girish

The Genius of the System

2010-03-06T14:25:00.005-05:00

The rich discussion on auteurs and auteurism in the previous post thread has me humming with questions. Let me take up one particular line of inquiry in this post.

I think it would be uncontroversial to assert that our present moment is not the Golden Age of American Cinema -- especially so in comparison with Hollywood's aesthetic zenith at the height of the studio era from the 1920s to the 1950s.

For example, here is a small subset of Andrew Sarris' list for best films of 1956: Ford's The Searchers; Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man; Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life and Hot Blood; Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now and The Killer is Loose; Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, There's Always Tomorrow, and Battle Hymn; Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt; Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life and Tea and Sympathy; Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It; George Cukor's Bhowani Junction; Stanley Kubrick's The Killing; Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers; George Stevens' Giant; Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments; and many more.

What was in place -- what combination of factors existed -- during that moment in Hollywood, and in America, that allowed a thousand good movies to bloom? One early answer came from André Bazin, who cautioned the 'young Turks' of Cahiers, like Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette, against creating a "personality cult of the auteur". Instead, he defended the fertile context composed of industry, genre, and tradition he called "the genius of the system":

What makes Hollywood so much better than anything else in the world is not only the quality of certain directors, but also the vitality and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition...The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements.

David Bordwell adds:

Bazin's point struck the Cahiers writers most forcefully only after his death, partly because the decline of the studio system faced them with mediocre works by such venerated filmmakers as Mann, Ray, and Cukor. 'We said,' remarked Truffaut bitterly, 'that the American cinema pleases us, and its filmmakers are slaves; what if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.' Pierre Kast agreed: 'Better a good cinéma de salarie than a bad cinéma d'auteur.'

I think that the fine arts during the Renaissance and theatre during Elizabethan times might provide two parallels to Studio-era Hollywood. In all three periods, we had large numbers of artists who produced work of great collective volume for a single, sizable audience. The scale of the system could support and nourish a large number of artists and craftsmen, permitting them to work towards a technical mastery of skills. Further, genres flourished as conventions were created, elaborated, modified, transformed and regenerated in a continual and vital process of exchange with a mass audience.

Two more analogues of such "systems" spring to mind, both of which, like Studio-era Hollywood, thrived in the first half of the twentieth century. First, the era of the "Great American Songbook," with its brilliant roster of songwriter/composers including Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Shwartz & Dietz, Hoagy Carmichael, and dozens of others. The institutions that made this great flowering possible included Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood itself.

Second: Comics -- both comic books and newspaper comics. The Comics Journal, the leading US publication that focuses on comics as an art-form, conducted a large poll in 1999 of the "100 best comics of the century" (scroll down about half-way). Their results are revealing: while a good number of contemporary "art-comics" make the list, the uppermost reaches are occupied by works of popular art from earlier in the century like George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Walt Kelly's Pogo, Winsor MacCay's Little Nemo and Carl Barks' Donald Duck (all in the top 10).

So, to draw the circle back to where we started. We all know that American movies are still Big Business. Viewership is high. The industry has seen rapid technological development, with a concomitant expansion of palette for artists and technicians. What, then, accounts for today's American films not being in the same league as those made during the '20s to the '50s? How are the two eras -- then and now -- crucially different? And what role might "the genius of the system" play in all of this?

I realize that I've advanced more questions than answers in this post, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of these issues. Thank you!

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Some recent reading:

-- I've respected and learned from Cineaste associate editor Thomas Doherty's writings over the years, but his new piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Death of Film Criticism," is disappointingly glib, lazy, and inaccurate (as others have pointed out). See Chuck Tryon's and Jim Emerson's responses to the piece, and Jonathan Rosenbaum's comments on the Chronicle post thread.

-- The new issue of Cineaste has about a dozen pieces available to read online, including a few "web exclusives."

-- Adrian Martin at Filmkrant: "For my part, I often return to a key article of 2004 by the young Brazilian critic Filipe Furtado which...begins with a fine gesture: it juxtaposes Kiarostami's Ten (2002) and McG's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003) while sharply lamenting, 'the fact that it seems impossible to talk about them together struck me as a shame.'

-- Zach Campbell at The Auteurs on the extras and supplements for Criterion's DVDs of "Rossellini's War Trilogy."

-- Kevin Lee puts up Jia Zhang-ke's 1998 essay "The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return."

-- David Hudson looks ahead to several new films including Secret of the Kells; and a tad late but no less interesting for its delay: Doug Cummings at Film Journey has put up his list of favorite films of 2009.

-- Several new posts at prolific Jeffrey Sconce's blog, Ludic Despair.

-- Craig Keller posts notes on several new Masters of Cinema DVD releases.

-- The Self-Styled Siren mounts a defense of Sam Wood; and Glenn Kenny takes up auteurism in his "Topics/Questions/Exercises of the Week" column at The Auteurs.

-- Is there a harder-working film-blogger than Michael Guillen of The Evening Class? Recently: he interviewed James Benning.

-- A nice overview of the career of Sergei Parajanov by Ian Christie in the new Sight & Sound.

Journey of a Word

2010-02-08T11:10:00.002-05:00

A New York Times article last week anointed Steve Jobs as an "auteur":

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. [Apple's "design restraint"] is evident in Mr. Jobs’s personal taste. His black turtleneck, beltless blue jeans and running shoes are a signature look.

How far we've traveled in 50 years. When Truffaut, Godard and other Cahiers du Cinema critics originally formulated their "politique des auteurs," they meant for it to particularly apply to Hollywood filmmakers like Hitchcock, Hawks or Nicholas Ray who managed to imprint their films with a personal vision and stylistic signature while working within an industrial system of production. Crucial to this "politique" was a politics of resistance that was manifested in at least 3 ways:

(1) A select few Hollywood filmmakers resisting (through aesthetic tactics grouped under a sign called "mise-en-scene") the powerful standardizing forces of the Hollywood system.

(2) A corresponding gesture of resistance on the part of the French critics themselves: one aimed at the dominant and respectable homegrown "Tradition of Quality" cinema.

(3) These French critics also combating the notion that Hollywood cinema, because it was a mass-culture product, was not worth taking seriously as art.

In the 1960s, Peter Wollen resituated the notion of the auteur with the help of structuralism. (See the essay "The Auteur Theory" in his book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.) This move could also be seen as a gesture of resistance -- in this case, against an overly romanticized notion of the auteur with near-mystical powers of individual genius. The auteur, for Wollen, became a site, an "unconscious catalyst," a collection of themes, oppositions and traits that could be read, then inventoried and grouped under a name within quotation marks: "Hitchcock," "Hawks," "Fuller," and so on.

The term went into decline, at least in the formal study of film, in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has seen a resurgence -- in a reconstructed form -- since the 1990s. It was around this time that "independent cinema," as an industry category, began to show sizable commercial promise. In the last 15 years or so, we've seen the industry (first independent, then the mainstream) seize the term and deploy it -- not with any kind of resistance in mind but, plain and simple, as a strategy for product differentiation. Directors -- independent or mainstream, at the multiplex or the film festival, talented or mediocre -- are indiscriminately dubbed "auteurs" in a move that automatically attempts to bestow upon them quality and distinction, a brand identity. Especially when wielded by the industry and the media, the word has been diluted to the point of insubstantiality. It represents little more than the commodification of a set of product attributes in search of a market niche. The original animating values of resistance and critical polemics have slowly disappeared from the word since its appropriation. What does remain vitally useful today (especially for cinephiles) is the reading strategy we call "auteurism."

Your thoughts about the evolution of the word "auteur" over the last few decades, and its usefulness today? I'd love to hear them.

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What was "independent cinema" before it became a commercially lucrative market segment about 15-20 years ago? We can find some answers in the fascinating 100-page catalogue [pdf] that accompanied a month-long, 150-film retrospective Independent America: New Film 1978-1988 at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1988. Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay for the catalogue, "Myths of the new narrative (and a few counter-suggestions)," can be found at his blog. Chief curator David Schwartz writes:

Before the commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Pulp Fiction (and before the rise of home video), independent filmmakers made and showed their films in a world truly apart from Hollywood. To get their work seen, they would travel for months, with their 16mm film prints in tow, to colleges and media arts centers across the country. The commercial success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape marked the beginning of the end of this era. Last year’s big “independent” hit, Juno, was distributed by Fox Searchlight, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and it made more money than any other Best Picture contender. Juno’s virtues were not in its artistic independence; but precisely the opposite — it was a well-written, well-directed, well-performed, and utterly conventional movie.

Rosenbaum’s essay, and the entire Independent America film series, capture a time when the label “independent” was truly up for grabs, indicating a genuine alternative to mainstream commercial cinema.

New Year, New Venture

2010-01-23T17:00:00.000-05:00

I'm teaching a film class for the first time. It's an undergraduate course titled "Philosophy and Film," and I'm doing it in partnership with my colleague Tanya Loughead, who is a Continental philosopher. Rather than being a course that uses films--or slivers of films--simply to illustrate philosophy, we've designed the course to accord equal time and importance to both areas. On the philosophy side, we'll read Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Foucault, Butler, and Derrida. For film, we've picked about 10 well-known, canonical titles including Ray's Pather Panchali, Bresson's A Man Escaped, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, Denis' Chocolat, Haynes' Safe, and Varda's The Gleaners and I. This being our maiden voyage into teaching cinema, we've chosen (conservatively) films with established reputations, films that have been amply discussed and written about. In addition to exams and papers, we've designed the course to include an in-class, small-group discussion component. My own primary role in the course will be to work to provide students with a basic grounding in film form, style and aesthetics. It promises to be an exciting--and unpredictable--venture.

We'd appreciate greatly any suggestions or advice from film teachers who happen to be reading. We are particularly curious about the experiences of others in using small-group discussions. But, really: any words of wisdom will be most welcome. Thanks!

* * *

The recent film I most want to see is Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August. An excerpt from Adrian Martin's essay on it in the new issue of Indian Auteur:

Is every important, progressive film of today a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943)? Almost every Pedro Costa film, for instance, seems to return to it; and ghosts or zombies of every material sort seem to stalk or sleepwalk through the work of Albert Serra, Lisandro Alonso, Tsai Ming-liang, Béla Tarr … But Our Beloved Month of August takes us back to a very particular moment of Tourneur’s masterpiece: the scene in which the previously subservient, glad-handing, guitar-strumming, nightclub entertainer with the wonderful name of Sir Lancelot breaks his subaltern role and strides forward to gleefully accuse the drunken, guilty white man with his deceptively lilting ditty: “Woe is me / Shame and scandal in the family …” [...]

The great Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser once mused on the difference between a screen wall and a solid wall – for him, the convenient key (like so many mundane, everyday phenomena, of the kind that Gomes also alights upon) to understanding our civilisation and its discontents. The solid wall marks, for Flusser, a neurotic society – a society of houses and thus ‘dark secrets’, of properties and possessions. And of folly, too, because the wall will always be razed, in the final instance, by the typhoon or the flood or the earthquake. But whereas the solid wall gathers and locks people in, the screen wall – incarnated in history variously by the tent, the kite or the boating sail – is “a place where people assemble and disperse, a calming of the wind”. It is the site for the “assembly of experience”; it is woven, and thus a network.

It is only a small step for Flusser to move from the physical, material kind of screen to the immaterial kind: the screen that receives projected images, or (increasingly) holds computerised, digital images. From the Persian carpet to the Renaissance oil painting, from cinema to new media art: images (and thus memories) are stored within the surface of this woven wall. A wall that reflects movement, but itself increasingly moves within the everyday world: when I was a little child and once dreamed of taking a cinema screen (complete with a movie still playing loudly and brightly upon it), folding it up and putting in my pocket so I could go for a stroll, I had no idea it was a predictive vision of the future, the mundane laptop computer or mobile phone.

