Creative freedoms and final cuts

What is frequently mentioned whenever Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) is brought up is Welles's contract with RKO, which allegedly gave him previously unheard-of creative freedom.

While there is no denying that Welles's contract was unusual, especially in the way it said that Welles was to have four responsibilities (actor, writer, producer and director) and a right to final cut. But disregarding the comparatively unimportant part of him also acting, this was not unique or unprecedented. Consider for example F.W. Murnau's contract with Fox for making Sunrise (1927), which gave him almost unlimited freedom (for his next two films for Fox that freedom was severely curtailed), or Ernst Lubitsch's contract with Warner Bros. in the early 1920s. ("Lubitsch shall have the sole, complete and absolute charge of the production of each such photoplay /.../ there shall be no interference of any kind whatsoever from any source, with Lubitsch, with respect to any matter or thing connected with the production, cutting and final completion of such photoplays.") That shows the high esteem in which the two Germans were held but it was not just already established directors from abroad who could get good deals in Hollywood. Consider Preston Sturges at Paramount for example, or Frank Capra at Columbia, and many other directors including some that are more or less forgotten today. Mitchell Leisen said once that since he was a "top director at Paramount" he just "snapped" his fingers and got whatever he wanted. (I wonder how accurate that was though.)

But the contract itself is not all that matters. For two case-studies let's look at two films from 1938, the year before Welles signed with RKO, at the height of the power of the studio system and at two different studies: Bringing Up Baby, made by Howard Hawks for RKO, and Jezebel, made by William Wyler for Warner Bros.

Hawks had signed a deal with RKO to make up to three films. After much time was spent on coming up with ideas and concepts Hawks settled on a short story by Hagar Wilde he had read, and called in Dudley Nichols to help make it into a feature-length script, gathered a cast and began filming. In Wyler's case, Warner Bros. already had Jezebel in mind for a film, and Wyler had many years earlier spoken about wanting to make it, so he was hired for this one film.

Once the contracts were signed Hawks and Wyler were in charge. They made all decisions, got the writers they wanted, went way over budget and over schedule, yet the studios could do nothing. The two films were made on Hawks and Wyler's terms and on their own schedules. They were responsible for the shape and form of the scripts too, and called for help with it from those they felt were right for it, in Hawks's case Nichols and in Wyler's case John Huston. (Wyler did on several occasions sign Huston up for writing or polishing scripts.) All the studios could do was hope for the best and write exasperated memos, such as one at RKO which complained that "All the directors in Hollywood are developing producer-director complexes and Hawks is going to be particularly difficult."

You could argue that Warner Bros. had been expecting to get a Warner Bros. film but instead they got a William Wyler film. But they had reason to be pleased with the finished result though, as Jezebel was a huge hit whereas Bringing Up Baby was not. RKO did not have any particular film in mind when the contract was signed but were still disappointed that they got a Howard Hawks production. Despite Hawks's deal for potentially three films only this one was made and then RKO had had enough of him.

The following year, 1939, Hawks made a film for Columbia and Wyler returned to his old partnership with Sam Goldwyn. Now though Hawks was more fortunate than Wyler, as he made Only Angels Have Wings without interference, a film that is not only one of his best but also what might be called the purest expression of all his themes and then current style. Wyler on the other hand made Wuthering Heights, where he and Goldwyn had different ideas of how it should end. Wyler's version was final and tragic, an image of Heathcliff frozen to death in the snow (the film is not a particularly faithful adaptation). That was not something Goldwyn could stomach and as Wyler refused to do a new ending Goldwyn had H.C. Potter direct a brief coda to lighten the mood, and removed Wyler's last scene.

***

The point is not that Hawks, Welles, Wyler, Murnau, Lubitsch were unique but that quite a few filmmakers in Hollywood could make films with great creative freedom, and not necessarily with less of it than their peers among prestigious European and Japanese filmmakers. Another point is that one must differentiate between staff directors and freelancers. A third, central, point is that the actual, lived reality in which they and all other filmmakers work is complex, constantly changing from time to time, from film to film, and often unsuitable for general theories and generalisations. It is this complexity which makes studying film history so interesting and exciting.

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Charles Vidor directed a couple of re-takes with Rita Hayworth for Only Angels Have Wings. I am not sure why, but in any event it does not effect the film.

Some sources and references:

Thomas Schatz's book The Genius of the System (1989)
Scott Eyman's book Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (1993)
Jan Herman's book A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler (1995)
Todd McCarthy's book Howard Hawks - The Grey Fox of Hollywood (1997)
Vanda Krefft's book The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (2017)

Richard B. Jewell's article "How Howard Hawks Brought Baby Up: An Apologia for the Studio System" (1984)

Mitchell Leisen was interviewed by Leonard Maltin in 1970 but now I do not recall for which publication.

Speaking of lesser known filmmakers, I am curious about the contracts of someone like Mervyn LeRoy, perhaps the most successful and powerful person among the staff directors at Warner Bros. in the 1930s. Further research is definitely warranted, not just because he made such important and fine films as Little Caesar (1930), I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) or They Won't Forget (1937) but also because he and producers Hal B. Wallis and Darryl F. Zanuck can be said to have been particularly important in the creation of Warner Bros. particular style of filmmaking. And how did he compare to someone like Roy Del Ruth, even lesser known today yet Warner's highest paid director at the time? But having read whatever books and articles about LeRoy I could find (which was not much) I was not particularly more enlightened, other than that James Cagney was not at all a fan of him as a director or as a person.

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.

***

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.

Henry Koster

As I have mentioned before when writing about Henry Hathaway and Henry King at 20th Century Fox, there was also a third Henry there, Henry Koster. As they were known as "the three Henrys" I feel I should write something about Koster too, as part of my on-going focus on Fox.

***

Henry Koster made close to 50 films but the overwhelming majority of them are more or less forgotten and unknown today. But some of them were very important in their own time and a few of them have become loved classics, albeit not for a general audience perhaps, and they are not necessarily known and remembered as "his" films. The Inspector General (1949) is known for being a Danny Kaye-film, and Harvey (1950) is known for being the film with James Stewart and a giant, invisible rabbit. But they are also indicative of the kind of films that Koster primarily made; slightly whimsical fairy-tales and musicals, often with a religious theme. I say primarily for a few of them, such as No Highway (1951, aka No Highway in the Sky), My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953), D-Day the Sixth of June (1956), strike a very different tone.

