Abstract and tactile

The other week I read Earning the Rockies, the latest book by Robert D. Kaplan who is an interesting thinker on geopolitics. That book is about how the geography of the United States has been the basis for its political place (or dominance) in the world. Kaplan is a deeply read scholar with impeccable credentials, and can discuss the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Romanian urbanity and 5th century Chinese warfare in the same chapter. But, and this is why I mention him here, while deeply embedded in political and historical theory he is also critical of a certain strain of academic writing/thinking for its detachment from the real world. He is the kind of writer who goes to the places he writes about, a traveller as much as a thinker.

In many different fields and disciplines there is a difference between what can roughly be called abstract theory and tactile theory. (Theory loosely defined.) It is not only in political science that this is a distinction worth making. It is equally applicable on film studies.

Within film studies I would define the tactile approach is being interested in the work itself and how it is done, being interested in the art of film and the physical object. It is also interested in the filmmakers and the audience as actual people, as individual human beings. The former, abstract theory, is by my definition interested in theory in itself, and in books about films rather than actual films. It looks at politics and ideology, and deals primarily in generalisations. It can often show an indifference to actual films, film history, filmmakers and audiences.

It is not an either/or thing, few are pure tactile or pure abstraction (Kaplan mentioned above is both as much and the star of much of contemporary cinema studies, Gilles Deleuze, could be said to be as well) and one is not automatically better than the other; it is partly a question of what you yourself are interested in. But it is not just a matter of preferences. It is a question of whether the thoughts and ideas that are presented come from research and genuine engagement with and knowledge of the material about which one writes. While I am more partial to the tactile approach myself it often happens when I read about a certain film or filmmaker that the object of study is not contextualised and therefore not properly understood and the value and uniqueness of the film or filmmaker is overestimated due to this lack of context and wider historic awareness. But abstract theory is on average worse. It can even be offensive in its lack of interest in the subject it is allegedly concerned with, i.e. film. (On occasion at conferences I have been tempted to ask "Have you actually seen a film?" after a paper has been presented, but as yet I have constrained myself.) It is a peculiar thing how it seems that many people within film studies who are researching and writing about it seem to regard film as uninteresting and even worthy of disdain. It is particularly dispiriting that many of those who give that impression, through their writing and conference papers, actually teach film studies. Imagine playing football (or soccer) and the coach is completely uninterested in the actual playing of football and instead only talks about, say, the politics of grass-cutting among Chilean peasants in "the post-political". A potentially worthy subject, but not if you are a football coach and is supposed to teach children how to play.

I have often pointed out that much of what is being taught and written about concerning film history is a collection of myths and mistakes. One strong reason for this is that so many do not bother to watch the films, even the films that they themselves write about, and this combined with the general disinterested approach to the subject means that it is rather rare for academic writing to go deeper than a random Wikipedia-entry when it comes to actual film history or practice. The book or article might be insightful and knowledgeable about whatever political theory is being discussed but not about films, either in themselves or about film history. Instead one myth or distortion after another is repeated and taught. In the rest of this post I will focus on one such area, writings about auteurs, since I have recently read several recent articles and new books in which "auteur theory" have been discussed.

Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Ernst Lubitsch

Of all these books and articles, not a single one of them gave an accurate description of it. Rather the opposite. It was not a case of simplifying for expediency but getting the basic facts backwards. Most said that "auteur theory" argued that auteurs were filmmakers who wrote their own scripts and did not make genre or mainstream films but unique and personal films. This might be how the writer in question defines an auteur now but, as I said, this is almost the opposite of what Truffaut, Godard, Sarris and others argued. What they said was that auteurs could be found anywhere, not least among mainstream genre filmmakers, and that even when they did not write their own scripts their personalities came across in their films. If you pretend to provide a history of thinking about auteurs then at least study the issue first. It is not a difficult subject, not quantum physics. Or, accept that you do not care enough to actually research it and say nothing more about it.