* * *

A couple of links:

-- At the Guardian: "Haiti's only film school was destroyed in the earthquake, but the mini-movies that its students have made since are a living chronicle of the still-unfolding crisis and will serve as enduring testaments to the power of cinema to inform and move."

-- At Sight & Sound, several critics and curators pick (and display) their favorite online videos of 2009.

-- Senses of Cinema World Poll 2009.

The Film Criticism of Tim Hunter

2010-01-13T19:30:00.001-05:00

(Thank you to sleuthing super-cinephile Adrian Martin!)

Tim Hunter is probably best known to film-lovers as the director of the classic teen drama River's Edge (1986). In addition to two other good youth-centered films (Tex, 1982; Sylvester, 1985) he notably co-wrote Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979), a film that looks stronger with each passing year.

Hunter's father, the British screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter, fronted for Dalton Trumbo on the original story for Roman Holiday, and was later himself blacklisted. The family went into exile in Mexico, and then to New York. Hunter grew up mostly around blacklistee kids. He then attended Harvard from 1964 to 1968. He ran a film society there, quickly developing into a precocious cinephile and budding filmmaker. American auteurism, spearheaded by Andrew Sarris, was in the air, and it was an exciting time to be a movie enthusiast. On the strength of several student films, Hunter was admitted to the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies in the early '70s, where he studied alongside Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and David Lynch.

At Harvard, Hunter was film critic and arts editor for the student publication, the Crimson. It turns out that 42 pieces he wrote for the publication (mostly in the mid-to-late '60s when he was an undergraduate student) are now available on the Internet. What a surprise: especially given his tender age, it's a collection of sharp, thoughtful and knowledgeable film criticism that also gives us a good sense of the film culture of the period. The most remarkable quality of these pieces, in my view, is their keen awareness of cinematic craftsmanship and style--the choices that filmmakers make (or the opportunities they miss), and how those formal choices work to make meaning in a film. Let me share a few excerpts.

Here Hunter expresses dissatisfaction with The Graduate:

Cinematically, the chief influence on Nichols remains the photographer of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Haskell Wexler, also cameraman on In The Heat of The Night. When the sun shines, Nichols points his camera at it; if a car approaches the camera, Nichols bounces the headlights off the lens; should a character jump into the water, Nichols makes the camera jump into the water; and as mood becomes essential, well, Nichols can always shoot it with a shaky hand-held camera.

The problem goes deeper than Nichols' consistent substitution of trickiness for style. A great director, Rosselini or Hitchcock, plans his film as a totality, understanding instinctively how each shot relates to the film as a whole; a competent director of narrative films like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) plans shots with relation to the entire scene. Nichols, however, cannot plan past a given shot, and although a frame may contain an effective gimmick, camera angle, or background detail, the scenes themselves are purposeless and disconnected, largely due to awkward and self-conscious editing.

On why the first half of Torn Curtain is much better than the second:

The importance of the first half, however, cannot be overestimated, as it shows Hitchcock at a point of maximum control of his medium. Breaking new ground in color photography, he has filmed Torn Curtain without direct lighting. Instead, he has used reflected light, bounced off a white screen on the set. This reduces the color contrasts, putting much of the film into lush soft-focus, and almost eliminating unnecessary shadows.

He continues in Torn Curtain to experiment with visual romanticism: Julie Andrews is chastized by Newman on an airplane and as she lowers her head sadly, the camera while dissolving to the next scene begins to blur, as if tears were clouding the lens. Suddenly Hitchcock cuts sharply to the airplane door loudly opening, revealing the East Berlin airport. It is an unnerving return to reality, a visual refusal to give his heroine any means of escape.

He's bowled over by Chabrol's The Champagne Murders:

The implications of the finale are fathomable on a script level, then obscured by the zoom pull-backs that serve as the final shots. Chabrol makes no judgments at the ending and leaves the three in limbo, either to destroy one another or to form a new menage substituting Audran for Christine. The optics of a fast zoom shot are wondrous in that the audience is left with a feeling of simultaneous movement toward action and away from it. At the same time that we move to a higher vantage point with a wider angle of vision, we are jerked away from the luxury of watching action in sharp focus detail. The effect is one of ultimate suspension, in every sense of the word, and the greatness of the ending is a consequence of the perfect optical realization of attitude and theme.

On why Huston's The African Queen doesn't work:

The odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique promotes an episodic quality that defeats a build-up of suspense or tension; there is no attempt to vary action and the middle third of The African Queen concentrates solely on rapids: a small rapid, a big rapid, and--out of the blue--a great big surprise rapid, spaced neatly at five minute intervals.

Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain makes a surprise appearance on his list of ten best films of 1967:

In a period marked increasingly by acceptance of lack of craft (witness the reception of Mike Nichols' mediocre The Graduate), Billion Dollar Brain stands out as a low-level case-book of cinematic efficiency. Russell's camerawork is frequently tantamount to cutting: he will start on a medium shot of Michael Caine, swing up to a sign on a building, down to people leaving the building, and back to Michael Caine--all so quickly we might have seen four separate shots...

And so does Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown:

Bernard Shaw postulated that great playwrights by definition write great plays, and this is certainly the easiest way to defend Preminger's' Hurry Sundown, a difficult and dramatically unrewarding film. Like most of the great European directors who work in Hollywood, Preminger, takes little of America for granted, and his films are marked by a distinctly individual way of seeing the world. [...] In Preminger's films, there are no point-of-view shots; Preminger never cuts to what a character sees, instead putting both the watcher and the watched in the same shot. Though Preminger tends to ignore the dramatic world of his films, his camera defines the personality and function of a character by the amount of space placed around him, and by the way he is moved with relation to the frame. The more space Preminger has to work with, the more complex his films become, and predictably, Preminger is a master of wide-screen cinematic technique. At best, Preminger creates a network of conflicting spatial relationships from the many people in his best-seller-based sagas, and his films work on a level far transcending the dramatic material. From this specialized, perhaps perverse, point-of-view, Hurry Sundown is close to Preminger's best film.

In the last 20 years, Hunter has worked mostly in television, directing episodes of shows like Twin Peaks, Homicide, Law & Order, Mad Men, Dexter and Nip/Tuck.

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David Hudson at The Auteurs is maintaining an updated post of Eric Rohmer tribute links.

Framework on Cinephilia, etc.

2009-12-31T10:20:00.003-05:00

-- The new issue of the journal Framework has a cinephilia dossier edited by Jonathan Buschbaum and Elena Gorfinkel. I joined several others, including Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin, Nicole Brenez, James Quandt, Zach Campbell, Chris Fujiwara and Laura Mulvey, in contributing a piece to it. For those with institutional access, the contents of the issue are available via Project Muse, Proquest, etc.

-- I haven't seen the film yet but Jim Emerson and Martin Anderson write about Avatar 3D causing eyestrain and headaches if the viewer looks away from the areas of the frame where the filmmaker wants you to look. André Bazin famously believed in the value of the spectator assuming an active role by scanning the film frame and choosing what to pay attention to. Avatar seems to be mandating the very opposite--by punishing viewer choice and agency with physical pain to the eye and the head!

-- The new season of the Cinematheque in Toronto features one of the films I've most wanted to see: Joris Ivens's A Tale of the Wind (1988). But alas, it's scheduled on a night when I teach. The European Foundation has assembled a 5-DVD Joris Ivens set which is rumored, at some point, to get a US release.

-- There's a new issue of Screening the Past, in two sections--of essays and reviews. Also: Senses of Cinema has a new issue.

-- A refreshingly candid interview with Manohla Dargis on women and Hollywood. Also: a reflection by her in the NYT on moving-image entertainments of the digital age.

-- At The Auteurs: Inspired by Manny Farber, B. Kite puts up a "Petite Mannyfesto"; and Zach on the book Manny Farber proposed in the 1970s but never wrote.

-- Sukhdev Sandhu has a brief piece in The Telegraph on "the decline of American cinema" during the decade. (via Jonathan Rosenbaum.)

-- At Jonathan's place, book reviews from the archives: Noel Burch's Theory of Film Practice; Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic; Rudy Wurlitzer's Slow Fade; and Susan Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn.

-- Two reviews of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's Gamer make me want to see it: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and Steven Shaviro.

-- Michael Sicinski's latest reviews include the new films by Soderbergh, Herzog, Reitman and Tom Ford.

-- David Bordwell on why Akira Kurosawa was a "problematic auteur."

-- José Neves has a list of films old and new (many unfamiliar and interesting) seen at the Lisbon Cinemateca during the year. (via Matthew Flanagan, who covers the London Film Festival in the new Senses issue.)

-- Several good posts at the prolific Jeffrey Sconce's blog, Ludic Despair.

Robin Wood, 1931-2009

2009-12-19T15:55:00.007-05:00

Film criticism has lost one of its giants: Robin Wood has died. He was 78. Catherine Grant has assembled a wonderful collection of links as a tribute to him. Armen Svadjian summarizes Wood's career and interviews him in a piece from 2006. David Hudson collects links to reactions around the film blogosphere.

Wood was a prolific and impassioned critic with a broad range and deep convictions. He was an inspirational writer and yet he was sure to provoke occasional disagreement and exasperation in even his most loyal followers. Most notably, he declined to keep his criticism at a remove from his personal life. (A well-known instance is his piece "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic" [pdf].) When Hitchcock's Films Revisited was released in a revised edition in 2002, he included a 33-page preface that was pure autobiography. Joe McElhaney's review of the book is a wonderful example of the deeply felt, searching, and sometimes ambivalent response that Wood was often capable of provoking.

My one memorable encounter with Wood occurred about 10 years ago at a limited Hitchcock retrospective in Toronto. He wrote the essay accompanying the series, and appeared in person to lecture on Marnie immediately following the screening. I suspect most of the audience had not read him and didn't know who he was, but nearly everyone stayed--electrified--for an hour while he held forth on the film. At the end, someone asked him about the T-shirt he was wearing. He swelled his chest out and pointed to it so everyone could see. It had a picture of a crystal ball with a photograph of Barbara Harris on it. It was, he explained, a protest shirt: he was wearing it in defense of Family Plot, which had been left out of the retrospective.

In addition to the Hitchcock book, my own favorites among his work include his writings on Howard Hawks (the book he wrote in 1968, the more recent BFI Film Classics monograph on Rio Bravo), and his collection Personal Views. But really, the moment I put that down, I realize how unfair and inadequate my selections are. It's impossible to winnow down his enormous contributions to just a couple of titles.

So, your reflections on Wood and his work? Any favorites among his writings? Please feel free to share them.

Best of the Decade

2009-11-25T18:20:00.006-05:00

Just as they did ten years ago, James Quandt and TIFF Cinematheque (née Cinematheque Ontario) have conducted a worldwide poll of film curators, archivists, historians and programmers for best ("most important") films of the decade (scroll down for the compiled list). It's a heady and wonderful list that militates unashamedly and polemically for film as art. There are 54 films on the list, and four of the top 5 are Asian. Here's the top 10:

1. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
2. Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
3. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke, China)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, France)
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, China)
6. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania); and Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary).
8. Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, France)
9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
10. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)

One of the purposes of such a list is to stimulate conversation and debate. So, let me make a few comments about it; I invite you to do the same.

-- Just 5 of the 54 are women-made films: Beau Travail and L'Intrus (Claire Denis); The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda); The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel); and Longing (Valeska Grisebach). Missing women filmmakers include Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, and Jennifer Reeves (among many others).