Koster was born in Berlin in 1905, as Hermann Kosterlitz. His mother was very musical and loved the opera so young Hermann grew up with music. His father, a travelling salesman in lingerie, was however not a music lover and Koster suggested in an interview that this might have been one reason why his parents separated in 1910. His mother wanted him to become a musician but Koster was more interested in painting and drawing and he did cartoons and illustrated children's stories. But he did have an interest in films too. He worked as a newsreel cameraman and an editor, and wrote some film criticism. He adored Ernst Lubitsch and was a close friend to both Billy Wilder and Joe May. (The artistic crowd used to hang out at Romanisches Café, and that included various filmmakers. Even Lubitsch might drop by from time to time.) When Koster was 19 he began writing film scripts and his career as a filmmaker got started. His first acknowledged credit was for Die große Gelegenheit (1925), directed by Lorand von Kabdebo, and he would then write several films a year. One, Eins + Eins = Drei, he wrote together with Béla Balázs, and it was directed by Felix Basch in 1927. But he most frequently wrote for Kurt Bernhardt (later known as Curtis Bernhardt). These were mostly dramas or more serious work and Koster felt closer to light comedy so in 1928 he began working with the writer Hans Wilhelm, in that genre. In 1932 he helped Erich Engel with the direction of Fünf von der Jazzband and soon he was directing on his own. The most important thing to mention though is that the producer of Fünf von der Jazzband, Joe Pasternak, became impressed with Koster's work on the film, and would remember him. They were to become great friends and also the saviours of Universal Pictures in Hollywood. But that was still in the future.

A more immediate concern was the rise of the Nazis. Life in Germany had been ugly for some time and when the Nazis came to power Koster, as a Jew, had to flee. That was in 1933 and he went to Paris, to where Kurt Bernhardt had already moved and they made some films together. Then Pasternak got in touch in 1934. He was a producer for Universal Pictures's European productions and was at the time based in Budapest, Hungary. He wanted Koster to come and work for him and he did, writing and directing a number of films around Europe that Pasternak produced, until Carl Laemmle, the boss of Universal, wanted Pasternak to come to Hollywood. He said he would be happy to if Koster could come with him. Reluctantly Laemmle said yes, and later that year Koster was having drinks at the Algonquin Hotel in New York with his wife.

But in Hollywood there were no jobs. Although Koster had a contract with Universal they were not willing to let him do anything, so he just went to the studio every day, sat under a big tree and read the newspapers. Universal, which during the beginning of the 1930s had had great successes with their horror films, were now on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy and they were at a loss as what to do. Fortunately for them they finally asked Pasternak and Koster what they would do if they were to make a film. Koster told them an idea he had, and the studio went along with it. Then the casting began and Koster and Pasternak found an actress called Edna Mae Durbin, who had never acted in a feature before but had done some radio performances. They fell for her and Koster began coaching her privately to prepare her for her proper film debut. The film, Three Smart Girls (1936), became a huge hit and Durbin too, as Deanna Durbin. That is what saved Universal from financial ruin and Pasternak, Koster and Durbin made several more films together, all light comedies with lots of music. He frequently worked with the cinematographer Joseph A. Valentine, and the films can be said to be made under the spell of Lubitsch, without being nowhere near as good. (Lubitsch did give his approval after having seen a preview of Three Smart Girls.) Beside the films with Durbin, Koster and Valentine also made The Rage of Paris (1938) which was Danielle Darrieux first film in Hollywood. She is good but the film is not.

Darrieux in the sofa, with Helen Broderick and Mischa Auer.

Even though Pasternak and Koster had initiated the Deanna Durbin film series, Universal felt that Koster worked too slow and in 1938 he was replaced as director and Norman Taurog took his place. The "Durbin unit" as it was called was a collective approach in which only Durbin was irreplaceable. Although Koster was soon brought back. In 1944 Pasternak and Koster left Universal for MGM, which Koster did not like as it was less free and more impersonal than Universal, and he and Pasternak had a falling out. Soon Koster left MGM too. In 1947 he was hired by Samuel Goldwyn to make one film, The Bishop's Wife, which happens to be one of Koster's best films. He then signed with 20th Century Fox where he stayed almost 20 years until he got fed up with filmmaking in 1965 and retired. He went back to his original artistic interest, painting.

***

There are several reasons for why The Bishop's Wife stands out, and it is mainly due to the team Goldwyn had assembled. Gregg Toland was cinematographer, Robert E. Sherwood was the credited writer and Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett did uncredited writing too. The cast is lovely, with Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven in a peculiar love triangle. Niven plays a bishop, Young his wife and Grant an angel sent to earth to give spiritual guidance to the bishop, who has lost his ways and is jeopardising his career, his integrity and his marriage. But Grant and Young fall in love, even though he is not of this world, and the bishop gets increasingly jealous of the flirtatious relationship between his wife and "his" angel. It does have all of Koster's typical hallmarks, including some choir singing. But, as is also a hallmark, something is still missing. It does not rise above the good. There is no greatness in Koster's work, however amicable or sweet the films might be, and The Bishop's Wife is not as sharp, stylish or emotional as it could have been, given the circumstances.

At Fox he was not among the top tier. He is not as good or important as Henry King of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, or Hathaway. And he does not seem to have been all that happy with his position. He got along well with Darryl F. Zanuck, who was the boss, but Zanuck was not the producer on Koster's films and that meant that Zanuck did not consider Koster or his work as important as his favourites, such as the other Henry's, or John Ford who did some films there occasionally. While there is no reason to question Zanuck's priorities, they were better filmmakers and greater artists, one might get the feeling that Koster felt neglected. ("[Zanuck] had a way of keeping other producers and directors a little down so his picture could stand out at the end of the year." Koster said.)

