André Bazin's Writings

Dudley Andrew's essay on Bazin and Sartre in the new Film Quarterly opens with a shocking fact:

Stacked nearly a meter high in my attic are photocopies of all--or nearly all--Bazin's published writings. This amounts to over 2600 items, of which, scandalously, less than seven per cent are available in French or English.

To which Andrew appends this uncertain note: "Cahiers du Cinéma has rights to all Bazin's published writings. They hope to bring out a complete works some day." For someone who is often thought to be cinema's best-known theorist and critic, and who further was instrumental in the eventual creation of the film studies discipline, this seems baffling.

I've been doing a Bazin immersion the last few weeks, and I'm amazed especially by two things. First, his writings are not about developing a "theory of cinema" in an abstract and 'systematic' manner. Instead, he puts in motion a process of continual exchange between film criticism and film theory. He begins with the films themselves, and their details--formal, stylistic, thematic, etc. His theoretical reflections then arise from a scrutiny of these details. Second, it's striking to see how he did all his theory and criticism work in full public view. As Bert Cardullo points out, Bazin's writings were produced for a range of publications that were variously aligned: liberal (L'Écran Francais); socialist (France-Observateur); left-wing Catholic (Esprit and Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, now Télérama); non-religious and state-run (L'Education Nationale); and conservative (Le Parisien libéré). In addition, of course, he co-founded and wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma. It's staggering to be reminded of how much he accomplished before he contracted leukemia at 36 and died at 40 in 1958.

Today I've been inventorying all the English-language translations of Bazin's writings on my shelves:

-- The two volumes of What is Cinema? (1967, 1971), translated by Hugh Gray. They contain many of his best-known pieces like "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema," "The Virtues and Limitations of Montage," "In Defense of Mixed Cinema," and his essays on Italian neo-realism, the Western, Rossellini, Chaplin, Bresson, De Sica, and so on. (I wonder: do these two volumes of translations contain all the essays from the original 4-volume set of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?)

-- Bazin at Work (1997), edited by Bert Cardullo, with essays on Wyler, Pagnol, adaptation, cinema and theology, Citizen Kane, etc.

-- Jean Renoir (1973), edited by Truffaut.

-- Orson Welles (1978), translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

-- The Cinema of Cruelty (1982), with separate sections on: von Stroheim, Dreyer, Sturges, Buñuel, Hitchcock and Kurosawa.

I'm curious: Am I missing any of Bazin's writings available in English?

Starting in the late '60s, the rise of a certain brand of theory--ideological, psychoanalytic, semiotic--was inhospitable and downright hostile to Bazin and his theories of realism inflected by Catholicism and existentialism. In retrospect this was understandable but since the 1980's cinema studies has witnessed the rise of a 'historical turn'. I'm wondering: Has the discipline seen a consequent return to and recuperation of Bazin? Are there signs this might come to pass?

Any ideas you may have on Bazin are welcome.

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And now ... fashion? There's a side of me that doesn't get out too much on this blog: a 'foreigner' who's lived in America for two decades but still finds its culture endlessly fascinating (and 'other'). The new issue of Entertainment Weekly has a list of pop culture moments of the last 25 years that influenced fashion. I've gathered here some of the interesting items on it:

Early Madonna (fingerless gloves, lingerie-styled wedding dress, crucifixes); Michael Jackson circa Thriller (Jheri curls, loafers with white socks); Ally McBeal (microminis); Miami Vice (roomy linen suits, sockless loafers); mid-'80s mall pop like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson (biker shorts, skorts, scrunchies); Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (scissored sweatshirts); Gwen Stefani circa No Doubt (white tanks, studded bra straps, bondage pants); Kanye West (those sunglasses); Rihanna (the bob); Janet Jackson circa Rhythm Nation (the military look--epaulets, cadet caps); Pretty in Pink (Molly Ringwald's DIY prom-dress, Duckie's bolo tie); Reality Bites (Lisa Loeb's cat-eye frames); Mr. T in The A-Team (a sort of proto-bling); The Golden Girls (shoulder pads, sequins); early Shania Twain (bare midriffs enter Nashville music culture); Puff Daddy and Mase's "Mo Money Mo Problems" (bright, baggy tracksuits); and Beverly Hills 90210 (sideburns).

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Links:

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Pedro Costa: "I found that, even though I simultaneously loved and had to struggle in diverse ways with all of Costa’s films, Casa de Lava, his only landscape film, was the one that blew me away the most."

-- Two fascinating interviews by Michael Guillen: Catherine Breillat and Elvis Mitchell.

-- David Phelps has been on a roll. At his blog Videoarcadia, he has a post with some reflections and links to his writings including his new piece on Ken Jacobs's Razzle Dazzle at Auteurs' Notebook.

-- Glenn Kenny: "Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Brasillach, and Anti-Semitism: Some observations."

-- At his site Jigsaw Lounge, Neil Young on the Edinburgh film festival.

Received Ideas in Cinema

You may remember Christian Keathley from his stimulating guest post on "Uncanny Overlaps" a few months ago. In an e-mail last week, Chris was musing about "received ideas" in cinema, and I'd like to share his thought-provoking words here for us to read and talk about. -- Girish.

Jean-Marie Straub once remarked: “People think Eisenstein was the best editor because he had some theories about it. But the greatest and most precise editor was Chaplin, and Jacques Rivette is a close second.”

I love the way this remark turns upside down certain received ideas that we think are set in stone. The received idea here has to do less with Eisenstein than with Chaplin. The established line is that Chaplin was the great humanist filmmaker, and maybe the greatest movie actor of all time; but when it comes to “cinematic” qualities, Keaton is the one who shines. Apparently, Straub sees things differently.

I read this remark of Straub’s years ago, but was reminded of it when my friend Prakash Younger told me about Robert Bresson’s contribution to one of the Sight & Sound Top Ten polls.

1. City Lights
2. City Lights
3. The Gold Rush
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

In addition to being funny (indeed, Prakash described this as Bresson’s version of a Chaplinesque gag), this list reinforces something of Straub’s point: clearly, the modernists Straub and Bresson see in Chaplin a formal rigor that the general line does not account for. Even when the rest of us acknowledge the general line on Chaplin as a “received idea,” with all the limitations that term implies, that line still holds an influence that can blind us to these other virtues.

Similarly, there are possibly qualities in Eisenstein that the general line on him overlooks as well. Another of my favorite quotes comes from him: “Suppose some truant good fairy were to ask me … ‘Is there some American film you’d like me to make you the author of – with a wave of my wand?’ I would not hesitate to accept the offer, and I would at once name the film that I wish I had made. It would be Young Mr. Lincoln directed by John Ford.” This remark makes me want to re-watch Potemkin more than Young Mr. Lincoln. Are there common qualities, especially qualities in the Eisenstein, that I hadn’t seen before in these films that seem so obviously to contrast one another in so many ways? Those critics who have typically fawned over Eisenstein, Straub, and Bresson (I’m thinking here of the likes of Michelson, Burch, Sontag) never alerted me to any such correspondence.

A key part of the pleasure of these quotes is that each involves a filmmaker of the highest rank speaking candidly (and unexpectedly) about the work of another. None of this nonsense of a director saying what he thinks he's supposed to say. (In the 1952 Belgian Cinematheque poll, both Elia Kazan and Billy Wilder picked Potemkin as the greatest film of all time. I don’t believe it for a second.) A great example of a director speaking candidly about others is the fabulous interview with Jacques Rivette in Senses Of Cinema. It’s filled with great remarks about other directors. Two of my favorites: “Here's a good definition of mise en scène - it's what's lacking in the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.” And on Michael Haneke’s Funny Games: “What a disgrace, just a complete piece of shit!” The second remark is just funny, while the first raises a pretty important issue.