-- The list privileges narrative, feature-length films. Avant-garde/experimental cinema is almost wholly absent (save Ken Jacobs, and Apichatpong, whose work straddles narrative and avant-garde modes). Thus, for instance: no James Benning, Peter Tscherkassky, Nathaniel Dorsky, Michael Robinson, or (again) Jennifer Reeves. Also: no short films except Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World.

-- The decade was marked by an explosion of the documentary form, which had a profound influence on fiction filmmaking and even made great incursions into the mainstream. But documentaries (except the Varda) go missing on the list.

-- By explicitly advancing the cause of art cinema, a poll such as this automatically marginalizes the aesthetic merits of commercial cinema. So, from Hollwyood to Bollywood, popular cinema barely registers here.

-- A personal aside: My own cinephilia peaked during this time. I attended TIFF throughout the decade, and caught most of the films on the list at the festival. There's exactly one film here that I didn't care for at the time: Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000). Time to give it a second look.

-- I wonder: are all filmmakers represented here by their most worthy work of this decade? There are two Tsai Ming-Liang films on this list but not What Time is it There? (2001), which, to my mind, is a key film in his oeuvre, a kind of summation of his themes and a compendium of his style. I have no quarrel whatsoever with Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth or In Vanda's Room (astounding films, both!) but I miss the inclusion of his Straub/Huillet documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? Finally, I wonder: is Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman her best film--better than The Holy Girl or La Cienaga?

Let me conclude by adding a handful of personal choices that are not on the list: La Captive (Chantal Akerman, France), RR (James Benning, USA), Remembrance of Things to Come (Chris Marker, France), Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki, Finland), and Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria).

I'd love to hear your reactions to the Cinematheque list--and your ideas for "best films of the decade" that don't appear on it.

A Handful of Reads

2009-11-15T17:45:00.002-05:00

-- Cinematheque Ontario is doing a series, curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, on essay films. Also: Andrew Tracy on essay films at Moving Image Source.

-- Glenn Kenny on Cinemascope at the Auteurs Notebook; David Bordwell is among those who weigh in after the post.

-- Bordwell: on the sexual use of bedposts in movies; on Shaw Brothers widescreen cinema; and on four little-known but interesting Hollywood films from 1933.

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT: two horror film articles (one and two); on new Sirk and Buñuel DVDs; and on Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol. (Also: Dan North on the Zemeckis.)

-- From the Viennale, Gabe Klinger reflects on film festivals. Also: Gabe on the AFI Fest.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum: on "recycled cinema" (Rivette's Divertimento and Stone's Natural Born Killers); a dialogue between Jonathan and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa on Kiarostami's Shirin; on Resnais and Marker's Statues Don't Die; and on his favorite Ford film, The Sun Shines Bright (1953), which I've never seen but just found online in a used VHS copy.

-- An autodidact's joy: "250 Free Courses from Top Universities," all online.

-- Catherine Grant: links to some introductions to film studies; a collection of studies of the close-up; and writings in phenomenological film and media studies.

-- Chris Cagle evaluates several currently used film history textbooks.

-- Michael Guillen assembles a large post of Robert Beavers' comments to audiences during the filmmaker's recent 2-week residency in San Francisco.

-- Ben Sachs relates Michael Mann to 19th century painting at The Auteurs Notebook.

-- Michael Anderson at Tativille offers an essay on the "taxonomy of the 360-degree panorama."

-- Michael Byrne at The Nation on the films of Dusan Makavejev.

-- Pedro Costa discusses his Jeanne Balibar documentary, Ne Change Rien, with Scott Foundas: “When the Lumière brothers did a shot, the movement inside the shot is almost impossible to re-create today [...] I am always very afraid when I see a little dog crossing the street in a Lumière brothers film, afraid it’s going to be crushed by a Model T. It’s something very concrete, this menace. Then Chaplin did the same thing consciously, and Stroheim took it further. We could see so many things in those films that, today, you only see in some Filipino or Chinese films, or sometimes on TV, in some documentaries. Everything beautiful and everything dangerous and everything that has to do with society disappeared a little bit from films. I’m becoming very reactionary, but Straub would say you have to go back to the past to push things forward.”

-- Newly discovered blog: Matthew Holtmeier's Cinema Without Organs.

pic: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), in Jean-Pierre Gorin and Cinematheque Ontario's essay film series.

Lines of Inspiration: Popular Cinema to Art Cinema

2009-11-01T10:50:00.001-05:00

One of the best and most fascinating things about cinema is the tension between its status as art and its status as industry. There is nothing new about this idea. But the way we construct the categories of 'popular cinema' and 'art cinema'--in starkly opposing fashion--holds them further apart than they really are or should be. It's good to be reminded of this on a regular basis.

So, my ears always perk up when I hear art filmmakers claim popular filmmakers as inspirations and influences. Let me relate a recent instance. Last month, of the 25 or so films I caught at the Toronto International Film Festival, the most memorable was To Die Like A Man, by Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues.

To Die Like A Man is a rich but challenging film about an aging drag queen/cabaret singer on the brink of a sex change operation. She has volatile and difficult relationships with both her junkie lover and her young, psychologically unstable son. The film is challenging because it never settles into a single comfortable narrative mode; it's forever shape-shifting. At various points, it becomes: melodrama, "queer realism," a musical with songs (but frequently without musical accompaniment!), a Wizard-of-Ozian fantasy, a breathtaking ode to silent cinema, and (in one brilliant moment) a medical documentary in which a doctor demonstrates a sex change operation using origami.

But here's the important thing: These shifts don't resemble the collage and pastiche practices that we sometimes associate with a certain kind of popular "postmodern cinema". To Die Like A Man presents itself to us, with no confusion, as an art film.

In the Q&A after the screening, someone asked Rodrigues about the film's unusual opening, resembling a war movie, in which a squad of soldiers moves through a forest in the darkness. It was inspired, he answered to everyone's surprise, by Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! He added that he screened Douglas Sirk films for the cast during production. I would not have dreamed, without being told, that this film held classic Hollywood as an important forebear.

This isn't an isolated, freak example. In 1995 the journal Projections, in collaboration with Positif, devoted an issue ("Film-makers on Film-making") to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema. In this issue, each filmmaker contributes an essay, big or small, devoted to her or his signal inspirations in cinema. The number of art filmmakers choosing to speak about popular films or filmmakers is eye-opening.

Chris Marker turns in an impassioned 8-page essay on his all-time favorite film, Vertigo. Catherine Breillat performs an insightful analysis of Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, which affected her powerfully and spurred her to write 36 Fillette. And arch-modernist Greek director Theo Angelopoulos writes of growing older and refashioning his personal history of cinema in the form of fragments: a few faces, gestures, shots, and words. Turns out they all belong to popular cinema:

The cry 'I don't want to die!' in Michael Curtiz's Angels With Dirty Faces; Orson Welles' damaged face in Touch of Evil; the young Irish girl dancing with Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine; Ingrid Bergman's face full of love in Notorious; Peter Lorre's monotonous whistling in M; these short moments, shots cut out of the films they belong to, make up the one film which marked me, the film which still does.

One the best accounts comes from Raul Rúiz. He tells the story of seeing Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat for the first time, and experiencing an utter revelation: here was a film that was an unconscious inspiration, a proto-Rúizian narrative unbeknownst to him.

Several times I had been linked with Edgar G. Ulmer and I usually disagreed [...] People as different as Jérôme Prieur, John Zorn and J. Rosenbaum had compared me to him. Now at last recognition came to me, and as in an old melodrama, I exclaimed: "Father!' and he replied 'My son!'

For at least twenty of my films find their source in The Black Cat. Each scene in the film is transformed, and completed, into one of mine.

A couple more examples. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about Straub's admiration for Chaplin:

Over a decade ago, Jean-Marie Straub made this startling observation: “A lot of people think that Eisenstein is the greatest editor, because he has some theories about it, but this is not true. Chaplin was greater, I think, in editing, only it is not so obvious. Chaplin was more precise than Eisenstein, and the man after Chaplin who is the most precise is surely Rivette.”

What Straub had in mind, I think, is Chaplin’s and Rivette’s ability to edit in relation to content: emotional content, narrative content, performance content. For both directors, editing is a precise answer to the question of what a particular shot’s meaning is–where this meaning begins and where it ends.

Finally, Pedro Costa's love for Jacques Tourneur is well-known, and is also evident in his first feature, O Sangue.

So, I wonder: can we collect some examples here of art filmmakers who have held up popular cinema as an important inspiration or influence?

pic: Boris Karloff in Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934). Also: here are two valuable interviews with João Pedro Rodrigues, by Michael Guillen and Dennis Lim.

Catching up on Interweb Reading

2009-10-03T14:40:00.003-04:00

I spent a week at the Toronto film festival--more on that in a post coming up next week--and then came down with 'festival exhaustion'. Now I've now been catching up on all the Internet movie reading I missed in the last few weeks. Let me collect some of it here:

-- At Slow TV, a terrific debate on the new Tarantino film featuring Adrian Martin and three other critics/scholars.

-- Zach Campbell: "Mad Men is good, but it's not even close to Tashlin's critiques. It remains exquisitely tasteful, on the surface, and ultimately middlebrow. Therein lie a few of the problems." Also: Zach on Inglourious Basterds: "Quentin Tarantino has an incredibly unphilosophical mind, and this is both his strength and his problem. Not even in his most mature work (Jackie Brown) does he really question anything. The root of his cinema is pleasure, a deeply tactile, visceral, and memory-based pleasure for which, presumably, there are no limits worth abiding (in quantity or quality)."

-- Several pieces at Jonathan Rosenbaum's: Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers (that appeared in Camera Obscura); Fatal Attraction ("Fear of Feminism"); Paris Journal for Film Comment (1971) on Demy, Pollet, Franju, Tati and Rivette; two Alan Rudolph films, Remember My Name and Mortal Thoughts.

-- New issues of: Cinema Scope; Senses of Cinema; Film Quarterly.

-- From the Toronto International Film Festival: Darren Hughes at Long Pauses; Richard Porton at Cineaste; B. Ruby Rich at SF360; Also: David Hudson collects a master index of TIFF reviews at The Auteurs.

-- Recent Dave Kehr writing in the NYT DVD column: "Tradition of Quality" films; Jacques Demy's Model Shop, Nikkatsu Noir; The Wizard of Oz.

-- A wealth of links from the valuable, indefatigable Catherine Grant, including this post on classical cinema.

-- Igantiy Vishnevetsky is among the most thoughtful of today's film bloggers. Here, at his site, Sounds, Images, are links to his recent writings and posts.

-- At Moving Image Source: Kevin Lee's two-part essay on Chinese cinema of the Cultural Revolution; Joshua Land on "The female Christ figures of Lars von Trier's films"; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Manny Farber.

-- Jeffrey Sconce on the Rotten Tomatoes' "worst of the worst" films of the decade.

-- Frieze runs a series in which artists and filmmakers talk about films that are important to them. Latest in the series is Tacita Dean; other entries can be found in the sidebar.

-- Matthew Flanagan's Landscape Suicide is one of the most original and stimulating places in the film blogosphere. See this recent post on forests.

-- David Bordwell on summer movies: one, and two.

-- Sally Potter's Rage is the first film made for cell-phone release. Here's an interview with Potter.

-- Marc Raymond on melodrama in Korean cinema.

-- Danny Kasman's review makes me eager to see the new Rivette film.

-- At Dennis Cooper's: David Ehrenstein presents "Rainer Werner Fassbinder Day."