But he still did some good films other than The Bishop's Wife, including two of his most famous: Harvey and The Robe. The first was not made at Fox but he was making it for Universal, although not with the same crew as in the 1930s. It was a stage play originally, but it is a typical Koster, with a wonderful performance by James Stewart as the man with the rabbit friend only he can see. It is a weird concept but it works quite well in the film, my only complaint is the slightly hysteric acting of some of the supporting cast. But when it is just Stewart, it can be rather spellbinding. He had also played the part on stage before the film.



The Robe is a biblical epic about a Roman military tribune, played by Richard Burton, during the time of Christ. But it is more famous for being the first film shot in CinemaScope. Koster had also directed Burton's first American film, My Cousin Rachel, the moody 19th century-set drama based on Daphne du Maurier's novel and written and produced by Nunnally Johnson.

But I wonder if No Highway is not the film of Koster I like best of those I have seen. It was made in England and about an airplane designer who is convinced that there is a weakness in one particular model and is desperately trying to stop it from being used. Part of the film takes place on board one such plane and there he tries to convince the crew and one of the passengers, a famous actress played by Marlene Dietrich, about the danger. He is played by James Stewart, who gives a typically lovely performance, and it is beautifully shot by Georges Périnal, and it is quite emotional and suspenseful. Stewart's engineer is a widower and single parent and a lot of the film's emotional undercurrent comes from this fact and his relationship with his daughter, played by Janette Scott.

When Koster was asked about his own work, there are two quotes that are revealing. Once when asked about whether he tried to "put [his] signature on the films" he said "I tried to. I couldn't always penetrate, I couldn't get through, but I tried to reflect my personality, which today [1980] would probably be too gentle and too sentimental and too coy." In another interview he said: "I like to have that family feeling. I have never been too much involved in love stories of young men and women, but always with parents and children, or friends. I don't know. It must be in me, something that I feel very strong about family, and about religion. These are things I believe in, in my own life, too"

To claim Henry Koster as a forgotten master or anything like that is not a particularly fruitful exercise. He may be disappointed in not having had the ability to develop his own ideas but there is no reason to assume that he would have been greater if he had. One of the later films he himself really liked, Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955), is to me close to insufferable. But film history is not just about the masters and most filmmakers are more like Henry Koster than John Ford, and knowing them and their place in that history is relevant too.

Deanna Durbin and Koster on the set of Spring Parade (1940).

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Print sources:
Easy the Hard Way (1956), by Joe Pasternak
Henry Koster (1987), interviewed by Irene Kahn Atkins.
The Genius of the System (1996 [1988]) by Thomas Schatz.
Just Making Movies: Company Directors in the Studio System (2005) by Ronald L. Davis.

Links to my writings on 20th Century Fox: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/search/label/20th%20Century%20Fox

2017-12-03 I amended the part about the making about Three Smart Girls to clarify how Deanna Durbin made her appearance. I also added that Harvey was originally a play and that Stewart had played the same part on stage before.

Thoughts about acting

When I was a young boy I used to act in school. Not in plays necessarily but in comic sketches, and sometimes in what might be described as soap operas. Me and a classmate would come up with the idea and then ask a couple of other classmates if they wanted to participate, under our direction, such as it was. We put up a little show every Friday, or at least every second Friday, for years. The other year I was in a Swedish film, Ego (Lisa James-Larsson 2013) and I had two lines, as a travel agent, in a scene with the leading actress. It certainly was not method acting but I was pretending to be something I was not, or somebody other than myself. My question is this: was I acting then? Or does acting involve more, must for example emotions also be involved? There were emotions in my scene. I was laughing and my "character" took an interest in the well-being of the customer. I was pretending not only to be a travel agent but also a fictive person who cared about another fictive person. Is that want acting is all about? I often wonder about that, although rarely with reference to myself. But here are some other thoughts regarding acting which does not involve me.

***

Sometimes after I have seen what I think is a marvellous performance I will see the actor again in an interview, or occasionally even on the tube, and being startled by the fact that they are exactly like they were in the film. What I thought was a great performance was only them being more or less themselves. This happens more frequently with local actors but one more famous example is Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979). This is part of what makes acting and actors so intriguing. We might assume that a particular thing the actor is doing adds nuance and depth to a part and congratulate the actor for it, not knowing that this is not part of the act but a natural habit that the actor does all the time, whether on set or alone in the car. They might not even be aware of it. So it is something that is always there, and not unique for this particular performance for this particular part. But if what they do is something that is part of their natural behaviour it feels peculiar to regard it as great acting.

It is different with people like Kevin Costner for example. When I have seen interviews with him he comes across as rather stiff and dull. But in films he is not like that at all, he can be very likeable, or very scary, even an action hero, which is very far from how he appears in those interviews. Whereas Clint Eastwood, who directed Costner, and acted against him, in what might be their finest achievement, A Perfect World (1993), does not differ all that much from how he appears to be in private from how he appears in films. That would suggest that Costner is a much better actor, because he can believably transform himself into somebody whom is very different from who Costner is in person.

But there is more to it than that, because you must also come across as alive, present, believable, even if you are not a great actor you have to blend in with the film. In Crossroads (Tamra Davis 2002) three young women go on a road trip and they are played by Britney Spears, Zoë Saldana and Taryn Manning. Neither of them do their parts well, they all stumbled on their lines and come across as uncertain and unfocused. Whereas Eastwood come across as natural in his films Spears, even though she is playing a person close to herself, does not. It might be a question of being comfortable in front of the camera, which none of the three women succeed in being.

Here is when direction becomes vital. A recent article by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian about Lauren Bacall and her performance in To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks 1944) did not once mention the name of the director. Bradshaw mentioned the studio, the writers and other actors but it was as if he thought that directors are irrelevant as for as actors and performances are concerned. This is not unique for Bradshaw but a more general tendency, to talk about direction and acting as distinct from each other. But they are of course the opposite of that; directing to a large extent specifically means working with the actors. In creating a good atmosphere, in getting the right performance and getting a good performance. If an actor performs badly the director is partly to blame. (I have seen episodes of Next Top Model where the young would-be models are criticised by the jury for their performance on a photo shot, but that is unfair because the models do not know anything, they only do exactly what the photographer tells them to, so if they do badly it is not their fault but the photographers.)

