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Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
from an auteurist perspective. The index to these files of posts can be found at http://www.fredcamper.com/afilmby/ The purpose of these files is to make our posts more accessible, for downloading and reading and to search engines.
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emailing them from that Web site.
1901
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 4:52pm
Subject: Fw: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
For your information.
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dorota Ostrowska"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 5:29 AM
Subject: New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
*******************************************************************
New Cinemas:
Journal of Contemporary Film
Volume 2 (2004) edited by World Cinema Group,
University of Leeds
CALL FOR PAPERS
New Cinemas is a refereed academic journal devoted to the
study of contemporary film around the world. Recent
developments have brought about a renewal of film industries in the
Far and Middle East, Europe, Africa and America. However, there
is a marked tendency to focus exclusively upon issues of 'otherness'
and 'marginality', ignoring the specificities of these films. New
Cinemas challenges this value judgment to explore approaches that
posit the egalitarian value of cinema.
There is a strong focus on what is happening now. The focus is
on work being produced and new ways of approaching evaluation of
this work - not as if the work is done in a historical vacuum, but on
current work: We recognise filmmakers in Argentina or in Iran
always have behind them a tradition they can use or react against: we
believe the whole experience of 'avant-garde' film-making and the
explosion of styles to come out of the 1960s is relevant to - and
accounts for - the work of contemporary film-makers. This journal
breaks down barriers and places World cinema on an equal footing
with the 'mainstream' by creating a space where 'marginal' voices
can find a vehicle for expression.
The journal invites contributions from a wide and diverse
community of researchers. It seeks to generate and promote
research from both experienced researchers and to encourage those
new to this field. The aim is to provide a forum for debate arising
from findings as well as theory and methodologies. A range of
research approaches and methods is encouraged. The research field
of New Cinemas will include first the specificities of current work in
the New Cinemas, across the broadest possible geographic range,
furthering understanding of the specific through the articulation of an
egalitarian view of all Cinemas and second the specificities of the
New Cinemas, including evaluations through the histories, societies,
politics, cultures and other works that may bring influence and
definition.
Submissionsshould be in the following:
. Full Articles (5000-6000 words) should include original work of
a research or developmental nature and/or proposed new methods
or ideas which are clearly and thoroughly presented and argued.
. Notes (2000-5000 words) should include reports of research in
progress, or reflections on the research process or research
evaluations.
. Reports (1000-2500 words) include perspectives on conferences,
seminars and events pertaining to the subject matter of the
journal.
. Reviews (500-1500 words) include any published work (print or
electronic) relevant to a further understanding of the subject
matter
of the journal.
We are seeking suitable papers for consideration by the
editorial group. In the first instance, manuscripts should be submitted
in two printed hard copies, double-spaced. All style conventions
and further details of the journal can be found at:
<http://www.intellectbooks.com/journals/>
(See 'Information and Submissions' and 'Notes for Authors')
Please send manuscripts to: New Cinemas, C/o School of Modern
Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT,
U.K.
Forthcoming deadlines for submission:
Volume 2:1 - 1 November 2003
Volume 2:2 - 1 February 2004
Volume 2:3 - 1 May 2004
For further information and article submission, please contact:
Song Hwee Lim (General Editor). Email: s.h.lim@l..., or
Claire Taylor (Volume 2 Number 1 Co-Editor). Email:
c.l.taylor@l...
Dorota Ostrowska, DPhil
Research Fellow in European Film Production
Louis Le Prince Centre for Cinema, Photography and Television
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
--
Dorota Ostrowska
ostrowska@f...
--
http://www.fastmail.fm - Accessible with your email software
or over the web
1902
From:
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 5:07pm
Subject: Re: Fashion, Beauty and Film
No, sorry you missed my point. I was writing about the Fascist imagery in Fashion photography. Everything from Herb Ritts to maybe even Calvin Klein ads - Cecil Beaton's photography are not fascist at least not to my eyes... in fact he's one of my favorite photographers. But besides that point, I was commenting on fascist imagery in fashion photography - and therefore I feel Riefensthal was perhaps the first artist that certain fashion photographers picked up on.
tosh
-----Original Message-----
From: MG4273@a...
Sent: Sep 11, 2003 9:40 AM
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [a_film_by] Fashion, Beauty and Film
With all due respect to other writers, I do not belive that Leni Riefenstahl
had anything to do with the rise of fashion photography, fashion in film, or
the worship of beautiful people by the camera.
Fashion images in still photography have a long history in magazines. Many
great photographers have specialized in fashion photos, such as Cecil Beaton.
This was long before the 1930's and Riefenstahl (an evil director whose hideous
Nazi propoganda films have rightly earned her a place of infamy and loathing).
Fashion shows regularly appeared in silent newsreels in the 1920's, and as
episodes in silent films, such as the society ladies in the latest fashions
Lillian Gish encounters at the party in Griffith's "Way Down East" (1920). Some
fashion shows in movies are delightful, including those which also appeared in
the sound era. One thinks of the fashion show that ends "Roberta" (1935). Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rodgers dance to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", as the film
soars off into emotional ecstasy!
During the 1920's, famous fashion designers were lured to Hollywood, to dress
the stars. One thinks of Clare West's spectacular costumes for the ladies in
Cecil B. De Mille films. Who can ever forget movie vamp Bebe Daniels' red
"queen of the spiders" outfit West created for her in "The Affairs of Anatol"
(1921) (you can see it in two-color Technicolor in the movie). Greatest of all was
Travis Banton, who arrived in Hollywood in 1924 after a career in New York.
His feathers dress for Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express" (1932) is one of
the screen's most beautiful images. Marlene wore countless Banton outfirs in
her films.
Women were not the only ones who duded up for the camera. I just saw King
Vidor's "Love Never Dies" (1921), a rare silent, and posted earlier about how its
star Lloyd Hughes made 95 films but is largely forgotten today. Hughes was
the clean cut Arrow Collar Man type that was so popular in the 1920's. Writers
on the IMDB are quite startled by him, calling him "a gorgeous hunk" and "an
amazingly beautiful man". Vidor has him change well-tailored suits roughly every
two minutes. "Love Never Dies" is as much a fashion show as it is a movie.
People all over the world went to movies to see the latest styles. Even
before that, they went to the theater to see fashions. Maria Falconetti, the great
star of "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), helped set fashion in France.
People went to her stage shows on opening night to see what she was wearing.
Mike Grost
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1903
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 5:19pm
Subject: Swamped
It'll take me a year to catch up with all the great recent posts.
Mike, the real problem with mystery criticism is spoilers. I am
struggling with this as I gear up to write my serial killers in the
cinema book next year, because a lot of the roots of the genre
are in novels, and both films and novels often have surprise
endings.
There is much that hasn't been made available yet in recent
French criticism that speaks to questions like
abstract/representational and the good old auteur theory.
Biette's "What is a filmmaker?" is absolutely required reading
after our recent debates; I'll try to summarize as much as I can in
my eulogy for him for Senses of cinema. Jacques Ranciere's
new book La fable contrariee is the most important new book of
film criticism and theory since Deleuze. I'll try to do a summary of
the main thesis at least when I have a second. - it brilliantly
speaks to the questions of narration, represntation, etc.
Right now, I haven't even gotten my post on Cinecom done!
Ishould never have rented the "24" DVDs.
Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her work at one
point as part of its program? Fred?
1904
From:
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 1:27pm
Subject: Re:Writers and Film
My URL is listed in the Links section of a_film_by, along with other
contributors.
If people have web sites, please list them! It is really interesting to visit
the web sites of a_film_by members - they tend to be full of good stuff.
My film web site is:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/film.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/film.htm
The Lang article is at:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/lang.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/lang.htm
True Confessions time:
Reading over the Lang article, it certainly has more to say about some
writers than others. There is much on Nunnally Johnson, but nothing on Sidney Boehm
or Vera Caspary. This is due to my ignorance. Some writers I have insight on,
others are still mysterious to me. This can easily give the impression that I
think these writers are unimportant. Not so! Once again, my ignorance is
tripping me up. Cinema and literature are vast, understanding them, very difficult.
Please give me a little indulgence. I will try harder in the future, and
improve coverage!
On Cinematograhers and editors, following up the interesting post of Henrik
Sylow.
There is not a word about cinematographers in the Lang article. This despite
the fact (for example) that Stanley Cortez' personal style is instantly
recognizable in "Secret Beyond the Door", just as it is in "The Magnificent
Ambersons". This is clearly a major flaw in the piece. Once again, I'll try better in
the future.
About editors: I know nothing about film editing. They are "mysterious
persons of talent" who I respect, but who I understand not at all. This is plainly
horrible. My apologies once again!
Mike Grost
1905
From: iangjohnston
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 6:04pm
Subject: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
>
> That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> PROBLEMATIC!
>
> "his best-known novels
> > were published
> > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from TRIUMPH
> > OF THE WILL."
>
> So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
There's surely a major difference between, on the one hand,
Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part of the Nazi
propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun, who, decades
after producing his major work, emerged as a pro-Fascist (although
not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is the reason for
the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease she generates:
unlike other collaborationist artists of the time, Nazi ideology is
central to her work, and her work is a product of that ideology. On
the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may dislike the
occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not define the work.
Ian Johnston
1906
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 6:15pm
Subject: Editors, cameramen
Mike, don't apologize - you're great! Just one note: Stanley Cortez
is the credited cinematographer on Ambersons, but he was
slow, and I was told by Dick Wilson that Welles used Harry
Stradling - pardon my Alzheimer's, I think that's the name - to
speed things up when he had to get to Rio to shoot the Carnival,
and then took Stradling with him to shoot It's All True - otherwise,
they'd still be in Rio.
There are a lot of mysteries in the Ambersons production reports
which Carringer doesn't address in his book. One is that while
Welles was shooting with his fast guy, he had Cortez working
with Dolores Costello on the library set all by himself! I think RC
also missed the fact that they shot the original ending on
Christmas eve when the studio was theoretically closed - just
snuck on the lot and shot it.
Certainly Cortez - and Welles - established the style of
Ambersons before the other guy was brought in. One of the
astonishing things about really good camermen is that they are
chameleons who can shoot it any way you want, including
imitating another cameraman's style.
As for editors, they are geniuses in their own right if they're good
- one of my best friends is Ed Marx, who edited It's All True after
Monte Hellman left. I sat for days on end watching him solve
problems and just write with the Avid. Basically, he might need
me to tell him where something went, or create a sequence, but
once I did that, he would do it and make it even better than I had
imagined with a flick of the wrist, or pigheadedly do it some other
way than I had said, which I had to admit was right (usually)
when I saw it.
Ed discovered, and articulated, in the Welles footage the
structural motif of "convergence" that Welles developed in
shooting the Decision to Go to Rio sequence, and used as well
in Finding the Body, Arriving in Rio (already shot before the bulk
of the film was shot in Fortaleza) and others. The great canard
about It's All True was that OW shot stuff that didn't cut together,
but all it took was a brilliant modern-day editor sitting down and
conversing with the footage to give the lie to that - what OW shot
not only cuts together, but cuts together beautifully.
I have a good head for that part of filmmaking, but I could no
more do what Ed does than I could fly. I supect that many real
filmmakers were like that, although OW was an exception; he
could light and cut once he got the hang of it. He could do just
about everything.