As an example, in Sonatas, Screams, and Silence by Alexis Luko (which I previously singled out as the most interesting of a recent bunch of Bergman books) there is one page (p. xxv) about the history of auteurism, which she claims begins with Truffaut's 1954 article A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema and that Truffaut "called for a revolution" in that article. He did not. He was praising some filmmakers whom he liked, such as Bresson, Ophuls, Tati and Becker. He then added "it so happens — by a curious coincidence — that they are auteurs who often write their own dialogue and in some cases think up the stories they direct" and he compared their films favourably to the films written by the team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost (and a few others). He was not suggesting a new kind of cinema, but was praising a certain kind of cinema that already existed. That is completely different. (Truffaut's article is one of those that are referenced by many but understood (or even read) by few.) There is no recognition in Luko's summary that this view of filmmakers far pre-dates Truffaut's article. The summary is so perfunctory it would have been better not making it at all.

In the recent edited collection The Global Auteur (eds. Jeremi Szaniawski and Seung-hoon Jeong) there is also an effort to give a summary of the history of auteurs. "As is well known, the 1950s Cahiers du cinèma critics initiated the political positioning of filmmakers' authenticity as equivalent to artists' authorship in other media." it says in the introduction (p. 2). That statement is not true. That discussion was initiated much earlier than the 1950s, it was there already in the late 1910s, in various countries and by various critics. It continued to be debated among French film critics in the 1920s, American film critics on the 1930s, British and Swedish film critics in the 1940s. There was nothing new in that respect with the Cahiers group. The Introduction later argues that "today's auteurs are philosophical thinkers who are also politically attuned observers and apt craftsmen or artists." (p. 9) which on the one hand is a bold statement from those who a few pages earlier had criticised the "semi-religious myth of independent creativity" (p. 4) and on the other hand confusing for it would suggest that earlier auteurs were not those things but if they were not then what were they and why and when did this shift from one stage to another take place?

The various chapters of The Global Auteur have their strength and weaknesses (I particularly liked William Brown's chapter about Michael Winterbottom), and for reasons known only to the editors no women are among the included auteurs, but now I want to continue focusing on the Introduction by the book's editors, partly as an example of abstract theory. The piece contains no thinking about film at all, it is only jargon and clichés, but more to the point was that there was so little connection (if any) between actual filmmakers and the theoretical constructions about them. They ask why it is relevant to talk about auteurs today and give this answer: "Because its agency is a causative force to activate an engagement that subjectively concretizes a certain universality of this global matrix of film discourse." (p. 5)

Later they argue that "Methodologically, their mapping can be not just a synchronic arrangement of various auteuristic positions, but also a diachronic narrativization of their agendas and motifs, pathologies and impasses, failures and potentials in the dialectic process of raising questions and seeking answers from the critic's perspective." (p. 7) They further say that "This yields a cognitive mapping of the political matrix that could reveal an unconscious ideology or paradigm and its cinematically virtualized reality through an aesthetic imaginary, as well as its political potential or deadlock when confronted with actual reality." (p. 9) This discussion throughout the Introduction is only interested in theoretical constructions about auteurs, and the actual filmmakers barely figures in that discussion.

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There is nothing really new to say about filmmakers in general; it has always been, and will probably always be, the case that film is a collaborative art form but that frequently one person is the central figure, whose vision and techniques dominate the finished film, and this person is usually the director (whether or not they also have screen writing credits). This view of it has also been common among critics and others since at least the days of Lubitsch, Ince, Griffith and Chaplin. (Not about all films and all filmmakers, but about many of them, which still remains they case today.) Everything beyond that, whether you call it "auteur theory" or "auteur-structuralism" or "transnational auteurs" or "global auteurs" or "neo-auteurs" or "post-auteurs" or "third wave auteurs" or "vulgar auteurs" or whatever are theoretical games which does not change, or relate to, the actual making of the films, to what happens during pre-production, production and post-production. Filmmakers working today do not differ on average from filmmakers working in earlier eras, and there is no need for any random book about filmmakers to make an excuse for how things are different now and why we need new ways of theorising the auteur or to argue that something is more relevant than ever. (But there can be new and different ways of looking at individual filmmakers of course, from the tactile approach.)