Another job for the director is to see to it that there is harmony between the various actors, that they do not go off in different directions. Some directors care more than others about such things. Some are content with letting the actors do their thing, others control and modulate them, just as they do with the design, the editing and the imagery. Ernst Lubitsch played all the parts himself beforehand to show his actors how they should do it. Two directors closely associated with MGM, George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli, had very different ideas of what kind of acting they wanted. For example, in Minnelli's films the energy of the actors is directed outwards whereas in Cukor's films it is directed inwards. Likewise, Akira Kurosawa's preferred style of acting is different from Yasujiro Ozu's and Hasse Ekman's is different from Ingmar Bergman's. This is an important aspect when considering the director as auteur, and it brings nuance to the often simplistic idea of a "studio style".

Hepburn and Holliday in Adam's Rib (George Cukor 1949)

Then there are different kinds of actors. There are those just playing a type and there are character actors, a term often misunderstood or at least used in different ways. A character actor sometimes refers to somebody who does not play a particular type, but varies from film to film. Sometimes it refers to an actor who plays eccentric characters, distinct or flamboyant. Walter Brennan was a character actor. Takashi Shimura played a tough samurai, a natural leader, in Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa 1954) but in his previous film for Kurosawa, Ikiru (1952), he played a meek old man, sick with cancer, and almost the antithesis of his part in Seven Samurai. But often it is not that easy to distinguish. Look at Toshiro Mifune or Al Pacino for example. They are often stylised and eccentric, but not always. They can be subdued too. Sometimes they play more generic roles, other times they create deep and rounded characters. But none of this necessarily mean that one is better than the other. Meryl Streep changes a lot from part to part, Judi Dench less so, but that does not mean Streep is automatically a better actress.

Al Pacino is by some regarded as the greatest actor for the last 40 years or so, other finds him too flamboyant and loud. Although there is no contradiction between the two of course, being loud and flamboyant does not mean that you are not a good actor. With Pacino, his low-key performances such as in Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell 1997) or Insomnia (Christopher Nolan 2002) are all the more impressive. And in Heat (Michael Mann 1995) where he alternates between low-key and overly expressive, depending upon the situation and what it requires (I mean what it requires of his character Vincent Hanna), he might have given his best performance. But it is hard to say what good acting is, other than perhaps to say "I know it when I see it." Sometimes when people say that they disliked a performance what they mean is that they dislike the actor, which is not the same thing. It is sometimes a question of what kind of acting style a person prefers. Some like extravagant actors like Jack Nicholson, others prefer the more low-key acting style of someone like Daniel Auteuil. But one might require as much skill and effort as the other. Acting is not just showing up, there is a lot of work and technique involved, regardless of acting style. There are of course also those who dislike actors and think that amateurs are much better, in some quest for as much realism as possible. But to consider realism as the main goal and purpose is to have a limited view of cinema, and art,

When I was growing up in Sweden, British TV was all the rage and people were saying "And the actors are so good!" It was an axiom that British TV series had the best actors. But it was rather peculiar because what was it actually based on? How were they better than actors in series from other countries? It was just something one said, rather than something one had actually experienced. And I feel that is often the case when the quality of acting and actors are discussed. It is hardly ever based on a real study and evaluation of the acting in question.

Two of my favourite performances happen to be British, Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (David Lean 1945) and Michael Redgrave in The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith 1951), but I would have a hard time explaining why. Why in the sense "What makes them different from other performances, by themselves and by others". One reason though is the conflict between the reserve (and the stiff upper lip that is required) and their, Laura's in Brief Encounter and Andrew's in The Browning Version, struggle with it, and ultimate inability to adhere to it (they both have breakdowns, crying uncontrollably), It is great acting, but part of the power comes not from the actual acting but the societal context, which is not part of the performances but help make the performances what they are. Another favourite performance is Clu Gulager in The Killers (Don Siegel 1964). Siegel often encouraged his actors to be quirky and odd, or cool, and none succeeded more than Gulager. It is a rather mannered performance, and he is always fussing around with something, at one point doing push-ups during a scene. It is a great performance. But whether it is great acting is another question all together.

Thinking about directors

Four years ago I wrote a blog post called On Authorship - or Auteurship but I was never completely satisfied with it, and as my thoughts on the subject has evolved since then I have now written a new piece, which incorporates parts of the old piece. It is primarily aimed at students:

When the first films were made at the end of the 19th-, beginning of the 20th century it was no secret who made them. The brothers Lumière for example, or Georges Méliès. As cinema evolved and developed the director became more and more important and by the 1910s some directors were global phenomenon such as D.W. Griffith, Thomas Ince, Fred Niblo, Cecil B. DeMille and Victor Sjöström, and it has been like that ever since. In the 1920s Ernst Lubitsch had become such a superstar that he was invited to the White House and had songs written about him. He was celebrated and influential in the US, Europe and East Asia. This background is important for this discussion since it shows that the history of directors and the history of cinema run parallel with each other. It is not an accident that the director has almost always been singled out as the most important person on the set. But they of course do not work in isolation.

The idea of the director as auteur, as the creative force behind the film, has often been criticised, even ridiculed. Pauline Kael was one who was skeptical. In the 1970s and 1980s it was customary to dismiss the director, any author, for ideological reasons. Some well-known examples of such views are Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Stephen Heath. But these efforts were never all that satisfying or successful. Films are made by living, breathing individuals with ideas, beliefs and dreams and although these individuals work with restrictions (financial, cultural, political, personal) they still impact the films that they make, and the books that they write. No film is completely unique, but no film is completely like another film either, and the differences matter. Any work of art, such as a film, is the result of the combining forces of an artist's personal agency and the context in which the artist works, just as Foucault's writings are the combination of his own beliefs and the context in which he was working. He is firmly embedded in a French post-war academic culture. So looking at the auteur/artist/author must not mean neglecting context or social circumstances; in good auteur criticism/scholarship discussing the relationship between the author and her context is key. But since one person's engagement with her surroundings and context is different from that of another person, the art works will be different too. Anthony Mann's films are easily distinguished from Budd Boetticher's, just as Picasso is different from Braque. A work of art is an expression of the particular artist's engagement with the particular context in which she finds herself, and that is true for painters, writers and directors alike, if they have that interest. Emphasising the author can also be a progressive, political act. Bringing forward women filmmakers and filmmakers from minorities and non-Western regions is an important part of auteur studies.