1907
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 6:21pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
--- iangjohnston wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
>
> wrote:
> > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> >
> > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> > PROBLEMATIC!
> >
> > "his best-known novels
> > > were published
> > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> TRIUMPH
> > > OF THE WILL."
> >
> > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
>
> There's surely a major difference between, on the
> one hand,
> Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part
> of the Nazi
> propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun,
> who, decades
> after producing his major work, emerged as a
> pro-Fascist (although
> not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is
> the reason for
> the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease
> she generates:
> unlike other collaborationist artists of the time,
> Nazi ideology is
> central to her work, and her work is a product of
> that ideology. On
> the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may
> dislike the
> occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not
> define the work.
>
> Ian Johnston
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
1908
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 7:44pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in Nazi imagery?
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
> Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
>
> He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
>
> --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
> >
> > wrote:
> > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > >
> > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > >
> > > "his best-known novels
> > > > were published
> > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > TRIUMPH
> > > > OF THE WILL."
> > >
> > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> >
> > There's surely a major difference between, on the
> > one hand,
> > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part
> > of the Nazi
> > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun,
> > who, decades
> > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > pro-Fascist (although
> > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is
> > the reason for
> > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease
> > she generates:
> > unlike other collaborationist artists of the time,
> > Nazi ideology is
> > central to her work, and her work is a product of
> > that ideology. On
> > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may
> > dislike the
> > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not
> > define the work.
> >
> > Ian Johnston
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
1909
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 7:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Semiotics is not a belief system.
and
href="http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/bride/g001/b_kennethanger.shtml"
target="_blank">Kenneth Anger
is quite a character.
--- George Robinson wrote:
> How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in
> Nazi imagery?
>
> Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
>
> --Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Ehrenstein"
> To:
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
> Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead
> at 101
>
>
> > Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
> >
> > He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> > reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
> >
> > --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David
> Ehrenstein
> > >
> > > wrote:
> > > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > > >
> > > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi,
> just
> > > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > > >
> > > > "his best-known novels
> > > > > were published
> > > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > > TRIUMPH
> > > > > OF THE WILL."
> > > >
> > > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> > >
> > > There's surely a major difference between, on
> the
> > > one hand,
> > > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as
> part
> > > of the Nazi
> > > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand,
> Hamsun,
> > > who, decades
> > > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > > pro-Fascist (although
> > > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This
> is
> > > the reason for
> > > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the
> unease
> > > she generates:
> > > unlike other collaborationist artists of the
> time,
> > > Nazi ideology is
> > > central to her work, and her work is a product
> of
> > > that ideology. On
> > > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we
> may
> > > dislike the
> > > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does
> not
> > > define the work.
> > >
> > > Ian Johnston
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> design software
> > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> > a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> >
> >
> >
> > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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1910
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:23pm
Subject: Re: Visual style
Mike Grost wrote
Fred Camper has
emphasized
again and again in his writings the greatness and artistic importance of visual
style. Visual style is still deeply neglected in much critical writing on
film. We need to do much more in this direction!
Bravo Mike. This is an extremely important point. Filmmaking is visual storytelling. The narrative and characters are expressed by the use of camera, sound, design, editing and all of the cinematic crafts available. Since the late 1980s I have interviewed hundreds of cinematographers, editors, sound craftspeople, and production designers for six books, American Cinematographer and CinemaEditor. Visual style is a very complex issue vital to understanding the medium. The visual style of a movie comes from the collaboration between the director and these crafts people. Investigation proves that some of the stylistic elements historically attributed to directors come from the collaboration with the specific crafts people they have worked with.
There are so many examples but I'll present one. Some time back Peter selected several films photographed by Gordon Willis by different directors to make the point that it was the director who should be attributed with the style. For my interview with Willis I screened every film and took notes. This question that leads off the interview was the sum of my findings of Willis' approach in every film he shoots regardless of director.
Q: Over the course of your long career which covers many different directors and film genres, several visaul characteristics become apparent. You often capture entire scenes in a single shot. Many times your camera shoots directly into a bright light source in the background and the characters in the foreground are dramatically modeled in shadow. You are known to work with extremely low light levels, and frequently position your camera directly in front of your subject as opposed to employing angles. Whey do you apply this philosophy of cinematography so consistently to your work?
Willis: It essentially comes out of the way one sees and things. The trick is to take a sophisticated idea and reduce it to the simplest possible terms so it's accessible, not only visually but philosophically, which I think is the most beautiful. But what happens is people usually take a simple idea, blow it up to a very sophisticated form, and get it all bent out of shape because they feel compelled to do something. Something within the frame has to hold an audience glued to the screen. If that's not happening, you can turn everything upside down, sideways - it's not going to work. So I just approach films that way and most of the directors I've worked for feel the same way.
Vinny
---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1911
From:
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:56pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Kenneth Anger is not a nazi. In fact he's a great filmmaker!
-----Original Message-----
From: George Robinson
Sent: Sep 11, 2003 12:44 PM
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in Nazi imagery?
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
> Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
>
> He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
>
> --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
> >
> > wrote:
> > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > >
> > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi, just
> > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > >
> > > "his best-known novels
> > > > were published
> > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > TRIUMPH
> > > > OF THE WILL."
> > >
> > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> >
> > There's surely a major difference between, on the
> > one hand,
> > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as part
> > of the Nazi
> > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand, Hamsun,
> > who, decades
> > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > pro-Fascist (although
> > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This is
> > the reason for
> > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the unease
> > she generates:
> > unlike other collaborationist artists of the time,
> > Nazi ideology is
> > central to her work, and her work is a product of
> > that ideology. On
> > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we may
> > dislike the
> > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does not
> > define the work.
> >
> > Ian Johnston
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
1912
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:35pm
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Nice suit, though.
g
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
> Semiotics is not a belief system.
>
> and
> href="http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/bride/g001/b_kennethanger.shtml"
> target="_blank">Kenneth Anger
> is quite a character.
> --- George Robinson wrote:
> > How about Kenneth Anger, who seems to delight in
> > Nazi imagery?
> >
> > Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
> >
> > --Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "David Ehrenstein"
> > To:
> > Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 2:21 PM
> > Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead
> > at 101
> >
> >
> > > Whoops! Suddenly rememebered Ezra Pound.
> > >
> > > He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
> > > reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
> > >
> > > --- iangjohnston wrote:
> > > > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David
> > Ehrenstein
> > > >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > The "problematic side" of Knut Hamsen ? HAH!
> > > > >
> > > > > That's a good one. He wasn't really a Nazi,
> > just
> > > > > PROBLEMATIC!
> > > > >
> > > > > "his best-known novels
> > > > > > were published
> > > > > > pre-1900 & occupy a different universe from
> > > > TRIUMPH
> > > > > > OF THE WILL."
> > > > >
> > > > > So it's all a matter of timing, eh? Good one!
> > > >
> > > > There's surely a major difference between, on
> > the
> > > > one hand,
> > > > Riefenstahl, whose major work was produced as
> > part
> > > > of the Nazi
> > > > propaganda machine; and, on the other hand,
> > Hamsun,
> > > > who, decades
> > > > after producing his major work, emerged as a
> > > > pro-Fascist (although
> > > > not a member of the Norwegian Nazi party). This
> > is
> > > > the reason for
> > > > the "special case" Riefenstahl offers and the
> > unease
> > > > she generates:
> > > > unlike other collaborationist artists of the
> > time,
> > > > Nazi ideology is
> > > > central to her work, and her work is a product
> > of
> > > > that ideology. On
> > > > the other hand, with someone like T.S. Eliot, we
> > may
> > > > dislike the
> > > > occasional anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism does
> > not
> > > > define the work.
> > > >
> > > > Ian Johnston
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > __________________________________
> > > Do you Yahoo!?
> > > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> > design software
> > > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
> > >
> > >
> > > To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> > > a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> > http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
> http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
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>
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>
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>
>
>
>
1913
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:14pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
> Re critical innovations, my rule no. 1 is that artists are smarter
> than critics. If Hitchcock and Rossellini were up to something new
in
> the '50s -- which I guess we agree they were
Do people agree? If people say there's nothing fundementally new in
criticism, it seems to imply there's nothing fundamentally new in art
(it's all been done before (and better)).
> -- then finding words
> for their activities inevitably called for new techniques of
> description. But good as Rohmer's criticism is (what I've read of
it
> in translation) it's of infinitely less value than his films.
>
> JTW
That reminds: the attitude of the critic to the director (respect or
condescension, etc.) is discussed in this passage by Raymond Durgat.
It's an interesting account of the history of film criticism in
England, which helps explains why the early auteur approach feels
different from most other critics, and why these critics seemed to be
offering something new. I can anticipate the response, however:
these are not substantive differences, only matters of taste or
sensitivity.
Also, I noticed that some of Durgnat's criticisms of Bazin and the
"Hitchcocko- Hawksiens" are similar to the criticisms of auteurism
that have been offered on this group.
----
Auteurs and Dream Factories
Questions of style bring us to the so-called auteur theory and the
debates about it that sprawl through French, British and American film
magazines. Our concern is not to discuss these controversies in all
their aspects, but to concentrate on those which concern the issue of
style and personal vision.
At the same time, it may be helpful to enlarge the field of
reference a little, so as to see how, behind the specific
disagreements, many assumptions have been operating which have
confused what only seems a `purely' aesthetic disagreement.
The auteur theory is the assumption that most films can be
interpreted in terms of their director's artistic personality just as
intensively as a novel can be interpreted in terms of its authors'. It
is obviously true of, for example, Dreyer and Bresson, so that much
discussion has cente`red on the question of how far, if am all, such
an approach is relevant or adequate to Hollywood directors.
We may perhaps usefully contrast limited and extended applications
of auteur theory. A limited theory was central to the tenets of whay
may may be called the '30's school' of British criticism, running from
Paul Rotha and John Grierson through to Richard Winningmon, Roger
Manvell and the Penguin Film Review (1946-49). Their auteurs were such
artists as Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Flaherty, Disney, Capra,
Carne, Welles, Sturges, Huston, Lean and so on. But side by side with
this appreciation of the artist, these critics generally had a special
interest in a film's reflection of social reality, and a special
antipathy to Hollywood `glamour' (which was tolerated, or not, but
generally felt to be antithetical to seriousness, with the occasional
exception, as for Garbo). Thus the documentary movement was felt to
beextremely meritorious, because it showed docks and post offices
and all the exterior paraphernalia of `social realism', whereas
Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich were felt to be more or less
meretricious (distinction between these and the Garbos was assumed
rather than explained). The critics were very sympathetic to the
auteur struggling to be individualistic and honest within of the
Hollywood system (which indeed attained a peak of rigidity in the
early 40's). Their lively awareness of the negative Hollywood system
constituted a powerful check toauteur theory. Another check came from
their advocacy of the documentary movement and its themes and
qualities. It was assumed that a director might make one or two good
films, or come up with a brilliant fluke then yield to pressures, or
stray after false gods, and be lost to serious filmmaking. Even the
films of obvious auteurs would be related to general aesthetic
directives or social issues with little exegesis and less close
linking with their creators' artistic personalities. All this
constituted a limited form of auteur theory.
A new spirit appeared when a group of Oxford undergraduates. notably
Gavin Lambert, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, founded their
magazine Sequence (1948-52) which, without reacting against the older
critics, moved a little way towards a less earnest tone, and to more
probing exegeses, after the model of the undergraduate English essay.