The arguments are rarely new or different either, it is mainly just a new vocabulary. At any given time in academia, as elsewhere, there are certain fashionable words that are used, over and over again, until they lose their appeal and are exchanged for other words. You probably noticed some of them in the quotes above, such as "mapping," a current buzz word. "Re-imaging" and "re-thinking" are also popular, which usually refer to taking a perfectly good and useful term or phrase and give it a new meaning for no apparent reason. And by doing so watering it out until it becomes devoid of actual meaning, and needs to be "re-imagined" again.

***

Considering what I do professionally, I naturally spend a lot of time reading about films. It rarely gives me any pleasure though. I am much happier when reading about geopolitics and evolutionary cognition. It is a peculiar thing. All of this bothers me both on a professional level, not least with regards to the students who have to endure the teaching and the required readings of so much poor stuff, and on a personal level. I take films, and the studying of them, seriously and get offended by those within film studies who do not.

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That quote from Truffaut above is slightly misleading. It is a fairly recent translation (I do not know the exact year) but made long after "auteur theory" became a thing. Obviously when Truffaut wrote it "auteur theory" was not a thing. The original text says "ce sont pourtant des cinéastes français et il se trouve - curieuse coïncidence - que ce sont des auteurs qui écrivent souvent leur dialogue et quelques-uns inventent eux-mêmes les histoires qu'ils mettent en scène" and nobody at the time would keep the word "auteurs" as it stands but translate it to "writers" most likely, or possibly "authors". So reading that translation gives the impression that Truffaut is coining a term, when he is actually only saying that some of these directors were also writers. This is a larger issue, which I might explore on a later date.

Victor Saville and Dark Journey (1937)

British cinema of the 1930s is naturally completely overshadowed by Alfred Hitchcock, but there is more to it than that. There were hundreds of films made, in various genres and various stages of professionalism. Both Michael Powell and Carol Reed were making their first efforts. But there were several others too, much less known, who should be subjects for further research. Previously I have written about Anthony Asquith. Two other filmmakers that interest me are Robert Stevenson and Victor Saville. They have in common that they were both prolific in various genres in the 1930s and then went to Hollywood when the war came. There Stevenson ended up working for Walt Disney and directing some of the biggest box office hits of all time. He will get a post later on.

Saville was born in 1895 I think, there is conflicted information on this. On BFI's profile it says both 1897 and 1896 and on IMDb and Wikipedia it says 1895. Early on he met Michael Balcon and produced a film with him in 1923, Woman to Woman, directed by Graham Cutts. (It was co-written by Hitchcock, who was also the art director and assistant director. Alma Reville was editor.) They then went their separate ways as producers during the 1920s but joined forces again in the early 1930s when Saville began directing films at Gaumont-British where Balcon was head of production. Later in the decade Saville became an independent producer/director (with a deal with Alexander Korda) and that is when he made Dark Journey (1937).

Saville claimed that he did not consider himself a great director and was more interested in producing, and this is what he primarily did when he moved to the US, where he became a producer first at MGM, and with a high profile. The transition from British to American films began with him producing two of MGM's British productions, The Citadel (King Vidor 1938) and Goodbye Mr. Chips (Sam Wood 1939). He then moved to the US where he first produced the great The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage 1940), which, together with Mervyn LeRoy's Escape from the same year, angered the Germans enough for them to ban all MGM's films. It also upset some people in Washington who called Saville in for a congressional hearing. (Borzage and the cast were also angry because Saville more or less argued he directed most of the film. A weird story which I do not understand.) He would then alternate between producing and directing (both for MGM and Columbia) until he returned to Britain in the late 1950s. His penultimate film as director was Paul Newman's first film, The Silver Chalice (1954), a film Newman famously hated. Saville had also required the rights to the books by Mickey Spillane so he was involved in the production of Robert Aldrich's incredible Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The last film on which he had a director's credit (as Phil Victor) was for the Spillane-based My Gun is Quick (1957), also directed by George White, otherwise an editor.