The extraordinary ending of Ride Lonesome (Boetticher 1959)

Some think that "auteur" is synonymous with "a good director", with particularly talented directors and "art cinema", but that is not satisfactory. It is the consistencies of the director's body of work, not the quality of it, that matters here. Auteurism is not about giving medals and awards, it is empiric work. Being called an auteur is sometimes seen as a badge of honour, a club for the elite, but that is not a good way of going about it. The way that deep focus has been seen as the exclusive style of certain filmmakers (Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and William Wyler) rather than accurately seen as a common tool used by many filmmakers, good or bad, all throughout film history, is a good example of how ideas of auteurs as exceptional can lead to wrong and ahistorical assumptions. (See my earlier post on deep focus.)

Another assumption is that there is an "auteur theory". There is not, and never has been. Even Andrew Sarris, who did unfortunately use that phrase, said almost simultaneously that it was not a theory. “[u]ltimately the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude.” he wrote in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions (1968). It should preferably be regarded as an approach, one among many, of looking at films where a given film is discussed in the context of the film's director's other films. What are Hou Hsiao-hsien's trademarks, how does he view the world, and how has his style and his themes evolved through his career? How does Three Times (2005) compare to Café Lumière (2003) and Millennium Mambo (2001), and are they different from A City of Sadness (1989), and if different, how? These are questions that auteurism are concerned with, and they are the same questions that critics and scholars asked themselves in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s as well, about Fritz Lang or John Ford and many others. And before there was cinema, these questions were asked about writers and painters. For some it may seem uninteresting or unnecessary, but that does not make it wrong or romantic. Barthes himself wrote loving tributes to several auteurs, not least Michelangelo Antonioni.

 Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien 2003)

One of the most persistent arguments against auteurs is that cinema is a collaborative art form. Although that is true it is not the final word, a case-by-case approach is needed here. There are editors and cinematographers and composers and actors who are very important and can have a profound influence on a film, but they all do just their part. The directors are (in most cases) the only ones involved in the whole process and the director is also usually the one to whom the others answer. They usually write the scripts and if they have not written the original script they almost always rewrite it, officially or unofficially. The director is also the only one who is concerned with both the look and the sound of the film, with camera angles, editing, decor, colour, effects and so on. And, of course, the only one who directs the actors. There are exceptions. Some producers, such as David O. Selznick, have been intimately involved with all aspects of many of the films they have been producing, and some writers, like Carl Mayer in Weimar Germany, take on responsibilities that are usually the director's. Some films can have two or more auteurs of distinction. For example The Social Network (2010) has two, director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, and it does not feel like they are really compatible. Midnight (1939) should be approached both as an important part of Billy Wilder's oeuvre (he wrote it together with Charles Brackett) and of Mitchell Leisen's oeuvre, who directed it. Another point worth making is that whether a director has a contract with a studio or not does not matter within auteur studies. Ingmar Bergman (who worked for SF most of his life) is not less of an auteur than somebody using their own digital camera and their own money. Making very personal films, like Bergman or John Ford or Andrei Tarkovsky, is more a question of integrity, ambition and judgement than whether you have a contract or not. Even in pre-1960s Hollywood many filmmakers had contracts that gave them comprehensive creative control, none more so than Lubitsch when he came to Hollywood in the early 1920s. (It is often said that Orson Welles was given unprecedented creative control when he made Citizen Kane (1941) but that is not the case. Creative control yes, but not in a unique way.) Ultimately, arguments against auteurs are best answered by pointing at the films. If there are strong links between the films of a particular filmmaker, and if those films are different from those by other filmmakers, then that is what matters.

Directors are often called auteurs as if the words were synonymous, but they are not. All directors are not auteurs, whether someone is is revealed through studying the films. But most well-known filmmakers, regardless if they are contemporary or from earlier days, are auteurs after all, be they from Iran, Brazil or working in Hollywood. Yet just calling somebody an auteur is not enough, further elaborations are needed. There are different kinds of auteurs. For example, one approach I have been developing is to distinguish between external and internal auteurs. An external auteur is somebody who just makes the films, with thematic and stylistic consistencies, but without having any personal presence in them. An internal auteur is somebody who not only makes the films but appears in them as well, and/or makes explicit autobiographical films, in short somebody whose personal presence is experienced directly. Charlie Chaplin, Hasse Ekman, Chantal Akerman, Ingmar Bergman, Clint Eastwood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut are some obvious examples.

Hasse Ekman in The Banquet (1948), which he also wrote, directed and co-produced.

Howard Hawks might also be considered an internal auteur, and in many ways an excellent example of the whole concept of auteurs. In all his films certain recurring characters, scenes, lines of dialogue, stylistic ideas, ethical discussion, ideas about life and love and gender, are to be found (and his voice). They are easy to recognise. He also was a freelancer, and often his own producer. But just because Hawks is an auteur does not mean that he alone has contributed to his films. There were indisputable contributions from writers such as Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway; cinematographers like Joseph Walker and Russell Harlan; actors like Walter Brennan, Lauren Bacall, Cary Grant, John Wayne, among others, and his wife (for a few years) Nancy Keith, aka "Slim". But the strongest input, and the special particularity that separates a film by Hawks from all other films made, comes from Hawks himself. Not least since he frequently got the inspiration for the films from his personal experiences and his life. Any film by Hawks is to some extent about him, he is embodied in them.

Auteur studies is empirical work and it requires a lot of effort to figure out who is responsible for what in a given film. Only after seeing most, if not all, of a director's films is it possible to tell whether he or she was an auteur, and in addition seeing films made by other contemporary directors, and other films written by the writers this director worked with, and other films shot by the cinematographers this director worked with, and so on and so forth. There are also useful questions to help in the research, such as:

How does the director use music?
Are there particular recurring characters?
Are there visual motifs that figure throughout the director's oeuvre?
Does the director have a special view of space, or use space in a specific way?
Can any specific views on questions about death and love be found?
Are there certain words or expressions that return in different films?
If a director is working for a particular studio (like Paramount or UFA or Toho or SF), how does the style of his films compare to the films of that studio in general.