Lindsay Anderson's enthusiasm for Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(1949) and Gavin for Jean Cocteau signalled an increase in interest in
what Sequence called `the poetic vision', as against the documentary
and realist virtues, which were in no way decried. Nonetheless Richard
Winnington, who had initially encouraged these young critics,
repudiated them just before his death, for having regressed to a
precious aestheticism.
Gavin Lambert, aided by the Sequence team, had by then become an
editor of Sight and Sound and of its sister journal, The Monthly Film
Bulletin, which had fallen into a dismal academicism. Lambert and Ken
Tynan, who contributed excellent appreciations of gangster films and
Tom and Jerry cartoons, looked like continuation of appreciative
criticism that had been so positive a factor of Sequence. But Lambert
and Tynan left, and the magazine began a period of slow stagnation,
all the more marked by contrast to the convulsive transformations of
French criticism. It maintained a sufficiently authoritative tone to
be accepted both here and abroad as `the' organ of English
intellectual opinion, which is why we pay attention to it here.
.The range of auteurs was scarcely widened from that which they had
inherited from the '30's school'. Indeed, by the late 50's, John
Grierson reproached the magazine for having neglected the discovery of
new talent (it promptly discovered Richard Quine, and then left
Hollywod at that for the next few years).
Condescension
While the old established auteurs were treated with consistent
respect, and an uncritical adulation for Ford prefigured the excesses
of extended auteur theory, there was a group of directors who were
held to have had their time as auteurs, but to have lapsed into the
Hollywood ruck. These included Fritz Lang, King Vidor and Alfred
Hitchcok (auteurs for some of their pre-war films), Frank Capra (for
his `socially conscious comedies of the 30's), Minnelli (for his
flirtatation with populism and for his musicals). Red River (1948) was
the last Hawks film to have an enthusiastic review. Nicholas Ray,
Robert Wise, Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey earned short-lived
reputations for early films (They, Live by Night, The Set- Up, The
Naked City and The Dividing Line)
I v.r) which were in accepted traditions, but were dismissed when they
grouped for new idioms and attitudes. Veterans like Raould Walsh and
Allan Dwari were as unnoticed as a relative newcomer like Otto
Preminger, and none of the new directors to emerge in the 1950's
provoked enthusiasm comparable to the old auteurs. Thus Richard
Brooks, Sam Fuller, Elia Kazan, Frank Tashlin and Budd Boetticher
were scarcely distinguished from the Hollywood `ruck.'
Interest in `social realism' itself underwent a change. In
theory, at
least, a special importance was attached to `social consciousness'
whether documentary or neo-realistic in type, or inclining more to the
`poetic vision,' like Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). A
tense
cynicism was accepted, but only within certain limits of tone and
topic. Thus Preston Sturges' edgy comedies were securely within the
pale, whereas Billy Wilder's aroused a faint distaste. The
`Raymond
Chandler' mood was welcomed for its lyrical astringency, but there
seemed to be an increasing deprecation or resentment of those films
which brought this astringent, questioning mood into relation to
social issues, or with the American social climate as a whole, notably
Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953). The idyllic, `Ford' Western was
still enjoyed, but not the new bitter tone of Sam Fuller's Run of the
Arrow (1957) or Anthony Mann's Man of the West (1958). Now Richard
Winnington's denunciation, which at the time had seemed excessive,
began to justify itself as a shrewd insight. Films such as Richard
Brooks' The Blackboard Jungle (1955) or Nicholas Ray's Rebel
Without a
Cause (1955) were damned with faint praise. Lindsay Anderson denounced
Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront as
"implicity, if unconsciously, Fascist ... hopeless, savagely
ironic…
fundamentally contemptuous ... without either grace, joy or
love,' but
his vehemence was, in a way, more worthy a response than the
supercilious shrug which greeted many equally `concerned' American
films. Unusually gracious was P.H.'s description of Nunally
Johnson's
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955) as `uneasily fascinating.'
But whether such films were condemned, tolerated, or adduced as
evidence of moral decay, their auteurs were credited with little
ability to think about, or make any interesting comment on, either the
topics in particular, or human nature in general. They were
spiritually depersonalized, they were merely `Hollywood', and the word
`Hollywood' was used with a quiet, but firm, dismissiveness.
Hollywood
had slickness, yes, but intelligence, never. The only exegeses of such
films was destructive; Penelope Houston attempted to prove Stanley
Kramer's On the Beach (1959) made fallout glamorous.
Gradually this derisive approach extended even to obvious auteurs.
The first Bergman film to be shown here, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) was
denounced as a neurotic throwback to the tricks of Germanic
expressionism. Even after Bergman's increasing celebrity had modified
this attitude, Peter John Dyer saw in The Virgin Spring only
`consulting-room horrors ... exhibitionism ... at its most
pathological'. The same article dismissed Visconti too; his Rocco and
his Brothers (1960) was `the boldest example of fraudu1ent conversin
since Ossessione'. It displayed `self-indulgence' (a trait which this
school of criticism was quick to notice, perhaps because it bears so
close a resemblance to self-expression), and Eric Rhode, writing about
Visconti's La Terra Trema, concurred in this hypochondriac approach to
the auteur: `There is something wrong somewhere (context implies: with
Visconti's emotional health) `when a nobleman makes a film entirely
about Sicilian fishermen' (presunably we should each keep to our own
class?). To the first Bunuel film to reach this country for several
years, La Mort En Ce Jardin (1956), Dyer conceded a 'a workable
script' and some interesting ingredients, but concluded 'What is
missing is the barest competence in direction.'
Whatever one's opinion of these films may be (mine is that only the
last three are anywhere near `materspieces') it was difficult
not to
be startled by the contrast between the between the brutal, summary
tone adopted by the English magazine, and the thoughtful, complex
exegeses characteristic of the wide variety of continental approaches.
The Sight and Sound team seemed unreflexively to identify the most
concerned and vital directors with an `unhealthy' American
climate
while castigating distinguished European artists for an equally
unhealthy individualism. In England only `Free Criticism'
(intimately
connected with the magazine itself) earned more than a token
appreciation.
What seemed an attitude of complacent contempt set the tone for
bitterness with which Sight and Sound was attacked by the younger
English critics, notably the `new wave' of undergraduates who were
associated first with the Liberal magazine Oxford Opinion and later
with Movie, and who were generally felt to be English proponents of
auteur approach. (Note: Not at all as rigid as that of Cahiers in
theory, though most of their writing centred round auteurs.)
The main dispute was not whether a film had to be by an auteur in
order to merit critical opinion, but, which directors were the
auteurs. The younger critics accepted most of the orthodox
`elect,'
and the dispute centred largely on the status of directors whom Sight
and Sound had consigned to the Hollywood `ruck'. The Movie critics
accorded particularly high places in their canon to the post-war films
of Hitchcock, Hawks, Preminger and Ray. In America, Andrew Sarris, the
most thorough Anglo-Saxon exponent of auteur theory, went on to
postulate as auteurs some fifty Hollywood directors, thus, if not
actually denying, at least sharply diminishing, the significance
traditional criticisms of the Hollywood system. In this respect Movie
and Sarris concurred with the `second generation' (ca 1954-58) of
critics of Cahiers du Cinema. These critics, dubbed the
'Hitchcocko-Hawksiens', included such Nouvelle Vague directors-to-be
as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques
Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. Thus, by the time the controversy came to
England, they were possessed of immense prestige, for their stylistic
and thematic innovations as for their international success.
The supposed indebtedness of the younger British critics to Cahiers du
Cinema gave rise to many a merry jest, though I doubt whether Cahiers
was more to them than a signpost to some directors, and, otherwise, a
flag to rally round. There was certainly little emulation of its
approach or thought. Movie offered, instead of Cahiers'
characteristically `philosophic' approach to style (of which more
later), something between 'exegesis' and `functional analysis'.
Its
critics often restricted themselves to clarifying the relations of
stylistic details to the whole, and they generally refrained from
judging the quality of the view of life in the films of their
favourites. Ian Cameron wrote, coat-trailingly, 'To judge a film on
anything other than its style is to set up the critics' own views on
matters outside the cinema against those of its maker. This is gross
impertinence. This, surely excessive, limitation on the scope of
criticism become more understandable when one bears in mind the
cavalier dismissal which had become the rule in Sight and Sound. The
younger critics, while capable of summary writing-off, wrote at length
only about the films they had enjoyed.
There can be little doubt that this critical line, however
controvsersial in detail, had the excellent result of extending
critical interest and respect to the films of many interesting
directors, who for decades had been relegated to the outer darkness.
For as we have seen Sight and Sound had become rather more rigorous in
its disdain of Hollywood than the 30's school had been. And incapable
of extended appreciative exegesis, restricting itself to, not
interpreting, but 'evaluating', a film in a rather piecemeal way (the
acting was 'sensitive', the direction was 'imaginative', the film a
'poetic vision' and so on). Indeed Movie and Film both showed that
many criticisms were virtually paraphrases of criticisms by *other*
members of the team of *other* films-identical phrases recurred, no
'specific' points were made. The equivalent French magazines had never
adopted such 'negativity'. (Note: Not, at least, on aesthetic
grounds. L'Ecran Francais, while dominated by French Stalinists, had
embarked on a systematic denigration of Hollywood films, but the
movies there were political, rather than 'supercilious'. The Sight and
Sound attitude was of course helped by a confluence of two attitudes:
a general sympathy for the left, and the cultured English disdain for
vulgar Americana.) From 1928 to 1931, and again from 1945 to 1950, La
Revue du Cinema, under the editorship of Jean-George Auriol, was
devoting major reviews to such films as Dassin's Brute Force (1947)
Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) and William Dieterle's Love Letter
(1945). (Note: During its earlier period, it had an English
equivalent in Close-Up, which however, was much less interested in
American films.) There was nothing specifically new, youthful or
'rebellious' about Cahiers' responsiveness towards American
films.
Indeed, the majority of French magazines were also exploring Hollywood
extensively. Positif (founded 1952), with its Marxist and Surrealist
tendencies, soon asserted its predilection for, notably, Robert Wise,
Richard Brooks, John Huston and Frank Tashlin. And Henri Agel, doyen
of the Roman Catholic school of film criticism, had also been paying
serious attention to such refreshingly unexpected films as Hawks'
Monkey Business and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun.
Indeed, it is possible to regard the Cahiers version of the extended
auteur theory as a `dogmatized' degradation of this general
tradition.
To understand this one must refer briefly to the figure of Cahiers'
`senior wrangler' Bazin.
Bazin was a left-wing Catholic, completely unpuritanical,
broad-minded and generous in his attitudes to the cinema. With his
passionate responsiveness to the cinema as an authentic 'humanism', as
an essentially `impure' art, went a sensitivity to the cinema
as a
culture whose nuances and sensitivities could be as non-literary, as
specifically cinematic, as those of music were specifically musical.