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A word of thanks to Chris for those reflections. They've got me thinking. Sometimes received ideas become reinforced and cemented by being brought up repeatedly as critical short-hand. For example: Samuel Fuller's films are "primitive"; Lang is all about fate; Ozu celebrates quiet resignation, and keeps his camera low and static; Chabrol makes Hitchcockian films that are bourgeois satires; Bresson is austere and minimalist; Peckinpah's films revel in ultraviolence, etc, etc. Now, these pronouncements aren't exactly false, but by no means are they the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The problem is that they 'fix' filmmakers too easily and quickly, thus constraining our thinking about them to certain pre-determined pathways.

I'd enjoy hearing from you: What do you think are some "received ideas" in cinema, some too-familar wisdoms that might need questioning or doubting? And are there (like in Chris' examples above) filmmakers who might help us do this by expressing unexpected affinities for certain films or directors we wouldn't normally associate with them?

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Links:

-- At Auteurs' Notebook, David Phelps has an epic, image-filled post on Rivette and Celine and Julie.

-- New articles at the Moving Image Source: Adam Nayman on Peter Lynch; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Marcel L'Herbier; Mark Asch on Tomu Uchida; and Tom Charity on the Chris Fujiwara-edited Defining Moments in Movies.

-- The debut issue of Experimental Conversations ("Cork Film Centre's online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art"). via Albert Alcoz at Visionary Film.

-- Kevin Lee posts two enjoyable video essays: C. Mason Wells on Truffaut's Les deux anglaises et le continent; and Chris Fujiwara on Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon.

-- Michael Sicinski has me curious to check out Definitely, Maybe and The Invisible Circus ("I'm ready to conclude that this Adam Brooks fellow may well be a severely underrated pop filmmaker.")

-- On my list to track down at the library: the new issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, which is devoted to Hou Hsiao-hsien and includes pieces by Hou, Adrian Martin, Paul Willemen, Shigehiko Hasumi, Kumar Shahani, and others.

-- Kristin Thompson on types and characteristics of "turning points" in Hollywood storytelling.

-- At his blog The Cine File, Andrew Schenker reviews Richard Brody's new biography of Godard.

-- New DVD releases that I've just added to my 'queue': Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, Wittgenstein, and Blue; Andre Techine's The Witnesses; Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares; Anthony Mann's The Furies; and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

pic: Rivette from the interview: "Starship Troopers doesn't mock the American military or the clichés of war - that's just something Verhoeven says in interviews to appear politically correct. In fact, he loves clichés, and there's a comic strip side to Verhoeven, very close to Lichtenstein. And his bugs are wonderful and very funny, so much better than Spielberg's dinosaurs. I always defend Verhoeven, just as I've been defending Altman for the past twenty years."

A Blog-Pause

I'm scribbling away to meet three deadlines and need to take a brief blog break. I should be back within a week or two. Take care, all.

Links

-- The newly redesigned Artforum site now features a film column that is updated with new pieces a couple of times a week. Currently up: James Quandt on Sokurov's Alexandra; Brian Sholis on Derek Jarman; Jason Anderson on Steve McQueen's Hunger; Andrew Hultkrans on Godard; Cécile Whiting on the art documentary The Cool School, etc.

-- A trove of good reading at the Moving Image Source, including: Dan Sallitt on late Hawks; Jonathan Rosenbaum on William Klein; Chris Fujiwara on Naruse actor Tatsuya Nakadai; B. Kite on the new Richard Brody biography of Godard, etc.

-- Zach writes about Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton.

-- Dan in a post about Nakahira, Vadim, and composition: "When I watch a movie and think, “These images are intrinsically beautiful – this director really knows how to compose,” and then try to analyze the visual style, I often conclude that the compositions are balanced between two functions: showing the figure in the foreground, and showing the world. The balance is always managed in such a way that the shot can still function in the mind of the viewer as a depiction of the foreground figure; and yet the room or landscape is presented with some spatial integrity.

"And every time I watch a movie and think, “These images are dull and conventional,” I conclude upon further analysis that the compositions are framed as if they are trying to present only one object, or one idea, and that the image reduces in my mind to a concept."

-- The new issue of Cineaste has over a dozen essays available online, including several Web exclusives.

-- Two recently discovered blogs: Scarlett Cinema ("Women in Film Criticism"); and DinaView, run by Dina Iordanova, one of the contributors to the Chris Fujiwara-edited book, "Defining Moments in Movies".

-- via Keith Uhlich: Maxim Gorky in 1896 on seeing some Lumière films.

-- In the DVD Panache interview with David Hudson, we learn that one of his favorite film books is Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire.

-- David points to the online publication Triple Canopy. The new issue features works by Michael Robinson and Keren Cytter.

-- Lots of good reading in the Kino Fist work issue, including pieces on Akerman and Godard.

-- via Mubarak: Jon Jost's blog.

Cinema & Revulsion

I have a conflicted relationship with modern horror cinema because, to be honest, I’m a bit squeamish. Maybe this has something to do with my cinema upbringing—in Indian film history, horror has never been a strong presence.

The Indian film market as a whole is composed of three categories: ‘A’ (large cities, where I grew up); ‘B’ (towns); and ‘C’ (rural areas, where the majority of the Indian population lives). In my teen years, the ‘70s and ‘80s, horror films did exist, but they were low-budget films made mostly for the C market. These were films marked by a double disreputability: not only did they contain explicit violence (although nowhere near the extent that their low-budget Western counterparts of the period did), they also had strong sexual overtones. Overt sexuality in Indian films was taboo for a long time; even kissing on the lips didn’t appear on Indian screens until the mid-‘80s. For these reasons, horror films didn't circulate much in A and B markets because producers were nervous about provoking widespread middle-class moral outrage in urban centers with high concentrations of educated bourgeois.

So, being barely familiar with the genre, when I moved to America as an adult and wandered innocently into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time, the damn thing hit me like a truck. It took me 10 years to return to it, gingerly, and then I quickly recognized its genius.

I find that sometimes I need more than one exposure to such a film in order to surmount my revulsions, to try and push back the limits of my squeamishness. Cinema can be a source of rarefied emotions and spiritual edification but ultimately it’s much more than those things: it deals with the entire gamut of human experience and sensation. To be truly curious about art in all its variety also means opening oneself up to that wide range of experience and sensation. This is the rationale, the mantra I repeat to myself when trying to work on my squeamishness problem.

And sometimes it can be hard. Horror films make special demands on us, even if they ‘reward’ us with special sensations. In her famous, much-anthologized essay “Film Bodies” (1991), Linda Williams speaks of the three genres that have never attained respectability: horror, melodrama, and porn. All three deviate from the norms and economy of classical realist narrative cinema with displays of excess. They strike audiences as gratuitous, viscerally manipulative, and unseemly. Importantly, they collapse the ‘aesthetic distance’ that makes the spectator feel comfortable and safe.

Williams points out that there’s something else these three ‘body genres’ have in common: they create a spectacle of excess that is enacted in the film upon the human body (violence in horror; emotion in melodrama; and orgasm in porn) but they also induce in the spectator a mimicry of these effects (fear for horror; tears for melodrama; arousal/orgasm for porn). In other words, these films brush ‘aesthetic distance’ out of the way and act viscerally upon the spectator’s body. The spectator doesn’t watch these films calmly, but instead convulses with them. Which can result in a certain hesitancy, a squeamishness on the part of the viewer due to the excess of physical and emotional investment these films demand.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Are there certain films or filmmakers you will not watch because they gross you out or disturb you too much? Over the years, has your tolerance/threshold for graphic horror gone up or down? What, in your opinion, are the difficult-to-watch films that are nevertheless rewarding and valuable? And what has been the effect of time: do you approach or process horror films any differently now than you did when you were younger?