-- Newly discovered blogs: the Indian site The Edit Room (at the Wide Screen Journal); Putney Debater, run by filmmaker/scholar Michael Chanan; Iranian cinephile Ehsan Khoshbakht's Notes on Cinematograph.

Any other recent, good reading you'd like to recommend? Please leave a link in the comments.

For Nika, For Alexis

2009-09-06T10:30:00.006-04:00

It was a tragic week: two valuable, inspiring figures of film culture, cinephilia and film criticism are with us no longer. Below, Adrian Martin pens a moving tribute to them. -- Girish.

* * *

For Nika, For Alexis

Adrian Martin

There are some people you like straight away. Nika Bohinc, editor of the Slovenian magazine Ekran for several years, was one of these people. I first met her in July 2007, at a film event in Zagreb inspired by Movie Mutations, the book I co-edited with Jonathan Rosenbaum. She had made the trip from Ljubljana with several of her comrades – just one sign of the enormous dedication of Slovenia’s current generation of intellectual cinephiles. Nika liked the way I introduced films (by Ruiz and Garrel), and so – impulsively, empathetically, definitely, the way she seemed to decide so many things in her life and work – I quickly became part of her plan for a Summer School on Independent Cinema, held as part of the Ljubljana International Film Festival three months later.

I shall never forget the moment I arrived at the Festival centre. I looked up from the registration desk and saw Nika’s face – with that warm, grateful, complicit, cheeky smile I came to know well. Her instant embrace told me that mere comradeship was over; friendship had begun. Indeed, the entire Summer School turned out to be organised around Nika’s friends: Christoph Huber, Neil Young, Gabe Klinger, an unlikely coalition of critics from Austria, UK, Australia and USA. Plus one other key speaker whose relationship to Nika had moved past friendship: Alexis Tioseco, raised in Canada, resident of the Philippines. Nika told me, in a private moment outside a club, about her excitement, mixed with nervousness, about leaving Slovenia to live with Alexis in the Philippines.

Nika, almost 30, and Alexis, 28, are dead – victims of a gruesome murder in Manila on September 1. Shot in the doorway of their house by thieves, their death resonates eerily with the recent short film, Butterflies Have No Memories, by Lav Diaz – one of the Philippine filmmakers tirelessly championed and promoted by Alexis. Where Nika felt only intermittent closeness to her national cinema – she once boasted to me how she had managed to feature a certain new Slovenian release in Ekran without betraying her low editorial opinion of it – Alexis had taken up the New Philippine Cinema, indeed Southeast Asian cinema as whole, as his cause. The recognition that Philippine cinema has gained over the past few years belongs to filmmakers such as Diaz, Raya Martin, Khavn De La Cruz and Sherad Anthony Sanchez – but it also belongs to Alexis, who was the fervent critical spokesman for that movement. I can look up from my computer right now and, like many cinephiles around the world, see all the DVD copies of key Philippine films, new or old (but all independent) that Alexis sent to me.

I had first heard from Alexis, via email, in 2004. I spotted him in the audience a year later, in Singapore, at a conference on Hou Hsiao-hsien: like Nika, he was a committed follower of film culture, wherever it took him. Alexis was harder to get to know than Nika: he had a quiet, reserved, excessively polite side. But he was also a joker, with a fine antenna for gossip, and a matter-of-fact willingness to tell you if you had got something wrong. I chided him when, in 2005, he launched his invaluable website Criticine by citing Olaf Möller’s hysterical attack on Movie Mutations (in a pre-Nika issue of Ekran!). But Alexis, in fact, made Olaf’s point made more eloquently and rightly: “It is necessary that the written word of writers native to a country’s cinema reach the world at large, for their insights – that can only be gleaned from one that lives and breathes the history, culture, and air of the work’s origin – is important. Cinema must be dialogue.”

In a public letter that has been widely distributed on the Internet since that tragic day, Alexis declared to Nika: “The first impulse of any good film critic, and to this I think you would agree, must be of love. To be moved enough to want to share their affection for a particular work or to relate their experience so that others may be curious. This is why criticism, teaching, and curating or programming, in an ideal sense, must all go hand in hand.” Both of them lived by that creed.

Both of them too, spent the short span of their adult lives fighting against the film bureaucracies of their respective countries – overbearing in the Slovenian instance, indifferent in the Philippine case. They experienced disillusionment with their myopic, local, national film cultures (as do we all), but found solace in a wider world, a fragile community of like-minds and soul-siblings discovered through Film Festivals, publishing and the Internet. Ekran, under Nika’s guidance, pursued this fine ‘line of flight’ – her final issue (February-March 2009), for instance, heralded Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August, a Portuguese film she (like me) dearly loved, on its front cover. In 2007, Nika and I brainstormed a project, somewhere between a magazine and a website: we would ask people from all over the world to write about, precisely, the indescribably beautiful bit of their local cinema which had never been imported onto the Festival or art-event circuit, the precious part that resisted such easy ‘translation’ or commodification. The closest Nika came to this dream was the blog page Ekran Untranslated; a glance at the people, stories and cultural experiences represented in these ‘postcards’ from critics and filmmakers, printed in their original languages, will give you a sense of the internationalist dream she lived. And her unforgettably poignant union with Alexis was another part of the same dream, extended into the most intimate realm of love.

Alexis, I am proud to say, picked up on a quotation I fondly recycled in Ljubljana: Godard’s remark that cinema is “the goodwill for a meeting” – to which JLG added, “it is the love of ourselves on earth”. Cinema must be dialogue, and it must be love. I learnt this, more deeply than I realised, from Nika and Alexis.

© Adrian Martin September 2009

* * *

I never met Nika or Alexis face to face but knew them through correspondence, the blogosphere, and Facebook. Their warmth and generosity, and the way in which they incarnated for us the powerful spirit of global cinephilia, were ever palpable in my exchanges with them. Their inspiration will live a long life inside of us.

Let me collect here a few of the tributes and reflections that have appeared in the last few days: Gabe Klinger at the Auteurs; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Noel Vera at Critic After Dark; Glenn Kenny at The Auteurs; Jason Sanders at Filmmaker; Raymond Phathanavirangoon at TIFF; Kim Voynar at Movie City News.

Please feel welcome to share any reminiscences or thoughts of Nika and Alexis here. Also, please feel free to post links to any tributes if you like. Perhaps we can build Nika and Alexis a small 'virtual memorial' here.

Photo: Jason Sanders at Filmmaker

TIFF 2009 Films

2009-08-20T13:45:00.002-04:00

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has posted its entire film list. Here it is, at Darren's TIFF blog, 1st Thursday. As in previous years, I expect to spend a week at the festival, driving back in between to teach my classes.

The avant-garde program, Wavelengths, looks very strong, with new films by Ben Russell, Michael Snow, Jean-Luc Godard, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jean-Marie Straub, Ernie Gehr, Lisandro Alonso, Harun Farocki, Heinz Emigholz, Jim Jennings, and others.

In addition, I'm targeting the following films:

White Material (Claire Denis), Les Herbes Folles (Alain Resnais), Face (Tsai Ming-liang), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu), Independencia (Raya Martin), Irene (Alain Cavalier), La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris (Frederick Wiseman), Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat), The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke), Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont), Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo), Lourdes (Jessica Hausner), The Time that Remains (Elia Suleiman), Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara), A Prophet (Jacques Audiard), Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda), Antichrist (Lars von Trier), Bright Star (Jane Campion), The Window (Buddhadeb Dasgupta), Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar), Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé), Mother (Bong Joon-ho), Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova), Le Père de mes Enfants (Mia Hansen-Løve), La Donation (Bernard Émond), Hotel Atlântico (Suzana Amaral), Vincere (Marco Bellocchio), L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea), Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore), The Hole (Joe Dante), Vengeance (Johnnie To), Nymph (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang), To Die Like a Man (Joao Pedro Rodrigues), and A History of Israeli Cinema (Raphael Nadjari).

Any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations of films or filmmakers on the TIFF film-list? I'd be most eager to hear them. Thank you!

A Few Links

2009-08-11T22:25:00.002-04:00

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum's "A la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions" is a 1977 piece that will appear in his upcoming book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, out from University of Chicago Press next year. Also: there are several interesting entries in his Notes section.

-- Two recent blog discoveries: Jeffrey Sconce's Ludic Despair; and Damon Smith's The Hands of Bresson.

-- Dennis Cozzalio has a lengthy interview with Joe Dante.

-- The New York Film Festival has announced its lineup; it includes new films by Resnais, Denis, Rivette, Breillat, Costa, Almodovar, von Trier, Oliveira, Haneke, etc.

-- Lots of new reading at The Auteurs, including Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on D.W. Griffith (who is "always modern"); David Cairns on Nicholas Ray's You Can't Go Home Again; and a roundtable on Alejandro Adams' Canary with Ignatiy, Michael Sicinski, Craig Keller and Dave Macdougall.

-- Dave Kehr on the 1986 film Combat Shock ("one uncompromising picture, a movie so eccentric and so relentless that no mere profit motive could possibly explain it.")

-- Doug Cummings provides illuminating excerpts from Hayao Miyazaki's Starting Point: 1979-1996, a compendium of Miyazaki’s writings and conversations.

-- Dana Polan at Moving Image Source on "The generous pedagogy of Julia Child and The French Chef."

-- I've been reading, with great pleasure, the new collection Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, edited by Joe McElhaney.

Any other web reading you'd like to recommend? Please feel free to suggest in the comments.

pic: Alain Resnais' latest, Les Herbes Folles, is playing at the New York and Toronto film festivals, and just got picked up by Sony for US distribution.

A Cinephilia Collection

2009-07-30T14:15:00.004-04:00

Zach Campbell and I have co-edited and participated in a series of letters on blogging, cinephilia and the Internet. The letters appear in a new collection out from Wallflower Press (distributed in the US by Columbia University Press) called Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, edited by Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb. Also taking part in our letter relay were bloggers Dan Sallitt, Brian Darr and Andy Horbal.

* * *

A few links:

-- Great news: David Hudson returns!

-- I've just discovered two terrific film blogs: Matthew Flanagan's Landscape Suicide; and the self-effacingly named "Log" run by two cinephiles, RW and Clint.

-- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on a recent manifesto by Jean Douchet translated for us by Craig Keller. Ignatiy writes: "[Douchet] calls for a more partisan criticism, one less interested in appearing respectable than in defending its positions, whatever they might be [...] This is both a call to arms and an example: cinephilia that isn't afraid to be polemical, youthful and "unfair.""

-- The Venice Film Festival has announced its lineup; and Darren has been tracking the Toronto film festival announcements.

-- At Nitesh Rohit's blog Winds from the East you can view, in its entirety, Shyam Benegal's 1982 documentary Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker.

-- Adrian ("The Machine") Martin: on Abbas Kiarostami and Victor Erice at Artlink; "A Reflection on Animation Studies"; a podcast at the Monash University site, "Playing Vampire Cool: The Strange Postmodern Romances of Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994) and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995)".

-- Cinematheque Ontario now has a blog.

-- Chris Fujiwara on Jerzy Skolimowski at Moving Image Source.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum has an essay on Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

-- Doug Cummings has a blog entry on Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.

-- Catherine Grant makes has two invaluable discoveries for us: a collection of V.F. Perkins' writings online, and a post about the site "The Art of the Title Sequence."

-- At his blog Caméra-Stylo, Will Scheibel calls for papers on a panel on "Popular Film Criticism in Media Culture" for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Los Angeles next spring.

-- Cause for celebration: the first book-length study of Hou Hsiao-hsien in English.

-- The latest online issue of Vertigo magazine.

-- Thank you to all who contributed to the vigorous discussion and debate in the comments thread to the last post on "building a large conversation"!

Building A Large Conversation

2009-07-13T16:25:00.003-04:00

In his book-length essay What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003), James Elkins surveys the last 50 years of the field. Contemporary art criticism, he writes, is in a state of crisis. While the field itself is larger than ever before--more writers, outlets, volume of writing produced--it has steadily receded in both importance and ambition. The vast majority of today's art criticism, which is generally written for art magazines, catalog essays, gallery publications, newspapers, etc., leans towards description and neutrality--and shies away from making strong judgments. Elkins calls for a new and alternative kind of art criticism that is both (1) deeply aware of art history and thought about art; and (2) is unafraid to evaluate, pass judgment, and be polemical. He writes:

Art criticism is best, I think, when it is openly ambitious, meaning that the critic is interested in comparing the work at hand with past work, and weighing her judgments against those made by previous writers. I like art critics who periodically try to bear the burden of history by writing in the imaginary presence of generations of artworks, art critics and art historians.

Elkins makes an important and troubling observation: the two fields of art criticism and art history hardly ever cite each other. Art historians writing in journals like Art Bulletin, October or Art History almost never refer to art critics who write in contemporary art magazines or newspapers. And similarly, art critics, while focusing on individual artworks and often rendering close, detailed descriptions of them, are either unwilling or unable to invoke the work of art history scholars both contemporary and past, even though it would undoubtedly help deepen their reflections if they did.

I see some parallels of Elkins' critique in the fields of film criticism and film scholarship. Except for a small number of invaluable critic-scholars who work to bridge the gap, the two groups similarly shy away from citing each other. Why is this so? For critics, it would require the significant effort of familiarizing themselves with scholarly literature past and present, an effort made more difficult by the presence of a specialized scholarly vocabulary. For scholars, whose jobs already require them to do vast amounts of reading, this would mean widening their field of vision to include writing in film magazines, the Internet (including blogs), and newspapers. Added to this are the demands in both professions of watching scores of films on a steady basis.

But nevertheless I think it's an important and worthwhile effort. In a roundtable at Artforum, Annette Michelson makes a penetrating comparison of two similar-but-different film writers, Umberto Eco and Pauline Kael. Both concentrate on narrative, seldom dwelling on matters of film form like camerawork or lighting. They have keen powers of observation and are witty writers, they possess an affection for a wide range of films both highbrow and lowbrow, and they have significant experience in journalistic writing targeted at general readers. But while Eco is deeply knowledgeable about intellectual history and scholarship--even being a notable contributor to the field--Kael is relatively uninterested in and even hostile to scholarly work. This, Michelson writes, inhibits Kael's

ability to account for film's impact in terms other than those of taste and distaste, [her resistance] expressed with increasing vehemence. To have continued to write into the '90s with no account taken of the advances made in our ways of thinking about spectatorship, perception, and reception meant that she ceased to renew her intellectual capital, to acknowledge and profit by the achievements of a huge collective effort. And so her writing, unrefreshed, grew thinner, coarser, stale. It is this that was ultimately responsible for Renata Adler's punishing assessment of her work, published in the New York Review of Books in August 1980.

One of the invaluable aspects of scholarly work is this "huge collective effort" that builds upon the work of others--both of centuries past and contemporary. The edifices that scholars construct have the likelihood of being tall and capacious by virtue of the largeness of this effort. There is a lesson here that film critics can learn from scholars: the practice of reading widely to become familiar with traditions of thought in film, art, philosophy, and other disciplines that can guide them and their readers towards a deeper understanding of cinema. This would mean a practice of criticism conducted in an exemplary fashion: as Elkins says, in the imaginary presence of generations of artworks, critics and scholars.

What can film scholars learn from practicing film critics? At least two things. First, critics are invaluable because they have their fingers on the pulse of cinema at any moment. They are on the front-lines, watching new films, directions and innovations break. They help determine which films will acquire critical reputations, thus boosting the films' chances of being taken up for future study. Second, journalist-critics have the talent to write engagingly and skillfully for a large audience of educated non-scholars. In addition to their customary mode of writing--with their peers in mind--scholars could learn much from critics about cultivating this alternative and useful mode of writing that can bridge the gap between academia and the general reader.

Let me close with one practical tip for critics and scholars. Critics looking to get acquainted with some of the best scholarship of the last 10 years might consult this large 2007 poll at Screening the Past. And scholars seeking pointers to the best online criticism (blogs and otherwise) tracked on a daily basis should bookmark the indispensable David Hudson, formerly of Greencine Daily and IFC Daily, soon to return at an as-yet-undisclosed site.

Any thoughts on the opportunities and challenges for critics and scholars in building this large conversation? Please feel free to share them here. Thank you!

pic: A still from Noël Burch's Noviciat (1964), which features Annette Michelson in its cast. Might someone know: is this Michelson in the photo?

Links

2009-07-03T16:30:00.004-04:00

-- The French critic Jean-André Fieschi has died. He is best-known to English-language readers through his brilliant essays, in Richard Roud's 2-volume Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, on Hitchcock, Buñuel, Murnau, Tati, Rivette, Vertov, and others.

-- There's a new issue of Cinema Scope.

-- Let me collect here links to the writings of the thought-provoking blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky: his site, Sounds, Images; at The Auteurs, including his column "What is the 21st Century?"; and at Tisch Film Review.

-- Also at Tisch Film Review: interviews with J. Hoberman; Ivone Marguiles; and A.S. Hamrah.

-- At the Monash University site: an Adrian Martin podcast titled "Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others". Via Catherine Grant, here are links to a collection of podcasts by several other scholars including Lesley Stern, Andrew Benjamin and Graeme Gilloch.

-- A link to all five of Ryland Walker Knight's posts which collect an eclectic array of quotations.

-- Dave Kehr on Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad: "For Mr. Resnais, a fan of comic books and genre fiction, the hotel in “Marienbad” belongs to a long line of Dark Old Houses, the archetypical setting for a certain kind of comic thriller that dates back at least to silent films like Roland West’s 1926 “Bat” and Paul Leni’s 1927 “Cat and the Canary” (and to the Broadway plays that inspired them)."

-- The Claude Chabrol Blogathon at Flickhead.

-- Dan Sallitt on Stephen Frears.

-- Kevin Lee interviews scholar Chris Berry on Chinese cinema.

-- Steven Shaviro has a post on Michael Jackson: "Greil Marcus, as the quintessential white hipster, can only see cultural innovation and subversion when it it is performed by white people. Marcus celebrates the ways in which “the pop explosions of Elvis, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols had assaulted or subverted social values,” but denounces Michael Jackson’s pop explosion as “a version of the official social reality, generated from Washington D.C. as ideology, and from Madison Avenue as language … a glamorization of the new American fact that if you weren’t on top, you didn’t exist.” For Marcus, black people are evidently at best primitive, unconscious creators whose inventions can only take on meaning and become subversive when white people endow them with the critical self-consciousness that Marcus seems to think black people altogether lack. And at worst, black artists and performers are, for Marcus, puppets of the Pentagon and Madison Avenue, reinforcers of the very status quo that countercultural whites were struggling so hard to overthrow."

-- The online magazine Cinefils features English-subtitled interviews with international filmmakers.

-- Ted Gioia on how the jazz world has viewed Michael Jackson over the years.

-- Joe Hughes reviews Paola Marratti's Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy.

pic: Chabrol in his jammies, courtesy Kevin Lee.

Adieu Philippine: Mise-en-scène de la jeunesse

2009-06-18T23:45:00.004-04:00

"Men are dangerous at forty: at that age they get sentimental." -- One teen to another in "Adieu Philippine".

Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto has kicked off its summer season. The highlights: French New Wave, Otto Preminger, Surrealism and the cinema, Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre Melville, and leading ladies of Italian cinema.

Playing in the New Wave series is Jacques Rozier's rare Adieu Philippine (1962). What a smart, lyrical and witty film this is! A young TV camera operator meets, befriends and tries to seduce two young women who are aspiring actresses. Upon the film's release, both Rivette and Rohmer named it a masterpiece and Truffaut found a genius "in the balance between the insignificance of the events filmed and the density of reality."

The film is also a great inventory of the 'signs' of a nouvelle vague film: slender plot with episodic unfolding; documentary-like hand-held camerawork; location shooting; a looseness of framing and composition; the 'un-authoritarian' camera often following the actors around rather than choreographing them; naturalistic dialogue; sexual candor, and so on.

But what makes this film distinctive is a through-line of theme not uncommon to New Wave films but elevated here to a masterful organizing principle: the gulf between young and old.

New Wave histories by Richard Neupert and Michel Marie tell us that France of the 1950s was deeply interested in the manners and mores of the postwar generation. The journalist Françoise Giroud coined the term "New Wave" in a series of articles she wrote in the magazine L'Express (the equivalent of Time or Newsweek). They summarized the results of a mammoth sociological survey of youth; 8 million people between the ages of 18 and 30 were surveyed. This was the generation, she wrote, that soon "will have taken France in hand, their elders taking leave, the younger ones helping them move out." The survey, by training a microscope on the lives of the young, also exhaustively set that generation apart from the older one.

It is precisely this distance--even alienness--with which youths viewed adults that is enacted ingeniously in the very mise-en-scène of Adieu Philippine. Adults in this film generally fall into two groups: (1) they are seen but not heard, only the young being privileged with speaking parts; or, (2) when they do speak, they come off as foolish, sentimental, gauche or out of touch. (An exception is a great family dinner-table scene with Maurice Garrel.)

In one scene in an auto-repair shop, four teens kick the tires and size up a used car ("The tires are as bald as Yul Brynner", "We'll never pick up any girls in this jalopy"). As their raucous repartee flies back and forth, there's a cut to an older mechanic who is looking on at them silent and google-eyed as if he plainly doesn't comprehend what language they're speaking. In another scene shot guerrilla-style at an airplane landing strip, a boy and two girls flirt and wisecrack with each other while adults (bystanders who happened upon the film's shooting, no doubt) hover and stare at the youths, as if gaping at specimens of some strange species at the zoo. In one of the film's virtuosic passages, two girl-friends are followed on a busy Paris street by a non-stop lateral tracking camera. Passing them is a stream of older people, but we hear only the girls, loud and clear, and none of the adults (the film has silenced them).

Of course, the keen awareness of one generation succeeding another is also an important aspect of the story of French New Wave cinema itself. The "young Turks" who led the New Wave revolt against "le cinéma de papa" were trying to make their voices heard loud and clear first through their criticism and then through their films. In 1958, after the L'Express survey, Pierre Billard, the editor of Cinéma, put together an issue of "Forty Under Forty," in which he identified 40 young filmmakers to watch. The New Wave was being born.

Some other interesting or off-the-beaten-path films showing this season:

-- In the surrealism program: She Done Him Wrong, Monkey Business (Marx, not Hawks), Pour Vos Beaux Yeux (Henri Storck), and Hans Richter's narrative feature Dreams That Money Can Buy (I'd never heard of this but it sounds fascinating).

-- A Preminger series that includes The 13th Letter, Margin for Error and Such Good Friends, although Skidoo is absent because the estate refused permission.

-- Chabrol's ultra-rare Les Godelureaux (1961), which I've hunted in vain for years.

-- An eclectic "leading lady" Italian series.

Any thoughts/comments on the season's films? Please feel free to share.

This just in: there's a large, brand-new issue of Jump Cut now online.

pic: Adults in the foreground, youths in the background. We see the adults' lips move but we hear no sound. Instead, the soundtrack is given over to the four young men.

Recent Web-Reads

2009-06-02T21:40:00.002-04:00

-- Catherine Grant, with characteristic generosity, has put up two enormously valuable posts of links: on cinephilia and on auteurism and film authorship.

-- There is a lot to read at Jonathan's place: his best-of list for 1998, with detailed annotations; "Le Vrai Coupable: Two Kinds of Criticism in Godard's Work," an essay that appeared previously in Screen; a piece on Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma written originally for Trafic; and a 1973 review of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Also: an essay on video art at Moving Image Source.

-- From "Collages," Adrian's current column at Filmkrant: "One of the most beautiful books I have ever read is by a visionary Italian artist (now in his 80s, and recently the director of a powerful video piece about prisons) named Gianfranco Baruchello; the book is 'Why Duchamp', and bears the subtitle 'An Essay on Aesthetic Impact'. In this wide-ranging and far-reaching discourse, Baruchello speaks of his 'art of collecting': 'Maybe one day I'll make an inventory of all the things that clutter up my mind in a way that implies that each of these things is a complement of all the others, and that what they're looking for is the secret of what all of them can mean together'. But, in the meantime, he says, he will just continue to work, putting one thing next to another [...] In May, the Spanish version of 'Cahiers du cinéma' gave a sign that old-style print magazines are truly changing to accommodate the influence of the Internet: included as part of an excellent supplement devoted to the great Portuguese director Pedro Costa is a vivid, three-page collage by Andy Rector, mixing images from films by Costa, Ford, Chaplin, Raoul Walsh and Charles Laughton. It is an argument in images, posing resonances between filmmakers who, however separated by history or nationality, nonetheless form a tradition of cinematic purity and resistance."

-- More Adrian-watch: A new essay on Will Ferrell (in English) at the Spanish magazine Miradas de Cine; an excoriating review of Richard Brody's Godard biography (reproduced with an introductory note by Andy Rector at Andy's place); "Poetics of Garrel," a 2006 piece; and a link to a podcast lecture on video art delivered in Sydney recently.

-- There is a vigorous discussion on Philippe Garrel in progress at Dave Kehr's. Also: Dave's Garrel DVD review in the NYT.

-- The indispensable David Hudson rounds up the summer issue of Cineaste for us.

-- Doug Cummings on Armand Gatti: "One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, and Jean Cayrol, but due to the fact that none of his films have been released on video in the US, he remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles."

-- Next week Dudley Andrew is giving a series of 4 lectures at York University in Toronto. His upcoming book is Where Cinema is! André Bazin’s Line of Thought.

-- At The Auteurs: the first two installments of B. Kite's video essay on Orson Welles.

-- I've just discovered an Indian online magazine called Phalanx, founded and run by M.K. Raghavendra, which focuses mostly on politics, cinema and current affairs. Recent essays include: an editorial on the liberal media response to the Mumbai attacks; Asian women writers in Britain; depiction of Bihar in Telugu cinema; and the aesthetics of cricket.

-- Bruce Jenkins on Paul Sharits at Artforum: "[Sharits's] shift to installation—what he termed “locational film pieces”—returned his work to the gallery and brought “the act of presenting and viewing a film as close as possible to the conditions of hanging and looking at painting.” What made these works manifestly ready for the white cube was in part his singular rejection of film’s representational content, its traditional reliance on mimesis and language..."

-- The New Republic has created a site where it's running a 'retrospective' of the film criticism of Stanley Kauffmann.

-- An interesting interview at Frieze with experimental artist, composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad.

Any favorite recent online reads? Please feel free to suggest them in the comments.

pic: Philippe Garrel's I Can No Longer Hear The Guitar (1993).

John Ford in "Undercurrent"

2009-05-18T16:15:00.001-04:00

Chris Fujiwara has assembled a wonderful, diverse dossier of essays on John Ford in the new issue of Undercurrent. The roster of 18 writers is first-rate--and the range of pieces a real treat.

One of my favorite 'minor' Fords is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and since it doesn't appear in the Undercurrent special section, I thought I'd say a few words about it.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon--the first thing we notice about it is the searing Technicolor!--is the middle work of the Cavalry trilogy, sandwiched between Fort Apache (1948) and Rio Grande (1950), both of which are in black-and-white. It is a comedy, a romance, an adventure film, but most of all it strikes me as a Cavalry procedural. An elaborate web of rituals--and their underlying rules--envelops this film. These rituals aren't grand but small-scale, ordinary, everyday.

For Ford, these Cavalry rules and procedures form a grid that serves two purposes: (1) To ground the film, moment by moment, in the minutiae of the work that Cavalrymen do; and (2) To provide a solid support structure within the film through which emerge its humor, romance, and pathos.

Ford uses, repeatedly and with great imagination, that lowliest and least-respected of bureaucratic activities: making a report. In a moving moment, a corporal is rescued after being seriously wounded in a Cheyenne attack. But before being attended to, and half-fainting, he insists on delivering his report. Capt. Brittles (John Wayne) listens attentively, then replies according to proper procedure without acknowledging the man's wounds: "That's a good clear report. It'll join your record. You'll come up with that extra stripe in 2 or 3 years." As written, the words are unemotional but Wayne's expression and delivery undercut their neutral, businesslike quality with sadness. Later, when the corporal is being operated upon by a surgeon, Brittles refuses to bend the rules and stop the troop for even a few minutes ("You know I can't halt even if it were my own son!"), and so the operation takes place on a wobbling, lurching wagon with the inebriated nurse (Mildred Natwick) singing a lusty perversion of the title tune ("She wore a yellow garter/wore it for her lover/in the US Cavalry").

In another report-making instance, a former Confederate brigadier-general, now a trooper for the US Army, spends the final moment before his death praising, with Cavalry formality, the sergeant (Ben Johnson) who aided him. At the close of the film, Brittles is brought out of retirement in a photo-finish--just as he is about disappear into a flaming-red John Ford sunset--and returns to the fort. A celebration dance--that Fordian axiom--is about to begin. But business comes first: Brittles must make a report. We see him exit through a door but puzzlingly, the camera stays in the ballroom, with his commanding officer (to whom he would ostensibly report) in full view. Who on earth could Brittles be making his report to instead? To his long-dead wife, it turns out, as he kneels at her grave.

In his essay on Fort Apache, Dan Sallitt proposes the fascinating idea of the Fordian "container"--a deliberate authorial setting of mood that operates independently of story, often undercutting or deflecting the deep tragedy and sadness of the film. There is nothing in Yellow Ribbon that is close to the shattering ending of Fort Apache but when we peer through the thick net of work and ritual, procedure and process in Yellow Ribbon, we find that at the heart of the film lies defeat: the complete and utter failure of "the last patrol," the mission that forms the film's central section and occupies most of its running time.

Leaving aside what are often considered to be the 'major' Fords--The Searchers, My Darling Clementine, Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, etc.--I'm curious to learn if you have any favorites among his other, possibly 'minor' works?

The Ford at Fox collection has gathered great praise but its very size (21 DVDs!) has daunted me. I'm wondering: what are (in your opinion) the high points of this set, the films you might recommend first?

Also, any ideas or comments on the Undercurrent essays? Please feel free to share.

Cavalry procedure? A lieutenant (John Agar) embraces his sweetheart (Joanne Dru) and turns around to ask his captain (John Wayne) a silent question. The captain barks: "Well, haul off and kiss her back, blast you, we haven't got all day!"

A Cinema Haunted By Writing

2009-05-03T15:15:00.003-04:00

Film criticism has been often been drawn to the metaphor of cinema as writing.

1. One of my favorite interviews with a film critic is the one conducted with Serge Daney by Bill Krohn, originally published in the zine The Thousand Eyes in 1977. In it Daney says: "...the cinema loved by the Cahiers--from the beginning--is a cinema haunted by writing. This is the key which makes it possible to understand successive tastes and choices. This is also explained by the fact that the best French filmmakers have always been--at the same time--writers (Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, Jean Epstein, etc.)"

Daney is referring here not only literally to film artists who were gifted writers but also in a broader sense to writing as an act of "personal utterance" (this is how Susan Sontag translates Roland Barthes' notion of écriture).

2. The figurative heart of auteurism was that of the author who inscribes his [sic] personal vision into a film often made in a collaborative fashion within an industrial context. Alexandre Astruc, in "The Birth of a New Avant-garde" (1948), one of the most famous essays in French film history, used the figure of the caméra-stylo, or camera-pen, to symbolize the means of expression for future film artists. Jean Douchet wrote that Astruc "dared to claim that like literature and philosophy, film could tackle any subject, that the subject was part of the writing, and the camera the pen of modern times."

But Astruc was not only a critic. According to Richard Neupert, he was the earliest model of critic-turned-filmmaker for the young Jean-Luc Godard. Such a dual vocation was not uncommon in an earlier era of French cinema (the 1920s) in the work of Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein. (Astruc himself was once dubbed the "Louis Delluc of the sound cinema.") Godard, in turn, considered criticism and filmmaking to be common, closely allied, expressive activities.

3. Robert Stam points out that the graphological trope of film-as-writing has been especially dominant in France since the fifties. The New Wave films contain a surfeit of writing imagery: "From Truffaut's Les Mistons (1958) through Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (1967) we encounter people writing: on walls (Jules et Jim), on cars (Masculin, Feminin), in dairies (Pierrot le Fou), on advertisements (Le Gai Savoir), and in notebooks (2 ou 3 choses)."

Stam shows how Truffaut's 400 Blows prefigures this obsession. In the credit sequence, the director's name is superimposed on an image of the cinémathèque. The first shot following the credits shows a student writing at a desk. Antoine writes a poem on a wall, and is punished by having to conjugate a sentence. He forges a note from his mother, and later steals a typewriter to avoid having his handwriting recognized. And so on.

4. Auteurism has traditionally been a male-dominated movement but one of the key pre-New Wave films was La Pointe Courte (1954), made by Agnès Varda after she had established her reputation as a photographer. The activity she often refers to when she describes her cinema isn't still or motion-picture photography but writing. She calls her work "cinécriture" (cine-writing):

I am so fed up with hearing: "It's a well-written film," when I know that the compliment is meant for the scenario and the dialogue. A well-written film is also well-filmed, the actors are well-chosen, so are the locations. The cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filming and editing have been felt and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth and meaning of sentences, the type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow, etc. In writing, it's called style. In the cinema, style is cinécriture.

5. In the new translation of Andre Bazin's What is Cinema? (see this previous post for an extensive discussion), Timothy Barnard has a translator's note on découpage. For Bazin, "the essence of cinema was situated in the act of writing the film visually through découpage." Similarly (Barnard writes), Astruc believed that when the silent era gave way to sound, montage

was replaced by a process of ‘picturising’ the script through mise en scène and camerawork, a form of narrative writing distinct from and prior to editing. For Astruc, sound cinema did not just adopt a style of editing different from silent montage cinema: it introduced a different way of conceiving and creating films, one which opened the door to ‘writing’ films with a caméra‐stylo.

6. Returning to where we started, to Daney in 1977:

In American cinema I think that it is easier to see, as it recedes, what interested us: always the excess of writing over ideology, and not the reverse (Huston, Delmer Daves, William Wyler, today Altman.) It's clearly a paradox: because this led us to take an interest in filmmakers who were not exactly left-wing. This excess of writing over ideology is only possible in the framework of a prosperous industry and a real consensus. This occurred in Hollywood until some time in the fifties; a little in France before the war; In Italy; in Egypt and India, no doubt; in Germany and England before the war. Outside this industrial framework (industry+craftsmanship), it's the reverse that happens: excess of ideology over writing. Look at the countries of the Third World, including China. This cinephilia is historically dated: the terrain from which it sprang is this mixture of industry and craftsmanship. It's not possible to revive it. But in the precision of the writing of Tourneur, Lang or de Mille, there is an exigency which continues with Godard, Straub, Robert Kramer, Wim Wenders, Akerman, Jean-Claude Biette, Benoit Jacquot.

A couple of questions I'm curious to pose to you: (1) Other examples (there are surely many) of critics or theorists employing the writing metaphor for cinema?; and (2) Favorite examples of films that depict the act of writing or instances of the written?

Also, any comments on the Daney passages and interview? Please feel free to share.

Good news: six more pieces are up at Rouge including Adrian's festival diary from Las Palmas. Which reminds me: his new column is online at Filmkrant. Finally: there's a new issue of Screening the Past.

The image above: Antoine Doinel in "The 400 Blows" writing what will be condemned as Balzac plagiarism. Resources for this post included: Richard Neupert's "A History of the French New Wave Cinema" (2002), Alison Smith's "Agnès Varda" (1998), and Robert Stam's "Reflexivity in Film and Literature from Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard" (1985).

Recent Web Reading

2009-04-17T18:55:00.002-04:00

Returning from Easter break, I've been catching up on some recent online cinema reading. Let me gather a few links here:

-- Chris Fujiwara interviews Japanese New Wave filmmaker Kiju Yoshida on his "anti-cinema" at Moving Image Source: "The common rule is that when you make a close-up, the focus of the shot should be at the center of the frame, so that for most people it's easy to look at, it's comfortable. Which also means that as part of the set of rules of cinema, the person at the center is often unconsciously defined as the protagonist. So I very often frame only half of the face of the actor. It's a kind of resistance, telling the audience, "Don't trust so blindly what you see on the screen. Please try to find by yourselves what is really important to you as the audience, in what you see within this frame.""

-- The new issue of Senses of Cinema includes three interviews by Darren (Claire Denis, Lisandro Alonso, Albert Serra) and this essay by Tag Gallagher on Samuel Fuller. An excerpt: "A gunfight in Forty Guns is parsed into isolated body parts, which Robert Bresson will copy in Lancelot du lac (1974), having already modelled Pickpocket (1959) on Pickup on South Street, not only for its pickpocket who works the subways using a newspaper, but in the Dostoevskian fantasies of a would-be hero compulsively clever and self-deceiving, wherein fragmenting montage alternates with long-take claustrophobia [...] Fuller’s last four films, all French productions, no longer look for solutions. They flee into cynicism and indulgence. Always his Hollywood movies had profited from avant-garde techniques, but toward telling a story. And if some of his projects began as theses, they had ended up, like Shock Corridor, centred on individual personalities, as did the abstract montage during the gunfight in Forty Guns. In the last films, in contrast, experiment is for its own sake, characters are mannequins and all is farce, pedantically reflexive."

-- On Gerald Peary's documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism: David Bordwell and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

-- At Film Studies for Free, Catherine Grant, in memory of recently deceased queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, has assembled a webliography "of links to high quality, freely accessible, scholarly writing (or recordings/videos) on the web on the topic of queer/glbt films and/or queer film theory, a number of which, unsurprisingly, employ her critical insights."

-- Adrian-watch: An essay on Aki Kaurismaki ("Poetic Realism and a Few Drinks") at a Finnish website; his new Filmkrant column ("Cinema Has Never Existed"); a new blog from Monash University on film festivals; and a tribute to Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara at Indian Auteur. Also available at the latter site is a Mani Kaul essay ("Beneath the Surface: Cinematography and Time").

-- Via Sudhir Mahadevan: Bioscope, a terrific blog on "the world of early and silent cinema."

-- Robert Koehler has been covering two film festivals (Buenos Aires, Guadalajara) at Film Journey.

-- Via Walter at Quiet Bubble: Ted Gioia has a new website and an essay on Conceptual Fiction. "Did sci-fi writers from the 1940s and 1950s anticipate the future of serious literature better than the so-called "serious writers" or, for that matter, the highbrow critics?"

-- Adrian Curry at The Auteurs on posters for Satyajit Ray films.

-- Dan North at Spectacular Attractions has an interesting links round-up.

-- New issues of film journals: Film Quarterly; Film-Philosophy; and Wide Screen (via Corey Creekmur).

-- More reads: Snippets from an interview with Serge Daney; an interesting "Top Ten" from Michael Almereyda in Artforum; and Andrew Patrick Nelson on "the recurring appearance of stereoscopes in Westerns."

Any recent good web reading--and not only cinema-related--that you'd like to recommend? Feel free to do so in the comments.

Satyajit Ray-designed poster for Devi (1960), courtesy satyajitrayworld.com.

Narrative Synthesis

2009-04-04T11:35:00.006-04:00

I blogged about Robert B. Ray's book The ABCs of Classic Hollywood a few months ago. In the recent collection New Media/New Methods, Ray has a fascinating essay called "Eight Film Studies Problems for the Twenty-First Century." The eight problems deserve their own post--actually, several posts!--but let me use one idea from the essay as a point of departure.

Ray addresses the problem of bridging the gulf between academic and non-academic readers. He cites the example of history scholar Thomas Bender, who, in the mid-80s, called for a "narrative synthesis" in his discipline--writing that would take the interpretations and findings of a number of specialized subfields (like gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc.) and synthesize them in a narrative format that was accessible and engaging to an audience-at-large that was interested in reading and learning about history.

To illustrate. According to historian James McPherson, the subject of the American Civil War has three distinct audiences: (a) professional historians--scholars working in the field--who are typically concerned with large questions like the causes and effects of war; (b) "Civil War buffs" who are interested primarily in military campaigns and battles; and (c) general readers who are interested in history but prefer the work not of professional scholars but non-academics like Shelby Foote or Ken Burns. McPherson writes:

[Ken] Burns consciously set out to provide the kind of narrative synthesis that neither the "old school" (as he termed it) nor the "new history" offered--the old school because while narrative in approach, it did not incorporate material on "women, labor, minorities, and the social transformation" accomplished by the war; the new history because it "often abandoned narrative completely.

For Ray, film studies resembles the Civil War in having at least two distinct audiences: academic scholars who only or largely read books and articles written by other scholars; and a non-academic cinema-interested audience of readers who typically don't read academics. Ray proposes that we need scholars who can devise a ""narrative synthesis" that will "propagate professional knowledge about the cinema" to a non-academic audience-at-large.

What is meant, exactly, by the term "narrative synthesis"? I would say that, in the context of film writing, it names an approach that does two things: (a) it is simultaneously "high-level" (broad in scope--drawing upon a number of specialized subfields within cinema studies) AND "low-level" (paying attention to individual films and their details); and (b) it weaves together a "story" of sorts--just like a good piece of film criticism always "tells a story"--that interests and engages the non-academic reader.

There are scores of examples of such writing in film. Let me quote from one: the opening of Edward Buscombe's BFI Classics monograph on John Ford's Stagecoach. Buscombe begins by describing John Wayne's first appearance in the film, unusual because it takes us by surprise, forsaking Ford's customary style for a second by dollying in for a close-up, the camera not even able to maintain perfect focus as it lunges forward. Buck (Andy Devine) calls out, "Hey look, it's Ringo!"

Ringo is dressed in jeans, with the trouser bottoms rolled up and worn outside his boots. He wears army-style braces, a neckerchief and a placket-front shirt, which has a panel buttoned on it. Wayne was to make this style of shirt his trademark, and Jane Gaines has suggested that it gives the wearer a kind of fortified or armoured look, reinforcing the authoritarian aura of the mature John Wayne persona. By 1938 there were two distinct styles of Western costume in the movies. One derived originally from the flamboyant outfits affected by such real-life Western self-publicists as George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody, who went in for elaborately fringed buckskin jackets, thigh-length boots and shoulder-length hair. Mingled with the influence of Mexican vaqueros, rodeo cowboys and the fantasies of showbiz, this style had been brought to a peak of extravagance in the 1920s by Tom Mix, whose sartorial flourishes were to be adopted wholesale by the singing cowboys of the later 1930s.

But there was another vital if less exuberant tradition, best exemplified in the early 1920s by William S. Hart. Though in some ways as stylised a performer as Mix, Hart claimed his films took a more realistic look at the old West. Characteristically his costume is more functional than fancy; it favours, in its use of gauntlets and heavy leather chaps, the protective rather than the ornamental. [...] Wayne, in Stagecoach and in all his subsequent Westerns, was squarely in the Hart tradition.

The passage is typical of the three Buscombe monographs for BFI, the other two being The Searchers and Unforgiven. They bring together erudition and ideas from many disciplinary realms (e.g. in the above passage: film history, the Western genre, fashion) and present them in a skillful, easy-to-read style that might appeal equally to scholars and non-scholars alike.

So much of Peter Wollen's writing--his collections like Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture, Paris Manhattan: Writings on Art--also works in this narrative-synthetic mode. His pieces tells sweeping stories, polymathically reaching into diverse realms of knowledge, sometimes rewriting history in new and unexpected ways. For example, his essay "The Last New Wave" tracks the artistic fortunes of British cinema over the course of a century. (The piece is an argument against Truffaut's infamous putdown of British cinema as "a contradiction in terms"). "Who the Hell is Howard Hawks?" tells the story of Hawks' career and his canonization, first in France, then in the US, thus painting a study in contrasts between the histories of American and French film cultures. The essay "JLG" manages, in 20 pages, to give the best overview of this filmmaker I have ever read. In "An Alphabet of Cinema," Wollen playfully condenses his cinephilic passions into 26 entries, one for each letter of the alphabet. (All the above essays can be found in Paris Hollywood.) His writing style--clear, crisp, direct--works to compress vast coverage into unified essay-length pieces that never lose their storytelling momentum.

An eminent example of narrative synthesis that appears weekly on the web is Dave Kehr's NYT column: always elegantly, engagingly written, with a broad and deep film-historical knowledge standing behind it. (Also: I enjoy Kehr's acerbic wit--one of the funniest pieces of film writing I've ever read is the personal account of his youth and his cinephilia in the collection Citizen Sarris, edited by Emanuel Levy.)

And so, I'm wondering: Do you have any favorite pieces of writing or examples of writers--not just in film but in any other field you can think of--that practice some form of "narrative synthesis," putting scholarly heft and insight to work in pieces written accessibly for a somewhat broader readership? I'd love to discover examples of writing in this vein. Thanks much!

I quickly want to point out that the previous post, on Bazin, sparked one of the best and meatiest discussions this blog has ever had the fortune of hosting. Thank you, all, for taking part and for reading--the dialogue still continues there...

André Bazin & caboose

2009-03-11T16:00:00.004-04:00

I first became aware of Montreal-based publisher caboose when they approached me last year to pen a volume in their Kino-Agora series. (Series details can be found here.)

Today, some momentous news for film culture: caboose is releasing a brand new translation, by Timothy Barnard, of André Bazin's What is Cinema?

In a recent Film Quarterly, Dudley Andrew pointed out that less than 7% of Bazin's writings are available in English translation. Spurred by this startling observation, I put up a post on Bazin's writings a few months ago that sparked a lively and informative discussion.

Bazin's Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? originally appeared in French in 4 volumes beginning in 1958, soon after his death at age 40. The 2-volume English-language What is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, came out about a decade later. It included a selection of essays from Bazin's original, and was put out by the University of California Press.

The new Barnard translation collects several key essays from Bazin's original volumes, and includes three pieces that don't appear in Gray's translation: on Wyler, Tati and Painlevé, the last of these never before translated into English. Samples from all 13 essays in the book are available to read online. The publisher promises: "This is the only corrected and annotated edition of Bazin in any language [...] Rarely does a new translation radically alter our understanding of a thinker's work. This is that book."

Gray's rendering of Bazin has remained invaluable but has also provoked mixed feelings and controversy. Richard Roud wrote a scathing critique of it in Sight and Sound in 1967. Adrian Martin remarked in the comments to the previously mentioned post: "Gray's Bazin is the rather cosmic/mystic/Catholic/realist Bazin that many (most) Anglos think of, which is why Cardullo's Bazin at Work is such a crucial corrective to it."

We are in the midst of a Bazin revival, evident from the recent twin-venue conference held in Paris and at Yale to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Further, recent writing like Daniel Morgan's well-regarded essay "Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics" (Critical Inquiry, 2006) has served to enlarge and complicate our view of this versatile theorist.

Despite the strong resurgence of interest in Bazin, why has it taken so long--over 40 years--for an alternate translation of his key work to appear in English? The answer has to do with copyright issues. In many countries--including Canada, Japan, China, New Zealand, and others--copyright is retained for 50 years after an author's death before works enter the public domain. In fact, this used to be the international norm until the U.S. and France moved to a 70-year rule. Today the U.S. stipulates this as an explicit part of bilateral trade deals, and has persuaded Australia and South Korea, and more recently, Argentina and Chile, to move from 50 to 70 years. Canada has been lobbied by the U.S. on this issue but has passed no legislation yet to alter the 50-year rule. Since Bazin died in 1958, his writings passed into the public domain last year in Canada; this has made the new translation possible. (For more on copyright: here's the Wikipedia entry on public domain.)

The new issue of Offscreen is titled "Bazin Renewed." It includes an interview with Timothy Barnard about the new translation and a piece by Donato Totaro called "What is a Good Translation? Bazin Revisited".

There is also an essay at the caboose site that makes for particularly stimulating scholarly reading: Barnard's translator note on the word "découpage." It runs to over 20 printed pages and carefully traces the uses and meanings of the word over the course of the last one hundred years. Also of interest: Barnard's foreword (not available online) details the "meticulous research into Bazin's sources which has led him to a connection between the ideas of Bazin and Bertolt Brecht and to a pseudonymous article believed to have been written by Siegfried Kracauer."

The book can be ordered online through the caboose site but for shipping only to Japan, China (including Hong Kong), New Zealand, and other countries who follow the 50-year rule. Pages is selling the book online and at their store on Queen Street in Toronto. Apparently, it doesn't matter where the order originates--Pages will ship only to Canadian addresses. The book will also be on sale at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Tokyo in May.

Your thoughts on Bazin, film-writing translations, or copyright issues? All are welcome!

cover pic: "Sharlo Takes a Bow," a woodcut of Charlie Chaplin created by the Soviet artist, book designer and illustrator Varvara Stepanova for issue #3 of the journal Kino-Fot in 1922.

Around & About

2009-03-06T16:10:00.015-05:00

First, there's a new issue of Rouge, titled "Teenage Wildlife," devoted to accounts of youth in cinema. Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant Mcdonald begin their introduction thus:

There are many ways, in cinema, to tell the story of youth. One can tell it as a reassuring ‘rite of passage’ that takes us safely (with a few thrills and tears along the way) from childhood innocence to adult maturity. One can tell it nostalgically, as an adult reminiscence of the ‘days gone by’, the world as a simpler place back then ... One can show teenagers slowly integrating themselves, becoming part of a family, a community, a nation, a world.

Or we can tell another story: the story of Teenage Wildlife. The story of teenagers living in an eternal present moment, like a savage, roaming pack of animals. Living violently, impulsively, on their wits and instincts. Without ties to family, to adults, to any kind of civilised society. Teenagers in a world apart, their own, separate universe which is incomprehensible to the concerned adults (parents, police, social workers, politicians) who look on, aghast. Teenagers who (in the immortal words of the Surrealist Robert Benayoun) exhibit all the ‘normal qualities of youth: naiveté, idealism, humour, hatred of tradition, erotomania, and a sense of injustice’.

Alluding to Marcos Uzal on Jerzy Skolimowski, they write:

Skolimowski remained fixed, according to Uzal, on ‘awkward adolescents and immature adults, on the insolence of sons and the disillusionment of fathers. What do we gain and what do we lose in leaving our youth?’ There is an intensely physical struggle betrayed by each youthful body, as Skolimowki’s beloved author Gombrowicz put it: a fight between the ‘inconsolable boy’ and the ‘made man’. At stake, at all times, is the difficult – perhaps impossible – entry of youth into the larger ‘social body’, the certified world of maturity and ‘experience’ (as Benjamin mocked it). For many constituent members of the teenage wildlife, that passage will not be achieved at all; the bubble that defines their tumultuous eternal present will be burst only in the instant of death.

The issue also features a couple of cinephile-bloggers including Zach Campbell and Jenna Ng.

* * *

Other recent web reading:

-- David Lowery, whom we have long known as a presence in the film-blogosphere, has made his first feature film. It's called St. Nick, and the trailer looks tantalizing. I wrote a post about David's short films a couple of years ago.

-- Anthony Kaufman has a piece on the demise of VHS at Moving Image Source. Some of the responses to it include: Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus; and a discussion around Peter Martin's post at Cinematical.

-- Do you google up every film you see, new or old? I do, and that's why one-stop collections of links to writings on a film are so invaluable. Here are two recent excellent examples: Michael Guillen's round-up on Chantal Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle; and Kevin Lee's links post with hefty excerpts on Frank Borzage's Moonrise.

-- Chris Fujiwara on Paul Schrader: "It feels cold to write of someone who has been directing for 30 years that his first film is his best, but I have little hesitation in declaring BLUE COLLAR (1978)...Schrader's strongest and sharpest movie to date. One of the few American commercial films to take a sustained, insightful, and informed look at the problems of workers, Blue Collar is stringent in its treatment of the dehumanization and occasional violence of an auto-assembly line, the financial pressures on the middle class, the need to escape through alcohol and cocaine."

-- Dave Kehr in the NYT on the newly released 26-film DVD set Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986: "Movies are among the most fragile of art forms, and avant-garde films are among the most fragile of movies. Usually made on delicate, narrow-gauge stock (16 millimeter, 8 millimeter and Super 8, formats made virtually obsolete by video), printed directly from the original camera materials and distributed informally in a small number of copies, many of the avant-garde films of the 20th century have become difficult to see in anything like their original state."

-- Also on this DVD set: Ed Halter at Moving Image Source. I noticed recently that Halter has put together a most useful webpage of experimental resources.

-- More at Moving Image Source: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Cinéma Cinémas, a French TV series devoted to cinephilia. Also: Jonathan on Molly Haskell's new book, Frankly My Dear: Gone With The Wind Revisited: "I’m glad that Armond White gave this book a favorable review in the New York Times, which it clearly deserves. But I wish he hadn’t muddied his kindness with lazy misinformation and lazier prose."

-- A 'Film Festival Research' bibliography gathered by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck for Universität Hamburg. Via Adrian Martin's new column at Filmkrant, which is on web film resources and film festivals.

-- There are hundreds of film essays available to read at the Criterion website.

-- At The Auteurs' Notebook, Danny Kasman, Ry Knight and Andrew Grant interview Film Comment's Gavin Smith.

-- I've been catching up on some great blogosphere reading lately, especially new posts at: Vinyl Is Heavy; Film Studies for Free; Tativille; and Serge Daney in English (new links to two Daney pieces);

-- A 1928 interview with King Vidor from the British film magazine Close Up is reproduced at Man Without A Star.

-- David Bordwell has a terrific piece on documentary:

People tend to think that documentary films are typified by two conditions. First, the events we see are unstaged, or at least unstaged by the filmmaker. If you mount a parade, the way that Coppola staged the Corpus Christi procession in The Godfather Part II, then you aren’t making a documentary. But if you go to a town that is holding such a procession and shoot it, you are making a doc—even though the parade was organized to some extent by others. Fiction films stage their events for the camera, but documentaries, we tend to think, capture spontaneous happenings.

Secondly, in a documentary the camera is seizing those events photographically. The great film theorist André Bazin saw cinema’s defining characteristic as its capacity to record the actual unfolding of events with little human intervention. All the other arts rely on human creation at a basic level: the novelist selects words, the painter chooses colors. But the photographer or filmmaker employs a machine that impassively records what is happening in front of it. “All the arts are based on the presence of man,” Bazin writes; “only photography derives an advantage from his absence.” This isn’t to say that cinema can’t be artful, only that it offers a different sort of creativity than we find in the traditional arts. The filmmaker works not with pure imaginings but obstinate chunks of actual time and space. [...]

Film theorist Noël Carroll defines documentary as the film of “purported fact.” Carl Plantinga makes a similar point in saying that documentaries take “an assertive stance.” Both these writers argue that we take it for granted that a documentary is claiming something to be true about the world. The persons and actions are to be taken as representing states of affairs that exist, or once existed. This is not something that is presumed by The Gold Rush, Magnificent Obsession, or Speed Racer. These films come to us labeled as fictional, and they do not assert that their events and agents ever existed.

pic: From David Lowery's St. Nick (2009).

Strombolian Films

2009-02-21T19:45:00.002-05:00

I'm curious to hear about your experiences with films that you weren't ready for when you first encountered them--films that required considerable effort before you could understand and love them. Nicole Brenez calls these Strombolian films; for her, Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (1949) was such a work. She writes in Movie Mutations: "These are films that resist, that one must surmount just as Ingrid Bergman scaled her volcano, and that change you forever..."

Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994) was, for me, a key Strombolian film. The first time I watched it, I remember this: I reached for a pillow and hurled it at the screen! It was at the very moment that Faye Wong put on the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" for the umpteenth time. The film seemed to be caught in an infinite loop, uninterested in moving forward. At the time I had been discovering the pleasures of character-driven cinema--like Howard Hawks and Eric Rohmer--and in comparison, Wong's film seemed to care not a whit about 'advancing' plot or character. The reigning mood was one of stasis.

A few years later, when I revisited the film, I was led to an important self-realization: that I had privileged and held as 'natural' a certain economy between form and content in a film work. According to this economy, matters of form and style--composition, cutting, rhythm, color, texture, movement, mood--had a specific function. They served something 'higher': narrative and character. Of course, this classicist criterion for judging an artwork seems embarrassingly restrictive to me today--but there was a time when I applied its yardstick to every film that came along. In fact, I suspect that such an economy between form and content is widely held as the norm by the viewing public at large today.

The content of Chungking Express might be about stasis, but its form--I realized upon second viewing--is all about movement! The film burns with stylistic bravura, most remarkably Wong's signature stretch printing of action which smears colors and shapes voluptuously across the screen. The French critic Jean-Marc Lalanne has written:

In cutting and recomposition through editing each movement of the actors, the mise-en-scène invents a kind of 'ballet mécanique' of human movements, a choreography in which each gesture becomes abstract, loses its functionality in favor of a purely musical value.

Brenez's notion of Strombolian films holds at least three lessons: (1) A viewing experience is often contingent upon where we happen to be situated--in our lives at a certain point in time--in relation to a work and its aesthetic; (2) It is important to revisit films that frustrated or disappointed us the first time around, and do so with a willingness--even eagerness--to struggle with the work while we simultaneously de-emphasize evaluative judgment for a little while; and (3) The resistance we encounter from an artwork can be put to great and productive use.

I'm wondering: What are your experiences of films that you weren't ready for when you first encountered them? Please feel free to share.

pic: Faye Wong, in pink cleaning gloves, plunges a toy United Airlines plane into Tony Leung's aquarium.