But those films are a far cry from the films he made in the 1930s, several with the musical actress Jessie Matthews. Musicals like Evergreen (1934), with music by Rodgers and Hart, and Evensong (1934), The Good Companions (1933) after J.B. Priestley's novel, an adaption of the German cross-dressing comedy Viktor und Viktoria (Reinhold Schünzel 1933) called First a Girl (1935), spy thrillers like I Was a Spy (1933) and Dark Journey and the drama about council politics, South Riding (1937). One thing they and many others of Saville's films have in common is that they have a strong female character in the lead. (His 1950 adaptation of Kipling's Indian spy adventure Kim is an exception.)

Dark Journey is set in Stockholm of 1918 (the Swedish title was Spioncentral Stockholm) and Vivien Leigh, exceptionally stylish and glamorous, plays the lead as a French spy posing as a Swiss owner of a fashionable clothes store in Stockholm while also posing as a German spy. She has two gentlemen callers, a British spy played by Anthony Bushell and a German spy played by Conrad Veidt, the latter of which is a more complicated love interest as he, being German, is an enemy. But the story in itself is not particularly interesting. More impressive is the production itself, an expensive one with impressive sets. The set designer for several of Saville's films was Alfred Junge, otherwise known for his work with Powell and Pressburger, but not here. Instead the sets were designed by Ferdinand Bellan and Andrej Andrejew, and there were three cinematographers working with Saville, Georges Périnal, Harry Stradling and Jack Cardiff (still only as camera operator). There is plenty of talent involved and it shows.

The film on the whole is rather luxurious and sometimes witty and could at times be mistaken for a Paramount production. The screenplay is by Lajos Biró, an Hungarian who wrote the scripts for a lot of exotic British films of the 1930s, as well as the play on which Mauritz Stiller's Hotel Imperial (1927) and Billy Wilder's Five Graves to Cairo (1943) are based. He also wrote the story for Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command (1928). It may or may not be a coincidence that all those three films were produced by Paramount. But while being impressive looking and with an attractive mood Dark Journey still falls short, and this is due to Saville I would suggest. The actors could have been better directed, to be made livelier and more passionate. They are a bit too reticent for my taste. In addition, the staging of individual scenes is often rather unimaginative or too plain.

Despite those concerns Dark Journey is still an accomplished film, and one that need not be cast aside. There are other films by Saville of interest too, such as South Riding, which is peculiar but I like it, or Evergreen or the drama Friday the Thirteenth (1933), showing a day in the life of a cross-section of English society. (The acting in them is not as reticent as in Dark Journey.) Even if Saville was not a great director he had an interesting career with many different stages and above all he was a key player in British cinema, leading up to the glorious 1940s when British cinema was at the height of what the art form can do.

The Mortal Storm. One decent couple in a room full of Nazis.
A link to my earlier article about Borzage.

The 500 000

A few days ago the stats showed that I had reached 500 000 visitors on the blog. That seemed like a good excuse to rest on my laurels (primarily because it is a fun thing to say). And it is still summer and the heatwave continues, even though I have tentatively began working again, reading student essays (no one's idea of fun) and such. But the next post, on Friday in two weeks, will be a regular kind. So see you then!

But before you go, a clip with Robert Redford, who announced his retirement this week.

A mountain man in Jeremiah Johnson (Sydney Pollack 1972)

Incredibly preppy in Barefoot in the Park (Gene Saks 1967), with Jane Fonda

With Brad Pitt in Spy Game (Tony Scott 2001)

Aston Martin

Already in my pre-teens I had developed an interest in British cars and the first thing I ever wrote for myself (i.e. not school-related or postcards to grandparents) was about Jaguar, one of Britain's most distinguished car makers. I wrote it on this typewriter which is still with me, although these days as a fashion statement rather than as a tool for writing.