He had two particular interests which were to be over-developed by
younger writers. There was his concern with the philosophical
implications of stylistic nuance, implications which he expressed in
terms bordering on the metaphysical. This was partly a natural result
of his Catholicsm, partly because he often wrote as if style expressed
the auteur's attitude to the character's experiences (whereas I
would
argue that it more often expresses nuances in these experiences)
Schematically rather than accurately, one may say that Bazin the
director, and the director with a very kindly God blowing a kind of
spiritual life into his subject-matter, much as God breathes life into
Adam. A very kindly God, but also a rather vague one. For Bazin, in
his very kindness, often dissolved the specific personal or social
issues of a film into a spiritual generalization, rather after this
pattern : 'Of course, Bicycle Thieves is, 'about' this workman in this
society. But this predicament is only an image for something deeper:
the universal human predicament…'
The, not so much flaws, as limitations, of such an approach must be
evident. Soon, no film is felt to be 'about' its subject-matter. Its
specificity, concreteness, and consequently its richness of detail,
dissolve into a sort of
spiritual soup, which itself makes nonsense of all the differences
between one culture and another, one person and another, one film and
another. Without some sort of specificity through which any
'universality' can be attained, as a sort of none-too-important
'bonus', 'art' sinks back into something like
religious-generalization-in-individualistic-metaphor. And much of
Bazin's criticism is quite different from exegesis. It is about
the
relationship of an auteur-God to his Creation. Bazin's 'collected
works read like one long stream of theological rumination, all the
more amiable, perhaps, for centring on man rather than God. They
sometimes sound like tentative prologomena to "Honest to
God," and,
however full of solipsisms, have, not only their own cinematographic
interest, but a quite theological tension and flow.
Bazin certainly makes the point that in the films of a genuine auteur
every detail can be taken as 'meant', and is neither accidental nor
'pure form'; and also that style 'is' content.
But some of Bazin's successors in Cahiers made of his approach a
Procrustean bed. They sometimes denied that an auteur's films could
validly be related to anything other than its creator's attitudes.
Once they accepted a director as an auteur (and only directors were
auteurs), then he could be no more deposed, or fall below himself than
God. The auteur had a quality of 'efficacious grace' that enabled him
to score repeated triumphs, down to the minutest detail, over the
Hollywood system. If an auteur's film was dramatically trite and
boring, they shifted their interest to its 'allegorical' level. Or
they felt that the auteur had, if not deliberately chosen, at least
seized upon so `empty' a subject, so as to give carte blanche
to his
nuance-laden style, through which the critic could apprehend, by
camera movement or other subtle means of stimulating reflection, the
`spiritual generality' of which the film was an illustration. Or,
again: only so 'banal' a subject could enable style to be its own
subject-mmater; so that a trite film could be talked about in a jargon
verging on that used of abstract painting (surprisingly, it never did
more than on it, perhaps because the critics' real interest iterest
was philosophical.) They occasionally argued that poor technical
quality (e.g., of back projection) showed a director was interested
only in the `deep' (allegoral, philosophical) aspects of his
plot. Or
he might be speaking to those connoisseurs who knew how to 'decode'
the inner content of his films.
In itself, none of these principles is far-fetched or absurd. They
are used every day in criticisms of the other arts. The much ridiculed
idea of auteurs speaking through an esoteric symbolism is relevant in
certain films, notably, of course, those which the Cahiers went on to
make. The idea of offering 'special' meanings to one's amis
inconnus
is common in all the arts, and quite compatible with the idea of the
work of art communicating before it is understood. The Idea of
'meaning through style' is very fruitful in the case of, for example,
Max Ophuls or Joseph von Sternberg. This essay has advocated virtually
this approach to the films of Bresson and Dreyer, by suggesting that
the spectator understands them best when he `plays the game'
of
assuming that every detail in a film is `meant.'
But the application of these principles was often disquieting. What
might seem that most sympathetic of critical aberrations, the
`delerium' of interpretation,' soon revealed itself as
not at all
generous. For it was used out the film's differences from the
critic's
own sensibility. Thus Ophuls, Hitchcock and Bunuel were all mashed to
crypto-neo-Platonic-Catholics-despite-themselves. And Bazin's own
indifference to social significance hardened among his followers into
something like resentment of it, with the implication that this aspect
of a film could be only 'obvious' or `banal', `a party
line', as it
were. Thus a concentration on 'the philosophy of style' too often
went
with quick evasions or dismissals of a a film's literary or
dramatic
components. A cabbalistic subtlety was attributed to films which
showed no other sign of deep thought, or of being more than
entertainments of moderate competence. Since the `esoteric' meanings
weren't very profound either, there seemed neither a prima facie case,
nor a reward, for all this complicated decoding. Indeed, many of the
directors celebrated had made it amply clear that they were very
rarely in complete control of their films, that they made many
potboilers for `alimentary' reasons, that em promises, concessions,
unwanted scripts and stars, were forced upon them.
One willingly grants `total meaning' to Bresson and Dreyer because
they give ample evidence, internal and external to their films, of
having achieved their extraordinary degree of control. But it isn't a
dogmatic assumption made before every film, nor an assertion that
every artist has equal control over his own experience, his medium,
mod his creative circumstances.
The attribution of `secret meanings' to otherwise unremarkable
craftsmen looked suspiciously like (a) a way of treating films as
objects troeves, rather than as part of a communicating situation (so
distorting them), and (b) a way of enjoying the Hollywood film while
giving it an apparent, but basically distortive, congruence to `high
cultural' ideas about authors and creative personalities.
For all this, it would be misleading to overlook the more 'moderate'
positions always characteristic of the best writing in Cahiers. It
would be most inaccurate to equate French criticism as a whole with
Cahiers, or Cahiers as a whole with all that was most extreme and
limited in Cahiers. Unfortunately, this last was taken virtually
granted throughout the auteur controversy in Britain, largely as a
result of Sight and Sound's own, defensive reflex. Sarcastic as its of
dismissals of Bergman, Visconti, Losey, Ray et al. had been, the
magazine felt wronged when attacked itself, in exactly similar terms
by the rising generation, and replied in terms which seemed to aim
less at a genuine understanding of the issues at stake than at a
crushing polemical victory. Thus Penelope Houston and Richard Rood
both chose to identify French criticism as a whole with the extrenw
trend in Cahiers. They seized on its repudiation of social
significance. and on its acceptance of style as its own
subject-matter, so as to contrast their own `humanism' with the
'non-humanist aestheticism' which Roud presented as The French Line.
Penelope Houston even went on to equate the younger English critics
with something like a `hoodlum' view of life. `To the generation which
has grown up during the last few years, art is seen as something for
kicks; films which stab at the nerves and emotions; jazz and the
excitements surrounding it.... Violence on the screen is accepted as a
stimulant....' Not surprisingly, the younger critics disliked being
called kicks-crazy when all they were asking for was for more
directors to be treated with critical respect and for more attention
to be paid to subtleties of style.
The Sight and Sound team proposed two solutions to the `style v.
content' issue. Miss Houston settled matters peremptorily: `Cinema is
about human relationships, not about spatial relationships.' But this
rules out the possibility, surely obvious, since the cinema is a
visual medium, that spatial relationships might themselves be
metaphors for human relationships. Richard Roud's conclusion seemed
more conciliatory. `We would gain ... by adopting. .. the firm belief
that form is at least as important as content.' But the persisting
separation of form and content which `as important as' implies,
reveals its consequences when Roud, commenting on the spatial
relationships in L'Avventura, sees its visual qualities as only `an
additional, non-representative element for our pleasure; a formal
choreography of movements which accompanies the films, providing a non
conceptual figure in the carpet'. Yet this formulation itself falls
into precisely that 'non-humanist aestheticism' so derided in Cahiers:
`A film's style is not about human relationships, but about its
style.'
To criticize this non-response to the eloquent visuals of L'Avvenura
is in no way to deny the possibilities of visual abstraction in films,
nor of a possible layer in L'Avventura itself, of aesthetic interest
for its own sake (a layer to which I would myself attach little
'cultural' importance). But what is curious is the difficulty in
seeing that the spatial relationships might be connected with the
story.
Also worth remarking is the hardening attitude towards the auteur.
The 30's school of social awareness of the Hollywood `system' went
with a certain sympathy for the artist who was trapped within it;
Sight and Sound made little or no attempt to distinguish, in the
current films of Hitchcock, Lang, Losey, Hawks, and so on, anything
that wasn't 'system'. The extended auteur theory, on the other hand,
makes little no allowance for the `imposed' aspects of a film. It is
content to 'decode' meanings and experiences from cryptic hints,
imaginary or real, and, in so doing, to accept, for the full emotional
picture of an aperience or attitude, a rather cerebral `notation'. No
distinction is made, or felt, or respected, between the `sign' for an
experience from the 'symbol' for it. But before we look at some
consequences of this non-distinction, its origins can perhaps be
clarified.
The Sight and Sound critics were heirs to an upper-middle-class
climate of cultural habit and opinion exemplified, at its best, by the
novels of E. M. Forster, at its most mediocre, by the complacent
pessimism of the remarks on the popular cinema by Palinurus in The
Unquiet Grave, and, at its least pleasant, by disdainful assumpions of
superiority over, and censorious defensiveness towards, the 'popular'.
They brought to the task of film criticism a philosophical
infrastructure which, felt rather than stated, and certainly never
examined, included such axioms as that the civilized few must proam
the humanism of a minority art-culture against an unthinking and
vaguely unpleasant world, which was exemplified by, variously, "the
moguls', the `mass media', the `undiscriminating public' or an
undefined, sensed `ruck' of inferiority. Further, since art is a
`sensitive individualism', then if a film isn't by an artist with an
obviously sensitive feel for the moods and nuances of human
relationships, i.e., it is probably an insensitive, impersonal film;
i.e. it is a product of the `ruck', unthinking, a specious substitute,
and therefore unpleasant.
Now, these nuances are sensed only when expressed by literary and
dramatic elements (because in Britain literature and the theatre are
facets of general culture, whereas the appreciation of the visual
arts' is more specialized), and furthermore the critic can recognize
quality and sensitivity 'intuitively'. He brings no ideological nor
intellectual dogma to a film, he 'senses' whether it is true or not to
his own experience of life. If there isn't this immediate
'recognition' effect the film is probably untrue, therefore
unthinking, therefore cheap and contemptible, like Kazan's, Bergman's,
or Visconti's; it has nothin to offer.
Indeed, under the pressure of these assumptions, the stress on,
`social consciousness' steadily receded throughout the 50's. Mere
'social realism' took second place to 'sensitive nuance', lack of
which relegated, for example, John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages
(1961), to the untrue-unthinking-contemptible category. (Note: Hence
in the mid-50's Definition's young critics, taking their inspiration
from the post-Suez New Left, attempted to reverse this trend,
reproaching Sight and Sound for making vaguely progressive noises
while rejecting all ideological interests. For this criticism Miss
Houston denounced them as `cultural gauleiters'. Lindsay Anderson,
whose discovery of Ford in Sequence days had contributed to the
eclipse of 'social consciousness', had, by the late 50's, become a
champion of the New Left, and, enjoying prestige in both camps, was
spared both their broadsides. He has now decided that he was a
'romantic' all along.)
However, this whole tradition had begun to lose hold on the younger
critics. For them, the 'sensitive nuances' of relationships were only
parts of human relationships, which were primarily determined by
strong, basic drives and attitudes. Marxism, psychoanalysis,
sociology, the war, the new social mobility, a general cultural
requestioning, had shifted attention from 'nuances' to 'fundamentals'.