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Links:

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant on Armond White's piece in the New York Press, "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies": "In the field of film criticism, White is against everyone: reviewers, promoters, bloggers, cinephiles. They are not merely myopic, in White's estimation, but 'wilfully blind' to the truth before them on the screen and in the world, because of ideological bias, or their desperate need to flee reality. But what is that truth, this reality? In his essay, White spontaneously offers 'ten current film culture fallacies' - ranging from 'Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he's really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger', to 'Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected'. That list is Armond White in a nutshell: it's all dubious assertion (only 'non-pop' Asian cinema is acclaimed?) and even more aggressive counter-assertion (Van Sant is a phony), in a non-stop, strident loop. There is no argument, no development, no depth in this writing - for the simple reason that White is always dancing on the surface of ideas, a polemical 'moving target'. His modus operandi is confusion, as in this thumbnail account of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: all critics (except White) apparently ignore the 'fundamental terms', 'the facts of his Asianness, his sexual outlawry and his retreat into artistic and intellectual arrogance that evades social categorisation'. So is he for or against the filmmaker? Who can tell?"

-- In Artforum, a tribute by several writers to Alain Robbe-Grillet.

-- The summer season at Cinematheque Ontario features the following series: Robbe-Grillet & Alain Resnais; Jean Eustache; Luchino Visconti; Marcello Mastroianni; 24 Japanese Classics; Peter Lynch.

-- Michael Sicinski takes up Serge Bozon's La France, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up on Mu, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues and Nanouk Leopold's Wolfsbergen.

-- Filmblog discovery of the week: Max Goldberg's Text of Light.

-- David Phelps (previously David Pratt-Robson) on "returns, escapes" in Rivette and Feuillade.

-- Michael Guillen on Joseph Campbell.

-- Danny Kasman's Cannes wrap-up piece with links to his reviews, at The Auteurs' Notebook.

-- via Joe Bowman at Fin de Cinema comes news of upcoming region-1 DVD releases: Demy's The Pied Piper and Jayasundara's The Forsaken Land. Also, picked up from Cannes were the new films by: Lucretia Martel, Arnaud Desplechin, the Dardennes, Leos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Steve McQueen, and Ari Folman.

-- Michael Wood in the London Review of Books on three Bresson films.

pic: Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977).

San Francisco

Generously offering to be my host, Michael "Maya" Guillen has invited me to San Francisco to attend the SF Silent Film Festival in a few weeks. I haven't visited the Bay Area in many years, and I'm excited not just to see the films but also to meet up with all the San Fransiscan bloggers and cinephiles I've been reading for ages now.

The festival is showing: Mikael (by Dreyer; the only film at the festival I've seen), The Unknown (Tod Browning), The Kid Brother (Harold Lloyd), The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Les Deux Timides, The Man Who Laughs, The Soul of Youth, The Silent Enemy, Her Wild Oat, Jujiro(Crossways), and The Patsy.

Any suggestions or thoughts about the films, the festival, or cinema hotspots in the city? They're most welcome.

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Links:

-- Here's a spot of Cannes coverage by Christoph Huber, Mark Peranson and Kent Jones at Quintin and Flavia de Fuente's blog, La Lectora Provisoria. Also: more from Kent Jones at Dave Kehr's blog.

-- Glenn Kenny on the Cannes awards.

-- David Bordwell blogs "some cuts I have known and loved."

-- Michael Newman at Zigzigger: "After four semesters now, I have collected some ideas about how a class blog works and doesn’t work that I thought would be worth sharing."

-- Edwin Mak at Faster Than Instant Noodles on Jia Zhang-ke's new film, 24 City.

pics: Dreyer's Mikael.

Quotational Writing

I’m fascinated by writing that juxtaposes quotations, allusions, and citations, ceaselessly making connections to other texts.

Of course, a postmodernist would say that all texts do precisely this. Roland Barthes’ famous essay, “The Death of the Author” (1968) calls any text “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Similarly, Michel Foucault writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) that every book “is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences … The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands … its unity is variable and relative.”

Barthes and Foucault, in an early expression of the postmodern sensibility, were pointing out that intentionally or unintentionally, all texts are intertextual: Every text exists not in isolation or autonomy but as part of a vast ‘environment’ of texts.

But I’m after something a bit more specific here: I’m wondering about texts that literally collage together quotations and citations from a variety of sources. One example that leaps to mind is Lesley Stern’s amazing book, The Scorsese Connection (BFI, 1995).

Completely flouting every available model of the ‘director study’, Stern weaves her book around Scorsese’s cinema rather than writing narrowly or exclusively about it. All through, she interpolates passages large and small from a wonderfully diverse and stimulating set of writers and artists: Deren, Godard, Nietzsche, Proust, Benjamin, Irigaray, Roger Corman, Derrida, Robert Mitchum, Raul Ruiz, and many others.

These quotations are set off prominently in boxes throughout the book but in addition she draws in passing from the writing of scores of other writers. (The dense “Notes” section at the end of the book is a treat to pore over.) Her book does a whole lot more (like exploring the countless ways in which Scorsese’s films might be seen as ‘remaking’ other films) but I’m confining myself to a more narrow agenda here: the collaging of writings.

Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, which I wrote about last week, gathers together over a hundred entries; nearly every one of them draws upon formulations or observations made by other writers or artists. In the foreword to Ray’s previous book, How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), James Naremore writes that Ray “sometimes aspires to a “readymade” or montage of quotations.”

At first glance the writing of Peter Wollen doesn’t appear to belong to this category, but in fact what powers Wollen’s writing is a furious erudition. Even his slender BFI Classics monograph on Singin’ in the Rain (a must-read) has a huge bibliography. He may not frequently interpolate quotations but it’s clear that the vast amount of writing he has read and digested stands behind his every line.

Wollen wrote a definitive short-introduction to Godard called “JLG,” a 20-page essay that can be found in Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (2002). In it he remarked that in the period immediately following May 1968, Godard’s famous quotational impulse continued to flower: his quotes of Romantics (Poe, Dostoyesvsky, Lorca) were now replaced by those of Marxism-Leninism and Mao. I read somewhere that every single line spoken in Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990) is a quotation.

Writers usually keep a repository of interesting quotes they encounter in what is known as a "commonplace book." The Pulitzer-winning book critic for the Washington Post, Michael Dirda, has published his own collection of favorite quotes in Book By Book (2005), a light and delightful read that exudes wisdom on every page. In recent months, this is the book I've given most frequently to friends as a gift; it never misses.

Finally, the epic example and summit of this mode of writing is, of course, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

I'd love to learn about other books or essays that make heavy use of quotations. Any suggestions or recommendations will be most welcome.

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Links:

-- Chris Cagle's Film of the Month Club kicks off with its first film: I've just put up a post on Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987). The discussion will continue for the rest of the month, so there's still plenty of time for you to rent the film and join the conversation at the site if you feel like it.

-- New issue of Senses of Cinema.

-- Jonathan's Rosenbaum's latest blog entry is an unpublished 2004 review of Brad Stevens's book Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision.

-- Film-blogger discovery of the week: Marc Raymond, a cinephile living in Seoul and writing his dissertation on Martin Scorsese.