The films in themselves are not enough either but interviews, biographies, on-set reporting and history overviews are also essential tools for getting to the bottom of the issue. But most important is still looking at the films.

Chocolat (Claire Denis 1988)

But it is not only hard work. Watching the films of a particular director, seeing how his or her films belong to each other, how they seem to be engaged in conversations with each other, to notice how Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks 1939) is intimately connected to his Hatari! (1962), how Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing (2001) and Enough Said (2013) are dealing with similar people with similar problems yet with different emphasises and solutions, is, ultimately, the joy of auteurism, besides its scholarly usefulness.

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A related posts about cinematographers.

2014-03-12. I always forget to include references. Here are some articles/essays:
Pauline Kael: Circles and Squares
Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes: Cher Antonioni
Michel Foucault: What is an Author?
As a bonus, a contemporary, nuanced text by James Naremore: Authorship,, Auteurism, and Cultural Politics.

National, transnational and a-national cinema

Czech New Wave, French New Wave, New Australian Cinema. To use the nation as an organising principle when talking about films and film history is to some extent straightforward and uncomplicated. Writing a book about the film history of Chile is a perfectly legitimate subject. Nations and nationality clearly matters. But how and when is not always clear and it is easy to become lazy.

The nation is an external definition we use when discussing films, it does not come from the films in themselves, such as colour or camera movements. Sometimes we are not even aware of a film's nationality. But we run the risk of being essentialistic, when the nation is deemed to be the cause and effect of the style, theme and character of a given film. Capricious Summer (Rozmarné léto1968) is like it is because it is a Czech film. Or Bergman's films are said to be like they are because they are Swedish, or Scandinavian. But could not similar films have been made in any other national context? Does the perceived bleakness and austerity of Bergman's films make them more Swedish than films that are lightweight and colourful? If the answer is yes to the first question and no to the second, than how central is Bergman's alleged Swedishness? To be precise, is there anything other than the political borders that make us talk of national cinemas. Does a nation have a specific soul that comes across in the films made in that nation? It is very common to hear people say "Well, that film doesn't capture the true Sweden (or Scotland, or Senegal, or South Korea and so on)." as if there was such a truth to be captured. I do not believe there is, and even if there was such a truth, who would to decide what it is? A governmental committee? A vote among the readers of a popular tabloid?

An additional question is which nation we are talking about. When (self-defined) Algerians make films in France about Algerians subjects, or Greeks in Australia, should they be discussed as part of French and Australian cinema, or Algerian and Greek, or both, or neither? There are no obvious answers to these questions, but as long as the reason for one view being used over the other is clearly spelt out then that problem can be contained. Also, when a state has several nations within its borders, placing all films made in that state under one nation-heading becomes politically (in-)sensitive. My previous post about Peter Weir mentioned Green Card (1990). It is often called an American film but it is actually a French/Australian co-production, with an Australian crew, set in New York, with a French leading actor and an American leading actress. If discussing it in a national context, which context should we choose? But there is another form of nationalism, the now so popular term transnationalism, which is more suitable when discussing Green Card, especially since the theme of that film concerns migration, immigration and different nationalities.  Even though it has become popular in academic circles to talk about transnational cinema the word in itself does not signify anything important, it is just a tool. Possibly most films are transnational, in that they have cast members from different countries, crew members from different countries, are co-productions, are bilingual, are shot in different countries, and so on. Whether or not the transnational aspect is interesting or relevant depends on the specific case. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of Swedish/Norwegian co-productions were made, shot in two versions, one in Swedish and one in Norwegian. Here it would be interesting to analyse the twin-productions and see to what extent the different versions were tweaked to become more Swedish and Norwegian, or if they were identical besides the language spoken.

Another interesting topic is the transnational-ness of Hollywood blockbusters, and how they, in order to be marketable all over the world, in different ways try to engage with the world outside the US. That could involve shooting on location in China and/or having a multi-ethnic cast and/or downplaying differences between the US and other countries. The examples I gave above, of films by Algerians in France and Greeks in Australia, could be discussed as transnational rather than national. In my thesis on Hasse Ekman I also write about Ernst Lubitsch. Both as an inspiration for Ekman but also as an interesting transnational filmmaker. Lubitsch was born in Germany, this is where he made his first films, and then in the early 1920s he moved to Hollywood. But only in person. Most of his films were still set in Europe, sprinkled across the continent and Britain, and sometimes they take place in some kind of Mitteleuropa fantasy. These films are often based on plays and stories of European origins. To establish whether the themes and messages of these films are American, German, Polish, French, British and/or Hungarian would require some deep studies of nationhood and nationality and would still probably only lead to reductiveness and simplifications without having made us any the wiser. In the end, maybe their nationality is primarily Lubitschland. As Dilys Powell pointed out in the early 1940s, questions of authorship and nationality are intimately linked, but so is authorship and transnationalism. Weir, Phillip Noyce, Ang Lee, Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are some current filmmakers where transnationalism becomes a central part of their authorship.  

But transnationalism does not automatically mean that the national aspects disappeas. It is often a case of competing national stories in the films, rather than a genuine blending of them, or disappearance of them. However, when nationality ceases to matter, I would like to use the term a-national cinema. Films in which the national setting is of no importance, films where the story might have taken place anywhere, or possibly nowhere. Many films might be said to fit this category. The fact that they are made in a particular country is of course unquestionable, but if that country does not matter, neither story-wise nor theme-wise or otherwise, then I would suggest they are a-national. In my thesis I am arguing that many of Hasse Ekman's films can be called a-national. That is also connected with his distinct (positive) urbanity, which makes him somewhat unusual in Swedish cinema. There are no hymns to the Swedish countryside or the Stockholm archipelago, which otherwise tends to be a central feature of a majority of Swedish films, including several of Bergman's films. But that is a discussion for a later post.