Thus the 'sensitive nuance', though still a factor, had ceased to be
the touchstone for a film's quality. From this view, E. M. Forster's
novel A Passage to India, without in any way disputing its positive
qualities, is uncongenial, in so far as it tends to present racial
tensions, sexuality, national cultures, religious prejudices, and so
on, in terms of 'nuances', rather than as strong, driving, insistent
urges, and so we never get a clear, 'dynamic' view of their play and
interplay. On the other hand, Nicholas Ray's film Rebel Without, a
Cause may be 'stylized', it may fall into rhetoric, it may be rather
less sensitive in its study of mood and nuance than E. M. Forster's
novel. But it is likely to be more congenial to those who see life in
trims of 'basic' drives and their intricate relationships. For its
(relative) lack of sensitivity, its rhetoric, its concessions to
melodrama, are compensated for by the central place which it allots to
basic tensions and their interaction: the relationships of mother,
father and son (Freud), its complacent evasions (middle-class
culture), the insidhous blend of toughness and conformism in
peer-group morality, which the hero gradually renounces as he comes to
equate virility with tenderness (to the heroine) and moral
responsibility (he adopts A paternal role to another teenager). Thus
he is freed from the state of alienation and nihilism whose cultural
origins are mediated through such lyricized symbols as the
planetarium, the ruined house and so on.
This contrast between the limitations of E. M. Forster's novel and
the structure of Ray's film is meant only to stress that the film has
a quite direct and valid appeal to a new common kind of sensibility.
But it is also arguable that the 'resonance' of these basic clich6s
shakes Ray's a more sensitive and disturbing film than a study which,
though more 'sensitive' ('truthful to conscious experience'), in a
Forsterian way, has little or nothing to say on this more 'dynamic'
level.'
The assumption that the critic is one of the cultured few who must
defend his sensitivity against mass crudity has also undergone
alteration. The younger critics have grown up with the mass
media-films, comics, records and so on. They are used to picking their
way through them, and for them the 'superficial' film is in no way a
'specious' substitute for an 'authentic' work of art; it is a 'fun'
film that one sees once and enjoys, more or less: 'superficial'
doesn't in imply 'contemptible'. There are films to which one returns
again and again, but no Manichean polarity as between the 'elect' and
the 'philistine'. Nor is a film that criticizes society felt to be
ipso facto more 'salutary' or true or brave than a film that accepts
it.
There seems also to be a difference between the very quick and total
dismissals characteristic of the 'sensitive nuance' school, and the
perhaps more cerebral, but also more thoughtful and adaptable,
responses of the younger critics. For the absence of 'dogma' on which
the `sensitive nuance' school prides itself is not without its
narrowmindedness. After all, one may be very sensitive to the sorts of
nuance that are relevant to the feeling-tones of upper-middle-class
English liberalism (and its currently favourite 'exoticisms', notably,
American sophisticated comedy of the 30's, Kurosawa, Ford Westerns,
Satyajit Ray's India, Raymond Chandler); and yet be very insensitive
to anything uncongenial to those feeling-tones. A film which is
immediately `plausible' to one's sensibility may be far less accurate
in its picture of alien sensibilities, and far less rich in insights,
than a film which one learns, almost against one's will, to trust. To
take only one example: Lindsay Anderson attacked Kazan's On the
Waterfront for its `Fascism', using as his implicit standard of
comparison either the attitudes of London dockers towards trade-union
solidarity or nebulous notions that working-class solidarity must be
the same all over the world. Yet Daniel Bell's account of the specific
labour disputes on which Kazan's film is based convincingly vindicates
it against most of Anderson's criticisms.
The issue is not so much one of the critic's knowledge of the world,
as of the extent to which he is willing to try to lend himself to a
film, on its own terms, before he decides whether to accept or reject
it as a whole or in part. The younger critics have the advantage in
that, adapted as they are to a time of cultural fluidity and change,
they often find more relevance to their own problems in American or
foreign films than they do in English tradition. In the same way,
Belmondo in Godard's A Bout de Souffle turns, not as his father might
have done to his age, to the novels of Gide, but to a photograph of
Humphrey Bogart (who is of course an 'intellectual's' star). This very
flexibility tends to go with a more 'cerebral' approach, an acceptance
of 'sign' for 'symbol', of 'idea' for 'experience'. One may regret, as
I do, that so many young critics reacted against a too-arrogant
attitude towards the artist's vision of life into a refusal to
criticize it, an opposite, if more amiable, excess. Yet for critics to
think of themselves as artists' friends and accomplices is surely more
responsive and constructive, a better beginning for eventual
evaluation, than the assumption that a critic can judge works of art
'off the cuff', from some stratospheric impartiality of his own.
(Note: In the event of course the brutal tone had to be at least
partly abandoned in the face, not only of European critical attitudes,
and of the younger criticism here, but of the extent to which the
English 'literary' and intelligent public became interested in films.
The subsequent course of Sight and Sound was erratic. There were a few
ventures into criticism in which philosophical terms were used freely,
and sometimes incoherently, in an effort to sound as profound as Bazin
was thought to be. The tone (exemplified by Rhode's feeling that
Visconti must be mentally sick to be interested in the proletariat)
lacked Bazin's generosity, and continued what was in the old, hostile
complacency. At the same time, Pauline Kael was 'importer' from
America to 'debunk' various sorts of intellectualizing about movies of
(one of her articles is cited later).
These destructive rearguard actions were followed by a general
elevation of Hawks, Ray, Mann, Losey and others to the realms of
critical goodwill, an elevation not extended to those auteurs who
hadn't been forcefully pushed into the limelight by the younger
generation. The influence of younger or French critics was never
acknowledged.
There was a notable change in the attitude to 'pulp' movies. Thus is
the magazine's pseudonymous columnist, Arkadin (reputedly John Russell
Taylor) asked, 'Why don't we take horror films more seriously - well,
not seriously seriously,' as if unaware that the rest of the world had
been taking them seriously for some years. Since then the floodgates
have opened and for the last two years the magazine has been dabbling
in an ostentatiously hedonistic acceptance of, for example, Don
Sharp's The Face of Fu Manchu. One of the excellences which T.M.
advances as evidence of this being 'a really good film' (my italics)
is that 'when a sinister hand coils round the edge of her door, Karin
Dor doesn't just scream, she very commendably slams the door on it'.
John Russell Taylor is also staggered by such creativity: 'when the
young heroine is threatened by a sinister oriental hand sliding round
her living-room door with a missive, she wastes no time in helpless
wails, but smartly slams the door on it...'
It's hard to believe that people of these critics' culture and
intelligence could have been so impressed by such 'innovations' (which
aren't), if they weren't forcing themselves to 'be jolly'. Yet the
whole point of appreciating a good film which happens to be couched in
the idiom of a pulp thriller is that you don't lower your normal
standards an inch, you're no more indulgent to Bond than you have been
to Liberace or Rin-Tin-Tin. The partial volte-face from critical
'superiority' to uncritical acquiescence is more than an example of
the aestehtic upsets generated by the current confluence of 'high
culture' and popular art. Tnervous strivings to keep up with
'festival opinion' on one hand and high camp on the other are the
vacillations of a stiffly classbound 'liberalism' in a cosmopolitan
world.)
The difference, in the end,less between `humanists' and `aesthetes',
than between reviewers who feel it their job to taste and judge, and
critics who try to understand and explore.
At any rate, it is not so much the French influence as the importance
traditionally attached to a `personal vision' in art, that has proked
the younger generation to feel particularly concerned to show that,
for example, Hawks and Preminger are each valuable for their qualities
of personal vision and style. But I should like here to question the
centrality of this issue, and to reassert an attitude more that of La
Revue du Cinema.
....
There's much more, but this is probably alreaedy too much for most!
1914
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:19pm
Subject: Re: Re: Return of the Repressed
Glad you reprinted that here. Ray was a great critic
and a superb literary stylist.
--- Paul Gallagher wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson"
> wrote:
>
> > Re critical innovations, my rule no. 1 is that
> artists are smarter
> > than critics. If Hitchcock and Rossellini were up
> to something new
> in
> > the '50s -- which I guess we agree they were
>
> Do people agree? If people say there's nothing
> fundementally new in
> criticism, it seems to imply there's nothing
> fundamentally new in art
> (it's all been done before (and better)).
>
> > -- then finding words
> > for their activities inevitably called for new
> techniques of
> > description. But good as Rohmer's criticism is
> (what I've read of
> it
> > in translation) it's of infinitely less value than
> his films.
> >
> > JTW
>
> That reminds: the attitude of the critic to the
> director (respect or
> condescension, etc.) is discussed in this passage by
> Raymond Durgat.
> It's an interesting account of the history of film
> criticism in
> England, which helps explains why the early auteur
> approach feels
> different from most other critics, and why these
> critics seemed to be
> offering something new. I can anticipate the
> response, however:
> these are not substantive differences, only matters
> of taste or
> sensitivity.
>
> Also, I noticed that some of Durgnat's criticisms of
> Bazin and the
> "Hitchcocko- Hawksiens" are similar to the
> criticisms of auteurism
> that have been offered on this group.
> ----
>
>
> Auteurs and Dream Factories
>
> Questions of style bring us to the so-called auteur
> theory and the
> debates about it that sprawl through French, British
> and American film
> magazines. Our concern is not to discuss these
> controversies in all
> their aspects, but to concentrate on those which
> concern the issue of
> style and personal vision.
> At the same time, it may be helpful to enlarge the
> field of
> reference a little, so as to see how, behind the
> specific
> disagreements, many assumptions have been operating
> which have
> confused what only seems a `purely' aesthetic
> disagreement.
> The auteur theory is the assumption that most
> films can be
> interpreted in terms of their director's artistic
> personality just as
> intensively as a novel can be interpreted in terms
> of its authors'. It
> is obviously true of, for example, Dreyer and
> Bresson, so that much
> discussion has cente`red on the question of how far,
> if am all, such
> an approach is relevant or adequate to Hollywood
> directors.
> We may perhaps usefully contrast limited and
> extended applications
> of auteur theory. A limited theory was central to
> the tenets of whay
> may may be called the '30's school' of British
> criticism, running from
> Paul Rotha and John Grierson through to Richard
> Winningmon, Roger
> Manvell and the Penguin Film Review (1946-49). Their
> auteurs were such
> artists as Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Flaherty,
> Disney, Capra,
> Carne, Welles, Sturges, Huston, Lean and so on. But
> side by side with
> this appreciation of the artist, these critics
> generally had a special
> interest in a film's reflection of social reality,
> and a special
> antipathy to Hollywood `glamour' (which was
> tolerated, or not, but
> generally felt to be antithetical to seriousness,
> with the occasional
> exception, as for Garbo). Thus the documentary
> movement was felt to
> beextremely meritorious, because it showed docks and
> post offices
> and all the exterior paraphernalia of `social
> realism', whereas
> Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich were felt to
> be more or less
> meretricious (distinction between these and the
> Garbos was assumed
> rather than explained). The critics were very
> sympathetic to the
> auteur struggling to be individualistic and honest
> within of the
> Hollywood system (which indeed attained a peak of
> rigidity in the
> early 40's). Their lively awareness of the negative
> Hollywood system
> constituted a powerful check toauteur theory.