-- David Hudson, the hardest-working man in the film-blogosphere, puts up his big and indispensable Cannes index post, which will be updated throughout the festival. We'll be bookmarking and returning to this post for all our film festival needs until next Cannes.

pic: Scorsese cites The Wizard of Oz in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

The ABCs of Classic Hollywood

Speaking as an academic, it’s been a hard week: I gave and graded one hundred final exams. But speaking as a cinephile, it’s been a thrilling week. I revisited 4 films—Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis—and read Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, the best new film book I’ve encountered in a long while. This strikingly unusual book is devoted to detailed exploration of the four films.

Ray’s starting point is this quote from Vincente Minnelli: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” Ray proposes a fascinating and unorthodox method for discovering these hidden things. For each film, he puts together a collection of ‘entries’, one or more for every letter of the alphabet. (It’s pure chance that this blog entry follows the one on Peter Wollen’s “Alphabet of Cinema”.)

Here are some examples of entries for Grand Hotel: A for Art Deco; B for the Blue Danube waltz, which plays throughout the film; C for the great Coffin scene, which seems parachuted in from some forgotten documentary; D for John Barrymore’s Dachschund, and for Doors; F for Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford); I for “I want to be alone”; O for overhead shots; U for underwear, etc.

The entries are eclectic and omnivorous, drawing from a wide variety of sources: Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, the two repeatedly invoked touchstones in this book—but done so in a lucid, pedagogically plainspoken way; Hollywood histories and biographies; Surrealism; philosophers like Wittgenstein and Cavell; la politique des auteurs, etc. Most interestingly, the work is pitched as “a movie primer,” aiming perhaps to build a bridge between academic thinking about cinema and the ‘lay’ film enthusiast interested in ideas.

Ray writes that the book began for him with a single image: after returning to her room from a failed ballet performance, Grusinskaya (Garbo) sits on the floor to remove her costume.

In the midst of Grand Hotel’s creaky melodrama and steamy overacting, this image—mysterious, beautiful, unmoored from any character’s perspective, narratively unnecessary—offers a challenge: what can we say that will do it justice? The movies, of course, are full of such moments, and the discipline of film studies arose, at least in part, to explain them. That task has proved more difficult than it once appeared: “[T]he movies are difficult to explain,” Christian Metz once admitted in his famous epigram, “because they are easy to understand.”

Ray performs neither a workmanlike New Criticism-style ‘close analysis’ nor a programmatic application of the ‘semiotic paradigm’—structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, ideological analysis, etc. (I’m not knocking either of these approaches, only saying that sometimes they can lend themselves to mechanical, cookie-cutter analyses that forget the power of surprise.)

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

One way to think about classical Hollywood filmmaking is to imagine a process occurring simultaneously on two axes. The x axis involves a movie’s forward momentum, its equivalent of melody […]—the enigmas and unfolding actions that keep the viewer wanting to see what happens next. In the studio system, producers, scriptwriters, directors, and editors had responsibility for this domain, the film’s story, regarded as its most decisive element. The y axis, on the other hand, resembles a melody’s particular harmony: every narrative moment must be inflected by choices of set design, costumes, casting, camera work and music. In general, the Hollywood studios reserved their highest rewards for the x axis: producers and directors, in other words, made more money than cameramen and costumers. The auteur critics would retroactively insist that directors had operated precisely at the two axes’ juncture; Hollywood production records, however, undermine that claim. With men like MGM’s W.S. “Woody” “One-Take” Van Dyke completing two features in nine days, and Warners’ Mervyn LeRoy, in Thomas Schatz’s words, “quite capable of cranking out six to eight pictures per year, on schedule and under budget,” while “averaging 5’30” of finished film a day,” directors often slighted the y axis in the pell-mell process of satisfying the studios’ quota of 50 features a year. In a conversation about Van Dyke, MGM producer J.J. Cohn once bestowed the studio system’s highest praise: “God, he was fast.”

Stars, of course, proved the exception to the x versus y rule. After producers, they commanded the highest salaries, perhaps because their work actually did involve both axes: Major stars became at once narrative axioms (Garbo-as-tragic-artist, Cagney-as-hoodlum) and a story line’s mise-en-scène (compare Grand Hotel to its remake, Week-end at the Waldorf: Garbo is not Ginger Rogers, John Barrymore is not Walter Pidgeon). Replacing a star could simultaneously disable a plot (John Wayne cannot play screwball comedy) and transform a film’s mood more decisively than any change in cinematographer, art director, or costumer.

It’s an indication of the freedom of movement of the book that the above excerpt is from a Grand Hotel entry called “Art Deco”. The work grew out of a 14-week course that intensely scrutinized the four films, and most of the entries are co-credited to specific students:

Far from wearing out the films under investigation, the intense scrutiny enhanced both my own and my students’ interest in them. In fact, as I wrote this book, I found myself reluctant to move on when I had finished each chapter; each movie I had been studying seemed, in turn, the richest and most entertaining of the group. (Since I took them up in chronological order, Meet Me in St. Louis now seems to me the greatest movie of all time.)

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Any recent (or even relatively recent) film books to recommend?

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Links:

-- At Critical Culture, Pacze Moj has been watching and blogging about early Antonioni (esp. the shorts), accompanied by lots of framegrabs.

-- Dave Kehr in a post on Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper (1952): "Alfred Hitchcock was a voracious filmgoer, and like many great artists, a bit of a magpie. Consciously or unconsciously, he would file away shots and sequences that impressed him, and years later some of them would re-emerge, reshaped by Hitchcock’s genius and fully integrated into his personal universe."

-- Craig Keller posts YouTube interview/clips of "Four American Masters": Ferrara, Cassavetes, Welles and Jerry Lewis.

-- Thom Ryan at Film of the Year: "Reflections on Cinema after Viewing Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time."

-- Robert B. Ray is also a leader of the respected rock band, the Vulgar Boatmen.

pic: Garbo removing her costume in Grand Hotel.

An Alphabet of Cinema

Last week I was chatting on the phone with Christian Keathley, and about a half-dozen times I thought: “Hey, that’d make a cool blog post.” One of those times, we were discussing a cinephilic essay that’s one of my favorites, Peter Wollen’s “An Alphabet of Cinema.” If you haven’t read it, please think of this post as an inducement, an urging, to do so: it’s great fun.

Wollen delivered “An Alphabet of Cinema” as the Serge Daney memorial lecture at the Rotterdam film festival in 1998. It was then published in the New Left Review in 2001, and also appears in Wollen’s essay collection, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (2002).

For each letter of the alphabet, Wollen chooses a cinema-related word that is important to him, and devotes an entry of a few paragraphs to it. There are two reasons why I particularly love this essay: its loose, ‘bloggy’ format; and its conversational clarity. Wollen was aiming the lecture at a general festival audience rather than a roomful of fellow academics.

Here is the alphabet, along with Wollen’s chosen subjects.