Tintin

The early Tintin albums were inspired by silent cinema, and they in turn inspired cinema. But all of Hergé's 23 proper Tintin albums, are should they be called graphic novels?, are very cinematic yet there have been few film versions. I myself have seen only one, the non-animated Tintin and the Blue Oranges (Tintin et les oranges bleues 1964), which is not based on any of the albums. I have also seen a TV-version, which was actually pretty good.

But I have never felt the need for any film adaptations. For me the albums have been enough, and I have been a Tintin fan since I was a young boy. I have read them in Swedish, English and French, and I even have an album in Japanese at home. I know them all very well, and I adore them. Especially the style, Hergé's ligne claire, which has become a very influential and easily recognisable style. Another thing about them is how they grew over time, developed in many different ways. Hergé changed when the world changed, both the global world and his own personal world, and the albums changed with him. First they were imaginative but rather crude, and in the case of Tintin in the Congo (Tintin au Congo 1931, re-edited colour version 1946) embarrassingly racist. Then came the middle period of such work as the anti-fascist King Ottokar's Sceptre (Le Sceptre d'Ottokar 1938, re-edited colour version 1947) and then the late masterpieces with the emotionally complex and beautifully illustrated Tintin in Tibet (Tintin au Tibet 1960) as the high point. That album, I think, is one of the greatest drawn art work of the 20th century. Other highlights are Blue Lotus (Le Lotus bleu 1936, re-edited colour version 1946), the album with which Hergé stopped being "just" a cartoonist and became an artist and storyteller, and the double feature The Seven Crystal Balls (Les 7 boules de cristal 1948) and Prisoners of the Sun (Le Temple du soleil 1949).
Now Steven Spielberg's film The Adventures of Tintin is here, and I saw it yesterday. Spielberg has been a fan of Tintin for several decades and got the rights from Hergé's, or to use his proper name Georges Remi's, wife in 1983, after Remi had died. Remi liked Spielberg's films and was happy for him to have the rights. But it has taken a long time before anything came of it.

I liked the film. For one thing it looks great, it is witty and it got a very strong drive. But somehow what is good about the film is also a problem. Spielberg has such a strong personality as a filmmaker, his style is easily recognisable and forceful and it all but negates Hergé's presence. What I mean is that although based on two albums there is very little left of the feel, texture and style of Tintin, whereas almost every shot clearly signals Spielberg's presence. It is not so much an adaptation as an appropriation. These means that there is a strong sense of wonder, and dazzling displays of visual imaginations, Spielberg at the top of his game. But there is also a certain breathlessness to the film, which I feel is a bit inappropriate. Hergé's albums are not breathless, they are more measured. Also, I did not like John Williams music, and there was too much of it at that. One thing that has got lost altogether is the subconscious level. Hergé filled his albums with hallucinations, dreams and nightmares, elements which he sometimes took from his own dark secrets. But the film is all surface.

They have taken the album The Secret of the Unicorn (Le Secret de la Licorne 1943) and blended it with The Crab With the Golden Claws (Le Crabe aux pinces d'or 1941, 1943). They are not related, but since they have taken so very little from The Crab..., I suppose they just wanted that album's first meeting of Tintin and Haddock . But when I saw the film and the traitorous first mate Allan appeared I thought, almost angrily, "Hey, he's not supposed to be in this adventure!" Then I realised what they had done and calmed down. It also says something about the quality of the film that I immediately recognised Allan, even though I was not expecting him to be there.

Of the new things that has been added to the film (but which are not in any album) a car chase, involving a hawk, a tank and a collapsing damn, was particularly breathtaking, even though they took place in a stereotypical fantasy of a Middle East kingdom. But the best part of the film was the opening, after the title sequence. It takes place on a square where there is a market, and a man is drawing a picture of somebody else. But we do not see the faces of either man. When the faces are revealed we see that it is Georges Remi drawing Tintin. I thought it was a nice gesture.

So there it is. A meeting between two of the most successful makers of popular art in the 20th century, Hergé and Spielberg (and Peter Jackson on the side), has resulted in a film which is both a dazzling piece of film, and a disappointment. It actually ties in well with what I wrote not long ago about adaptations. It is also fun to consider which other filmmaker's would have been suitable. A version of The Castafiore Emerald (Les Bijoux de la Castafiore 1963) by Ernst Lubitsch or perhaps even by Eric Rohmer would have been something. A Michael Mann version of The Calculus Affair (L'Affaire Tournesol 1956) would be interesting as well. But the beauty of the albums is still unsurpassed.

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There is a very good documentary about Tintin and Hergé called Tintin et Moi (Anders Ostergaard, 2003). Not sure of its availability but look for it, it is worth the effort.

Carole Lombard

Since it is Carole Lombard's birthday I'll take the opportunity to post some clips. She was one of the greatest of comediennes, even though she could do drama as well. She had a very interesting voice, and a slightly otherworldly allure. She was made for screwball comedy, perhaps because she was a bit of a screwball herself. It is a sad thing that she died as young as 33 (in a plane crash in the winter of 1942), but she had at least eight good years, when she became the highest paid female star in Hollywood. Her big break came in 1934 when she starred in the milestone masterpiece Twentieth Century. It was Howard Hawks's first screwball comedy (and one of my top ten favourite films), and it is pure anarchy from start to finish.

One of her more peculiar films is Swing High, Swing Low (1937). In it she plays a girl on a cruise ship who meets a man in Panama and stays there with him. So far it is a musical comedy, with the man (played by Fred MacMurray) being a trumpet player. When he gets a job in New York the tone of the film shifts dramatically. She gets more and more lonely in Panama while he is living a grand life in the big city, and forgets to write to her. Finally she follows him there, and telegraphs for him to meet her in the harbour. He isn't there. She goes to a hotel, and tries to locate him but nobody knows where he is. She gets the number to a woman whom he performs with and calls her. He answers, but doesn't recognise her voice. So she stands in the dark in the hotel room and whispers, panic stricken, to herself "What shall I do now?" It is a heartbreaking scene, beautifully shot and acted, as in a film by Max Ophüls, and it captures the full range of her talents.