> Another check came from
> their advocacy of the documentary movement and its
> themes and
> qualities. It was assumed that a director might make
> one or two good
> films, or come up with a brilliant fluke then yield
> to pressures, or
> stray after false gods, and be lost to serious
> filmmaking. Even the
> films of obvious auteurs would be related to general
> aesthetic
> directives or social issues with little exegesis and
> less close
> linking with their creators' artistic personalities.
> All this
> constituted a limited form of auteur theory.
> A new spirit appeared when a group of Oxford
> undergraduates. notably
> Gavin Lambert, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson,
> founded their
> magazine Sequence (1948-52) which, without reacting
> against the older
> critics, moved a little way towards a less earnest
> tone, and to more
> probing exegeses, after the model of the
> undergraduate English essay.
> Lindsay Anderson's enthusiasm for Ford's She Wore a
> Yellow Ribbon
> (1949) and Gavin for Jean Cocteau signalled an
> increase in interest in
> what Sequence called `the poetic vision', as against
> the documentary
> and realist virtues, which were in no way decried.
> Nonetheless Richard
> Winnington, who had initially encouraged these young
> critics,
> repudiated them just before his death, for having
> regressed to a
> precious aestheticism.
> Gavin Lambert, aided by the Sequence team, had by
> then become an
> editor of Sight and Sound and of its sister journal,
> The Monthly Film
> Bulletin, which had fallen into a dismal
> academicism. Lambert and Ken
> Tynan, who contributed excellent appreciations of
> gangster films and
> Tom and Jerry cartoons, looked like continuation of
> appreciative
> criticism that had been so positive a factor of
> Sequence. But Lambert
> and Tynan left, and the magazine began a period of
> slow stagnation,
> all the more marked by contrast to the convulsive
> transformations of
> French criticism. It maintained a sufficiently
> authoritative tone to
> be accepted both here and abroad as `the' organ of
> English
> intellectual opinion, which is why we pay attention
> to it here.
>
> .The range of auteurs was scarcely widened from that
> which they had
> inherited from the '30's school'. Indeed, by the
> late 50's, John
> Grierson reproached the magazine for having
> neglected the discovery of
> new talent (it promptly discovered Richard Quine,
> and then left
> Hollywod at that for the next few years).
> Condescension
>
> While the old established auteurs were treated with
> consistent
> respect, and an uncritical adulation for Ford
> prefigured the excesses
> of extended auteur theory, there was a group of
> directors
=== message truncated ===
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1915
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 10:40pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein wrote:
> Glad you reprinted that here. Ray was a great critic
> and a superb literary stylist.
He was a wonderful writer!
"Auteurs and Dream Factories" originally appeared in a 1965 issue of
Films and Filming, and it was reprinted in "Durgnat on Film" and
"Films and Feelings."
I didn't realize the formatting of the text would be so bad! I've been
posting messages on the web
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/post).
I think I should format the text on my own before posting.
Paul
1916
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 11, 2003 11:31pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
Here's a speech by Roger Leenhardt that might complement Durgnat's
article. Another view on how film criticism had changed.
AMBIGUITY OF THE CINEMA
Cahiers du Cinema No. 100
(The following is a speech delivered by Roger Leenhardt at the
19th Congress of Philosophical Societies of the French Language,
on September 2nd, 1957 at Aix-en-Province. )
I will consider the word "cinema" in the limited sense of
cinematographic art. Undoubtedly the cinema is more often a means
of expression, a language. The savant using the camera for
experimentation, the pedagogue making a film for instructional
purposes, are not involved in an artistic activity. A film becomes
a work of art only when made by an artist, to the end of expressing
a style or a vision of the world and of producing in the spectator
a moral effect accompanied by aesthetic pleasure. It is not that
I minimize the extra-artistic aspect of cinema - but with a
subject so vast as Man and Cinematographic Works one must limit
himself from the start.
As soon as one wants to reflect upon the cinema with any rigor
one is faced with a major difficulty. Unlike the classical arts, it
was born quite recently, and its evolution - still in progress - has
been so rapid and so considerable that one hardly knows how to
grasp the cinema-in-itself. The insistence by its theoreticians on
speaking of the "specificity" of the cinema is a direct betrayal,
I believe, of the ambiguous and equivocal nature of screen art.
For the vagaries of critical thought, as peremptory as they are
unstable, have not followed the evolution of cinematographic
style and technique in a parallel way.
AN INFLATION OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC THOUGHT
During the epoch that some still call the golden age of movies,
between 1920 and 1930, philosophy was not yet interested in the
screen, and academic aesthetics even refused to call it art. They
called it simple reproduction and claimed it was not a transposition
of reality. In opposition to this, a young avant-garde group
discovered and baptized the seventh art, calling it the universal
language of image and the privileged expression of the modern
world. It was in a literary mode, effusive and quite baroque and
constituted less a philosophy than a mystique. It should have
collapsed with the advent of sound but, in spite of the bugbear
of filmed theatre, this curious art of the image, proud of its
muteness, integrated the word with the greatest of ease.
The power of words - like that of photogeneity, for example - is such
that this primary (at least in the historical sense) concept of
the cinema reappears even in contemporary cinematic studies -
enterprises of scientific strictness for all that. After the
war in effect - I was stationed in France - the discovery of the
new American and Italian films provoked a renewal, a stirring-up,
I'd say almost an inflation of cinematographic thought. The number
of texts and works on the film was abruptly multiplied by twenty.
The movement occurred on two axes. One was termed the New Criticism
and the other Filmology.
From 1949 on, the ardent and erudite voting group at Cahiers du
Cinema abandons impressionistic, psychological and even historical
criticism in favor of a technical and one might even say
philosophical criticism. Andre Bazin, leader of this generation,
proved to what level of thought precise problems of cutting and
shooting such as flash-backs and deep focus could be analyzed.
Certain of his disciples have pushed the method a bit far. And
one cannot help feeling a certain uneasiness when the slightest
account of a curious Western (for these young turks prefer "B"
films to obviously major works) leads to a discussion of ontology
and alienation, this genre of terms being at times handled very
casually.
Of course one is reassured to find this vocabulary
coming from the filmologists as well, but at times one feels the
opposite sort of uneasiness. Certainly one must praise Cohen-Seat
for having led great specialists in intellectual disciplines such
as aesthetics, sociology or psychology, with their own familiar
scientific precision, to the world of film. And we shouldn't be
astonished if, the realities of the screen being less familiar
to them, the results are, uncertain at first. An article by Andre
Bazin, entitled annisingly enough (if my memory is correct)
"Prolegomena for All Filmology," explains this phenomenon admirably.
I must admit that I am, unfortunately, rather ignorant of the
development of filmology - having ceased of activity as critic
after its birth. But I don't doubt that the method, now that it
is more organized, has produced and is producing remarkable works.
A recent study which I have just finished reading - and I don't
know whether it belongs to orthodox filmology - that is, in any
case, a model type of dense and brilliant philosophical analysis
of cinema by an informed man, has, however, renewed in me a
feeling of equivocation that it would be useful to dispel.
It is the "Essay on Sociological Anthropology" by Edgar Morin
entitled "The Cinema and Visionary Man." I am sorry to speak
in a somewhat unpleasant critical fashion for a few moments,
but at times it is necessary to clear the air in order to
arrive at a clean, concrete statement.
What is Morin's central thesis? It consists
of demonstrating that the cinema, born dialectically out of
the movie camera's simple optical and objective reproduction of
reality, establishes a subjective vision, relative to the visionary,
to onirism, to magic. It amounts to a "virtual surrealizing of the
screen." Valentin's formula, which he cites, is characteristic :
"The lens confers an air of legend to whatever it approaches ;
transports everything that falls within its field outside of
reality."
I do not propose to dispute this thesis. In one sense it is
evident. Any aesthetic vision, whether it is painting or literature,
consists of transposing a given reality, of affecting a certain
coefficient of subjectivity, of super-reality.
THE EVOLUTION OF STYLE
It is interesting to analyze the specific cinematic elements that
determine this transfiguration. With respect to the author, it
is worth the trouble of turning to technique for a moment. He
studies successively the "phantomness" of the cinematic image -
airlike, transparent, with the first stylization of black and
white; the importance of playing with time - accel erated or slow
motion - or with space - dissolves or superimpositions ; the
necessary accompaniment of the succession of images by an expressive
and affective music; the fragmentation of time and space by montage;
cutting for scenes with fascinating angles ; the framing
itself - that arbitrary composition within the screen's rectangle
and finally, the macroscopic - that is to say, the systematic
use of close-ups, psychological when it involves a face and
animistic when objects are shown.
Well, what is extraordinary is that all of these elements,
undoubtedly current usage for the silent films of 1928, correspond
to modalities of expression that the evolution of cinematic style
has gone beyond and even abandoned. I'll go over them quickly.
All technical effort for the past twenty years has tended to be
more and more fixed, clean and dense. And if people are still
making films in black and white, it's not for aesthetic reasons
- no matter what they say - it's purely a question of budget.
One would be hard put to cite, with the exception of documentaries,
a single recent film that uses speeded-up or slow motion in the
course of a story. I pass on to music. You A I 44 know that
important films are now being made without music, or with briefer
and briefer musical intrusions - and it is generally justified. I
am thinking of an example : shortly you are going to see a film by
Clouzot (Mystere Picasso). Well! My friend Georges Auric was very
upset by the fact that a critic who liked the film attacked the
music Auric had written at Clouzot's request and in the style
demanded. I believe that it has nothing at all to do with the nature
of the music but rather with its very existence - it was put in
out of habit and was not only inessential to the film but foreign
to it.
As for special effects, although black-outs and dissolves etc.
are still used, these so-called filmic punctuation marks have
practically disappeared. Superimposition, once called "essential
to stylistic cinematography," nowadays produces a profoundly
uneasy sensation in any spectator of taste.
Montage itself has become a secondary cinematic element. We know
that for the past ten years the montage of successive sequences, such
as long-shot followed by close-up, tends to be replaced by
mise en scene
in depth - utilizing deep focus and supplying in a single sequence
of long duration a kind of vision in which the spectator, as when
faced with reality, does the job of selecting that which, one used
to think, devolved on the camera ... But today we see that both
methods may be employed concurrently without anything essential
being changed. Five years ago, Hitchcock achieved a tour de
force: Rope, in a single sequence. Although the film retains its
feeling of tone and atmosphere, it appears in retrospect no
different than it would had it been made with a classical
cutting technique. This seems to me to lessen the interest of
Kuleshov's famous experiment
(the same shot of Mosjoukine's assuming different expressions in
relation to a coffin, a little girl or a bowl of soup) which is
ritualistically cited in every work on the cinema.
Of course, as far as shooting angles are concerned, the director
continues to calculate them carefully but, except for rare effects,
only neophytes and the rear guard use extraordinary angles.
THE SACROSANCT CLOSE-UP
To tell the truth, the creators themselves (for we must always
be suspicious of statements by artists)
are very much responsible for the perpetuation, among their
exegetists, of points of view that are basically out of date. In
their declarations, and not in their comportment, they are constantly
mistaken about the evolution of the cinema. When "talkies" appeared,
they unanimously prophesized the end of the art of the image and
at the same time they plunged into experiments with sound.
When color came, each declared that he would use it only in a
stylized way, like painters do, but that went by the boards as
soon as it became sufficiently true-to-life.
Only four years ago, after the first showing of Cinemascope
in Paris, Figaro asked several French directors how they felt
about the future of the process. The majority, from Becker to
Rene Clair, downgraded the wide screen on the ground that it
rendered plastic composition too difficult. I believe I was,
along with Alexander Astruc, one of only two directors to
think that the wide screen would become a permanent fixture -
part of the inevitable progress in the inevitable evolution
towards an ever more realistic screen vision.
The following was one of the major argument, against
Cinemascope: it would do away with the closeup, the sacrosanct
close-up. They were simply forgetting that the close-up, as a
major element in cinematic expression, has in fact disappeared
of its own accord - just like special angles, rapid montage and
superimposition - a completely abandoned sty_ le, definitively
abandoned because it was, in fact, extremely limited : powerful
but poor.
The analysis of the face in close-up, they said and
still say, is for the cineaste the means of psychologically delving
into a character, of going into the soul with the camera. A total
error. Certainly the physical comportment, the expression of the
actor, is the equivalent of the novelist's commentary on the
character but precisely when he is seen on the screen normally, as
today. on a medium shot. An exaggerated close-up of a face is not
psychological and complex but lyrical and elementary. Any woman's
face, seen from very close, looks like - if the face is without
make-up and the texture of the skin is a thousand times
enlarged - Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, and,
if it is taken in shimmering sunlight against a flesh-
colored background it looks like Greta Garbo. While
sculptors never grow weary of translating an infinite reality
onto a marble face, the cineastes are tired of
putting the same face on film, are tired of what is called pure
cinema. For all classical style is the same. For example, any rapid
montage of a dance scene expresses, in a surprising way, the fact
of dance - but treats a Spanish, Russian or Scottish dance in
identical fashion. There is no leeway for anything new. Briefly,
these are the limitations of what has been called the specifics of
cinematic expressions, its rigidly defined domain, out of which
the art of the screen has evolved.
We will pass now to the second point of view from which we may
examine the cinema, like any creation or work - that of content,
to the extent that one can, in art, separate it from form.
I recall, in 1946, having tried, at Sartre's request, in the first
issue of Tenips llodernes, to draw tip a balance-sheet; it was
an attempt with no preoccupation about aesthetic and formal
problems, to find out what the cinema had brought that was new
and profound to our knowledge of the cosmos and of Man. The list
of the cinema's conquests didn't go very far. It consisted,
essentially, of simple landscapes on a grand scale : the desert,
mountains, snow, the sea (but, for example, try and find the
subtlety and humanity of the countryside near Aix presented on
the screen!) And then you had the City, the Machine, the Crowd,
the Child, the Animal . . . the great elementary sentiments,
violence, terror, sublime love, some forays into the categories
of lyricism and the epic, while as far as psychology and a nttanced
metaphysical vision of the world were concerned, the cinema
continued to remain behind literature and the theatre. Well, I
wouldn't say the same things today because as soon as it freed
itself from a formal style that was limiting its possibilities,
cinematographic creation progressed in depth in its apprehension
of the world and the spirit.
A PERSONALIZATION OF CREATION
It is for this reason that I was obliged to go on at such length
in my analysis of a conception of cinema that is still too
frequently accepted (not only among philosophers, but among the
most fervent screen adepts, notably the film societies )-in order
to cleanly reject it. It somewhat resembles a novelistic philosophy
that takes off from the epic, its ancestor. People still talk
about meter, an essential coinponent of the Romantic style, and
you see the principal romantic function, the creation of the hero
tending to become myth. This language of the image. which is
universal, was a popular art, finding itself again in contact
with the public at large-something that was lost by the other
individualized arts adapted to the bourgeoisie.
Well, we should make it clear that, whether one dislikes it or
not, it seems that all forms of artistic expression tend to move
from a formal art with precise canons, well-defined genres, a simple
but powerful inspiration that appeals to the collective
emotions, towards polymorphous arts with freer style, a more
complex and subtle message designed for the aesthetic pleasure
of an individual reader or listener or spectator. You have
this evolution from the rigorous religious fresco offered to
the crowd to the easel painting destined to delight the amateur.
The same occurs with the passage from lyric recitation to the
poem in blank verse, from the amphitheatre to the small stage
or bourgeois comedy, from the epic to the novel.
The cinema has evolved in the same way. Certainly, many popular
films have not obeyed this law just as the adventure novel, a
residue from the epic recitation, has subsisted side by side
with the modern psychological novel. But the new worthwhile
films correspond closely to the forms of contemporary art. I am
thinking of the ten best films of last year (1956) according to
a referendum made up by a group of critics, running from Senso
to Smiles o f a Summer Night, from A Man Escaped to Mystere
Picasso. I believe that eight out of ten of these films are
difficult and designed for the individual, informed spectator;
all of them are somewhat ambiguous and a melange of genres.
We have come a long way from the three antique masks, from the
way we classified films twenty years ago (the way my concierge
still does)-as drama, comedy or cops-and-robbers. And if I am
asked about the most important new thing in films in the past
ten years, I answer, perhaps : the utilization of the flash-back
and the introduction of narration. They have given the suppleness
and complexity of literature to cinematic construction. The most
subtle nuances of personal expression are now open to the
film-maker.
This general movement of the arts I spoke of just
now has been simultaneously an individualization of the public
and a personalization of the creation (not mentioning the personal
genius of Homer) of the creators themselves. More, it tends
toward the expression, pushed by the creator more and more, not
of what values have in common but their differences.
The actual evolution of the cinema thus occurs in a general
sense as a personalization of creation. Certainly Stroheim and
Murnau did personal work. But aren't we deluding ourselves
about certain great names of the classical cinema - or the
primitive cinema, if you will - who were stronger on technique
than on an original world-view? Don't Eisenstein and Pudovkin,
in spite of their different temperaments, express above
all a certain formal style - that of post-World War I Russia?
Whereas, on the contrary, after World War II, Italian
neo-realism's pretention to express an essentially social
reality and to be founded on a communal
method, as well as the abandonment of actor's cinema, very
quickly disintegrated to permit the appearance of irrepressible
personalities, such as Rossellini, Visconti and Fellini.
Since we have come from the work to the man, before attempting to
describe the creator of the contemporary cinema, in control of
a highly evolved technique and making use of this supple instrument
in order to deliver an interior message - very much like the
novelist who is not preoccupied first of all or essentially with
literary technique - I must however express a reservation and more
or less go back on what I just said.
It has occurred to the from time to time to define the conception
of cinema I have just presented and which holds true objectively,
at least as I believe it. in the sense of the evolution of the
seventh art, with a somewhat provocative formulation: the cinema
is not a spectacle.
Well, if aesthetically, in its best efforts,
cinema seeks in effect not to be a spectacle ; practically.
socio- logically, economically it actually remains a spectacle.
This is where the drama of the cineaste comes in. I'd like to
give an example here. I worked recenth- for several months with
Rene Clement on the screen adaptation of Giono's Hussard sur le
toit. The story is somewhat picaresque, constructed, Giono says,
like an Italian opera. Well, Clement, who has great finesse and
sensitivity, really wanted to retain the unexpected aspect of
the story and the originality of tone but he wanted at the same
time - and this was the origin of our conflict - a tight
construction, a dramatic progression, suspense ... etc. "You
understand," he said to me, "my film must be applauded in Tokyo
and Buenos Aires, too." There you see that the creator of cinema
is torn, not only between art and commerce. but more exactly
between the desire for the freedom and depth of expression
possessed by the novel and the necessity for immediate efficacity
that any spectacle must have.
"And then, the film would be too long," Clement told me, and he
was right. I believe it was Thihaudet who made the distinction
among the arts involving time that the limited arts like the
sonnet, the novella and the play, even allowing for the restrictions
of form. are more dramatic than the unlimited arts like the
novel.
By aesthetic vocation, the cinema is an unlimited art
(the few great films of several hours' duration give us a
presentiment of the temporal perspectives that can be deployed,
using the memory, like in a book, at the interior of the work.)
In fact, the cinema is a limited art in which the director must
seize and hold a vast public in one hour and forty minutes.
THE FILM AUTEUR
We can now approach the problem of the film auteur more concretely,
that is to say the role of the individual in cinematographic
creation. I reject immediately the false problem of collective
film creation. The numerous technical specialists, even if you
call them collaborators in the production, contribute to the
success of the film, but simply in terms of its production - not
its creation.
On the contrary, a major problem and, to tell the
truth, an insoluble one is that of the auteur's moral right
which arises in a film in the relation of the scenarist to
the director. This problem is similar to but separate from
the problem of the relationship between conception and
realization. From time to time, the scenarist and director
are spoken of as a pair o equals, but in works of value one
partner is actually always subordinate to the other -
the creator-leader. A Prevert scenario directed by
Christian-Jaque, Cayatte or Carne will give you, with
more or less success, a Prevert film. Inversely, a film directed
by John Ford is a John Ford film no matter who writes the scenario.
What is certain is that in the evolution of the cinema more and
more professional importance is given to the scenarist. One has
only to look at the figures. On the other hand, directors who
figure as auteurs today are more or less complete auteurs. In
France, Rene Clair and Clouzot are writers. With different luck,
Bresson and Becker are now writing their own dialogue. In America,
the most plastic director, the one who has returned to the source
of expressionism, is first of all a man of the world, a man of
radio and the theatre : I mean Orson Welles.
The finished film, however, is a far cry from the most
elaborate scenario, and if one were to sketch a characterology
of the director, to define the "habits" of the cineaste as
compared to those of the writer,
one would be inclined to place in the foreground such values as
personality, authority, decision, communication in contrast to
such values as scrupulousness, dreams and solitude which characterize
the writer.
For a film, while it is being shot, is like all
armored division that may never stop. On the set, at least,
cinematic creation must be a stranger to the hesitations, mistakes
and revisions that make up the normal course of events in literary
creation. In this sense, the architect and the orator would have
more in common with the cineaste than the novelist or painter.
We come now to another aspect of the man of cinema: the director
of actors. In the theatre the actors act amongst themselves, with
each other. In the studio, each actor has the director as his
principal partner. In the cineaste's conscious memory a film is
less the presentation of a scenario, the establishing of shooting
angles, than the bloody battle carried on simultaneously for tell
weeks with the faces, expressions, gestures and voices of four
or five actors and actresses. It is curious, and even indicative
of the cinema's ambiguities and contradictions, to note that at
the moment when, in Italy and in France, De Sica and Bresson were
seeking to eliminate professional actors, a new, brilliant
generation of Hollywood directors from Nicholas Ray to Logan all
emerged from the efforts of the Actors' Studio in New York.
If one were to combine the diverse characteristics I have sketched
in the same individual there would appear the portrait of the
typical man of the cinema: this could be Jean Renoir. A great
animator, a bit of all adventurer (as a youth he sold some
of his father's pictures in order to finance his films),
creator of dialogues, theatrical writer, maintaining the same
theme in thirty films, a prodigious director of actors
(not by imposing like a Clouzot, but on the contrary by
pushing the actor on his path), he is into the bargain
the screen's greatest plastic artist which is, no matter
what I may say, an essential attribute of the man of the
cinema.
CRISIS AND REGRESSION?
