time that the limited arts like the
sonnet, the novella and the play, even allowing for the restrictions
of form. are more dramatic than the unlimited arts like the
novel.
By aesthetic vocation, the cinema is an unlimited art
(the few great films of several hours' duration give us a
presentiment of the temporal perspectives that can be deployed,
using the memory, like in a book, at the interior of the work.)
In fact, the cinema is a limited art in which the director must
seize and hold a vast public in one hour and forty minutes.
THE FILM AUTEUR
We can now approach the problem of the film auteur more concretely,
that is to say the role of the individual in cinematographic
creation. I reject immediately the false problem of collective
film creation. The numerous technical specialists, even if you
call them collaborators in the production, contribute to the
success of the film, but simply in terms of its production - not
its creation.
On the contrary, a major problem and, to tell the
truth, an insoluble one is that of the auteur's moral right
which arises in a film in the relation of the scenarist to
the director. This problem is similar to but separate from
the problem of the relationship between conception and
realization. From time to time, the scenarist and director
are spoken of as a pair o equals, but in works of value one
partner is actually always subordinate to the other -
the creator-leader. A Prevert scenario directed by
Christian-Jaque, Cayatte or Carne will give you, with
more or less success, a Prevert film. Inversely, a film directed
by John Ford is a John Ford film no matter who writes the scenario.
What is certain is that in the evolution of the cinema more and
more professional importance is given to the scenarist. One has
only to look at the figures. On the other hand, directors who
figure as auteurs today are more or less complete auteurs. In
France, Rene Clair and Clouzot are writers. With different luck,
Bresson and Becker are now writing their own dialogue. In America,
the most plastic director, the one who has returned to the source
of expressionism, is first of all a man of the world, a man of
radio and the theatre : I mean Orson Welles.
The finished film, however, is a far cry from the most
elaborate scenario, and if one were to sketch a characterology
of the director, to define the "habits" of the cineaste as
compared to those of the writer,
one would be inclined to place in the foreground such values as
personality, authority, decision, communication in contrast to
such values as scrupulousness, dreams and solitude which characterize
the writer.
For a film, while it is being shot, is like all
armored division that may never stop. On the set, at least,
cinematic creation must be a stranger to the hesitations, mistakes
and revisions that make up the normal course of events in literary
creation. In this sense, the architect and the orator would have
more in common with the cineaste than the novelist or painter.
We come now to another aspect of the man of cinema: the director
of actors. In the theatre the actors act amongst themselves, with
each other. In the studio, each actor has the director as his
principal partner. In the cineaste's conscious memory a film is
less the presentation of a scenario, the establishing of shooting
angles, than the bloody battle carried on simultaneously for tell
weeks with the faces, expressions, gestures and voices of four
or five actors and actresses. It is curious, and even indicative
of the cinema's ambiguities and contradictions, to note that at
the moment when, in Italy and in France, De Sica and Bresson were
seeking to eliminate professional actors, a new, brilliant
generation of Hollywood directors from Nicholas Ray to Logan all
emerged from the efforts of the Actors' Studio in New York.
If one were to combine the diverse characteristics I have sketched
in the same individual there would appear the portrait of the
typical man of the cinema: this could be Jean Renoir. A great
animator, a bit of all adventurer (as a youth he sold some
of his father's pictures in order to finance his films),
creator of dialogues, theatrical writer, maintaining the same
theme in thirty films, a prodigious director of actors
(not by imposing like a Clouzot, but on the contrary by
pushing the actor on his path), he is into the bargain
the screen's greatest plastic artist which is, no matter
what I may say, an essential attribute of the man of the
cinema.
CRISIS AND REGRESSION?
However, the cinema's human mystery resides in its being a
vocation. Why did my friend Alexandre Astruc, who could have been
a brilliant novelist or a great essay writer, absolutely want to
make films when expressing himself in this medium is so much more
difficult? With many young people it is, I believe, essentially
the desire for a greater audience (with its impure consequences
called the glory and the gold.)
Georges Neveux pointed out to me that there is all
irreversible ladder ; at the base you have the
poet - the most pure and the most isolated. He normally becomes
at the age of thirty, a novelist and graduates from the slim
volume in five hundred copies to an edition of five thousand.
But a novelist never publishes poems. The successful novelist
often moves on to the theatre, like Mauriac and Montherlant. But
an Anouilh is never tempted to write a novel. Pagnol finally goes
from the theatre to the cinema. But it would be utter madness
for Jean Renoir to do the reverse.
Neveux told me this five years ago, and, perhaps it is
no longer so true. I know a number of scenarists who, like
Prevert, return to literature which is
today, even materially, as interesting.
Since the cinema's famous crisis is really and truly
a reality, both artistic and economic,
it is pleasant in the epoch when sociologists are interested in
the seventh art and speak of the age of the man of the cinema,
to hear hankers (whose vision is often as clear as that of the
sociologists) asking themselves if the film industry, whose
importance in the first place has always been exaggerated (the
total business of the French cinema, $55 million, is less than
that of the Galeries Lafayette [big department store chain] ),
if this "industry" isn't in a definite regression.
Regression from which television profits. For this film substitute
is in the process of dismembering cinematic production and art. The
cinema has responded to the absorption of the current and popular
film by making spectaculars, superproductions in Cinemascope that
are most often too costly to permit the possibility of significant
works.
Between the two there remains only a feeble ma-r-ill,
economically fragile, for films by auteurs, such as I have been
trying to define, which are addressed to the highly evolved
spectator, and which, having gone beyond a constricting
formalism, have finally caught up to the
nobility and profundity of the traditional arts.
But let's not be too pessimistic. Who knows - a change in the
way films are distributed, an amortization in depth over a period
of ten or twenty years, will perhaps permit auteur films to
subsist, side by side, with television and superproductions, in
the way that an excellent book may come out in a limited edition
and hang on in spite of everything between the best sellers and
the whodunits.
I regret ending this way on a questioning note, and having brought
you a vision of the cinema that is more an analysis than a
synthesis, with more ambiguity than clarity. Such is the nature
of the cinema, 1 believe. and such perhaps is also the nature of
my spirit - more at ease in a discussion than in an explanation.
1917
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:41am
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101, &, Our Group
David Ehrenstein wrote:
>Whoops! Suddenly remembered Ezra Pound.
>
>He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
>reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
>
>
>
1. I have asked this before: kindly show some respect for the members of
this group by NOT quoting entire messages. Learn to turn the automatic
quote feature of your email off, or to delete the quote that pops up.
Quote only a small part, if necessary.
2. Our statement of purpose, which can be found in the files section,
states:
"There are only a few firm prohibitions. Personal insults against
anyone, in or out of our group, are banned. You can write, 'That was a
moronic film review,' but not, 'You're a moron.'"
I wrote our statement, but it was agreed to with almost no
modifications by the seven people who participated in the intensive
email discussions that led to our group's founding. There are many
reasons that I wrote that part of the statement the way I did, based on
some seven years of experience in Internet discussion groups, and based
on what I learned from my own tendency to fly off the handle, and on the
effect I have observed of personal insults on the overall climate of
discussion. There are lots of places on the 'Net where personal insults
are part of the normal discourse. If you want to engage in personal
attacks and insults, go there. This is not the place for this sort of
discourse.
I think I can speak for all seven of us in saying that our hope was for
a group in which serious discussion was engaged in, and not a group in
which one-line insults were thrown out. Though the question of Pound's
fascism has been explored at great length, it can be brought up here in
the context of a film discussion, but not in a manner which violates our
stated purpose
Similarly, it's important to avoid coming close to insulting members of
this group personally when engaging in discussion with them. Accusations
of massive ignorance, for example, are just not helpful. Knowledge is
the cure to ignorance; if you think someone needs to no something, tell
them about it. And we all have our views of what ignorance of cinema is.
From my point of view, it is truly impossible to have a full
understanding of the possibilities of film as an art without a good and
thorough knowledge of and feeling for the achievements of Stan Brakhage,
Robert Breer, Bruce Baillie, Peter Kubelka, Christopher Maclaine, Hollis
Frampton, and a number of other avant-garde filmmakers. So I'll
encourage others to see their films (of which more is to come), but I'll
try to avoid repeating that point of view -- that anyone who doesn't
have such knowledge in fact doesn't have a full understanding of cinema
-- in discussions. And I'll also cheerfully acknowledge that I myself
can also learn a great deal from people who have no knowledge of this
branch of cinema as well.
And by the way, let me stipulate that I fully accept the possibility
that my relative insensitivity to acting and scriptwriting could be used
to argue that I lack a full understanding of cinema too.
- Fred
1918
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:52am
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
>
> Surely the invention of cinema as a technology was a fundamentally
> new event in human history.
>
> Maybe therefore productive of new ideas?
>
> JTW
Rohmer said something like that: "Being able to photograph, to film,
brings us a fundamentally different knowledge of the world, a
knowledge that causes an upheaval of values."
Here's the context:
ROHMER: That's why I was opposed to all the sixties' structuralist and
linguistic ideas. For me, the important thing in film - to repeat what
Bazin said - is ontology and not language. Ontologically, film says
something that the other arts don't say. In the end, its language
resembles the language of the other arts. If one studies the language
of film, one finds the same rhetoric as in other arts, but in a
rougher, less refined, and less complex style, an idea that leads
nowhere except to say that film is able to imitate the other arts,
that it does so with great difficulty, but that it isn't always bad.
There's a nice metaphor for you, it's almost Victor Hugo!
NARBONI: It would mean taking note of the rhetoric and letting the
essential part go unnoticed.
ROHMER: The essential part is not in he realm of language but in the
realm of ontology.
NARBONI: That's the theoretical foundation of your collected articles.
ROHMER: Yes, but all I'm doing is organizing Bazin's ideas. He said
with regard to Monde du silence (The Silent World): "To show the
bottom of the ocean, to show it and not describe it, that's film."
Now, literature describes it; painting paints it; and by freezing it,
by interpreting it, film shows it - for example, Nanook the Eskimo
harpooning the walrus. It's like nothing else, it has no equivalent.
Until film, one had either to paint a painting or describe something.
Being able to photograph, to film, brings us a fundamentally different
knowledge of the world, a knowledge that causes an upheaval of values.
That is what I tried to prove, rather awkwardly, but I can't say it
any better, it's very difficult to explain.
NARBONI: When you say that, one has the impression that the most
important thing is in the realm of becoming, of time - in Nanook of
the North, for example - and yet you wrote an article called "Cinema,
the Art of Space."
ROHMER: There is a cinematic space, different from pictorial space
although some believe it can be reduced to pictorial space - that is
the source of aestheticism. You have to be careful about space. The
cinematic being reveals himself in space as well as in time. To tell
the truth, he reveals himself in space-time, since in film one cannot
dissociate one from the other. All I can say here is that this idea is
very important to me, as you can see from what I've written. Perhaps
today I would express it differently.
http://cs1.cs.nyu.edu/m-pg0123/rohmer.html
1919
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 2:30am
Subject: Robert Breer, and avant-garde film
As my one privilege as group "owner," and with the consent of
co-moderator Peter, I've commandeered the image feature of our home page
for a while for avant-garde film. I'll change the image every three
months or so.
The images from Robert Breer's latest great film are particularly
relevant to Chicagoans, as it's showing tomorrow night at Chicago
Filmmakers' "Onion City Film Festival." See
http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org/navonion.htm for links to the whole
festival, http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion.htm#1 for this program,
and http://www.chireader.com/movies/ for my capsule review of four of
the six programs, including a few comments on the Breer -- except that
it's not up yet, should be by tomorrow morning. I also have a review of
Breer's earlier work that does apply to this film at
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/0697/06067b.html
Breer's film is not one in which every frame is different, by the way,
though he did make a film like that once; I chose the strips I did to
show cuts. But many times the images do only last a few frames. He's an
"animator" whose work has nothing to do with commercial animation. Every
instant, every part of the frame, is alive with the anticipation of change.
Oh, someone did make a VHS. Someone else even sent it to me. I've never
looked at it. It should be possible to find it though.
I'm afraid I'm going to have very little time the next few weeks, but I
want to throw out something that I can try to elaborate on later, and
that I already alluded to in an earlier post. I think understanding, and
loving, avant-garde cinema can affect one's understanding of all cinema,
and in a positive way. These are filmmakers who really *do* focus on
light and color and space and shape and time and rhythm, and seeing and
appreciating their films I think helps make you a better film viewer.
Images from what is perhaps Warren Sonbert's best film just recently
graced out page. This was a silent "travelogue" with radical cutting
between different places -- the larger version of the image of the first
two shots is still up in the "files" section. Yet he was deeply inspired
by, and I think influenced by, the visual aesthetic of Hollywood
filmmakers such as Hitchcock and Minnelli. His films had a distinctive
sense of space and color, and a distinctive expression; they just didn't
tell stories, "entertain," or have actors in the usual sense. Stuart
Byron managed to get a positive piece on Sonbert's very early films into
"Variety." He called them "anti-dramatic," which was true.
- Fred
1920
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:42am
Subject: Re: Swamped
hotlove666 wrote:
>
>Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her work at one
>point as part of its program? Fred?
>
>
>
You know, I think one or both of the two famous ones were and are part
of the "Essnetial Cinama' reperatory, but I can't verify this at the
moment -- for some strange reason I can't find the essential cinema
stuff online. I'll let you know when I find out.
- Fred
1921
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:48am
Subject: Re: Swamped
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is definitely Essential Cinema--and Anth. has
shown it quite recently. Do you who like the film like all of it? I
can see one claiming some of the sequences as great cinema, but the
(as I remember) interminable parade of Nazi brass...
In late editions of the Times yesterday, Riefenstahl's obit ran next
to Edward Teller.
Ezra Pound, geez--doesn't mental illness come as a mitigating factor?
PWC
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
>
> hotlove666 wrote:
>
> >
> >Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her work at one
> >point as part of its program? Fred?
> >
> >
> >
> You know, I think one or both of the two famous ones were and are part
> of the "Essnetial Cinama' reperatory, but I can't verify this at the
> moment -- for some strange reason I can't find the essential cinema
> stuff online. I'll let you know when I find out.
>
> - Fred
1922
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:57am
Subject: Re: Re: Swamped
"Ezra Pound, geez--doesn't mental illness come as a
mitigating factor?"
Not when it's used as an alibi.
--- Patrick Ciccone wrote:
> TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is definitely Essential
> Cinema--and Anth. has
> shown it quite recently. Do you who like the film
> like all of it? I
> can see one claiming some of the sequences as great
> cinema, but the
> (as I remember) interminable parade of Nazi brass...
>
>
> In late editions of the Times yesterday,
> Riefenstahl's obit ran next
> to Edward Teller.
>
> Ezra Pound, geez--doesn't mental illness come as a
> mitigating factor?
>
> PWC
>
>
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > hotlove666 wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her
> work at one
> > >point as part of its program? Fred?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > You know, I think one or both of the two famous
> ones were and are part
> > of the "Essnetial Cinama' reperatory, but I can't
> verify this at the
> > moment -- for some strange reason I can't find the
> essential cinema
> > stuff online. I'll let you know when I find out.
> >
> > - Fred
>
>
__________________________________
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1923
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 4:07am
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101, &, Our Group
>"From my point of view, it is truly impossible to
have a full
understanding of the possibilities of film as an art
without a good and
thorough knowledge of and feeling for the achievements
of Stan Brakhage,
Robert Breer, Bruce Baillie, Peter Kubelka,
Christopher Maclaine, Hollis
Frampton, and a number of other avant-garde
filmmakers."
I would modify that to "an awarness of their work." On
that short list the only filmmaker that has truly
affected me is Breer.
And I would put in place of those you listed Michael
Snow, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Jack Smith, Ken
Jacobs and Owen Land.
Matters of "taste" are also matters of conviction.
--- Fred Camper wrote:
__________________________________
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1924
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 4:12am
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101, &, Our Group
David Ehrenstein wrote:
>And I would put in place of those you listed Michael
>Snow, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Jack Smith, Ken
>Jacobs and Owen Land.
>
Every one of these is also on the list of my one hundred favorite
filmmakers, at http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Filmmakers.html
Fred
1925
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 4:28am
Subject: Re: Re: Swamped
Patrick Ciccone wrote:
>TRIUMPH OF THE WILL...Do you who like the film like all of it? I
>can see one claiming some of the sequences as great cinema, but the
>(as I remember) interminable parade of Nazi brass...
>
>
Yeah, well, you're right, but somehow it doesn't quite seem adequate to
call "The Triumph of the Willl" "uneven"...
Pound was not the first great artist to advocate for evil and still make
great art, though I certainly could have done without a few of those
references to "kikes" in the Cantos.
Frampton studied with Pound when he (Frampton) was a very young man but
I know of no signs that he accepted any of Pound's fascism, and there's
certainly none of it in his films, quite the contrary. In any case,
Pound's fascism may have been in "remission" by the time Frampton knew
him. Still later, at the end of the Cantos comes this fragment, Canto
CXX (typographyt not quite rigtht):
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise
Let the Gods forgive what I have made
Let those I love forgive
what I have made.
- Fred
1926
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 4:44am
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101, &, Our Group
As well they should be. But you mentioned other
filmmakers in your post, about whose talents we can
well agree to disagree.
--- Fred Camper wrote:
>
>
> David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> >And I would put in place of those you listed
> Michael
> >Snow, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Jack Smith, Ken
> >Jacobs and Owen Land.
> >
> Every one of these is also on the list of my one
> hundred favorite
> filmmakers, at
> http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Filmmakers.html
>
> Fred
>
>
>
__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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1927
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 4:49am
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
Thanks to Paul for posting these very valuable articles. Durgnat is a
hero of mine (what was that idea about everything having been said
before, but better?).
Unfair as it is, I think this passage still bears pondering:
"The extended auteur theory, on the other hand, makes little or no
allowance for the `imposed' aspects of a film. It is content
to 'decode' meanings and experiences from cryptic hints,
imaginary or real, and, in so doing, to accept, for the full emotional
picture of an experience or attitude, a rather cerebral `notation'. No
distinction is made, or felt, or respected, between the `sign' for an
experience and the 'symbol' for it."
JTW
1928
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 5:14am
Subject: Mysteries
Recent posts on mysteries led me to wonder about possible relations
between mystery plotting and audiovisual form. Can anyone suggest any
mystery films that fit either of the following descriptions?
1) The mystery is solved by the end of the film, but the viewer is
provided with sufficient information to deduce the correct answer
ahead of time, through "background" visual and aural clues that are
neither referred to in dialogue nor highlighted in the mise-en-scène.
2) The solution to the mystery is never overtly revealed, but enough
information is provided for the viewer to deduce a specific "hidden"
solution.
There are elements of 1 in Brian de Palma and 2 in David Lynch, but
both are too imbued with poetic unreason to bother with "playing
fair" by the viewer.
JTW
1929
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 6:27am
Subject: Leni 'n' Hitch, mysteries
Patrick,
I haven't seen Triumph in a long time, except for one section of it,
the sequence from Hitler's pov coming into the rally. Hitchcock used
it at the beginning of Memory of the Camps, a documentary he
supervised but did not edit in 1944 using footage by cameramen who
had been inside the camps after they were liberated. The film was
produced by the British government - a documentary that was meant to
be shown to Germans after the war, but never was. Invited by his
future business partner Sidney Bernstein, AH left Hollywood in the
midst of preparations for Notorious to travel by boat to England,
sharing a cabin with 30 other people. He viewed all the footage and
wrote a treatment I haven't seen, which was left to the editors to
execute -- if it was like the 65-pp treatments he usually did for
films, it was the whole film as an image/sound text. I will reserve
judgement on how well the editors did until I can see the document,
which was not seen as far as I know by the person who wrote the only
article I've read on the film's production, in Film Comment.
Memory of the Camps starts off with two pov sequences: Riefenstahl's
Hitler sequence is followed by a moving camera going down a road past
a German village to a concentration camp, whose smell becomes
noticeable as we approach. (The analogy to the more estheticized
opening of Night and Fog is striking, but it's a case of great minds
thinking alike: there's no way Resnais - whom Hitchcock admired, by
the way - could have seen Memory.) It was definitely AH's idea to use
the Triumph footage and follow it with that parallel movement damning
the inhabitants of the village - a pars pro toto for Germany - whose
main thoroughfare led to the camp: Belsen, I believe. As I recall
from viewing a tape copy Joe McBride made for me off his copy made
when the film aired on PBS in 1984, the structure is one reel per
camp, with the last reel, Auschwitz, missing.
My theory is that the British government not only suppressed the
film, the voiceover for which was only recorded in the 80s, but also
suppressed the tenth reel, for the same reason that other hands
during the 50s snipped all references to I. G. Farbin and its postwar
survival out of Notorious, until Disney put them back in 1999:
Auschwitz was built as a labor camp for Farbin, and I doubt that AH
would have omitted to play up the fact. He and Ben Hecht started
inserting references to Farbin, the company which built Hitler's war
machine and gobbled up rival companies during the Anschluss as spoils
of war, when Farbin's American ally Standard Oil lost its bid to hold
on to Farbin assets that had been put in its name before the war in
case the Nazis lost. The case made the papers in November of 1944,
while Notorious was shooting, and the references were inserted (along
with references to Franco which were actually cut before release) at
that time. Claude Raines is a Farbin agent in the film.
While I was researching this at my local LA Public Library branch I
started chatting with Hannah, a woman who works there, who mentione
that her father "worked for Farbin." "As an executive?" I asked. "No,
as a slave," she said.
Jake,
The Last of Sheilah (1973), a nifty feature directed Herbert Ross
from a script by by Tony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, is a play-fair
mystery with a solution the audience could guess from visual clues
that precede it.
In 1962 (age 17)I thought that The Birds was a mystery with clues but
no solution - frustrated by the ending, I concluded based on visual
clues that Melanie is Lydia's daughter, and that the birds are a
Greek tragedy device akin to the Furies aimed at preventing unwitting
Mitch-Melanie incest. I didn't really give up this idea until 1999
when I plowed through the 600-plus files on the film at the Herrick
and found that a) Jessica Tandy was one of many actresses considered,
although as an old friend she probably had the inside track, and b)
the revelation that Melanie's mother abandoned her was inserted just
before the sand dunes scene was shot, based on an unsigned
handwritten suggestion from someone on the production whose identity
I still plan to learn by comparing handwritings, when Aunt Ethel
signs the oilwell over to me. It wasn't Hedren, as Evan Hunter
believes, or Hitchcock, or Alma, or Peggy Robertson, or V. S.
Pritchett - all likely suspects. It'll be fun finding out someday who
it was.
1930
From: Tosh
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:14pm
Subject: Carlos Fuentes' commentary on Leni Riefensthal in today's LA Times
The following is a brief commentary on Riefensthal in today's L.A.
Times by author Carlos Fuentes. I thought it was interesting, so I
am passing it along to the readers here. Plus it's nice to read
'Bunuel & Rene Clair's' name in the editorial section of the L.A.
Times!
By Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes is a novelist and critic.
His most recent book is "My Years With Laura Diaz" (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2000). Times staff writer Lorenza Muñoz translated this essay.
The death of German director Leni Riefenstahl on Sept. 9 brings back
memories of a story Luis Buñuel told me once.
During World War II, the great Spanish director worked at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York City. A refugee of the Spanish Civil War, a
Franco opponent disillusioned with Hollywood and the impossibility of
making personal cinema in California, Buñuel found refuge in the
illustrious New York museum.
It was there that he was charged with an impossible mission: Take
Riefenstahl's filmed evocation of the Nuremberg rallies, "Triumph of
the Will," and turn it from an epic of Nazi exaltation to a weapon in
the fight against Nazism.
Buñuel conscientiously went about this task, inspired by his own
anti-fascist convictions but also, inevitably, by his respect for the
aesthetic quality of Riefenstahl's film.
Once he finished, Buñuel held a private screening for his friends
Charlie Chaplin and film director René Clair. Each time Adolf Hitler
appeared on screen, Chaplin, Buñuel told me, convulsed with laughter,
pointing his index finger at the Führer and exclaiming: "He is
imitating me! You see that? He doesn't do anything but imitate me!"
Chaplin was referring to his splendid and corrosive parody, "The
Great Dictator," in which his Hitler look-alike, re-baptized as
Adenoid Hinkel, plays a classic scene in cinematic history, dancing
with the globe.
If Chaplin laughed uncontrollably, Clair kept a somber, Gallic
silence. As accomplished as Buñuel's version was, Clair couldn't stop
worrying about the powerful aesthetic of the film - the way
Riefenstahl's montages, her angular takes, her able evocation of the
Greco-Roman epic, the cult of the body, its pagan fascination,
revolutionized what film could do and defied Buñuel's attempt to turn
pro-Hitler images into anti-Hitler propaganda.
Riefenstahl was a Nazi but she was also an artist, and it seemed
impossible to untangle the two. Clair suggested that Buñuel's version
be shown to the president of the United States, Franklin D.
Roosevelt. The screening took place in the White House and the
verdict was forceful: "Do not show this film. Preserve it, but do not
show it. If the public sees it, they will be convinced that the Nazis
are invincible. It is a film that will demoralize our war effort."
Riefenstahl made one other great Nazi film, "Olympia," a documentary
about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It contains a moment in which the
filmmaker's affiliation with Hitler can almost be forgotten, when the
miraculous eye of her camera captures Hitler's repugnance and fury as
black athlete Jesse Owens wins four gold medals.
The Third Reich, according to its own propaganda, should have lasted
1,000 years. It reached only a dozen before it crumbled in 1945,
engulfed in the flames of the regime glorified by Riefenstahl's
films. By contrast, Owens' world record in the long jump (set in
1935) stood 25 years. The black man doubled the duration of the Aryan.
Riefenstahl's political art carried with it a price. At the end of
the war, she spent years in detention camps or under house arrest
until she was absolved, in 1952, by a German denazification tribunal.
She lived the rest of her long life - 101 years - declaring her
innocence and passing herself off as an idiot, claiming she knew
nothing about Nazi atrocities. But she was neither innocent nor
stupid.
Today we watch the original versions of "Triumph of the Will" and
"Olympia" for their great cinematic lessons and, with a cold eye, we
see them also as great funereal monuments to the most monstrous
political regime in all of history. Put into context, with Owens'
achievements, say, or a documentary like Alain Resnais' concentration
camp film "Night and Fog," the dead continue to testify against her
artistry.
Which brings me back to Buñuel. "One thousand corpses are a terrible
statistic," he once told me. "But only one corpse, eliminated because
of political reasons, is a cry for justice."
That could be the epitaph on the greatness and the misery of Leni
Riefenstahl, 1902-2003.
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1931
From:
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:56pm
Subject: Re: Mysteries
Some movies that show carefully constructed plots with clues that would allow
the viewer to deduce the correct solution:
I Wake Up Screaming (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941) (Based on a novel by Steve
Fisher)
Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M. Newman, 1953) (Based on a story by John Dickson
Carr)
Witness For the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1958) (Based on a play by Agatha
Christie)
The Spider's Stratagem (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) (Based on a story by Jorge
Luis Borges)
Ellery Queen TV show: The Mad Tea Party (James Sheldon, 1975) (Based on a
story by Ellery Queen)
Fourth Story (Ivan Passer, 1990)
In addition, many episodes of the Poirot TV series, made in Britain about
Agatha Christie’s sleuth Hercule Poirot, are outstanding fair play detective
tales. Two of the best:
1-27-91 WASP'S NEST Scr: David Renwick D: Brian Farnham
1-5-92 THE ABC MURDERS (120) Scr: Clive Exton D: Andrew Grieve
Andrew Sarris has written about how much he enjoys this series.
The principle of including all the clues in a story that would allow the
reader/viewer to deduce the solution is called “fair play”. The principle seems to
have been elaborated first by Israel Zangwill, in his 1895 preface to his
great mystery story, “The Big Bow Mystery”. (Zangwill’s play, “The Melting Pot”,
about the lives of immigrants, has given a phrase to the language.)
The only detective film I can recall, in which the solution is clear to the
viewer at the end, but not fully spelled out in the movie, is:
The Draughtsman's Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982)
This has an incredibly convoluted plot. Make sure you get a good night sleep
before you see it, and eat a high protein meal :)
Mike Grost
1932
From:
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 2:13pm
Subject: John Ritter
Like Fred, I'm way behind on reading posts (and have several lengthy
responses in the works already), but I can't let the death of John Ritter go without a
remark. Ritter appeared in a number of films I'm a fan of, but his best is
Bogdanovich's "They All Laughed." There's an awful irony in that Bogdanovich
intended the story in that film of Ritter and Dorothy Stratten's characters to
be the "sweet" one - to contrast with the "bitter" story of the failed love
affair between Ben Gazzara and Audrey Hepburn's characters - and yet in real
life Stratten and Ritter both died terribly premature deaths.
"They All Laughed" is one of the most magnanimous, sweet-natured films in
modern American film, but it's also marked by tragedy.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1933
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 6:25pm
Subject: Re: John Ritter
"They All Laughed"is a lovely film. Ritter's best
work, however, was in "Slingblade."
--- ptonguette@a... wrote:
__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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1934
From:
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 2:32pm
Subject: Re: Re: Visual style
In a message dated 9/11/03 4:27:08 PM, vincentlobrutto@y... writes:
>Some time back Peter selected several films photographed by Gordon Willis
>by different directors to make the point that it was the director who should
>be attributed with the style. For my interview with Willis I screened every
>film and took notes. This question that leads off the interview was the
>sum of my findings of Willis' approach in every film he shoots regardless
>of director.
Thanks for sharing a little of this interview, Vinny. Willis definitely has
a distinctive style which you can trace through most (all?) of the films he's
worked on. And yet... my point in message 1488 was that "The Godfather," "All
the President's Men," and "Annie Hall" all "feel" like completely different
films, even while they share certain commonalties we can sensibly attribute to
Willis. And I'd attribute their "differentness" to the differences between -
and influences of - Coppola, Pakula, and Allen.
All this said, Willis is admittedly an extreme case; often a director of
photography's fingerprints manifest themselves a little more subtly (as in Sven
Nykvist's work) or even invisibly (as Gary Graver would probably claim as far as
his work with Welles goes, though I think Gary's overly modest). But that
auteurism can, I think, deal with the challenge of a Gordon Willis is a credit
to it as a workable approach.
I'm fully in agreement with your comments about the importance of visuals in
cinematic art: a move of the camera in "Some Came Running" relays as much (and
I'd argue more) meaning and emotion as the story line or acting per se.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1935
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 7:18pm
Subject: Ritter, son of Tex
He'll be missed. I loved him in Skin Deep, where if that hooker
book (You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again) is right he was
more or less playing himself (hence the torn aorta...) Edwards
told me that the first reading he did of his play, Scapegoat, was
with Ritter - I assume he played the Devil (who is being treated
for depression by a female shrink).
1936
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 7:23pm
Subject: Re: John Ritter
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> Like Fred, I'm way behind on reading posts (and have several
lengthy
> responses in the works already), but I can't let the death of John
Ritter go without a
> remark. Ritter appeared in a number of films I'm a fan of, but his
best is
> Bogdanovich's "They All Laughed."
Bogdanovich clearly was very fond of John Ritter, using him in
Nickelodeon and Noises Off, as well as the wonderful They All
Laughed, in which he gave a lovely performance.
I'll always first and foremost think of Ritter, however, in
connection with Blake Edwards's Skin Deep, which for me is the
greatest American film of the 1980s. Ritter showed himself to be a
brilliant physical comedian and, with his unexpected sensitivity and
self-reflectiveness, was a perfect conduit for Edwards's concerns and
obsessions.
-- Damien
1937
From: George Robinson
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 7:28pm
Subject: Re: Re: John Ritter
Ironically, my wife and I were watching an old Kojak episode Sunday in which
Ritter was the guest star, a petty thief who gets into something over his
head (a favorite Kojak plot); Margo (my better half) had interviewed Ritter
for Variety many years ago and remembered the experience fondly, and
watching him we both remarked on how genuinely charming he was as a screen
presence and bemoaned the fact that so much of his career had been wasted in
bad sitcom work.
Very sad, then, to read the obit today.
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Damien Bona"
To:
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 3:23 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: John Ritter
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> > Like Fred, I'm way behind on reading posts (and have several
> lengthy
> > responses in the works already), but I can't let the death of John
> Ritter go without a
> > remark. Ritter appeared in a number of films I'm a fan of, but his
> best is
> > Bogdanovich's "They All Laughed."
>
> Bogdanovich clearly was very fond of John Ritter, using him in
> Nickelodeon and Noises Off, as well as the wonderful They All
> Laughed, in which he gave a lovely performance.
>
> I'll always first and foremost think of Ritter, however, in
> connection with Blake Edwards's Skin Deep, which for me is the
> greatest American film of the 1980s. Ritter showed himself to be a
> brilliant physical comedian and, with his unexpected sensitivity and
> self-reflectiveness, was a perfect conduit for Edwards's concerns and
> obsessions.
>
> -- Damien
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
1938
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 1:29am
Subject: Film books: help me expand my library
So in my moving into my new apartment, I've finally organized all the
film books I have on one bookshelf. The caveat: my collection looks
paltry and missing a lot of obvious titles (granted, some I do own but
are elsewhere), plus I no longer have the rotation of books from my
college library. Thus in the interest of 1)expanding my collection
2)seeing what film books auteurists consider important, I ask all of
you who are interested to contribute a list of the next five books I
should add to my collection. This isn't a poll, so once someone
mentions a book, don't put that book on your list. That's why I ask
for only five books a person: if a good many people respond, the
heterogeneity of selections can increase. And so that I'll have a
large wish list—
English and French is what I can read, and whether in or out of print
doesn't matter. Let's see if this works (self-promotion is OK)!
RIP Johnny Cash—-Mark's Romanek's "Hurt" video is own of the films of
the year, as far as I'm concerned...
PWC
Here's what I've already got (in the order it appears on my shelf):
GENERAL:
Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Vols. 1 & 2 editor Richard Roud
The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris
American Directors, Vols. 1 & 2 Jean-Pierre Coursodon et al
Dictionnaire du cinema, Jacques Lourcelles
Classical Hollywood, Bordwell and Thompson
Cahiers compilations: Critique et cinephilie, La politique des
auteurs, le gout de l'amerique
Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich
BY CRITIC:
Agee on Film, James Agee
Qu'est-ce le cinema?, Bazin
La Maison cinema et le monde, Daney
La Rampe, Daney
Negative Space, Farber
Movie Love in the Fifties, James Harvey
Vulgar Modernism, Hoberman
A 20th Century Job, Cabrera Infante
The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez [why doesn't someone invite him here?]
La fable cinematographique, Jacques Ranciere
Placing Movies, Rosenbaum
You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet, Sarris
Confessions of Cultist, Sarris
Sitney, Visionary Film
Magic and Myth of Movies, Parker Tyler
VARIA:
La Jetee, Marker
Birth of the Motion Picture, Emmanuelle Toullet
Hard-Boiled: Great Lines from Classic Film Noir
Panorama of American Film Noir, Borde and Chaumerton
FILMMAKER:
Chicago Review: Brakhage Issue
Notes sur le cinematographe, Bresson
Bresson, ed. Quandt
Bunuel, Durgnat
Film Form, Eisenstein
A Third Face, Fuller
John Ford Movie Mystery, Sarris
Speaking about Godard, Farocki and Silverman
Godard, Marc Cerisuelo
Godard par Godard
Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Wood
Films of Fritz Lang, Gunning
The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Tag
Sirk on Sirk, John Halliday
Film of Josef von Sternberg, Sarris
Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Josef von Sternberg
Wim Wenders on Film
Pardon the lack of accents—cut and paste into the groups interface
doesn't work for them.
1939
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 3:14am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
That's a great group you've got there.
I'd add:
"La Mise en Scene Comme Langage" by Michel Mourlet
"L"Homme Ordinarie du Cinema" by Jean-Louis Schefer
"The 50-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood" by Ezra
Goodman
"The Studio" by John Gregory Dunne
"The Cleopatra Papers" by Jack Brodsky and Nathan
Weiss
"Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society" by Richard
Dyer
"The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin
Scorsese" by Me.
--- Patrick Ciccone wrote:
__________________________________
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1940
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 3:29am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
Thierry Jousse's John Cassavetes
Luc Moullet's Fritz Lang
Godard's Introduction a Une Veritable Histoire du Cinema
Damien's Inside Oscar (which is far more interesting than a
simple history of the academy awards)
There's ms on the BFI series my favorites are: Once Upon a
Time in America (by Adrian Martin), WR (by Raymond Durgnat),
Greed and Dead Man by Rosenbaum) and L'argent (by Kent Jones).
Filipe
> So in my moving into my new apartment, I've finally organize
d all the
> film books I have on one bookshelf. The caveat: my collecti
on looks
> paltry and missing a lot of obvious titles (granted, some I
do own but
> are elsewhere), plus I no longer have the rotation of books
from my
> college library. Thus in the interest of 1)
expanding my collection
> 2)
seeing what film books auteurists consider important, I ask al
l of
> you who are interested to contribute a list of the next five
books I
> should add to my collection. This isn't a poll, so once som
eone
> mentions a book, don't put that book on your list. That's w
hy I ask
> for only five books a person: if a good many people respond,
the
> heterogeneity of selections can increase. And so that I'll h
ave a
> large wish list—
>
> English and French is what I can read, and whether in or out
of print
> doesn't matter. Let's see if this works (self-
promotion is OK)!
>
> RIP Johnny Cash—-
Mark's Romanek's "Hurt" video is own of the films of
> the year, as far as I'm concerned...
>
> PWC
>
> Here's what I've already got (in the order it appears on my
shelf):
>
> GENERAL:
> Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Vols. 1 & 2 editor Richard Ro
ud
> The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris
> American Directors, Vols. 1 & 2 Jean-Pierre Coursodon et al
> Dictionnaire du cinema, Jacques Lourcelles
> Classical Hollywood, Bordwell and Thompson
> Cahiers compilations: Critique et cinephilie, La politique
des
> auteurs, le gout de l'amerique
> Who the Devil Made It, Bogdanovich
>
> BY CRITIC:
> Agee on Film, James Agee
> Qu'est-ce le cinema?, Bazin
> La Maison cinema et le monde, Daney
> La Rampe, Daney
> Negative Space, Farber
> Movie Love in the Fifties, James Harvey
> Vulgar Modernism, Hoberman
> A 20th Century Job, Cabrera Infante
> The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez [why doesn't someone invi
te him here?]
> La fable cinematographique, Jacques Ranciere
> Placing Movies, Rosenbaum
> You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet, Sarris
> Confessions of Cultist, Sarris
> Sitney, Visionary Film
> Magic and Myth of Movies, Parker Tyler
>
> VARIA:
> La Jetee, Marker
> Birth of the Motion Picture, Emmanuelle Toullet
> Hard-Boiled: Great Lines from Classic Film Noir
> Panorama of American Film Noir, Borde and Chaumerton
>
> FILMMAKER:
> Chicago Review: Brakhage Issue
> Notes sur le cinematographe, Bresson
> Bresson, ed. Quandt
> Bunuel, Durgnat
> Film Form, Eisenstein
> A Third Face, Fuller
> John Ford Movie Mystery, Sarris
> Speaking about Godard, Farocki and Silverman
> Godard, Marc Cerisuelo
> Godard par Godard
> Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Wood
> Films of Fritz Lang, Gunning
> The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Tag
> Sirk on Sirk, John Halliday
> Film of Josef von Sternberg, Sarris
> Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Josef von Sternberg
> Wim Wenders on Film
>
> Pardon the lack of accents—
cut and paste into the groups interface
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---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
1941
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 3:59am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
My turn! Okay, you already own the first two titles that I would
consider essential (Jean-Pierre Coursodon's American Directors
and Gilberto Perez's The Material Ghost).
I vote for the following:
Kevin Brownlow: The Parade's Gone By
Tag: John Ford
Todd Rainsberger: James Wong Howe: Cinematographer (has
much interesting material on visual style).
Mike Cormack: Ideology and Cinematography in Hollywood,
1930-39 (ditto on visual style).
Patrick Robertson: Film Facts (endlessly interesting facts and
statistics collected in one place, and reasonably trustworthy. For
example, he says the first regular film critic was one Frank Woods,
using the pen name of 'Spectator' in the NY Dramatic Mirror,
starting work on May 1st 1909 at a salary of $20/week. All the
information has that level of detail).
--Bob Keser
Patrick Ciccone wrote:
> ...my collection looks
> paltry and missing a lot of obvious titles ...
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1942
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 4:17am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
I would add all of Kevin Brownlow's books;
Jeanine Basinger: A Woman's View
Anything by David Bordwell
And in homage to the man who dragged me onto this list,
Inside Oscar by Damien Bona and Mason Wiley
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
1943
From: Fernando Verissimo
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 4:20am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
Hitchcock on Hitchcock - Sidney Gottlieb
This is Orson Welles - Bogdanovich, Rosenbaum
Memo From David O. Selznick - Rudy Behlmer
Jean Vigo - P.E. Salles Gomes
Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan - Robin Wood
fv
1944
From:
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 1:03am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
Five essential titles from my shelf (and not already owned by Patrick or
named by others):
CINEMA STYLISTS, by John Belton
ORSON WELLES, by Joseph McBride
GETTING AWAY WITH IT, by Richard Lester and Steven Soderbergh
STANLEY KUBRICK, by Vinny
HITCHCOCK AT WORK, by Bill
A sixth title would be Thomson's BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY, which I usually am
not a fan of until someone smart like Dan makes a case for a particularly
great essay within it (i.e. the one on Hawks.) So it's kind of a
half-recommendation from me.
Peter
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1945
From:
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 1:14am
Subject: Rafelson's No Good Deed
I just saw Bob Rafelson's new film "No Good Deed," which opened today in
Columbus (though not, as far as I can determine, New York or Los Angeles.)
Originally titled "The House on Turk Street" (after the Hammett story it's based
upon), this is an odd duck, for sure. Despite being cast with some "name" talent
(Samuel Jackson, Stellan Skarsgard, the girl from "Resident Evil"), it bears
the names of distributors and production companies heretofore completely
unknown to me; the IMDB indicates it's been in international release for over a
year. No press screenings have apparently been held in the U.S.; I've not seen a
trailer or TV ad promoting it.
The film itself is actually rather good - not as good as "The King of Marvin
Gardens" or "Blood and Wine," but what is? Rafelson's still a great noir
stylist; despite the confined spaces of the film (it essentially takes place
inside a house, a few offices, and cars), there's atmosphere to spare; lots of
expressionistic lighting and sneaky zooms. The lead character's hobby and love
for music relates to "Five Easy Pieces." It's all very low-key and at several
points I was convinced that I was watching a TV movie someone decided to
release to a few hundred theatres; there are several very ungraceful fade outs which
feel like commercial breaks. Nevertheless, you can tell it's by a real pro
and that's a quality I value in the current atmosphere.
I wonder if anyone else has seen it yet and/or can fill me in on the
mysterious-seeming circumstances surrounding its release. I don't know if I've ever
gotten a real handle on Rafelson's career - including the long gaps between
films (and existence of a number of short films, unseen by me) - apart from the
fact that he has made some great movies.
Peter
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1946
From:
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 1:23am
Subject: Re: Re: Return of the Repressed
I'd like to also extend a welcome to Chris Fujiwara, whose very perceptive
writing for The Boston Phoenix (among others) I've learned a great deal from
over the years. Incidentally, it's really nice to "meet" someone else who
recognizes a profound "termite" quality in late period Woody Allen!
Chris' mention of "Exodus" spurs me to ask: can you give us some information
about the Preminger critical biography your site indicates you're at work on?
If it's half as good as your Great Directors piece on OP, we're in for a real
treat.
Peter
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1947
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 5:59am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
Narrowing down which film books you should give priority to depnds to
some degree on where your interests lie. For instance, I'm
fascinated by the political history of Hollywood, so "Tender
Comrades," edited by Patrick McGiligan and Paul Buhle, is a book I
treasure. If you're not particularly interested in American social
history as it affects movies, then the book wouldn't be an essential.
Books I wholeheartedly recommend which haven't been mentioned yet are
(I'm not sure which are still in print):
"Hollywood Director" by David Chierichetti, which is an in-depth
examination of Mitchell Leisen, punctuated by lots of incisive
interviews from people Leisen worked with. I think Leisen is
certainly Billy Wilder's superior, and probably Preston Sturges's,
too.
"Laughing Husterically" by my friend Ed Sikov. A superb analysis of
50s comedy emphasizing Tashlin, Hawks, WIlder and Hithcock.
"Sirk On Sirk," edited by Jon Halliday.
"THe Street With No Name" by Andrew Dickos, another author I'm proud
to call a friend. An outstanding -- and exhaustive -- look at film
noir using German expressionism as a starting point.
"Kings Of The Bs" edited by Todd McCarty and Charles Flynn. This is
a wonderful collection of essays about, and interviews with, B
filmmakers, including Ulmer and Phil Karlson. And the book reveals
that Joseph Kane was a McGovern supporter.
Also, the individual entries I've seen from the British Film
Institute Classics series have been outstanding.
And thanks to Filipe and George for mentioning "Inside Oscar."
1948
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 6:02am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
One more that I forgot:
The Films Of Jacques Tourneur by Chris Fujiwara.
1949
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 6:19am
Subject: Re: Rafelson's No Good Deed
It's all very low-key and at several
> points I was convinced that I was watching a TV movie someon
e decided to
> release to a few hundred theatres; there are several very un
graceful fade outs which
> feel like commercial breaks. Nevertheless, you can tell it'
s by a real pro
> and that's a quality I value in the current atmosphere.
>
> I wonder if anyone else has seen it yet and/or can fill me i
n on the
> mysterious-seeming circumstances surrounding its release.
I haven't seen it yet. Funny you mention that it looks like a
TV movie because i'm quite sure the first time i read about
it, it was mentioned as a straight to cable film (and
Rafelson's last before this one was a pretty good TV
adaptation of Chandler's last book). So maybe Rafelson
thinking he wouldn't get any theatrical release. I looked at
the IMDb and at least one of the production companies listed
there is british.
I've seen 5 Rafelson films, like them all if the exception of
Blood & Wine (where I have the feeling he was defeated by the
script).
Filipe
---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
1950
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:05am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ciccone" wrote:
Thus in the interest of 1)expanding my collection
> 2)seeing what film books auteurists consider important, I ask all of
> you who are interested to contribute a list of the next five books I
> should add to my collection.
>
> American Directors, Vols. 1 & 2 Jean-Pierre Coursodon et al
A natural complement to this is Coursodon and Tavernier's _50 Ans de
cinéma américain_.
Here are my 5 (or 7) suggestions:
Georges Sadoul. Dictionary of Films. Dictionary of Film Makers.
Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
Joel Magny. Le Point de vue. (Part of "Les Petits Cahiers" series.)
Raymond Durgnat. Durgnat on Film.
Noel Burch. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese
Cinema.
Paul
1951
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:34am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
I'll second Brownlow's Parade, but will also highly recommend "Behind
the Mask of Innocence". Get his and David Gill's TV documentries as
well if you can.
I can also recommend "A Million and One Nights" by Terry Ramsaye and
"The Genius of the System" by Thomas Schatz.
You can never go wrong with Wood, Richie and Spoto. Borrow Bordwell
and Sarris before you decide to buy them.
Finally; Get both the "Golden Turkey" books. They are great fun.
1952
From: Tosh
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 8:59am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
I wrote this for a website that is not operating anymore. Forgive me
it's long(ish), but one can skip it in parts. These are the
essential film books in my library:
French New Wave, by Jean Douchet
When I die, I want to be buried with Jean Douchet's French New Wave.
The fact that yours truly will one day be in a coffin means that I
need a good (long) book to read and to look at -- and this is the
book. It is a treat for both the eyes, with ravishing film stills and
layout of text, and for the intellect, with penetrating thoughts on
the importance of the French 'New Wave' in cinema history. This
seductively well illustrated book takes one back to when films were
fresh and exciting. All the major heroes are here: Jean-Luc Godard,
François Truffaut, and others. Included are the original reviews by
the Cahiers du Cinéma group, plus the original film bills from the
ever influential Cinémathéque Française: First they were critics, the
first to look at the importance of cinema and the first to value the
films for their directors instead of their stars, studios, or
box-office stature. Later, they made films -- cheap, inventive, and
still fresh and beautiful as the first sunlight.
City of Nets, by Otto Friedrich
In the years between 1939 to 1949, Los Angeles was the cultural
capital of the world, in part due to men like Hitler, who were
discouraging certain types of artists from working in their version
of a new Germany. So Hollywood became host to cultural German legends
like Bertolt Brecht, Igor Stravinsky, Thomas and Heinrich Mann,
Alfred Doblin, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and
Peter Lorre, among others. On the American side, we had Nathanael
West, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others writing for
the film factory. And for the conservative-minded studio heads, the
one thing almost as bad as the Nazis were the Hollywood workers'
unions. No problem though, when one had the HUAC to label the working
stiffs as communists. In addition, there's Charlie Chaplin getting
kicked out of the United States for political and sexual reasons, and
Errol Flynn's infamous two-way mirrors in the walls and ceilings of
his love pad. The result is a book that exposes Hollywood as a
cultural landscape with a rather devilish personality.
Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, by Kenneth Anger
It's not the stories themselves, but how Kenneth Anger tells the
stories. On the surface this book is a diatribe against the Hollywood
system, but underneath it is a love letter to the city and its famous
citizens. One can spend a lifetime proving or disproving the gossip,
but what's the point? Anger (also a brilliant filmmaker) has written
a beautiful book about Hollywood's real greatness: the sleaze, drugs,
death, and sexual excess. What's distinctive about Hollywood is the
image, and Anger focuses fully on it. All the great gossip is here:
Fatty Arbuckle's rape trial, Chaplin's affairs with (much) younger
girls, Erich Von Strohiem's on-the-set staged orgies, and so forth.
In addition to the stories, Anger uses great photographs of the stars
at their low points. This book exposes the soul of Hollywood in
poetic terms
The Parade's Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow
The best history of the American silent-movie era. British film
historian Brownlow interviewed not only the stars of these films, but
their technicians, stuntmen, cameramen, and others who made silent
films an art form when the cinema medium was still young. Brownlow
spoke to many screen legends while they were still kicking, so one is
able to hear the voices of Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, Mary
Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and King Vidor. He was also wise in his
choice to let many of the participants speak for themselves about
their early cinematic experiences. An essential book for silent-film
lovers, as well as those who are interested in the culture of cinema
production in the early twentieth century.
Eros in Hell, by Jack Hunter
What's cinema without sleaze? The history of film always had an
element of sordidness, and the B-movie studios in Japan have produced
their own bizarre quantity of off-the-wall cinema. Jack Hunter's Eros
in Hell goes into the murky world of mondo Japanese films and their
filmmakers. Here we have interviews with filmmakers like Koji
Wakamatsu (Go, Go, Second Time Virgin) and Takao Nakano (described
here as the Ed Wood of Japan). There is also Seijun Suzuki (the Sam
Fuller of Japan), Hisayasu Sato (mixture of porno and avant-garde
leanings), and the legendary Nagisa Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence). Not only is this book jam-packed with information and
fantastic still photos, but it also gives a general overview on what
is and was happening in Japanese cinema besides the Kurosawa-Ozu
filmmakers. An essential book on underground Japanese cinema and its
culture.
Godard on Godard: Critical Writings, by Jean-Luc Godard
Godard has always been a god to me. His films are frequently cited in
essays about the nature and culture of the cinema. Godard began his
career by writing about film for the French magazine Cahiers du
Cinéma, and his style of writing is very much fan-like in its
exuberance, especially with respect to his appreciation of films that
were not getting proper critical attention, such as the works of
Nicholas Ray, Frank Tashlin, and Fritz Lang. It is somewhat like the
writings of a punk-rock fan who wrote about his heroes and then
decided to form his own accomplished band; Godard's writings led to
his own classic films. So this book is not only an essential look at
a filmmaker, but also at a man who loves films with all his heart.
Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz
I have a testing method for encyclopedias. What I do is look up
something totally cryptic, and if it's listed in the book, that's the
one to get! In film encyclopedias, I always look up Lois Weber, an
early female director who started making films in 1912. Ephraim
Katz's Film Encyclopedia not only has a nice mention of Weber but
also Alice Guy-Blaché (another early filmmaker), my second obscure
choice. Everyone is in this book, from Sacha Guitry (look him up if
you don't know who he is) to Zsa Zsa Gabor to totally obscure actress
Anne Jackson, who made three or four films, but is married to Eli
Wallach. Who is she? Is this information important? Yes it is,
because if you read this book from beginning to end you'll be the
master of movie knowledge. Which could mean that you become the
biggest bore on the block, or one who really appreciates a complete
knowledge of world cinema.
Hitchcock by Truffaut, by Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut
The ultimate book on one filmmaker by another famous filmmaker. Okay,
there aren't that many books by directors talking about their peers,
although Paul Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson,
Dreyer comes to mind. That is a rare and great example, but the
Hitchcock book has to be the best example of a great filmmaker
talking about his trade, the art of making movies. Truffaut goes
one-on-one to nail all the important questions about Hitchcock's
work. In other words, it's like sitting at a bar between two film
giants in conversation. Truffaut reviews every detail obsessively,
and Hitchcock, with great humor, discusses his entire career. This
book is for both the fans and aspiring filmmakers seeking inspiration
-- this book doesn't let anyone down.
LuLu in Hollywood, by Louise Brooks
The late Louise Brooks was a stunning beauty who along with Marlene
Dietrich and Greta Garbo was one of the great seducers on the silver
screen. Not only did she invent the helmet bob haircut of the
twenties, but she was also one of the best-understated film essayists
in cinema. Brooks refused to be compromised by the Hollywood system.
She was eventually blacklisted and condemned to live her life in
obscurity. From the shadows came Lulu in Hollywood, a book that
touches on old Hollywood, Brooks's experiences working with German
great Georg Wilhelm Pabst (Pandora's Box), and unusually positive
insights into stars such as W.C. Fields and Humphrey Bogart. Her
chapter on Marion Davies (an underrated comedy actress and mistress
to William Randolph Hearst) is touching and gives Davies credit as a
human being as well as an artist. Brooks is an icon that didn't
disappoint. It's not a film library if it doesn't include Lulu in
Hollywood.
Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr., by Rudolph Grey
This oral history on the "Titan of Bad", Ed Wood, wonderfully
captures the underbelly of Hollywood. It's all in here -- the dreams,
the sweat, weird characters (shades of Nathanael West), the early
porno industry, and cross-dressing galore. Ed Wood was a filmmaker,
scriptwriter, pornographer, drunk, novelist (Death of a Transvestite
is a must-read), and, according to this book, a decent guy. What is
heartbreaking about his life is his ongoing struggle to make
something against all odds, with a lack of money and, according to
some, a lack of talent. But that doesn't matter in Hollywood.
Nightmare of Ecstasy is essential for anyone who has an interest in
making a film or wants to create anything important in his or her
life.
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1953
From:
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:07am
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
What a terrific collection of books you have.
Here are some more:
The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976), edited by Chris
Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. THE history of the mystery genre. Tons of info on mystery
films. Long out of print - look in used book stores. A great book, loved by
mystery fans, never read by film people.
Andre Bazin - Jean Renoir (1971). This is a very inspiring book!
Film Noir Reader
Film Noir Reader 2
both edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini. Outstanding collections of
essays on this genre. An ideal intro to genre studies in film.
Don Miller - B Movies (1973)
Arthur Lyons - Death on the Cheap, The Lost B Movies of Film Noir (2000)
Guides to the bottom of Hollywood. Full of movies you've never heard of. The
ideal gift for those George Sherman and Lew Landers fans out there... Lyons is
a well-known writer of the Jacob Asch private eye novels.
Barry Salt - Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (1983, 1992) By
a maverick thinker trying to promote the "scientific" study of movies.
Lutz Batcher - The Mobile Mise en Scene (1978) History of the technology and
theory of camera movement.
Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers - Screen Deco (1985). Gorgeous look at Art
Deco art direction in 1920's and 1930's Hollywood. I love Art Deco!
Elizabeth Leese - Costume Design in the Movies (1976) Beautiful.
Stephen E. Whitfield, Gene Roddenberry - The Making of Star Trek (1968)
Inside look at the creation of the great TV series.
John Baxter - Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970). An informed survey.
Roy Armes - French Cinema (1985)
Roy Armes - The Cinema of Alain Resnais (1968)
Standard studies.
Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, editors - Godard on Godard (1968, 1972) Godard's
collected critical writings.
Leonard Maltin - Behind the Camera: The Cienmatographer's Art (1971).
Interviews and studies of cinematographers.
Raymond Durgnat - Franju (1967)
Christopher Wicking and Tise Vahimagi - The American Vein: Directors and
Directions in Television (1978) An auteurist look at American TV.
Sheldon Renan - An Introduction to the American Underground Film (1967).
History of experimental movies.
Mike Grost
1954
From:
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:40am
Subject: Re: Rafelson's No Good Deed
Have not seen the movie yet.
Have read Dashiell Hammett's original story, "The House on Turk Street"
(1924).
There are a few comments on it in the Hammett article on my mystery web site:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/hammett.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/hammett.htm
Mike Grost
1955
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 0:42pm
Subject: Re: Film Books: Help me expand my library
Great lists: Here are five more:
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: FIlm Style & Mode of Production to 1960 by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson.
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler
Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 by P. Adams Sitney
Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The Major Filmmakers Edited by Richard Roud
Vinny
---------------------------------
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1956
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 2:31pm
Subject: New Brakhage material
In the last six months or so, partly but not entirely a result of his
untimely death, a number of recent articles and other documents on Stan
Brakhage have been placed on the Web, many of them by me, and I have
been asked to curate and speak on two four-program tributes by film
festivals. These are all linked to from my Brakhage links page
(http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html ); for images and strips
from his films, see my Brakhage stills page
(http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageS.html ) Much information on
Brakhage's illness, death, and the disposition of his films and papers,
has been added to my site and linked to from the links page, and also
added recently are links to obituaries and links to reviews of the
Criterion DVD.
I wouldn't post something like this for just a few articles, but there
are so many I thought they were worth taking note of. Also, if you
notice any typos, language errors, factual errors, broken links, links
to add, et cetera, please email me. I'm not going to catch all of this
on my own!
For some time I have been working on a Web-based Brakhage filmography.
It's still far from perfect, but I think it's the most accurate and
complete one available: http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Filmography.html
See also my page, "Projecting the Films of Stan Brakhage," at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Projection.html This includes
comments on the practice of playing music during projections of
Brakhage's silent films, and important information on how to project
"23rd Psalm Branch," which has apparently been projected incorrectly at
most showings over the last four decades.
One item that may be of some interest even to those not interested in
Brakhage: recently in Chicago we did a private test screening comparing
the films on the new Criterion DVD, "by Brakhage," with prints of some
of the films. For me, and for most of the other attendees, much of what
was great about most of the films did in fact survive on DVD. A fuller
description of the event can be found at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/CriterionDVD.html
My liner note essay for the Criterion DVD, which represent my best
attempt at a general introduction to Brakhage, is at
http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=184&eid=298§ion=essay
(For info on the DVD itself:
http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=184 ). With my permission,
a DVD rental store has put my capsules descriptions of the Criterion
liner notes onto their site, which are indexed at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html#DVD Criterion has also
put up a short Brakhage bio they commissioned from me, not in the liner
notes, at
http://www.criterionco.com/asp/in_focus_essay.asp?id=13&eid=301 In
addition, Criterion has commissioned several other articles on Brakhage
for their Web site, which I recommend, and which can be accessed from
http://www.criterionco.com/asp/in_focus.asp?id=13
For those who already know my writing on Brakhage, I recommend something
a little different, "Three Myths About Brakhage," at
http://www.logosjournal.com/camper.htm
My review of Brakhage's late films, with many frame enlargements, and
photographs of Brakhage at work by Kai SIbley, is at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Brakhage3.html
My "Stan Brakhage: A Short Introduction" is at
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/brakhage_intro.html
I have added strips of one of Brakhage's two last films, "Chinese
Series," along with a short comment, to my stills page at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageS.html#Chinese"
I'll be presenting four programs of Brakhage films in Belo Horizonte,
Brazil in October 2003 (http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Brazil.html )
and Hong Kong in April 2004
(http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/HongKong.html )
P. Adams Sitney wrote a Brakhage obituary for "Cahiers du Cinema" which
has been published only in French; with his permission I have posted the
English original (with one factual correction) at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/Sitney.html
I did a story for the "Chicago Reader" largely consisting of
reminiscences of Brakhage's years in Chicago by filmmakers and artists
who knew him (Mimi Brav, Tom Mapp, Louis Hock, Bill Brand, Rob
Danielson, and Nora Jacobson.); this is not available free but can be
purchased from the "Chicago Reader" for $1.95 at
https://securesite.chireader.com/cgi-bin/Archive/abridged2.bat?path=2003/030418/BRAKHAGE&search=Stan%20Brakhage%20Louis%20Hock
I thought I would also mention the availability of transcripts of
Brakhage's 1982 radio programs on film, music and poetry, generously
provided by Brett Kashmere, at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Brakhage/TestofTime.html ; this has been on my
site for quite a while.
Finally, I've taken a stab at defining, and discussing the naming of,
avant-garde film: http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/AvantGardeDefinition.html
Fred
1957
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 2:48pm
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
> the next five books I
> should add to my collection.
First, probably Bordwell, "Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema," for the month(s) ahead. TBC...
1958
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 3:08pm
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Henrik Sylow"
wrote:
>
> Finally; Get both the "Golden Turkey" books. They are great fun.
I, on the other hand, would strongly discourage getting any books
with which that reactionary buffoon Michael Medved is associated. One
of his tomes included Last Year At Marienbad as among the 50 worst
movies of all times. What a philistine.
1959
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 3:45pm
Subject: Re: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
Damien Bona wrote:
>I, on the other hand, would strongly discourage getting any books
>with which that reactionary buffoon Michael Medved is associated.
>
Yes, well, reading the first Golden Turkey book in a bookstore, I also
noticed "Ivan the Terrible," Griffith's great "Abraham Lincoln," and
Preminger's "Hurry Sundown" on the "50 worst" list. I particularly loved
the "analysis" of why Ivan was so bad: the plot was said to be so
ridiculous that Ivan was on his deathbed at one moment and miraculously
recovered ten minutes later. The writer apparently didn't understand the
plot, in which Ivan feigns illness to see who his opponents are (it's
been ages, so forgive me if I get this a little wrong, and correct me if
I have it more than a little wrong).
Some suggestions:
The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. Sitney, has
many great things, essays that are examples of filmmakers writing their
own film theory, defining cinema in the particular terms of their own
work, the only theory I really care about.
Metaphors on Vision, by Stan Brakhage. A key book about cinema. Problem
is it's now a Fluxus collectible and tends to go for over $100. But key
sections are reprinted, with some other great stuff, in "Essential
Brakhage," which is in print.
A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book, by Stan Brakhage. Another key
book on cinema: how to make films, from the Brakhage point of view,
which is unlike any other.
Hitchcock's Films, by Robin Wood:. This was a key early book for me, at
a time when detailed analysis of "auteurist" cinema was very rare in
English, and the discussions of "Vertigo" and "Psycho" may not be all
that surprising today but are still good.
The Archeology of the Cinema, by C. W. Ceram There are apparently a lot
of problems with this book, lots of factual errors, and there's stuff in
French that's supposed to be much better. BUT: it's heavily illustrated,
and it opened up the world of pre-cinema for me, the connections between
cinema and all those other things. Reading it helped me formulate a
somewhat fanciful anti-cinema argument -- that is, it occurred to me
that there's a way in which this stuff is "better." (If someone knows of
something much better on the subject, illustrated well (which seems key
for such things), preferably in English but also in French, please post).
- Fred
1960
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 4:19pm
Subject: Rafelson
Thanks for the tip - I have no idea what it is. I agree with Peter's
evaluation of Blood and Wine: Catch it if you like film noir, because
it's the real thing, not "neo-." I kind of enjoyed Man Trouble, too,
but on a different level. Carol Eastman also wrote The Shooting and
The Fortune - Man Trouble is closer to the latter than to the former,
but it's still enjoyable. Mountains of the Moon is one of those dream
projects that was dreamed too long and is DOA. Black Widow is a
stunner because of the cinematography and the two leads; BR rewrote
the script, so it's decent, despite the writing credit for Ron Bass.
Rafelson has had an uneven time of it since he slugged the producer
of Brubaker, but I believe he's wealthy, so he doesn't have to work.
I wouldn't say he's been picking his projects - the above is a very
mixed bag - but Blood and Wine proved he still had the stuff, and Man
Trouble is a sweet reunion of the star, director and writer (aka
Adrien Joyce) of Five Easy Pieces, with Ellen Barkin thrown in for
good measure. King of Marvin Gardens, of course, rules.
1961
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 5:32pm
Subject: Re: New Brakhage Material
Fred,
Thank you so much for this invaluable post and especially for your tireless work concerning Brakhage's life and career.
I highly reccomend the Criteron DVD - it was the joy of my summer - I watched one film at a time - reading the notes - listening to the remarks and sitting on the floor in amazement of how wonderful the work comes across. Of course they were made to be seen projected but this DVD will get Brakhage's work out to many who probably would not encounter it in any way.
For me Brakhage like Kubrick is not just a great filmmaker but a great 20th Century Artist - I have not totally gotten over his death - like Kubrick these men were one of a kind artists dedicated to the medium.
I have a copy of Metaphors on Vision that was personally sold to me by Jonas Mekas when Anthology was at the Public - back probably 33 years ago. I also purchased A Moving Picture and Taking book at Cinemabilia around the same time - I refer to them constantly - great works of film literature.
Again, my hat goes off to you Fred for all your good work.
Vinny
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1962
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 6:11pm
Subject: Re: Film Books: Help Me Expand My Library
Tosh's beautiful post broke the dam, so here are a whole bunch of
really great titles:
Since this is for Patrick (glad to see you have the Ranciere!) I'll
add some French:
Jean Douchet, Hitchcock
Jean-Claude Biette, La Poetique des Auteurs
" " Qu'est-ce qu'un cineaste?
Andre Bazin - Charles Chaplin
" " - Le cinema de cruaute
Luc Moullet - La Politique des Acteurs (and his Fritz Lang, which I
think someone already mentioned)
Jean Epstein - Ecrits sur le cinema
Louis Seguin - Une critique dispersee
Georges Sadoul - Louis Lumiere
" " - Georges Melies
Francois Lacassin - Louis Feuillade
Noel Burch - Marcel L'Herbier
" " - Hollywood Rouge (with Thom Andersen)
Michel Mourlet - Cecil B. DeMille
Youssef Ishaghpour - Orson Welles Cineaste
Gerard Leblanc and Brigitte Devismes - Le double scenario de Fritz
Lang
Alain Bergala - Nul mieux que Godard
Charles Tesson - Luis Bunuel
" " - Satyajit Ray
Shiguehiko Hasumi - Yasujiro Ozu
William Karl Guerin - Max Ophuls
Carl Dreyer - Reflexions sur mon metier
Roberto Rossellini - Le cinema revele
Camille Taboulay - Le cinema enchante de Jacques Demy
Noel Howard - Hollywood sur Nil
Henri Langois - Cent ans de cinema
Available in English:
Slavoj Zizek - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Lacan But
Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock
Andre Bazin - French Cinema Under the Occupation (French title: Le
cinema francais de l'Occupation et de la Resistance)
" " - Orson Welles
" " - What Is Cinema 1 and 2 - but the whole series, in
French, is indispensable if you can get it
(By the way, to those who have Deleuze Cinema 1 and 2 in English,
it's a bad translation; so, unfortunately, are the two volumes of
Bazin, but not as bad as the Deleuze, which translates the French
titles of American films literally.)
Rohmer - Le Gout de la Beaute/The Taste for Beauty
Chabrol/Rohmer - Hitchcock
Eisenstein, Film Form and Film Sense
Bernard Eisenschitz - The Lives of Nicholas Ray
Raymond Bellour - The Analysis of Film
Michel Ciment - Kubrick
Noel Burch - Theory of Film Practice
English:
Michael Singer - Directors (1997 edition)
Jonathan Rosenbaum - Moving Places
" - Jacques Rivette
" - Abbas Kiarostami (with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa)
Simon Callow - The Road to Xanadu
Joe McBride - Searching for John Ford
" " - Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
" " - Orson Welles
" " - Hawks on Hawks
" " - John Ford (with Michael Wilmington)
Michel Chion - Audiovision
John Belton - Hawks, Borzage, Ulmer
Ken Mogg - The Alfred Hitchcock Story (UK edition only)
Peter Wollen - Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
James Naremore - The Films of Vincente Minnelli
Ralph Rosenbloom - When the Shooting's Over
Martin Rubin - Thrillers
Tim Lucas - All the Colors of Darkness (TK)
Janet Bergstrom (ed.) - Endless Night
Gerald Mast (ed.) - Bringing Up Baby
Bridget Gellert Lyons (ed.) - Chimes at Midnight
Robert Sklar - Dark Carnival
Richard Roud - Dictionary of Cinema (ed.)
" " - A Passion for Films
Robin Wood - Ingmar Bergman
" " - The Apu Trilogy
Christopher Wicking and Tise Vahimagi - The American Vein
David Ehrenstein - Film: The Front Line
Budd Schulberg - What Makes Sammy Run?
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Last Tycoon
Nathaneal West - The Day of the Locust
Stanley Cavell - Pursuits of Happiness
" " - Contesting Tears
Robert Parrish - Hollywood Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Ralph Rosenbloom - When The Shooting's Over
James Baldwin - The Devil Finds Work
James Agee - Agee on Film, vol. I
Manny Farber - Negative Space
Andrew Sarris - Confessions of a Cultist
" " - The John Ford Mystery
Patrick McGilligan - Alfred Hitchcock, A Life Lived on the Dark and
the Light Side - TK
" " the Backstory series (ed.)
" " - A Double Life
" " - Clint: The Life and Legend
Vincent LoBrutto - Principal Photography
" " - By Design
John Russell Taylor - Hitch
Barbara Leaming - Orson Welles
Gavin Lambert - On Cukor
Tom Gunning - The Films of Fritz Lang
Raymond Durgnat - The Crazy Mirror
" " - King Vidor, American (with Scott Simmon)
" " - Franju
" " - The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock
Dudley Andrew - Andre Bazin
King Vidor - This Is a Tree
Raoul Walsh - Every Man in His Time
David O. Selznick - Memo (ed. Rudy Behlmer)
Michael MacLiammoir - Put Money in Your Purse
Charles Barr - English Hitchcock
Sidney Gottlieb - Alfred Hitchcock Interviews
Robert J. Corber - In the Name of National Security
Robert Samuels - Hitchcock's Bi-Textuality
Tania Modleski - The Women Who Knew Too Much
Bill Warren - Keep Watching the Skies (two volumes)
Shirley Temple - Child Star
Gene Fowler, Jr. - W. C. Fields: His Fortunes and Follies
I vote strongly against buying or reading the Golden Turkey Awards,
which also includes (as a "turkey") Bring Me the Head of Alfredo
Garcia, my one unabashed Peckinpah rave. The failure even to touch on
all the "classy" crap that Hollywood has made predicted 100% the co-
author's future as a film critic, championing said crap.
1963
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:02pm
Subject: Fw: GUY DEBORD: Situationist Film Soundtracks
Apologies for cross-listing but I think the members of all three of these
lists will want to see the item below.
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bureau of Public Secrets"
To:
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 1:31 PM
Subject: GUY DEBORD: Situationist Film Soundtracks
> New translations of the soundtracks from all six of Guy Debord's films are
> now online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films .
>
> Some excerpts:
>
> "The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation
> between people that is mediated by images. . . . Spectators are linked
> solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them
> isolated from each other."
>
> "The function of the cinema, whether dramatic or documentary, is to
present
> a false and isolated coherence as a substitute for a communication and
> activity that are absent."
>
> "Society broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history
> reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers -- the persons
who
> embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens."
>
> "This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each time unknown
> people try to live differently. But it was always far away. We learn of it
> through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, relating to it as
> just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own
> nonintervention."
>
> "Others unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their
> work and their home, to their predictable future. For them, duty had
already
> become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their
> city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to
> break out of this conditioning, in search of different uses of the urban
> landscape, in search of new passions."
>
> "Thus was mapped out a program calculated to undermine the credibility of
> the entire organization of social life. Classes and specializations, work
> and entertainment, commodities and urbanism, ideology and the state -- we
> showed that it all needed to be scrapped. . . . These perspectives have
now
> been widely adopted, and people everywhere are fighting for or against
them.
> But back then they would certainly have seemed delirious, if the behavior
of
> modern capitalism had not been even more delirious."
>
> "The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only
> in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies
the
> withering away of all the alienated forms of communication. The cinema,
too,
> must be destroyed."
>
>
>
>
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
>
> The Bureau of Public Secrets website features numerous texts by and about
> Guy Debord and the Situationist International.
>
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
>
>
> BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
> http://www.bopsecrets.org
>
> "Making petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune."
>
>
1964
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:04pm
Subject: Fw: Well, it doesn't make up for pulling HITCHCOCK HOUR, but..
Just thought you'd all like to know that the Hallmark Channel (Ch. 107 on Time Warner Cable uptown) is showing The Virginian on Sunday nights at midnight (monday a.m.) and on October 12 will be showing "It Tolls For Thee" the Fuller episode.
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1965
From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:43pm
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
and couple of gems:
Maya Deren, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film" reprinted
in "Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde" ed. Bill Nichols
Victor Grauer, "Montage, Realism and the Act of Vision," available at
no cost, online through this page:
http://www.worldzone.net/arts/doktorgee/home.htm
(it seems you can only proceed to subsequent parts of the book by
typing in changes to the last part of the URL, e.g., "-part1.html"
to "-part2.html," etc.)
and I'll throw out a few titles on visual arts in general, which I
tend to find much more useful than texts in the
philosophical/linguistic/semiotic fields:
John Berger, "Ways of Seeing"
Carter Ratcliff, "The Fate of a Gesture"
Clement Greenberg, "Homemade Aesthetics" and the series of collected
writings
John Milner, "Piet Mondrian"
-Jason
1966
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:47pm
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
Jason Gutharz:
> and I'll throw out a few titles on visual arts in general, which I
> tend to find much more useful than texts in the
> philosophical/linguistic/semiotic fields:
>
> John Berger, "Ways of Seeing"
I wouldn't argue with the recommendation, as Berger's book is a
worthwhile one, but isn't this squarely in the tradition of semiotics
and cultural studies? Berger is a long, long way from Clem
Greenberg ...
--Zach
1967
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 9:37pm
Subject: re: Film Books
Dear comrades -
It has been great reading everybody's film book recommendations. What is
really striking to me - and I do not mean this as a criticism of any
individual or the group as a whole - is how completely the lists concentrate
on French and American critics! (Although I am glad to see the high number
of votes for Ray Durgnat from UK). The Franco-American axis is hardly
surprising given the specific expertise, interests and professional
histories of many of us here. But I often find myself hungry to know: who re
considered, by those who know, the great critics of Russia, China, Brazil
Egypt, Greece, Poland, New Zealand, etc etc? Even the very rich film
cultures of Italy or Austria or Japan or Germany are mostly unknown to many
of us, even in the Internet age. Are there equivalents to 'What is Cinema?'
in other languages, other cultures, that we have never heard of since they
haven't been translated into English or French? (The great Shigehiko Hasumi
and his magnificent book on Ozu have scored a mention here, but only through
the French translation!!!)
Also, I must point out - within the French scene - how completely we shy
away from the Positif camp, or indeed just about anything French that is not
Cahiers!!! In this spirit (since I too have mainly read within an
Anglo-Euro-Australo axis) I would especially like to mention two key books
by two deceased giants:
Viv(r)e le cinéma by Roger Tailleur. This sensational collection of writing
1950-1970 is for me as significant as Farber's Negative Space, and as much
fun, too. His essays on Chris Marker were decades ahead of their time; his
writing on figures from Antonioni to Richard Brooks is just great. There's a
bit of Tailleur (some of his best) in the revent Positif selection published
in English.
Cinemania by Gerard Legrand. Incredible, far-reaching stuff - the central
long essay on Lang here is a masterpiece.
Also beyond Cahiers is a whole newer scene in France (actually, to be fair,
Cahiers in its now-defunct Tesson era was open to it) that includes not only
contributors to Trafic - has anybody mentioned the 2 volumes of Raymond
Bellour's L'Entre-Images yet, sublime and ground-breaking stuff - but a
whole raft of terrific magazines including Simulacres, The Image and the
World, and Balthazar, featuring young critics including Stéphane Delorme and
many, many others. From Simulacres, Jean-Baptise Thoret's recent book on
Dario Argento (published by Cahiers) is the best and deepest book on this
director by miles. And the mother of this whole newer scene is a book that
certainly figures on my Top Ten list: De la figure en general et le corps en
particulier (On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular) by Nicole
Brenez. Her forthcoming book on Abel Ferrara, in English in the Illinois Uni
series next year, is also world-shatteringly brilliant.
Adrian Martin
1968
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 10:08pm
Subject: Re: re: Film Books
Adrian Martin wrote:
>....But I often find myself hungry to know: who re
>considered, by those who know, the great critics of Russia....
>
Dunno about that, but I noticed too late that Patrick has a later
edition of Wood on Hitchcock, AND, I noticed a big omission from my and
I think everyone else's recommendations: Eisenstein. "Film Form" is I
think still the place to start, followed by "Film Sense." Vertov's
writing is great too. The small collection of Vertov pieces in "The
Film Culture Reader" is terrific. I guess I still prefer strong writing
by great filmmakers to most criticism, including my own.
- Fred
1969
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 10:10pm
Subject: Re: re: Film Books
I don't know if it's in print anymore, but there is also the Vertov
collection that Annette Michelson did, "Kino-Eye."
And if you want to add to the Russians, albeit probably out of print, there
used to be collections of Dovzhenko, Pudovkin and Kuleshov available in
English, not to mention "Cinema in Revolution" which is an excellent
anthology of lesser-known Soviet theorists.
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Camper"
To:
Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2003 6:08 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] re: Film Books
>
> Adrian Martin wrote:
>
> >....But I often find myself hungry to know: who re
> >considered, by those who know, the great critics of Russia....
> >
> Dunno about that, but I noticed too late that Patrick has a later
> edition of Wood on Hitchcock, AND, I noticed a big omission from my and
> I think everyone else's recommendations: Eisenstein. "Film Form" is I
> think still the place to start, followed by "Film Sense." Vertov's
> writing is great too. The small collection of Vertov pieces in "The
> Film Culture Reader" is terrific. I guess I still prefer strong writing
> by great filmmakers to most criticism, including my own.
>
> - Fred
>
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
1970
From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 10:26pm
Subject: Re: Film books: help me expand my library
> I wouldn't argue with the recommendation, as Berger's book is a
> worthwhile one, but isn't this squarely in the tradition of
semiotics
> and cultural studies? Berger is a long, long way from Clem
> Greenberg ...
True enough. The common ground among the works I mentioned is that
they seem to stay closer to the artworks they discuss, whereas much
of what I've read of "film theory & criticism" (though admittedly
limited) tends to stray too far afield for my purposes, treating the
works they discuss like exhibits in a judicial trial. The
visceral/emotional/affective stimulation (or sense of ecstatic
beauty) provoked by a great film is what I value above all else, so
interpretive and critical approaches which evade or devalue
aesthetics have little use to me.
(I intend to raise related issues in a different thread, coming soon
to a screen near you...)
-Jason
1971
From:
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 7:17pm
Subject: Re: Film Books
Adrian Martin writes:
"What is really striking to me - and I do not mean this as a criticism of any
individual or the group as a whole - is how completely the lists concentrate
on French and American critics! (Although I am glad to see the high number
of votes for Ray Durgnat from UK)."
Here is a somewhat humorous rebuttal, which I hope will offend no one :)
Hey, my film book list includes such Brits as Barry Salt, Elizabeth Leese,
John Baxter, Roy Armes, Tom Milne, Christopher Wicking and Tise Vahimagi, as
well as Raymond Durgnat. I LOVE British culture. My recommended list of movies is
dripping with zillions of British films. I also love 1980's music video,
which is full of British directors. My last post to a_film_by recommended the
British TV series Poirot. (By the way, the director of that superb Poirot episode
"Wasp's Nest", Brian Farnham, shows an admirable sense of camera movement and
staging.)
Here on the Border (Detroit USA/Windsor Canada) we hear Canadian Radio loud
and clear. I listen to CBC Radio-2 every day ("Classics and Beyond"): it's my
main media contact with the world. So do vast numbers of other Americans on the
Border. The Canadian musicians, writers and painters one hears everyday on
the radio have come to seem like personal friends.
"Britain and the United States are two countries that have everything in
common, except language, of course." Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost"
Mike Grost
In Detroit, Michigan, USA
1972
From: Tosh
Date: Sat Sep 13, 2003 11:45pm
Subject: re: Film Books
Actually Adrian sort of brings up a point that I was thinking about
this morning. What Country or culture has the most 'critical' film
titles? The two that comes to mind is probably the U.S./U.K. and
France. But what about Germany or other European countries?
Also in Japan there are I think a lot of U.S. and French titles
translated into Japanese, as well as books by Japanese film critics .
But is there a specific Culture that really go bananas over film
books - books written in the original language as well as
translations?
Overall I don't think the U.S. has that many 'foriegn' titles
translated into English. I could be wrong....
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
1973
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 0:18am
Subject: Re: Film Books
Fred, I mentioned Film Form and Film Sense.
Adrian, I don't read Japanese, etc., and little from those languages
has been translated anywhere. Credit Claudine Paquot with at least
making the Ozu book available in French, along with the recollections
of Mizoguchi's closest collaborators, which she recently reprinted.
Tag can fill us in on Italy, I imagine. Credit me with one Aussie,
Ken, and you know what I think of your BFI book - someone else just
got there first.
I love your enthusiasm, but can't agree with its objects: Raymond
Bellour hasn't written much of value since Analysis of Film, which I
did list, unless you count the Dumas book, which is an extension of
Analysis, and I certainly don't agree that Nicole Brenez is world-
shatteringly brilliant: more like world-shatteringly pretentious. I
don't know how anyone can have written an essay on the notion
of "figuration" in cinema without acknowledging Auerbach's "Figura,"
or at least the etymological thread which that widely-read essay is
teasing out. Sorry - I think these tastes are very much a factional
matter, and we're not in the same faction.
I do like some Positif critics, but I don't get all those books for
free! I mentioned Seguin, and I assume that anyone who likes his
collected essays will run, not walk, to his books on the Straubs and
Space in Cinema (of particular interest to this "spacey" group, I
would think). I value Ciment's book on Kubrick (mentioned), but not
his books on Kazan and Boorman, whom I don't value greatly as
filmmakers. Jean-Pierre Berthome and Michael Wilson are both friends
of mine: I'd recommend Jean-Pierre's book on Demy to anyone, after
the one by Taboulay, and I'm waiting for Michael's book on Tourneur
to cut loose with an unqualified recommendation - I thought the Walsh
was way too religious.
I also like, as I indicated, Burch, Mourlet, Lacassin, Epstein and
many others I wouldn't call Cahier-ists - France has a very rich
critical tradition, as Godard noted in 2x50 Years of Cinema, the text
of which I would certainly add to my list of highly recommended book
titles. Here are some I missed:
Joel E. Siegel - Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror
In the same series, Roud's books on Straub and Godard
JR's book on Midnight Movies with J. Hoberman, still a classic
Sylvie Pierre - Glauber Rocha
Olivier Assayas - Kenneth Anger
Jean Renoir - My Life and My Films (what a wonderful book!)
John Belton - American Cinema/American Culture
Kracauer's two books that have been translated (from German): From
Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film
There are great collections of Vertov in French (10/18), as well as
much more of Eisenstein (same press), Sadoul's book on Vertov,
Bernard Eisenschitz's little book on Russian cinema, etc., but they
aren't available in English. That's why I learned French. Maybe I
should have learned Turkish.
I was given Tavernier's collection of interviews, Amis americains, in
Lyon and liked what I read of it before trading it for Lacassin's
Pour une contre-histoire de cinema - a lifeboat decision I don't
regret. By the way, I have published one book with Actes Sud, a
rather Positif press, and it was an ex-Cahierist, the translator
Bernard Eisenschitz, who preemptorily decided not to include my
introduction, not Thierry Fremaux, the very Positif publisher.
I wish I had all those little French film magazines you've been
collecting - reading Charles' brief reviews of them makes me wonder
what they're up to. I have a few Vertigos, and one Simulacres -
that's about it. Nothing mind-blowing there, God knows, but I'd love
to see what Camille Nevers/Francine Rinaldi has been doing since she
left the Cahiers - how are her articles in Lettre au cinema? Call me
prejudiced, but I really think we have some very good young writers
in Cahiers these days, and I pray that they won't be scattered to the
winds by the changeover.
By the way, if you want to read something good on Ferrara, check out
Tag's article. It IS brilliant! Maybe the book by Brenez will be,
too. I like her Shadows book - not hugely, but it's OK. (Charles
Tesson's book on El in the same series I do like hugely.) That
reminds me, the Cassavetes commentary on the Faces script is very
useful, if someone wants a good book on/by that auteur.
Let a thousand Ferrara books bloom!
1974
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 0:59am
Subject: Re: re: Film Books
Godard once cited Tailleur's review of "Harper" in
"Positif" as being superior to what "Cahiers" was
turning out at the time.
Tailleur placed "The Detective" in the number one spot
for his top ten of 1967.
Very odd.
--- Adrian Martin wrote:
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1975
From: chris_fujiwara
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 1:04am
Subject: legrand and preminger
I second Adrian's inspired recommendation of Legrand's Cinemanie,
which is one of my most-consulted film books. Another "Positif" book
I can recommend is Robert Benayoun's Bonjour Monsieur Lewis. And
Michael Henry Wilson's book on Raoul Walsh.
I would put in a word for Lutz Bacher's Max Ophuls in the Hollywood
Studios, which thoroughly and concretely documents how Ophuls shaped,
controlled, and protected his American films.
Shiguehiko Hasumi's book on Ozu has been mentioned, but it's worth
stressing how great this book is. I can't think of a more profound
book of film criticism.
Thanks to Peter for his kind welcome. Peter asked about the Preminger
book I'm working on. It's going to be a very long book, part
criticism, part biography, and I'll be laboring over it this year and
next year. I thought I'd just throw out a few "authorship"-related
questions raised by Preminger's work.
Laura was, as is well known, started by Mamoulian, with Preminger as
producer; after two weeks, Zanuck fired Mamoulian and allowed
Preminger to take over as director. Preminger and Mamoulian both
later said that none of Mamoulian's footage remained in the final
film, and Vincent Price also said that everything Mamoulian had done
was reshot. In this, the three contradicted Lucien Ballard, the
original DP (replaced, when Mamoulian left, by Joseph LaShelle), who
claimed that his and Mamoulian's work remains in the film. There are
lingering doubts in some minds on this matter, and I wonder whether
the Mamoulian partisans on the list, if there are any, have any
thoughts about this.
The 20th Century-Fox legal department files on the film contain
production schedules that seem to show that not all of the Mamoulian
scenes were rescheduled for Preminger, but that proves nothing, since
the schedules in these files may not be complete, and since Preminger
could have gone off the schedule (one would need the production
reports, and they aren't available).
Forever Amber - a film that I was cold on before working on this
project but which I've come to like a lot - was started by John M.
Stahl with Peggy Cummins; after about two months and an expenditure
of $1 million, Zanuck halted production and replaced Stahl with
Preminger and Cummins with Linda Darnell. An often cited explanation
(which Frank Nugent put forward in a 1946 New York Times article on
the production) is that Cummins looked too young for the part; but
that still wouldn't explain why Stahl got the axe. Is there anyone
here who is really into Stahl and who has considered what Stahl's
version of the film might have been like, and what aspects of his
personality or style might have got him into trouble on Amber?
Flash. That great auteur Jean Negulesco was assigned to shoot retakes
and added scenes on River of No Return. Whether or not stuff of his
is in the film, I haven't established (I still need to do more
research in LA, and River is not one of the films I've focused on so
far), but I strongly suspect so.
1976
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 1:22am
Subject: Re: legrand and preminger
I would tend to agree with the others over Ballard
re."Laura."
Sorry that Cummings and Stahl got axed from "Forever
Amber."
"Leave Her to Heaven" is a masterpiece.
--- chris_fujiwara wrote:
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1977
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 1:26am
Subject: Precisions
Bill -
Many thanks for your comments on my comment. However, I just want to make
clear that I was not trying to pitch an anti-Cahiers stance, just trying to
broaden the references of the group a little in this regard. I did indeed
mention that Cahiers published the Hasumi book. Cahiers has also published
quite a few people outside its own camp, such Legrand on the Taviani
brothers. I acknowledge and salute this.
The venom of your response to Nicole Brenez's work surprises me. I am not
sure which specific essay you are referring to, but in the book I cited she
makes EXTENSIVE reference to Auerbach. So does the long review-essay of her
book by Bill Routt in SCREENING THE PAST - and Brenez cued Routt to further
rare, key texts by Auberbach on figuration for that piece.
And of course I am with you - let a hundred flowers bloom! Wars of critical
'taste' can be very counter-productive, I just like to see everything of
value be actually valued!
Adrian Martin
1978
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 2:46am
Subject: Re: legrand and preminger
A quote from Vincent Price: "I once asked Otto why he did so much
better with 'Laura' than Rouben. Otto told me, 'Rouben only knows
nice people. I understand the characters in "Laura." They're all
heels, just like my friends.'"
Pure speculation: Perhaps the reason Stahl was bumped from Forever
Amber is that Zanuck didn't want him idle while the studio tried to
figure out what to do with Amber, so he was assigned to The Foxes of
Harrow -- another extremely expensive, lavish period piece based on a
best-seller. (I don't know whether or not the production schedules
of the two pictures would bear out this postulation.)
I've only seen Forever Amber once and it struck me as relatively
minor Preminger. I suspect Stahl would have brought more brio --
both visually and in the performances -- to the movie, although
perhaps less mordant wit.
Chris, I apologize for mis-citing your Tourneur book, which, of
course, is "Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall," not "The
Films of Jacques Tourneur." Under any name, it's a wonderful book.
1979
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 4:00am
Subject: Laura
Chris,
Have you looked to see if there are files on Laura at UCLA Arts
Special Collections? They're spotty, but I have found great things in
the Fox collection, including a very instructive script file on Fixed
Bayonets and one on Lifeboat, which contained a few surprises. I
believe there were also script [supervisor] reports for Lifeboat.
1980
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 4:48am
Subject: Re: Film books
Adrian,
I apologize for my venom about Nicole Brenez. It's not personal -
I've never met her. For the record, I feel exactly the same way about
Stephen Heath's Questions of Cinema (never met him either) and a few
other books of that ilk that didn't exactly make my
list. "Pretentious" comes from the same root as "pretend," and my
comment was about the introduction to her first book, where she
attempted to define "figurative" without referring to Auerbach's
seminal essay on the subject. I'm glad she's encountered it since,
but my first impression was not good.
I'm surprised you weren't more taken aback by my blast at Bellour. I
bought L'Entre-Image - double-underline the word "bought" - and was
very let down by it. I thought moving over to the avant-garde was
logical and would bring new spark to his criticism, but by and large,
for my money (double underline "money"), it didn't, and that goes
bigtime for his work on narrative film since Analaysis of Film - it's
like he ran out of ideas.
This happens. Pascal Bonitzer was a fantastic critic during the
period of Le champ aveugle, but not after he started devoting most of
his time to screenwriting and filmmaking - and I love the films.
That's why I didn't include his Rohmer book on my list, even though
it's in English. To me it's half a loaf. Or take Jacques Derrida,
whose work for at least the last 15 years has been right down the
tubes, perhaps for the same reasons as Raymond. I hear that Raymond
has recently finished a definitive edition of a French writer he has
been puttering with for ages - maybe it will be great.
I think taste in criticism is much more factional than taste in films
for obvious reasons having to do with the alliances any professional
or semi-professional writer has to make to get published and advance
his/her career. God knows I TRIED to just list in my post books I
thought members of the group would actually enjoy or otherwise profit
from, including some by people who are certainly not allies of mine,
but I omitted, because I dislike the editor, volume 2 of the BFI
series of Cahiers translations, which is the only place you'll find
in any kind of English some of the most important theoretical essays
of the 70s, all by Jean-Pierre Oudart. Apart from that, the book is
comically lopsided as a representation of one of the magazine's
richest periods., but I recommend it highly for anyone who has been
puzzling over "realism," representation and "modernism," along with
vol. 1, which was edited, I believe, by Jim Hillier. Both are
indispensable if you can't read this stuff in French. Not that it
always makes much sense in translation...
One more comment: Do you know how expensive it is to translate
anything into anything? I mean well: not like the Rizzoli edition of
Hitchcock at Work, which reportedly has Notorious taking place during
World War I. It costs a fortune. And yet Claudine published a lush
edition of the film criticism of Oshima, and Yellow Now in Belgium
went broke doing the same for an Italian book on the peplum. In my
experience, the French are pretty curious and resourceful about
getting any interesting film criticism into their language, and when
they can't translate it, they import it: La librairie du cinema in
Paris has a whole wall of overpriced English-language books for
patrons who want to tackle them.
I believe that English-speaking countries have done well in this
regard, too. Tons of translations have appeared since the 60s, as
well as a hundred or more excellent specialized books on topics like
the making of Blonde Venus or DeMille and American Culture (in the
silent period) that are certainly well worth knowing about. (Another
omission: Roger Corman by Gary Morris, whose Bright Lights online
journal I recommend to all who haven't seen it.) I recently came
across a small book of Paradjanov's unpublished screenplays, so
someone is trying with respect to other cultures than France. I just
haven't seen much of the work you're talking about coming in from
Japan, Greece, etc. Let it flow, say I. And while we're waiting for
the spigot to open, let's hear some names to whet our appetite.
One of my big gripes with Cahiers for years is that they only run
capsule reviews of film books. I want to see FULL REVIEW ESSAYS of
film books from everywhere, in all languages, preferably not by
allies or enemies of the author or their cat's-paws, so I can get at
least a picture of what's being done, the way one used to be able to
do from The New York Review of Books or TLS. Some of the online mags
are starting to make a fist at this. I started off with a bang
reviewing Paglia's The Birds for Senses of Cinema, followed by you on
Leone - two books I liked - then failed miserably when a BFI book by
a writer who's on my list turned out to be mush, because I didn't see
any reason to say so in print. But there are hard-eyed types who
would like nothing better (point me at that Brenez Ferrara book!),
and if an online mag appears that just does that, in French or
English (but not in Russian), I'll be its most faithful reader. It's
shameful that people toil over books for years and don't even get to
read reviews.
1981
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 5:12am
Subject: Re: legrand and preminger
chris_fujiwara wrote:
> Preminger and Mamoulian both
> later said that none of Mamoulian's footage remained in the final
> film, and Vincent Price also said that everything Mamoulian had done
> was reshot. In this, the three contradicted Lucien Ballard, the
> original DP (replaced, when Mamoulian left, by Joseph LaShelle), who
> claimed that his and Mamoulian's work remains in the film.
For what it's worth, Ballard's visual style at the time used much more
light, more extreme angles, and deeper focus than LaShelle's. Both
came up with imaginative camera movements in various projects, but
LaShelle's "look" was decidedly darker and more shallow. I haven't
seen Laura in quite a while, so I can't recall any scenes atypical of
LaShelle. (Didn't ASC record an oral history with LaShelle? If so,
that might yield some clues).
Of course, Mamoulian was the king of totally unmotivated camera
movement, so that would be another tip-off of Mamoulian material.
Regarding Forever Amber, it seems to me that Stahl would not have
fit Zanuck's bill of exploiting the ribald rake's progress elements of
the project. In Back Street and Only Yesterday (and even Leave
Her to Heaven), Stahl seems much less interested in the scenes of
erotic temptation than in the aftermath, in showing how the characters
negotiate the consequences in terms of social roles and pressures. No
doubt, Zanuck was more interested in the former, as well as the
social-climbing angle. (Also, it may be significant that Stahl's most
satisfying films all take place in American settings. Perhaps his
ability
to deal with elements outside his own time and culture was limited,
or at least Zanuck may have belatedly remembered the egg laid
by Parnell).
--Bob Keser
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1982
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 5:17am
Subject: Re: Film books
hothotlove:
> they can't translate it, they import it: La librairie du cinema in
> Paris has a whole wall of overpriced English-language books for
> patrons who want to tackle them.
Is this the place on Rue Champillon? For some reason, they always
seemed to be closed when I came around, though there were enough film
books around the corner at La Hune to keep me busy when I was there.
Thanks, y'all, for all the recommendations--there is an amazing
proliferation of great work out there, and I intend to buy all of it
once I have the dough. One book that I don't think has been
mentioned, which I picked up today for a bargain $3 and is great:
V.F. Perkins' FILM AS FILM. This guy is a great writer, and his BFI
tome on the AMBERSONS is pretty excellent as well. What these lists
remind me of too is the pathetic nature of the film section as most
new book stores: there is an incredible wealth of criticism that
remains untapped by the reading public. Also, since the nationality
of criticism has come up, I should put in another word for a book that
was on my list: G. Cabrera Infante's A TWENTIETH CENTURY JOB (written
in Spanish, though the English translation was partially done by him.)
The viewpoint is Havana in the 1950s, and he was reading Cahiers but
adapting it to his own uses; the reviews of KISS ME DEADLY and VERTIGO
are especially prescient.
Two notes on recent cinema: 1) Ridley Scott (from MATCHSTICK MEN) is
the most heartless director working today. 2) DLP doesn't look
remotely like film, though pretty good for video (a minute of
aforementioned film before seeing it on celluloid).
PWC
1983
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 5:38am
Subject: Re: Re: Film books
hotlove666 wrote:
>
> One of my big gripes with Cahiers for years is that they only run
> capsule reviews of film books. I want to see FULL REVIEW ESSAYS of
> film books from everywhere, in all languages, preferably not by
> allies or enemies of the author or their cat's-paws, so I can get at
> least a picture of what's being done, the way one used to be able to
> do from The New York Review of Books or TLS. Some of the online mags
> are starting to make a fist at this.
We're lucky to see any reviews at all! Gary Morris told me that he's
discontinuing book reviews in Bright Lights because that section was
vastly undervisited, with the fewest "hits" counted on the site (also,
he
said finding reviewers was a problem).
--Bob Keser
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1984
From: markp43081
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 5:36am
Subject: Re: Rafelson's No Good Deed
I agree that it has a decidedly low budget feel--sort of surprising
considering Jackson, Jovovich, and Skarsgard are in it but whatever--
and a TV movie quality. I don't feel quite as positive about it as
Peter. Jovovich's character seems like she's from another era
compared to everyone else. The middle takes a little too long to
play out. Still, some solid moviemaking and a worthwhile view even
if I'm my opinion is more mixed than positive. And I got a kick out
of the Monkees song on the soundtrack.
(SPOILER) Peter, did the shot of Jovovich walking away at the end
remind you of THE THIRD MAN? Don't know that it is intended to or
what it would add, but that's what occurred to me at the time.
Mark
1985
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 1:33pm
Subject: Re: Re: Film books
"Film Quarterly" has tried its bestto keep upwith book
reviews,but in light of all the books coming out every
year it's damned difficult to do so.
--- Robert Keser wrote:
> hotlove666 wrote:
>
> >
> > One of my big gripes with Cahiers for years is
> that they only run
> > capsule reviews of film books. I want to see FULL
> REVIEW ESSAYS of
> > film books from everywhere, in all languages,
> preferably not by
> > allies or enemies of the author or their
> cat's-paws, so I can get at
> > least a picture of what's being done, the way one
> used to be able to
> > do from The New York Review of Books or TLS. Some
> of the online mags
> > are starting to make a fist at this.
>
> We're lucky to see any reviews at all! Gary Morris
> told me that he's
> discontinuing book reviews in Bright Lights because
> that section was
> vastly undervisited, with the fewest "hits" counted
> on the site (also,
> he
> said finding reviewers was a problem).
>
> --Bob Keser
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
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1986
From: Tosh
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 1:46pm
Subject: Re: Re: Film books
Regarding reviews, I am noticing that magazines are getting more
visual orientated and less text. But of course that's no secret. It
would be great if there was a journal or magazine that did full blown
essays on film books. There are good publications out there - but one
gets the feeling that they may disappear. For one, I prefer the old
version of Bookforum - Ithink the new version (they got a new editor
and designer) is not as appealing as the original. But it's still
early in the game.
But really, there should be more monthly publications devoted to book
reviewing. Of course the economy doesn't support such high
ideas...but still...it would be nice.
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
1987
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sun Sep 14, 2003 2:43pm
Subject: Re: Re: Film books
Yes, the latest issue of Film Quarterly has some very good pieces
in its Film Book Survey, but it always amazes me that The New
York Review of Books doesn't do the same with an annual roundup
of film books, especially considering the number of film books being
published. Maybe publishing houses that heavily invest in film titles
should lean on the NYRofB. One friend of mine vehemently insists
that publications that do not run film content are "worthless" (thus
condemning Popular Mechanics and National Geographic, though
I doubt that the NYRofB is trembling in its wingtips!)
--Bob Keser
David Ehrenstein wrote:
> "Film Quarterly" has tried its bestto keep upwith book
> reviews,but in light of all the books coming out every
> year it's damned difficult to do so.
> --- Robert Keser wrote:
> > hotlove666 wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > One of my big gripes with Cahiers for years is
> > that they only run
> > > capsule reviews of film books. I want to see FULL
> > REVIEW ESSAYS of
> > > film books from everywhere, in all languages,
> > preferably not by
> > > allies or enemies of the author or their
> > cat's-paws, so I can get at
> > > least a picture of what's being done, the way one
> > used to be able to
> > > do from The New York Review of Books or TLS. Some
> > of the online mags
> > > are starting to make a fist at this.
> >
> > We're lucky to see any reviews at all! Gary Morris
> > told me that he's
> > discontinuing book reviews in Bright Lights because
> > that section was
> > vastly undervisited, with the fewest "hits" counted
> > on the site (also,
> > he
> > said finding reviewers was a problem).
> >
> > --Bob Keser
> >
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been
> > removed]
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1988
From: George Robinson
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 7:10am
Subject: A Hawksian Inside Joke?
My wife and I were watching the last fifteen minutes of Bringing Up Baby
this evening on TCM and they got to the part when Susan (Hepburn) identifies
David (Grant) as the notorious "Jerry the Nipper." I turned to my wife and
said that I remembered reading somewhere that this was an inside joke on the
part of either Hawks, Hepburn or Grant but couldn't remember any more than
that and, after searching through several books on Hawks was unable to
further enlighten her.
Anybody remember anything about this, or am I just having another acid
flashback from the 1970s?
George (Wow, man, I saw God and Elmer Fudd and . . . .) Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
1989
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 8:37am
Subject: Re: Film books
Fred Camper wrote:
>The Archeology of the Cinema, by C. W. Ceram There are apparently a lot
>of problems with this book, lots of factual errors, and there's stuff in
>French that's supposed to be much better. BUT: it's heavily illustrated,
>and it opened up the world of pre-cinema for me, the connections between
>cinema and all those other things. Reading it helped me formulate a
>somewhat fanciful anti-cinema argument -- that is, it occurred to me
>that there's a way in which this stuff is "better." (If someone knows of
>something much better on the subject, illustrated well (which seems key
>for such things), preferably in English but also in French, please post).
I couldn't say whether it's 'much better' as I don't know the book you
referenced at all. Neither have I seen the book I'm about to suggest, as
it's rather expensive ($42.50 in paper/$95 in hardcover) and I haven't had
a chance to examine it at a library yet. Nevertheless, I think that this
is probably worth a look:
The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, by Laurent
Mannoni, translated and edited by Richard Crangle, introduction by Tom
Gunning (Exeter Studies in Film History/University of Exeter Press)
For more info check:
http://www.ex.ac.uk/uep/film.htm
Scroll about halfway down the page and click on 'reviews & more
information' under the listing for the book (the direct link is very long
and messy). Perhaps someone else knows more about this book? It looks
promising.
Bill, Adrian and Chris all recommended Shigehiko Hasumi's book on Ozu. The
non-French/Japanese reading among us may be interested to know that part
of this has been translated into English in Ozu's Tokyo Story, David
Desser, ed. (Cambridge University Press).
Adrian also wrote:
>Even the very rich film cultures of Italy or Austria or Japan or Germany
>are mostly unknown to many of us, even in the Internet age.
There are some encouraging developments on this front. This post from
another mailing list seems relevant here (with apologies to any who may
have already seen it):
>The book is Yoshida Kiju's award winning book Ozu Yasujiro no Han-Eiga.
>The English title will be Ozu's Anti-Cinema. The translators are Daisuke
>Miyao (an NYU graduate that is currently at Columbia on a postdoc) and
>Kyoko Hirano of the Japan Society. The press is the Center for Japanese
>Studies at Michigan, and we expect the book to be out by early November,
>earlier if possible in order to arrive in time for New York Film
>Festival's symposium.
>
>This is a fascinating book. Yoshida was, of course, one of the key New
>Wave directors that was critical of Ozu back in the 1960s. This book
>constitutes his reevaluation of the older director. It is deeply
personal,
>and written in a provocative, essayistic style. Yoshida has really looked
>at these films carefully, and there is a lot to learn from him.
>
>I might also add that this is the first film book published by Michigan.
>Everybody buy it, because if sales are attractive you can expect to see
>more books on Japanese film coming from here. In fact, there is one more
>great book nearing its final stages: Shadows on the Screen: Stories and
>Essays by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro on Cinema and "Oriental" Aesthetics,
>translated and with introduction and commentaries by Thomas LaMarre.
In another translation note, David suggested Jean Louis Schefer's L'Homme
ordinaire du cinema. Part of this book has made its way into an English
language collection of Schefer's writing entitled The Enigmatic Body
(Cambridge University Press).
Finally, I don't think anyone has yet mentioned Modernist Montage: The
Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature, by P. Adams Sitney, which is
one of my handful of favorite film books.
It's important also to remember how much excellent film-writing has yet to
make it into book form.
Fred.
1990
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:21am
Subject: Re: A Hawksian Inside Joke?
As I remember it, it was a blunder from Hepburn, so she "improvised"
calling Grant "Jerry the Nipper" (from his previous film "The Awful
Truth") and Grant, being quick on his feet, responds "its something
she saw at the movies."
And why throw something as wonderful as this out?
Perhaps I remember wrong, but I also have a question on "Bringing up
Baby"... Is it true that Dudley Nichols wrote the story "based" on the
relationship between Hepburn and John Ford?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "George Robinson"
wrote:
> My wife and I were watching the last fifteen minutes of Bringing Up
Baby
> this evening on TCM and they got to the part when Susan (Hepburn)
identifies
> David (Grant) as the notorious "Jerry the Nipper." I turned to my
wife and
> said that I remembered reading somewhere that this was an inside
joke on the
> part of either Hawks, Hepburn or Grant but couldn't remember any
more than
> that and, after searching through several books on Hawks was unable
to
> further enlighten her.
>
> Anybody remember anything about this, or am I just having another
acid
> flashback from the 1970s?
>
> George (Wow, man, I saw God and Elmer Fudd and . . . .) Robinson
>
> Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
>
> --Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
1991
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:27am
Subject: Re: A Hawksian Inside Joke?
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "George Robinson" wrote:
> My wife and I were watching the last fifteen minutes of Bringing Up Baby
> this evening on TCM and they got to the part when Susan (Hepburn)
identifies
> David (Grant) as the notorious "Jerry the Nipper." I turned to my
wife and
> said that I remembered reading somewhere that this was an inside
joke on the
> part of either Hawks, Hepburn or Grant but couldn't remember any
more than
> that and, after searching through several books on Hawks was unable to
> further enlighten her.
Irene Dunne's Lucy called Cary Grant's Jerry, "Jerry the Nipper,"
the year before in "The Awful Truth."
Hepburn tells the police that Grant is the gangster, "Jerry the
Nipper," and she's his moll, "Swinging Door Suzie." Grant complains:
"Officer, she's making it up from motion pictures she's seen!"
Is "Swinging Door Suzie" an in-joke too?
Paul
1992
From:
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 10:15am
Subject: Maurice Tourneur, Fritz Lang
Just saw "Alias Jimmy Valentine" (Maurice Tourneur, 1915). This is a
light-hearted melodrama about a safecracker who reforms. It is beautifully
photographed, and has real visual style. It is a very nice piece of storytelling, that is
recommended to all and sundry.
Even in 1915, filmmakers were making a big deal out of location photography.
Parts were shot on location at Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. The film
opens with a shot of the real life warden of Sing Sing, and a title card
thanking him. Raoul Walsh's "Regeneration" (1915) has location photography of New
York City in it.
Despite being crime films all shot in 1915, these two films and Feuillade's
wonderful "Les Vampires" (1915-1916) couldn't be more different from each
other. The auteurist concept of highly individual personal directors was in full
swing in 1915. (All of these are available on video - the Tourneur just turned
up at the local public library.)
That being said, there are signs that "Alias Jimmy Valentine" might have
influenced Die Spinnen / The Spiders (Fritz Lang, 1919, 1920). ("The Spiders" is
the name of a sinister gang in Lang's serial.) The highlight of the Tourneur
film is a vertical, straight down, overhead shot of a bank during a night time
robbery. We see many rooms down below, spread out across the screen like a
maze. And watch as people wander from room to room in an long take shot during the
robbery. It is splendid! Lang has a somewhat similar overhead shot of an
office near the beginning of Part II of The Spiders.
And Tourneur has a striking scene shot from an observation car of a moving
train; Lang includes a similar car in Part I of The Spiders. (IMHO, Part I of
The Spiders is highly superior to Part II.)
The somewhat comic crooks in Tourneur perhaps find an echo in the comic
treatment of underworld figures in Lang's M and "You and Me".
Mike Grost
1993
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 2:56pm
Subject: Addendum on film books: Eisenschitz's Ray
I was wondering if anyone knows if the the English translation of
Eisenschitz's Ray book uses the original English sources, since most
of those interviews appear to have been in English. It would be kind
of odd if Milne had re-translated translations.
?
Patrick
1994
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:02pm
Subject: Jerry the Nipper
It's a reference to Jerry, the character Grant played in The Awful
Truth - a blockbuster whose success Baby, alas, failed to repeat.
1995
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:07pm
Subject: Yoshida
I'd love to see what his book on Ozu says. I'd even more love to
see the retrospective of Yoshida, Hani et al. that the Munich Film
Museum is putting on in October. My recollection of the one
Yoshida I saw at MOMA, Coup d'Etat, is very strong: much more
interesting formally than most of Oshima, for example. And the
two Hanis I've seen - First Love Infernal Version and He and She
- are equally remarkable. We are being drowned in animes and
yakuzas and horror and porn from present-day Japan, but their
New Wave is impossible to see here, except for Oshima and
now Masamura. From my slight acquaintance with this
extraordinary period, the best may be yet to come.
1996
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:25pm
Subject: Bringing Up Baby
Ford and Hepburn could have been one model. Mast says that
Nichols and Hagar Wilde were another. They had an affair while
writing it (per mast) - a fact Schickel expressed astonishment at,
because Nichols was apparently very much the Grant character
in life. I believe Wilde wrote the story, and I am very interested to
know more about her - she also wrote I Was a Male War Bride.
She's supposed to be in that big book about women in H'wd, but
she isn't, and the Academy has nothing on her.
Let me again urge people to get Bringing Up baby Directed by
Howard Hawks for Mast's great introduction on the production.
That's where I learned that Dinkelhoffer and his Dog, a popular
daily comic strip, inspired the idea of the dog stealing the
dinosaur bone - a fact Todd hadn't heard and was miffed when I
told him: It was an episode that ran for months in the strip. RKO
paid King features a $1000 for the idea. Mast also prints not the
shooting script but the continuity for the rough cut, as I recall, so
you get some of the cut scenes, like Barry Fitzgerald
expostulating with a dressmaker's dummy in the garage as if it
were his wife.
To repeat a previous post, I went through the production files at
UCLA and found a treatment by Nichols and Hawks before Wilde
was brought in, where the golf course encounter ends with a
Laurel and Hardy routine in the parking lot: She smashes
something on his car, he smashes something on hers, etc. etc.
-- not David as he eventually appears in the film at all, but it
shows Hawks and Nichols' intention to use the traditions of
popular visual comedy side by side with sophisticated dialogue
and characters - hence Dinkelhoffer and his Dog, hence the
Laurel and Hardy gag that did eventually make it into the film,
when the back of Susan's gown gets ripped.
The production reports are the opposite of Hitchcock. They would
go on the set in the morning and spend half the day "rehearsing
and lining up shots" (production report lingo for improvisation),
getting the first shot usually after lunch. This was particularly the
case after the production moved to the soundstages
representing "Connecticut."
1997
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:37pm
Subject: Re: Eisenschitz on Ray
Whatever the translator might do if let to his own devices,
Bernard would never have allowed him to retranslate French
quotes - he's a stickler from way back, and fluently bilingual.
1998
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:38pm
Subject: Librairie du cinema
Patrick,
It's not the one on Champillon,. which i suspect of being some
kind of front - it's NEVER open. Librairie is just off Boulevard St.
Michel a few blocks before you get to the Seine.
1999
From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 5:45pm
Subject: Re: Film books
a newer one I neglected and I don't think has been mentioned:
"Making Pictures: A Century of European Cinematography":
A pricey (in US$: $65 list, $45 at Amazon) 500-page oversized book
addressing the history of European cinema, the DoPs' creative
contributions, and the evolution of cinematographic technologies.
I've only started going through the first historiographic essays,
which are very well-written and insightful: one lengthy essay by
Michael Leitch, another by Cathy Greenhalgh (names otherwise
unfamiliar to me). The middle section of the book contains a one-
page essay and high-quality film stills for each of 100 films, one
per DoP; many pages with 'Scope stills fold out (the one for
Gance's "Napoleon" makes my imagination drool, since I've only seen a
cable broadcast of the film). Perhaps most usefully, the book
focuses on eastern European films to a much greater degree than other
histories I've read. Something to put on your gift list (for
yourself and others) as that consumerist season nears.
QUESTION: Does anyone know of any effort to create (or can point me
to) multimedia film studies tools, e.g., a hypertext DVD which could
replace or supplement a standard text. As a tool for use outside the
classroom (for students as well as the general public) I think it
would be invaluable, eliminating the time & ink wasted in describing
a film sequence before getting to the analysis, and replacing film-
still illustrations -- a burden from which most writers would be
gladly freed, yes? (Particularly for avant-garde works which
frequently defy easy description.) Copyright issues would no doubt
be raised by the studios over any given 20-second segment from any of
their products, even though most claims in this area are matters of
extortion and have little-to-no validity as regards intellectual
property law. ("Fair use" anyone? The industry's real fear is likely
that anything which could help nurture and expand a genuine film
culture would turn people away from going to see the crap which
generates their revenues. Now if Chantal Akerman were to put out a
line of action figures with her next film...)
Jason
2000
From: Damien Bona
Date: Mon Sep 15, 2003 6:21pm
Subject: Jack Smight Has Died
Jack Smight died on September 1st of cancer. I didn't see any
obituaries, but a friend just informed me. He was 78.
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