While Jaguar is a fine car, a favourite is a green XK 120 from 1948, I still always favoured Aston Martin, and as it is the car that plays such a prominent part in the Bond films I have an excuse to write about it here. They became a pair in 1964 when Goldfinger came out and Q assigned an Aston Martin DB5 to Bond, with assorted extras such as bullet proof windows, machine guns and, famously, an ejector seat. ("Ejector seat? You're joking!" "I never joke about my work 007.") He got one in Fleming's novel Goldfinger too, but a DB Mark III as the novel came out in 1959 and Aston Martin began making the DB5 in 1963. DB is part of a tradition of Aston Martins, and stands for David Brown who was Aston Martin's owner from 1947 to 1972. When he was forced to sell the company, Aston Martin stopped using those letters until the DB7 appeared in 1994, when the company had new owners again. Ford was the new owner and they had also bought Jaguar, and in a way DB7 was a modified and Aston Martin-fied Jaguar. A brief but necessary glitch.

Today when the cast and crew of a new Bond film is revealed to the public the Aston Martin chosen for the film is also revealed, as if it too was a member of the cast. And it has almost always been a close collaboration between the car company and Eon Productions, the UK company that produces the films. Sometimes Eon has approached Aston Martin and asked what they have got to offer and sometimes Aston Martin has approached Eon and asked whether they might be interested in a certain car. But Roger Moore's Bond never drove an Aston Martin, for various reasons, and it is something that also exemplifies how the company was in a really bad shape for many years after David Brown had to sell it. The appearance of the V8 Volante (or variations thereof) in The Living Daylights (1987) was a conscious effort to help bring Aston Martin back to life. The company has often been in financial troubles, and this is still the case. It has lost money most every year for the last decade or so, but there are many individuals and firms (though no longer Ford) who are more than willing to provide financial support. I hope they manage to keep going. (Obviously Brexit will not be helpful.)

***

Aston Martin is a well-chosen brand because it is arch-British just like Bond and it is not an ordinary car. Few have even seen one in real life and even fewer have owned one or been in one, and so it is a fitting car for a character such as Bond. They are similar in style, origin and perhaps even decadence. Before Aston Martin, Bond drove a Bentley in the first two films, as he had in the books, but it is not as good a match because Bond is fast, irreverent and sexy, words that are a better fit for Aston Martin than Bentley. It was true for the DB5 as well as consecutive models which have appeared in the films, such as the DBS in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) or the V8 Volante in The Living Daylights. In the latest film, Spectre (2015), it was a DB10, which was made (handbuilt as usual) in only 10 units and exclusively for the film, one of which can be seen in this photo:

Given this it is absurd to consider that in three of Pierce Brosnan's Bond films he drove a BMW. Of course, Bond has driven all kinds of cars before, of many different marques, but the BMW's were not just ones he had to use because they were the only ones available; they were the official Bond cars. That was wrong on multiple levels. It was not a British car but a German one, and it was not a unique, somewhat otherworldly car but a car most people have seen, and many have owned themselves, if not new then as second hand. BMW might not be like a Toyota Corolla, but it is still a mainstream brand. A good year for Aston Martin is at best a couple of thousand cars sold. A good year for BMW is several million cars sold. And, even worse, one of those BMW's was a four-door sedan (750iL), not a sports car. An example of corporate sponsorship that goes against the concept of both film and character. Fortunately, for Brosnan's fourth Bond film Die Another Day (2002) Aston Martin was back, the V12 Vanquish. (It is still not a particularly good film though.) And Daniel Craig's Bond has always driven an Aston Martin, in all four films so far.

In Craig's first, Casino Royale (2006), a new Aston Martin (DBS V12) appeared as well as the old DB5. The new car meets a rather brutal end after being driven off the road and flipping over several times. I had long assumed that it was CGI at work but no, it was an actual car and driven by the stuntman Adam Kirley. What you see in the film (or clip below) is real. Aston Martin was meant to destroy the car afterwards, as is standard procedure, but they had developed an attachment to it so it is still with us. I have seen it in London and it looks surprisingly well, all things considered. It is a very impressive car.



The passionate interest I once had for cars, not just British ones but cars in general, is long gone and I do not spend my free time reading car magazines in three different languages as I did in the days of yore. But Aston Martin has maintained its hold on me. We have a long history together, and I therefore felt that it would be fun to write something about it here. I also think that one reason I am still interested in Aston Martin is that it means I keep something of my childhood intact, there is a connection there to my own past which is gratifying. The more so the older I get. Maybe when I retire I should even buy one.

Sean Connery in Goldfinger

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Often people seem to think that it was with Star Wars that merchandise based on a film first appeared but this was well-established much earlier than 1977. The Bond series is an example, and one of the key items for sale have been models of the various Aston Martin cars Bond has used, beginning in 1964 with a toy model of the DB5.

Another famous film with a noticeable Aston Martin is Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), where the car owned by Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren's character) is a DB2/4 Mk I Drophead coupé. It is featured throughout the film, and was especially required from Aston Martin.

While Roger Moore never drove an Aston Martin as Bond, he drove a DBS in the series The Persuaders! (1971-1972), as it was the car of his character Brett Sinclair. The most famous car associated with Moore is otherwise, with the possible exception of the Lotus in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the Volvo P1800 which his character Simon Templar drove in The Saint (1962-1969). A time when Volvo was considered cool and stylish and before it came to be used by only two kinds of characters in films: the wannabe bohemians or the boring fuddy-duddies.

The first Aston Martin, from 1914, called Coal Scuttle

100 years of Ingmar Bergman

Today is not only Bastille Day but also the centenary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, so he will (again) be the theme of this post. I was at a Bergman conference last month in Lund in the south of Sweden, the town towards which they travel in Wild Strawberries (1957), so he has had an unusually active presence of late. During and after the conference I read a lot of books about Bergman, some old ones I had read before and some new ones. Robin Wood's book really is one of the best, and as it has been updated and re-issued in 2013 (the version I read) it is both old and new. I was not particularly impressed by any of the entirely new books (you are better of just watching the films) but if I were to recommend one of those available in English it would be Alexis Luko's Sonatas, Screams and Silence (2016).

The Magician (Ansiktet 1958)

When I say I was not impressed by them I mean that I did not learn anything new about Bergman, so if you have not spent as much time with his film and his archives as I have you might find them more interesting, but I do think there are too many books about him. Despite there being many important topics that have not really been explored so far the books so often are about the same old things, or they use Bergman as an excuse to talk about other, unrelated things. Regardless of how important and good he was, the majority of filmmakers are vastly under-researched and among them there are many that are as interesting, or might be as interesting, as Bergman. Consider F.W. Murnau. How can it be that there has not been a single book in English about his life and work since Lotte Eisner's Murnau, originally from 1964, and then revised a bit in 1973? It is now out of print, and she did not say all there is to say about Murnau. The only Murnau book now in print is, I believe, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Ein Melancholiker des Films, published by Deutsche Kinemathek in 2003. And where are the books on, say, George Sherman and Márta Mészáros? (Catherine Portuges's book about Mészáros from 1993 seems to be out of print too.)

Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna 1963)

One reason why so many write about Bergman, as well as Hitchcock, is that they have not just made the films but also willingly talked about them and about themselves, and have had a strong public persona, carefully crafted. They are famous among people at large, not just among those interested in film, and fame obviously appeals to film scholars as much as to the next guy. It has become something of an industry, a self-perpetuating Bergman-Hitchcock-complex (and a handful of other directors), so there will be more books about them, and hopefully some might add something new.

But that apparent openness of Bergman to talk about himself and his films is also a problem because he is such a performance artist. Everything he does is an act, which is why you should never take anything he says as being true in any conventional way. He invents things, embellishes things or twists them around and adjusts them to his daily mood. Many of the stories he tells about his own life and his childhood are invented and often have little to do with what actually happened, whether it was something good or bad. Yet many critics and scholars use Bergman's own sayings and writings in an uncritical way as if he was telling it like it is (or was). He is not, and they should restrain themselves from relying on it. That is a topic I will have to explore further another day.

But here are some topics I have already explored because I too have written about Bergman of course. I do like his work after all, whether books, TV-productions, films or stage adaptations (his version of Yukio Mishima's play Madame de Sade was amazing), and because I have had so much to do with this work, professionally.

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/01/ingmar-bergman-stories.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/04/bergmans-films-of-1940s.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2013/05/bergmans-favourite-films.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2014/04/bergman-and-taxes.html