However, the cinema's human mystery resides in its being a
vocation. Why did my friend Alexandre Astruc, who could have been
a brilliant novelist or a great essay writer, absolutely want to
make films when expressing himself in this medium is so much more
difficult? With many young people it is, I believe, essentially
the desire for a greater audience (with its impure consequences
called the glory and the gold.)
Georges Neveux pointed out to me that there is all
irreversible ladder ; at the base you have the
poet - the most pure and the most isolated. He normally becomes
at the age of thirty, a novelist and graduates from the slim
volume in five hundred copies to an edition of five thousand.
But a novelist never publishes poems. The successful novelist
often moves on to the theatre, like Mauriac and Montherlant. But
an Anouilh is never tempted to write a novel. Pagnol finally goes
from the theatre to the cinema. But it would be utter madness
for Jean Renoir to do the reverse.
Neveux told me this five years ago, and, perhaps it is
no longer so true. I know a number of scenarists who, like
Prevert, return to literature which is
today, even materially, as interesting.
Since the cinema's famous crisis is really and truly
a reality, both artistic and economic,
it is pleasant in the epoch when sociologists are interested in
the seventh art and speak of the age of the man of the cinema,
to hear hankers (whose vision is often as clear as that of the
sociologists) asking themselves if the film industry, whose
importance in the first place has always been exaggerated (the
total business of the French cinema, $55 million, is less than
that of the Galeries Lafayette [big department store chain] ),
if this "industry" isn't in a definite regression.
Regression from which television profits. For this film substitute
is in the process of dismembering cinematic production and art. The
cinema has responded to the absorption of the current and popular
film by making spectaculars, superproductions in Cinemascope that
are most often too costly to permit the possibility of significant
works.
Between the two there remains only a feeble ma-r-ill,
economically fragile, for films by auteurs, such as I have been
trying to define, which are addressed to the highly evolved
spectator, and which, having gone beyond a constricting
formalism, have finally caught up to the
nobility and profundity of the traditional arts.
But let's not be too pessimistic. Who knows - a change in the
way films are distributed, an amortization in depth over a period
of ten or twenty years, will perhaps permit auteur films to
subsist, side by side, with television and superproductions, in
the way that an excellent book may come out in a limited edition
and hang on in spite of everything between the best sellers and
the whodunits.
I regret ending this way on a questioning note, and having brought
you a vision of the cinema that is more an analysis than a
synthesis, with more ambiguity than clarity. Such is the nature
of the cinema, 1 believe. and such perhaps is also the nature of
my spirit - more at ease in a discussion than in an explanation.
1917
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:41am
Subject: Re: Re: Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101, &, Our Group
David Ehrenstein wrote:
>Whoops! Suddenly remembered Ezra Pound.
>
>He's a piece of shit too -- and one of the many
>reasons why I despise Hollis Frampton.
>
>
>
1. I have asked this before: kindly show some respect for the members of
this group by NOT quoting entire messages. Learn to turn the automatic
quote feature of your email off, or to delete the quote that pops up.
Quote only a small part, if necessary.
2. Our statement of purpose, which can be found in the files section,
states:
"There are only a few firm prohibitions. Personal insults against
anyone, in or out of our group, are banned. You can write, 'That was a
moronic film review,' but not, 'You're a moron.'"
I wrote our statement, but it was agreed to with almost no
modifications by the seven people who participated in the intensive
email discussions that led to our group's founding. There are many
reasons that I wrote that part of the statement the way I did, based on
some seven years of experience in Internet discussion groups, and based
on what I learned from my own tendency to fly off the handle, and on the
effect I have observed of personal insults on the overall climate of
discussion. There are lots of places on the 'Net where personal insults
are part of the normal discourse. If you want to engage in personal
attacks and insults, go there. This is not the place for this sort of
discourse.
I think I can speak for all seven of us in saying that our hope was for
a group in which serious discussion was engaged in, and not a group in
which one-line insults were thrown out. Though the question of Pound's
fascism has been explored at great length, it can be brought up here in
the context of a film discussion, but not in a manner which violates our
stated purpose
Similarly, it's important to avoid coming close to insulting members of
this group personally when engaging in discussion with them. Accusations
of massive ignorance, for example, are just not helpful. Knowledge is
the cure to ignorance; if you think someone needs to no something, tell
them about it. And we all have our views of what ignorance of cinema is.
From my point of view, it is truly impossible to have a full
understanding of the possibilities of film as an art without a good and
thorough knowledge of and feeling for the achievements of Stan Brakhage,
Robert Breer, Bruce Baillie, Peter Kubelka, Christopher Maclaine, Hollis
Frampton, and a number of other avant-garde filmmakers. So I'll
encourage others to see their films (of which more is to come), but I'll
try to avoid repeating that point of view -- that anyone who doesn't
have such knowledge in fact doesn't have a full understanding of cinema
-- in discussions. And I'll also cheerfully acknowledge that I myself
can also learn a great deal from people who have no knowledge of this
branch of cinema as well.
And by the way, let me stipulate that I fully accept the possibility
that my relative insensitivity to acting and scriptwriting could be used
to argue that I lack a full understanding of cinema too.
- Fred
1918
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 1:52am
Subject: Re: Return of the Repressed
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
>
> Surely the invention of cinema as a technology was a fundamentally
> new event in human history.
>
> Maybe therefore productive of new ideas?
>
> JTW
Rohmer said something like that: "Being able to photograph, to film,
brings us a fundamentally different knowledge of the world, a
knowledge that causes an upheaval of values."
Here's the context:
ROHMER: That's why I was opposed to all the sixties' structuralist and
linguistic ideas. For me, the important thing in film - to repeat what
Bazin said - is ontology and not language. Ontologically, film says
something that the other arts don't say. In the end, its language
resembles the language of the other arts. If one studies the language
of film, one finds the same rhetoric as in other arts, but in a
rougher, less refined, and less complex style, an idea that leads
nowhere except to say that film is able to imitate the other arts,
that it does so with great difficulty, but that it isn't always bad.
There's a nice metaphor for you, it's almost Victor Hugo!
NARBONI: It would mean taking note of the rhetoric and letting the
essential part go unnoticed.
ROHMER: The essential part is not in he realm of language but in the
realm of ontology.
NARBONI: That's the theoretical foundation of your collected articles.
ROHMER: Yes, but all I'm doing is organizing Bazin's ideas. He said
with regard to Monde du silence (The Silent World): "To show the
bottom of the ocean, to show it and not describe it, that's film."
Now, literature describes it; painting paints it; and by freezing it,
by interpreting it, film shows it - for example, Nanook the Eskimo
harpooning the walrus. It's like nothing else, it has no equivalent.
Until film, one had either to paint a painting or describe something.
Being able to photograph, to film, brings us a fundamentally different
knowledge of the world, a knowledge that causes an upheaval of values.
That is what I tried to prove, rather awkwardly, but I can't say it
any better, it's very difficult to explain.
NARBONI: When you say that, one has the impression that the most
important thing is in the realm of becoming, of time - in Nanook of
the North, for example - and yet you wrote an article called "Cinema,
the Art of Space."
ROHMER: There is a cinematic space, different from pictorial space
although some believe it can be reduced to pictorial space - that is
the source of aestheticism. You have to be careful about space. The
cinematic being reveals himself in space as well as in time. To tell
the truth, he reveals himself in space-time, since in film one cannot
dissociate one from the other. All I can say here is that this idea is
very important to me, as you can see from what I've written. Perhaps
today I would express it differently.
http://cs1.cs.nyu.edu/m-pg0123/rohmer.html
1919
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 2:30am
Subject: Robert Breer, and avant-garde film
As my one privilege as group "owner," and with the consent of
co-moderator Peter, I've commandeered the image feature of our home page
for a while for avant-garde film. I'll change the image every three
months or so.
The images from Robert Breer's latest great film are particularly
relevant to Chicagoans, as it's showing tomorrow night at Chicago
Filmmakers' "Onion City Film Festival." See
http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org/navonion.htm for links to the whole
festival, http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion.htm#1 for this program,
and http://www.chireader.com/movies/ for my capsule review of four of
the six programs, including a few comments on the Breer -- except that
it's not up yet, should be by tomorrow morning. I also have a review of
Breer's earlier work that does apply to this film at
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/0697/06067b.html
Breer's film is not one in which every frame is different, by the way,
though he did make a film like that once; I chose the strips I did to
show cuts. But many times the images do only last a few frames. He's an
"animator" whose work has nothing to do with commercial animation. Every
instant, every part of the frame, is alive with the anticipation of change.
Oh, someone did make a VHS. Someone else even sent it to me. I've never
looked at it. It should be possible to find it though.
I'm afraid I'm going to have very little time the next few weeks, but I
want to throw out something that I can try to elaborate on later, and
that I already alluded to in an earlier post. I think understanding, and
loving, avant-garde cinema can affect one's understanding of all cinema,
and in a positive way. These are filmmakers who really *do* focus on
light and color and space and shape and time and rhythm, and seeing and
appreciating their films I think helps make you a better film viewer.
Images from what is perhaps Warren Sonbert's best film just recently
graced out page. This was a silent "travelogue" with radical cutting
between different places -- the larger version of the image of the first
two shots is still up in the "files" section. Yet he was deeply inspired
by, and I think influenced by, the visual aesthetic of Hollywood
filmmakers such as Hitchcock and Minnelli. His films had a distinctive
sense of space and color, and a distinctive expression; they just didn't
tell stories, "entertain," or have actors in the usual sense. Stuart
Byron managed to get a positive piece on Sonbert's very early films into
"Variety." He called them "anti-dramatic," which was true.
- Fred
1920
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:42am
Subject: Re: Swamped
hotlove666 wrote:
>
>Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her work at one
>point as part of its program? Fred?
>
>
>
You know, I think one or both of the two famous ones were and are part
of the "Essnetial Cinama' reperatory, but I can't verify this at the
moment -- for some strange reason I can't find the essential cinema
stuff online. I'll let you know when I find out.
- Fred
1921
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:48am
Subject: Re: Swamped
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is definitely Essential Cinema--and Anth. has
shown it quite recently. Do you who like the film like all of it? I
can see one claiming some of the sequences as great cinema, but the
(as I remember) interminable parade of Nazi brass...
In late editions of the Times yesterday, Riefenstahl's obit ran next
to Edward Teller.
Ezra Pound, geez--doesn't mental illness come as a mitigating factor?
PWC
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
>
> hotlove666 wrote:
>
> >
> >Re: Riefenstahl - Didn't Anthology in NY show her work at one
> >point as part of its program? Fred?
> >
> >
> >
> You know, I think one or both of the two famous ones were and are part
> of the "Essnetial Cinama' reperatory, but I can't verify this at the
> moment -- for some strange reason I can't find the essential cinema
> stuff online. I'll let you know when I find out.
>
> - Fred
1922
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 12, 2003 3:57am
Subject: Re: Re: Swamped
"Ezra Pound, geez--doesn't mental illness come as a
mitigating factor?"
Not when it's used as an alibi.
--- Patrick Ciccone wrote:
> TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is definitely Essential
> Cinema--and Anth. has
> shown it quite recently. Do you who like the film
> like all of it? I
> can see one claiming some of the sequences as great
> cinema, but the
> (as I remember) interminable parade of Nazi brass...
>
>
> In late editions of the Times yesterday,
> Riefenstahl's obit ran next
> to Edward Teller.
>
> Ezra Pound, g