“A is for Aristotle … the first theorist of film”; “B is not for Brecht, although of course it could be. Or even for B-movies, much as I always loved them. It is for Bambi”; C for Cinephilia; “D must certainly be for Daney, but it is also for Dance—Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly”; E for Eisenstein, a “ruined filmmaker, an image-maker ‘haunted by writing’ (Daney’s phrase), by the shot as ideogram, obsessed with the synchronization of sound, movement and image”; F for film festival; G for Godard, “for anti-tradition”; “H is for Hitchcocko-Hawksianism—and a pathway towards avant-garde film”; I for Industry and Ince; J for Japan; “K is for Kane, the film maudit par excellence”; L for Lumière; M for Méliès; N for Narrative; O for Online; “P is personal—for The Passenger, a film directed by Antonioni, which I wrote with my script-writing partner Mark Peploe”; Q for Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?; R for Rossellini, Rome Open City, Renoir, and Rules of the Game; S for Sternberg, Shanghai Gesture, and Surrealism; T for Telecinema, Third Dimension (3D), and Television; U for Underground Film; V for Voyeurism; W for Snow’s Wavelength; “X stands for an unknown quantity—for the strange fascination that makes us remember a particular shot or a particular camera movement”; Y for Les Yeux sans Visage, Franju’s Eyes without a Face; Z for the final frame of the zoom shot, Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma, and for Zero.

* * *

Here are some excerpts from the lecture-essay:

Paradoxically, I began to read Aristotle in order to understand the writings of his great antagonist, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht himself directly attacked the idea of an Aristotelian theatre, seeking to replace it with what he called ‘epic theatre’, but now I think his polemic was based on a common misunderstanding. Aristotle’s idea of tragedy was very far from the kind of psychologically involving theatre that Brecht attacked. Like his fiercest critic, Aristotle saw tragedy as essentially dialectic and political. Brecht’s tragic vision of history, a vision shaped by world war, by successful and failed revolution, by the civil strife of the Weimar period and the rise to power of Hitler, was not so very distant from that of Aristotle, shaped by Alexander of Macedon and the crisis of the Athenian polis. For Daney, cinema—true cinema—began with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a film about our personal response to an immense historic tragedy. Resnais’s film became the measure against which all others were judged. It was in their relation to Hiroshima, Mon Amour that Daney came to see Rossellini and Godard as the great moral film-directors of our time [...]

By ‘cinephilia’ I mean an obsessive infatuation with film, to the point of letting it dominate your life. To Serge Daney, looking back, cinephilia seemed a ‘sickness’, a malady which became a duty, almost a religious duty, a form of clandestine self-immolation in the darkness, a voluntary exclusion from social life. At the same time, a sickness that brought immense pleasure, moments which, much later, you recognized had changed your life. I see it differently, not as a sickness, but as a symptom of the desire to remain within the child’s view of the world, always outside, always fascinated by a mysterious parental drama, always seeking to master one’s anxiety by compulsive repetition. Much more than just another leisure activity. [...]

[Vincente] Minnelli saw himself as part of the fashionable art world—he was influenced by Surrealism and brought a dream-like delirium to the musical. [Gene] Kelly was part of the down-market dance world: brought up in the world of tap-dancing and working men’s clubs, the world of vaudeville, but aspiring to the world of ballet, to the world of high art. For me, Kelly was one of the few great geniuses of Hollywood. With On the Town, he took the musical out of the studio, onto the streets of New York, into everyday life. With Singin’ in the Rain, he perfected his invention of what we might call ‘cine-choreography’, his combination into one person of dancer, choreographer and film-maker, so that each dance was conceived and executed together with camera-angle and movement. Dance was no longer ‘filmed’ from outside. It merged with the film. Kelly broke down the distinction between offstage and on-stage, between narrative and spectacle. He dramatized dance, choreographed action. [...]

Godard was the most extraordinary artist to emerge from within the original French New Wave. I was in Paris when A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) first came out and I saw it every day for a week. At the time, people commented on the way it broke the traditional rules of film-making—its use of jump-cuts, its interpolation of cinema-vérité techniques into narrative film. Recently, when I saw it again, in a beautiful new 35mm print, it seemed almost classical. Its strangeness had been eroded by time. Godard himself never fitted into the festival genre. By the end of the sixties he had moved decisively into the avant-garde. For him, the ‘New Wave’ was more like an escape-hatch from the grip of Hitchcocko-Hawksianism. [...]

Thomas Ince was the director and producer who should get the main credit, if that’s the word, rather than D.W. Griffith, for creating the institution of Hollywood, for laying the foundations of the industry. It was Ince, at his own studio, who realized that the script was not just a dramatic story told in dialogue, but the template of the entire film, which could be broken down, scene by scene, to determine the estimated cost of production, the shooting schedule, the requirements that would be made of each department (sets, costumes, effects) and so on. Even today, the costume designer and the cinematographer and the props person carry annotated versions of the script, setting out what will be needed from them in each successive scene. Viewed in this light, the script is not so much an artistic product as an organizational tool, the fundamental prerequisite for the creation of Hollywood as an industry. It is the conceptual assembly line on which industrial production is based. It is also the opposite of Improvisation, the opposite of Godard. Blame or credit should go to Thomas Ince. [...]

And finally, Z is for Zero—Zero for Conduct, zero visibility, and Godard’s slogan, ‘Back to Zero’. As we enter the age of new media, the cinema is reinventing itself. We need to see that reinvention in radical as well as mainstream terms, to try and reimagine the cinema as it might have been and as, potentially, it still could be—an experimental art, constantly renewing itself, as a counter-cinema, as ‘cinema haunted by writing’. Back to zero. Begin again. A is for Avant-Garde.

* * *

A couple of links:

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's website launched last week with an entry on two neglected filmmakers, Eduardo de Gregorio and Sara Driver. And his archives go all the way back to the mid-80s.

-- From last week: Mubarak Ali has a post on Renoir, Garrel and close-ups. Also: lots of great links to international film blogs and sites in his blogroll.

-- The Siren on Thomas Doherty's biography of Joseph Breen, Hollywood's Censor.

-- At Artforum, P. Adams Sitney on Peter Hutton.

DVDs

I’m in the final week of classes this semester. Soon, summer will be here and along with it the chance to step up the pace of cinema-related activities—watching, reading, writing.

I’m generally a DVD renter rather than buyer, but I just purchased a big batch from Europe to fire up as soon as the semester ends:

-- Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema. I saw one of the earliest North American screenings that were part of the comprehensive JLG retro assembled by James Quandt about 6 years ago. But they are now a blur in my head, and more than any other movies I can think of, these demand repeated re-viewings.

-- Godard/Mieville shorts: De l'origine du XXIe siècle, The Old Place, Liberté et patrie, Je vous salue, Sarajevo, plus a hardcover book.

-- Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, finally on DVD. I've seen this once, on videotape.

-- Satyajit Ray’s Abhijan. Upon graduation from college, I joined a computer company in Calcutta. Right across the street from my office building in Ballygunge, I saw my first-ever retrospective, the complete films of S. Ray. I haven’t seen Abhijan since.

-- Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma. Also, great news: Criterion is releasing some of his made-for-TV history films in the fall.

-- Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives. I've seen just two Davies films: The House of Mirth and The Long Day Closes. Home Film Festival used to carry a videotape of his shorts that I'm sorry I never got around to renting.

-- Jean Vigo collection: L’Atalante, Zero for Conduct, A propos de Nice, Taris. I’ve been waiting years to see the latter two films.

-- Renoir’s Toni. Renoir is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers but I've never immersed myself in his films intensely over a limited time period. I'd like to do that this summer. And alongside, I look forward to reading the critical writings on his films by Andre Bazin, Raymond Durgnat, Christoper Faulkner, Leo Braudy, etc.

-- Mizoguchi’s Crucified Lovers and The Woman of Rumour. I haven’t seen the former but I loved the latter. Here's David Bordwell's entry on the film, and mine.

-- Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) a.k.a. Slow Motion.

I'm wondering: any recent or future DVD releases you're excited about or would like to recommend? To jog your memory, here's the release calendar page at DVD Beaver.

* * *

Links:

-- Best wishes to the indefatigable Matt Zoller Seitz, who is moving from print journalism to filmmaking.

-- Craig Keller on João César Monteiro. Also, Craig has an amazing DVD wish list at Glenn Kenny's place. Many others chime in with their suggestions as well.

-- New issue of Reverse Shot.

-- Adrian Martin's monthly column at Filmkrant begins thus: "With Cahiers du Cinéma - both in its printed magazine and internet (www.cahiersducinema.com) versions - now in crisis because of being dropped by its Le Monde publisher, it seems as if the book 'Gilles Deleuze et les Images' (edited by François Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon) may well be, alongside the updated French edition of Nicole Brenez's 'Abel Ferrara', among the last books to appear under the famous Cahiers banner. And, ironically enough, it is in the Deleuze book that we find a striking reflection by the American film scholar Dudley Andrew about how the globe of film culture is changing."

-- Robert Koehler at Film Journey: "Thierry's Cannes, Olivier's Quinzaine."

pic, courtesy DVD Beaver: Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977).

On Blogging

There’s a question I’ve been pondering all week, so allow me to pose it to you—and to myself: What personal functions does blogging perform for you? In other words: Why do you blog?

To answer this for myself, I need to reach back briefly into my autobiography. Not long after I graduated from engineering school, I entered a PhD program. I was in my early 20s, but to be completely honest, I hadn’t yet been ‘turned on’ by my education. I was going through the motions, not disliking school but not loving it either. And the first couple of years of grad school didn’t ‘light my fire’.

The event that changed my life was my first teaching assignment, a senior-level course on information systems. Suddenly I discovered a fortuitous intersection of my desire and my aptitude. Also, it gave me a way to tie two important things together—scholarship and pedagogy—thus firing up, for the first time, my scholarly interests. I had found the center around which I could see my life’s work revolving: teaching and learning.

I relate this story because I find blogging deeply satisfying for the same reason. More than anything else, the film-blogosphere, to me, is a learning community, a giant, dynamically changing group of film-lovers teaching and learning from each other, 24/7.

Another reason why I value the blogosphere is the way it affects the relationship between specialism and generalism. The capitalistic economy puts in place strong incentives for all individuals to develop and sustain specializations. Division of labor is built into the cost-minimization objectives of our economic model. In the pre-blog past, we had a relatively small number of specialist writers and a large number of readers. The blogosphere overturns this, permitting large numbers of passionate generalists to enter the cinema discourse in a serious and engaged fashion. Film-thought need not be left solely to specialists. Cultural works like films ‘belong’ to the community at large and blogs allow that community, via a cost-unconstrained mechanism, to generate and disseminate discussion about cinema. There aren’t that many pockets in our economy where the possibilities for pluralistic expression and communication are relatively unaffected by monetary considerations, but the blogosphere is one of them. I find great promise in this flowering of generalism and its empowerment of non-professionals. My hope is that more professionals will find time (and reasons) to blog, thus further enriching this growing mutual-pedagogical project.

Your thoughts on this large subject of blogging? I'd love to hear them.

* * *

Some of the juiciest chord progressions in pop music were written by Stevie Wonder in the 1970s. Here’s one, on “I Can’t Help It,” [mp3] that he composed for Michael Jackson’s wonderful record, Off The Wall (1979).

Stevie has a way of highlighting the complexity of his chords and their changes by writing little synth bass figures featuring some of the interesting, unusual notes in the chord, thus pulling the strangeness of the chord into the foreground. You can hear that right off the bat in the opening seconds of this song. The rhythm track arrangement is by Stevie and Greg Phillinganes, who plays all the electric piano and synth parts. (He’s also memorable on Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, among dozens of other session dates.)

There are hundreds of ‘perfect’ pop songs, and this, to me, is one of them. Every bar of it is branded on my memory, but there’s one fleeting moment that’s my favorite: when Michael Jackson abandons his high tenor for a second and plunges into the low register (very unusual for him) as he growls “Yeah…,” twice, at 2:00 and 3:07. Goosebumps…

pic: From the nine-minute dream sequence in Raj Kapoor's Awara (1951), one of the most admired scenes in all of Indian popular cinema.

Film of the Month Club

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Chris Cagle, who runs the blog Category D. He had an idea to start a movie club in the blogosphere, one that would, as he put it, “open up our own slice of film culture to a broader dialogue: between academic and cinephile, political and aesthetic, popular and avant-gardist, etc.”

This sounded like a brainwave to me, and I wrote back, offering my encouragement and support. Here is Chris’ introductory post at the new group blog he has created, Film of the Month Club. Do check it out: the more, the merrier. And the more interesting the conversation.

Chris asked if I wanted to kick us off by selecting the first film, and I’ve chosen Kazuo Hara’s documentary, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987). I’ll put up a brief post at the Film of the Month blog on Monday, May 19. I eagerly look forward to the discussion that ensues.

Four of Hara’s movies were released to region 1 DVD about a year ago: in addition to The Emperor’s Naked Army, Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (1974), Goodbye CP (1972), and A Dedicated Life (1994). I've been hearing and reading about his films for years but I’ve seen none of them.

I like it that once a month the film club will force me to renounce a little control over my viewing and perhaps expose me to films I might not otherwise see, with the added bonus of a meaty post-film conversation.

* * *

A couple of links:

-- Dan Sallitt has a thoughtful post called "Dramaturgy and Two-Ness": "[I]t occurred to me that classical dramaturgy could be seen as a way of creating a relationship between internal and external views of a work of art."

-- Matt Zoller Seitz, who comes from a family of jazz musicians, has a piece in the NYT on jazz and cinema.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum at DVDBeaver: "Ten Underappreciated John Ford Films."

-- Pacze Moj at Critical Culture posts a Glauber Rocha essay from 1970 called "Beginning at Zero: Notes on Cinema and Society."

pic: Dinah Washington in Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960).

A Cinema of Sensations

This week I drove up to George Eastman House to catch Jean Eustache’s Mes Petites Amoureuses (1974), which turned out to be one of the greatest coming-of-age films I’ve ever seen. This generally obscure movie deserves to be universally known.

The narrative events in the film are extremely small-scale and modest, but Eustache gives them great weight by using them as vehicles for vivid sensations and impressions: movement (a pack of boys riding their bicycles downhill on a country road, their wheels humming like music); light (the brilliant country sun followed by long hours in a dingy workshop in the city); sound (a first kiss stolen from behind in a dark movie theater during Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman while French-dubbed voices boom from the screen, substituting for Ava Gardner and James Mason); and texture (the endlessly arresting faces and bodies of a parade of nonprofessional players in schools, bars, boulevards, markets).

There is a poignant and ironic contrast at work here: on the one hand, the surfeit of sensations that the artwork gives generously to the viewer; and on the other, the silent, aching, ever-present physical longing the boy-protagonist feels in the film, a longing for sensations that are almost always out of his reach.

I also happened to revisit Bresson’s L’Argent and read Kent Jones’ excellent BFI monograph on the film. He quotes Bresson speaking to Michel Ciment in a 1983 Positif interview:

I’ve been called a Jansenist, which is madness. I’m the opposite. I’m interested in impressions. I’ll give you an example, taken from L’Argent. When I’m on the Grands Boulevards, the first thing I think is How do they impress me? And the answer is that they impress me as a mass of legs and a sound of feet on the pavements. I tried to communicate this impression by picture and by sound … There has to be a shock at the moment of doing, there has to be a feeling that the humans and things to be filmed are new, you have to throw surprises on film. […] That’s the Grands Boulevards, as far as I’m concerned, all the motion. Otherwise, I might as well have used a picture postcard. The thing that struck me when I used to go to the cinema is that everything had been wanted in advance, down to the last detail … Painters do not know in advance how their picture is going to turn out, a sculptor cannot tell what his sculpture will be, a poet does not plan a poem in advance …

You will have noticed that in L’Argent there are a series of close-ups whose only function is to add sensation. When the father, a piano-player, drops a glass, his daughter is in the kitchen. Her dustpan and sponge are ready. I do not then enter the room, but cut immediately to a close shot which I like very much, the wet floor with the sound of the sponge. That is music, rhythm, sensation … Increasingly, what I am after — and with L’Argent it became almost a working method — is to communicate the impressions I feel.

Jones writes:

The type of ‘sensation’ that Bresson is describing is felt only fitfully in the work of most other film-makers. The many shots from the inside of moving cars in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), for instance, or the episode with the broken-down boxer arriving at his hotel room in John Huston’s Fat City (1972), are powerful sensory experiences, in which film-makers have clearly sought and achieved human (i.e. personal, subjective) sense of duration, space, rhythm, the texture of reality as they perceive it. However these are isolated instances in films that, like most other works, leave behind the purely sensory to make way for the rhetorical, the poetic, the point of view of the protagonist or the purely functional. [Manny] Farber’s comments about Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) could apply just as well to a Bresson film: ‘Two exquisite cinematic moments: the safe-cracker, one hand already engaged, removing the cork from the nitro bottle with his teeth; the sharp, clean thrust of a chisel as it slices through the wooden strut.’ The very feel of the world, in which there is no hierarchy of attention and even the most apparently meaningless event has its own integrity and its own special thrill, has been central to Farber since his beginnings as a critic — he is not indulging in idle appreciation here. It’s also central to Bresson, and it informs every moment of his cinema (it’s worth noting here that Bresson began as a painter, and that Farber remains one). […]

Visually, on a shot-by-shot basis, Bresson likes to imprint a singularized action on a given space, like a charcoal line on a blank sheet of paper. The body is either traced in its stillness, or draws itself across the screen in a quick, decisive movement. When one discusses ‘rhythm’ in Bresson, it’s closer to the idea of rhythm in painting, much more than a question of ‘pace’, the actual rhythm of action, as in a film by Scorsese or Coppola, or of shot length, as in Antonioni. In Bresson, and this is a trait that he shares with Hitchcock, the length of a shot has less to do with tempo than it does with sensorial emphasis: it’s never a question of a character simply living a moment of time, as it is in most films, but the way one (i.e. Bresson) would experience the feeling of living such a moment. The shot of Yvon’s hand as it releases the waiter’s arm during the scuffle in the café has a family resemblance to the shot of Martin Balsam ‘falling’ down the stairs in Psycho — both are a-temporal, disjointed from any reasonable space-time continuum, and oriented around a particular sensation.

To me, it’s particularly important that although both the Bresson and Eustache films make striking use of place and nonprofessional actors, their conveying of sensations and impressions is not done in a documentary-like manner. Instead, the filmmakers present certain details (of gesture, movement, color, light, sound, texture) while also guiding our attentions in a controlled and highly selective manner.

Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs. Are there others in the series you particularly like and would recommend?

* * *

Links:

-- The new issue of Cinema Scope includes Jonathan Rosenbaum's DVD column on "critical editions".

-- Michael Sicinski's top 17 films of 2007 along with an introductory essay; and his reviews page for March, which covers about 20 films.

-- The new issue of Film Quarterly.

-- Especially for fellow Stones fans: There's a humorous interview with Keith Richards at Entertainment Weekly.

pic: The wine glass begins to quiver, just before toppling, in L'Argent (1983).

On Auteurism

I've had a couple of different trains of thought running through my head lately; let me draw them together in this post under the broad, common theme of auteurism.

The subject of Adrian's new column at Filmkrant is the screenwriter/auteur debate. He recounts an exchange between Josh Olson and Brad Stevens. Olson wants to remind everyone that even though Cronenberg might get the credit for the two much-talked-about sex scenes in A History of Violence, he (Olson) is the one who scripted them word by word. Adrian writes:

Stevens fires back with an impeccable cinephilic example. The opening scene of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière (2003) is so rich and complex on the level of its sounds and images, gestures and spaces, light-values and rhythms, that it could never have been entirely 'foreseen' or described in a script. Stevens does not mention Hou's close longtime script collaborator, celebrated Taiwanese novelist Chu Tien-wen, but his point is solid. However, it sends Olson and his LA-based comrades into apoplectic fits: it's a critic's fantasy! Auteurist nonsense that can only believed by eggheads who have never made a film! Give the greatest directors in the world a blank page, and see if they are so great then!

As Steven Maras argues in his forthcoming Wallflower Press book on screenwriting, this rage rests on the metaphor-idea that, while the writer is the true creator, and the script functions as an architectural blueprint, the director is merely the person who 'executes' the script, or builds the house to prior specifications. What auteurism - in its most enlightened form - is about is not the god-like primacy of the director on set, but the 'holistic', integrated, organic conception of a film, from first idea to final post-production. Hou guides this process from the start; while Cronenberg imposes his vision on projects that he does not always initiate. But cinema is the weaving of many different 'writings', from the written to the filmic - not the primacy of any one over all the others.

* * *

The above piece sparked an interesting discussion in the comments to the previous post (scroll down about three-quarters of the way). I thought we might continue and extend it, either here or in the previous thread. Let me offer a few remarks in response to that discussion.

In my view, auteurism is not an account of how films are made. It is instead one among many ways we, as viewers, choose to read a film. In other words, it is one particular lens through which films can be viewed: by foregrounding the 'marks' of expression belonging to one person, the auteur, most frequently the director.

The first widespread use of the term in France in the '50s occurred in a very specific historical and political context. Cahiers du Cinema critics used their politique des auteurs to champion those filmmakers working in the Hollywood system who managed to imprint their signatures on films being made within a factory-like system of production. Thus, the CdC critics chose to read Hollywood films—and this was a political choice they were making—in a way that focused on the 'identifying marks of expression' made by an auteur like Nicholas Ray or Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks.

Since then, the term 'auteur' has found use in a looser, broader fashion, but I don't see it as objectively claiming (as a 'theory' might) that the contributions of the director trump those of the screenwriter, the stars, the cinematographer, etc. In fact, the term 'auteur theory'—first used by Andrew Sarris when the politique made its trans-Atlantic crossing in the early '60s—is misleading since auteurism is not a theory at all, but instead a certain mode and manner of reading films.

* * *

Dana Polan has a fascinating essay called "Auteur Desire" which was published at Screening the Past in 2001. He explains the double meaning of the essay's title:

On the one hand, in auteur theory, there is a drive to outline the desire of the director, his or her (but usually his) recourse to filmmaking as a way to express personal vision. The concern in auteur studies to pinpoint the primary obsessions and thematic preoccupations of this or that creator is thus an attempt to outline the director's desire. On the other hand, there is also desire for the director - the obsession of the cinephile or the film scholar to understand films as having an originary instance in the person who signs them. Here, it is important to look less at what the director wants than what the analyzing auteurist wants - namely, to classify and give distinction to films according to their directors and to master their corpuses. [...]

[There is a] belief in conventional auteurism that it is precisely because the pressures of the system so weigh down on the auteur that he/she (but usually he in the canons of such criticism) is forced to creativity as a veritable survival tactic.

Polan makes a distinction between 'classic', Cahiers/Sarris auteurism and contemporary auteurism. The former was frequently mystificatory, believing that "personal artistic expression emerged in mysterious ways from ineffable deep wells of creativity," while the latter involves closer attention to the encounter between the auteur and the resources of filmmaking, and

a greater concreteness and detail in the examination of just what the work of the director involves. Gunning, for example, is explicit in his understanding of Lang not as a romantic genius drawing inspiration intuitively from hidden depths of insight but as a veritable pragmatist who directly labors on the materials of the world.

Likewise, the historical poetics of David Bordwell focuses attention on the immediate craft of the filmmaker - how he/she works in precise material ways with the tools and materials of his/her trade.

There are precursors to these contemporary approaches: for example, the mise-en-scène criticism of Movie magazine and V.F. Perkins, and Manny Farber's close attention to the myriad 'surface' details of a film—what Polan calls "an auteurism of energetics rather than metaphysics or thematics."

He also proposes this interesting idea:

[I]t might not be too extreme to suggest that in the auteur theory, the real auteurs turn out to be the auteurists rather than the directors they study. Faced with the vast anonymity and ordinariness of the mass of films that have ever been made - and in contrast to the anonymous, ordinary manner in which many people see films (the LA times reports that many average spectators go to the multiplex not having a specific film title in mind and choose once they confront the array of offerings) - the auteurist quests to have his personal vision of cinema emerge from obscurity. He struggles to impose his vision on a system of indifference...

* * *

This brings me to a notion that I have long wondered about: why is it that seasoned, intelligent auteurists don't always agree on the value of a particular film or filmmaker? In the light of "auteur desire," the answer is not difficult to see. If each auteurist brings to and imposes his/her desire upon a film or filmmaker, and no two people share the exact same configuration of desires (assuming that the desires of a person are influenced by his/her 'subjectivity', which is historically shaped by the accumulated set of cultural experiences that person, or 'subject', has had), each person would, naturally, have a different and unique encounter with a particular artwork. This makes disagreements both a matter of course and perfectly understandable.

Dan Sallitt, in a thread from the a_film_by archives, offers interesting insights on disagreements about the value of artworks:

When we disagree about the value of an artist or a work of art, we wonder how intelligent observers can be so far apart, not only in their opinions, but also in their perceptions. One possible model for disagreement is that one person has a wiser perspective on the topic at hand, and that the other person simply has grabbed hold of the wrong end of it. In most cases, this model is deeply inadequate from any objective perspective: it doesn't account at all for the great coherence and thoughtfulness that we often see on both sides, even when the positions are plainly mutually exclusive. But, in our hearts of hearts, this is the theory that we usually hold when we are one of the parties to the disagreement: our own position seems so coherent that we suspect the wisdom or the motives of the other party. Once in a while life presents us with an example of a disagreement where one side is clearly better supported than the other, and these occasional instances give us hope that maybe all of our opponents are similarly misled.

What occurred to me this morning is that maybe we underestimate: a) the incredible amount of data available in even the simplest work of art; and b) the mind's ability to find strong, coherent patterns in even a small collection of data. So, for instance, I come to Kubrick with a particular heightened aversion to a certain acting style which is connected to a certain personality trait. I identify this element, am ticked off by it, and calibrate my perceptive apparatus so that I start picking up any other element with some aspect in common. Because there is so much data in a movie, I have no trouble finding lots of support for my initial aversion, and in discarding the occasional data point that doesn't fit what I'm looking for. Within minutes, voila! I have constructed a coherent Kubrick-pattern that I call a sensibility. Meanwhile, other observers, without the same baseline aversion that I have, not only construct a different Kubrick-pattern, but also lack a slot in their Kubrick-pattern to help them identify the traits that look obvious to me.

pic: The train animations from Hou's Café Lumière.

Cinephile Accounting: Old vs. New

As a cinephile, I experience a certain tension between the desire/need to see older films versus new films.

Here’s a sample of a dozen older films I’ve seen within the last month: The Doll (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919); Dil Se (Mani Ratnam, 1998); Taipei Story (Edward Yang, 1985); Shri 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955); Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979); Rajnigandha (Basu Chatterjee, 1974); Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1954); Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933); Komal Gandhar (Ritwik Ghatak, 1961); Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978); J’entends plus la guitare (Philippe Garrel, 1991); and Day of the Outlaw (Andre de Toth, 1959).

In terms of quality, every one of these films is comfortably the equal of—sometimes better than—the best new films I saw last year. And yet, in terms of proportion, the number of new films I see each year is large, perhaps disproportionately so.

I see about 350 feature-length films a year (plus shorts), and of these, about 50-60 are new films. The majority of these new films (about 35-40) are seen in a ten-day period in Toronto in September. Thus, almost a full sixth of the films I watch each year are new. Given the century-plus span of film history, this strikes me as an extremely healthy, even overly generous, proportion.

Being part of the film-blogosphere often exerts a certain pressure on us to see recent films promptly. One wants to be part of—or at least comprehend—the conversation that these films spark. We feel left out of the loop—not allowed to play—if we haven’t seen the films that are being buzzed about (or reviled). Sometimes guilt follows, and occasionally, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, the act of putting off seeing a film just because it seems so required.

But these are the high-visibility examples, and I end up seeing most of them. Trickier are the scores of recent films that might play film festivals, receive decent reviews, show up occasionally on lists, and become easily available at theaters or on DVD. On a given evening, does one opt for Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding or Valerio Zurlini’s Family Diary? Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or Yasuzo Masumura’s Red Angel? George Ratliff’s Joshua or Johan van der Keuken’s I ♥ $? Sean Penn’s Into The Wild or Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya? I voted for the latter in all these cases, and they turned out to be excellent films, although I still haven’t seen the former films yet.

Of course, in theory, we don’t have to choose between these films with any finality since they are all available to us, but practically speaking, we are forced to make such choices on a daily basis in an environment that is deluging us with movies to see, both old and new, in all formats (theatrical, DVD, cable).

Physical location is a factor as well. For a cinephile in, say, New York or San Francisco, certain ‘gaps’ of key films or filmmakers may be attributed to foregoing the option of DVD and choosing to waiting for a retrospective or theatrical screening which may be imminent (or not). In my case, living where I do, it is unfortunate that I see the vast majority of older films on DVD; the only small upside is that I don’t feel compelled to put off watching a film in anticipation of a possible future theatrical screening.

Finally, what underlying personal objectives might dictate these viewing decisions? To answer this for myself, I'll invoke a fantasy. I still hold the naïve belief that cinema is a young art, and a century of it isn’t impossible to put one’s arms around. By this I don’t mean being able to see all films ever made (which is preposterous) but see a wide enough range of films to acquire a certain level of working knowledge about world cinema (both narrative and avant-garde) that will give one the facility to begin making associations and building networks in one’s head across decades, filmmakers, countries, and genres on dimensions like themes, formal strategies, stylistic characteristics, and performance. And to begin working toward this objective means building a personal foundation—amassing a repertoire—of film viewing from all periods of film history, rather than over-privileging the current moment.

The result is that while continuing to see about 50 new films each year, I find myself, on a daily basis, opting to see an older film much more frequently than a new film.

If you’ll allow me to toss out a few questions: Do you feel a similar tug-of-war between the desire or need to see older films versus new films? What guides your decision-making on what to see from day to day? What are the personal objectives that might underpin your decision-making on these matters? I’d love to hear your thoughts on these or any other related issues.

pic: Vidya Sinha, with the soon-to-wilt flowers of the film's title, in Basu Chatterjee's Rajnigandha (1974).