That one was directed by Mitchell Leisen, and he also directed Lombard and MacMurray in Hands Across the Table (1935), another great film, and a tender love story. It might be Leisen's best. Great is also the biting satire Nothing Sacred (1937), scripted, like Twentieth Century, by Ben Hecht, and directed by William Wellman. Her greatest hit was perhaps My Man Godfrey (1936). She also did a comedy with Alfred Hitchcock, Mr and Mrs' Smith (1941), but I've never warmed to it for some reason. Then she made her final film, which was released after her death, To Be or Not To Be, Ernst Lubitsch's brave and magnificent satire of Nazism. It shows her in all her glory and, as in Twentieth Century, she plays a headstrong actress.

But now let's look at some clips. It was as usual tricky to find my favourite parts, so there's considerably less than I had hoped...

The first one is from To Be or Not To Be, an illicit scene between Lombard and Robert Stack. This one I love.



Here's a dance number between her and George Raft, from Bolero (1934). (The dance begins after about a minute.)



And here's the whole of Nothing Sacred, if you've got 80 minutes to spare.



And here's another one from To Be or Not To Be, a film in which nothing is what it seems to be.



2011-10-08 I noticed a few misplaced words and a missing title so I've updated it just a bit.

Some recommended readings (1)

The autumn semester has begun (or will soon begin, depending on where you are in the world) so this might be a good opportunity to suggest some film books that are well worth reading, and even to own, for students as well as anybody else. The five books I've chosen today are in different ways introductory overviews of cinema, history as well as theory, but they're more than that. They are inquisitive, informative and intelligent, in short, indispensable.

The World in a Frame by Leo Braudy
Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell
The Story of Film by Mark Cousins
Film as Film by V.F. Perkins
Cinemas of the Mind by Nicolas Tredell

Then I'd like to recommend a book which isn't about cinema but is in keeping with the previous post on westerns and the West. A poignant, funny and sincere book: Sacagawea's Nickname - Essays on the American West by Larry McMurtry

Here's are also links to three good essays about various aspects of cinema. 

Stephen Prince's early attempt to formulate a theory about digital cinema:

http://fdm.ucsc.edu/~landrews/film178w09/Film_178_THE_RECONSTRUCTED_IMAGE_files/True%20Lies-%20Perceptual%20Realism.pdf

Luc Moullet's critic of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema Book 1 and 2:

http://www.rouge.com.au/6/deleuze.html

David Kalat about Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946):

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/03/26/where-are-the-nazis-in-cluny-brown/#more-32940

Happy readings!

You've Got Mail and Nora Ephron

One reason You've Got Mail (1998) is so good is because it works on several levels.

It can be enjoyed as a typical romantic comedy.

It can be enjoyed as an essential part of Nora Ephron's oeuvre as an auteur. It has got the Ephron-esque combination of quirkiness and melancholia and it is rich with her typical motifs, such as the daily presence of dead loved ones and a strong connection between two people who have never met (compare it with Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Julie & Julia (2009) for example). It is also filled with links, puns and references to older films, besides being a remake of Lubitsch's magnificent The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

And it is also a good, mature sociological study of city life in an era of neoliberal policies and the corporisation of the city landscape. The changes are hard and uncomfortable, but unfortunately often inevitable, and after we've fought and lost against the force of time, we must mourn and move on.

You've Got Mail can be appreciated on each of these levels, independently of the others, should you so wish, but combined they make the film so much richer.

So have a look if you haven't seen it before. As an example, here's a good scene (that won't embed).

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I've written about Nora Ephron before, with focus on Julie & Julia: http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2009/10/nora-and-meryl.html

On Authorship - or Auteurship

As of 2014-03-07, this post has been rewritten and reposted. You can find the new one, titled Thinking about directors, here.

Nora and Meryl

There are not that many directors working today who's new film I want to see the very minute it opens. But one of them is Nora Ephron, and last Saturday I saw her latest film Julie & Julia, which has now come to Scotland.

Admittedly, I haven't seen Lucky Numbers (2000), and not much particularly want to either, but Ephron has a certain style and tone which I find bewitching, and that includes Bewitched (2005), although very few people liked it. She's got a delicate touch, and she makes her characters and images glow. Never more so than Sleepless in Seattle (1993), which, more than a romantic comedy, is a film about grief and loss, which it handles intelligently and very moving. Michael (1996) and You've Got Mail (1998) are also very good. I honestly couldn't say if I prefer Lubitsch's earlier version (The Shop Around the Corner 1940) or Ephron's.

And now there's Julie & Julia, which tells the kind of story that is so ridiculous that it has to be based on a true story. Which it is. It's the story of Julia Child, the tall American woman who, after having worked as a spy during World War II (if you google her you'll get links to CIA), went to France with her diplomatic husband, took a cooking class and then wrote a book which changed the way Americans cook their food. And it's the story about Julie Powell, who in 2002 started a blog, writing about how she cooked herself through Julia Child's cook book. Now, to be honest, which of these two stories do you find most interesting? Me, I couldn't care less for Julie Powell's blogging. And even though Amy Adams is good in the role of Julie Powell, it's just not why I bought the ticket. I wanted to see Meryl Streep as Julia Child. And I was not disappointed. That part of the film was tender, witty, moving and delicious, and these days that has gone since I saw it, the feelings it awoke in me has stayed on.

It's in many ways a Nora Ephron film, just as it is a Meryl Streep film. The Ephron part is for instance the little gestures and hesitations that tells so much but are so quiet and brief, like when Julie Powell mumbles her delight and affection for her husband, or the first scene which implies that Julia Child can't have children. There's also the very Ephronian concept of the film, of a person's life, unbeknownst to him or her, touching someone else's, of having the main characters hardly or never meeting.

The Streep part is obviously her performance. It's a complete makeover yet again, so rich in body language and syntax it's uncanny, without ever going over the top. She becomes the person she's playing, and gives the role so much depth and nuance. It's brilliant.

Here's Stephanie Zacharek review in Salon. (Good as always.)

And here's the real Julia, guest at Letterman: