On wonderment in cinema

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Max Weber has appeared on this blog before, the previous time regarding his ideas about ideal types. This post is related to another idea of his; that in the modern era society, through rationalisations and secularisations, are experiencing a loss of enchantment, of the mystical, the irrational. The term he used to describe this modern phenomenon was Entzauberung (a term previously used by Friedrich Schiller), meaning disenchantment or demystification. In a speech from 1917, "Science as a Vocation", Weber explained it as that the modern person believes "that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted."

I would like to borrow this idea and apply it to cinema, or rather; I would like to suggest that we can talk about a kind of cinema, from a number of filmmakers, that have kept this sense of the magical, the irrational. Note that "enchantment" is not referring to something necessarily joyful, but something mysterious or spiritual or strange, so calling it a cinema of enchantment might give the wrong impression. Better perhaps to call it a cinema of strangeness, or wonderment. In his book The Art and Politics of Film (from 2000) John Orr suggests that Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Aleksandr Sokurov and others working under communist dictatorships brought in a new style of filmmaking, which used religious symbolism to undermine social realism ("a fusion of the marvellous and the tragic") and Orr calls this "a cinema of wonder" (he also includes Theo Angelopoulos and a few others). That is not what I am talking about though, my scope here is much larger.

One example is Jacques Tourneur, a filmmaker I have written about before, and who made films where there is generally found a sense of the otherworldly, of ghosts and monsters, and also uncertainties and ambiguities about what is real and what is imagined. A contemporary example is the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in whose films ghosts, apparitions and spirits mingled freely with ordinary mortals.

Tropical Malady (2004)

Hayao Miyazaki is another filmmaker who likes to show gods, monsters and fantasy-figures go about their daily business.

Spirited Away (2001)

It can be found, of course, in surrealist films or magic realism, or a cinema of abstractions. But it can also appear in films that are ostensibly realistic. Films in which there are no embodiments of magic or wonders but that have what might be called a pantheistic view of nature and the world. Terrence Malick is a contemporary example of this, as in The Thin Red Line (1998). He has even made a film with the title To the Wonder (2012), although in Malick's case that sense of wonder can occasionally feel overbearing. Another example is the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in which nature seems to be imbued with a life-force of its own, and where every place has a sense of magic and wonder. In their films the spaces in which the characters find themselves deeply affect them in ways they do not understand. See for example A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Black Narcissus (1947) or Gone to Earth (1950).

I Know Where I'm Going

Black Narcissus

One common way of letting the audience share the characters' sense of wonder is by close-ups of their faces. In the case of Steven Spielberg's films (which are generally built around a sense of awe and wonderment) it has given birth to the expression "the Spielberg face", zooming in on the face of a person looking up at something wondrous, scary, or both, which happens more or less in all of Spielberg's films.

François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Filmmakers who might otherwise be seen as more materialistic, like Michael Mann, can also include such moments of wonder. With Mann it is often related to animals (as I have written about before here). This clip show such a moment, an encounter with two coyotes in downtown Los Angeles. After this neither man is the same any more.

Ordinary, daily life might sometimes feel dull and filled with inordinate amounts of concrete, and one of the joys of art is to bring forward other dimensions, to enchant the world, or re-enchant it, to suggest that we are not all there is. It can also be subversive, as magical realism often is. It is not a religious thing, although for some it undoubtedly is, and neither is it about a belief in aliens or ghosts, just that there is something beyond the logical and the rational, something that is undefinable, but intuitive and emotional. We do not always understand what is happening to us and why.

The strange encounter with a wolf in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

On film history, and the art of studying it

I recently said that there is a difference between taught film history and actual film history. By this I meant that film history as it is presented in books, essays and lectures is more often than not a romantic effort to simplify something that is very complex and often beyond our reach. Film is not that old as an art form, but it is old enough to hold more films, movements, people and happenings than is possible for us to remember and evaluate. Most of it is forgotten, as all the unwarranted claims that has been made about Citizen Kane (1941) makes perfectly clear. Any film history book or film history course should be based on this humbleness, and acknowledge that what we think we know is not enough, and neither is it necessarily correct.

I think this is partly the reason why so much of taught film history is either wrong or at least highly questionable. Even though it is often very difficult to say what is right, it is often rather clear what is wrong, and where taught film history is problematic and when films, people, movements and eras are misunderstood, misconstrued or decontextualised. It can be the French New Wave, the Hollywood studio system, Rashomon (1951), neorealism, Citizen Kane, Jaws (1975), Westerns, audience demographics and so on and so forth. I want to mention some concrete examples today.

Beside the lack of awareness of the full spectrum of actual film history there are also the persistent efforts to make film history consist of clear demarcations. It is often argued that "Film noir was a genre that lasted between 1941 and 1958." or "The first film of the French New Wave was Le Beau Serge (1958)" or "The first film of the French New Wave was The 400 Blows (1959)." As if. Film history is not that neat. It is a process, with no definitive firsts and no definitive lasts. We can talk about something called the French New Wave without having to claim that one film was "the first". (Beside the two mentioned above there is also Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958).) Taught film history is often exclusive (trying to exclude what is not considered part of a movement or a genre, often for spurious reasons), when it would be more accurate to be inclusive (to show how everything is interconnected). Nothing is gained by reducing film noir to films made from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch Of Evil (1958). I would not call it a genre either.

So that is one weakness of taught film history, the problematic and unnecessary habit of tidying up things, and compartmentalising it. This is linked to the widespread idea of film history as a series of revolutions. First came "cinema of attractions", then came Griffith, then came sound, then came deep focus, then came neorealism and so on and so forth, and one leading to another, the one being an improvement upon what came before. This is film history as if based on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but this is not how cinema, or the arts, work. It is much more fluid, and simultaneous. Deep focus was almost always there, and neorealism was not new, it has been a tradition of filmmaking since the early days of cinema. There is very little that is new, and it does not matter whether something is new or not. The cult of the new, which I blogged about last year, has always seemed to me to be very shallow, as if something is not worthwhile if it is not new.

Sometimes the whole premise is wrong, or something has been simplified to such an extent that it stops having any bearing on anything real. One example would be a common argument which goes like this: "Ingmar Bergman was an auteur because he was his own man, whereas Hollywood filmmakers did work in a studio system." Only Bergman did also work in a studio system, with a producer breathing down his neck. He did not become independent until the late 1960s. Of course, he had a lot of freedom within the studio, at least after Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) won the Grand Prix in Cannes, but that is not what makes him different from Hollywood directors, it is what makes him similar to Hollywood directors, including the bit about becoming independent.

To some extent these errors are due to poor research, or complete lack of research. Instead much writing is based on myths, preconceptions and prejudices. In another earlier blog post I suggested that a concept made famous by the German sociologist Max Weber, Gedankenbilder or Ideal Types, is useful in understanding our perception of film history. In that previous post I explained Gedankenbilder as "an abstract model of something, say a phenomenon that we are studying, but a model which doesn't necessarily exist in reality, it is only a reference point." In our case a model of a genre, a filmmaker, an era, a movement or whatever it might be. This model, this ideal image, is then taken to be true, even though there might not be a single film that is actually like this image. When somebody thinks of a film noir, the film in their head probably has a voice-over narration and shadowy, expressionistic lightning, and while it is true that many film noirs have these traits, many do not, whereas many films not considered film noir do have these traits. The problem is not that there are ideal types, but that it seems to be so very hard to forget that it is only that, an ideal type. (I will discuss the special case of neorealism in a later post.)

Another reason is most likely the combination of ideology and romanticism that is often involved. Many scholars seem to have a romantic vision of neorealism or the various New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s that cloud their judgements, and so they sometimes attribute things to them which are not there, or is there but is not as revolutionary as they claim. A certain elitist view of cinema also plays a part, with American cinema bad and European cinema good (or vice-versa), even though many, if not most, of the differences are more perceptual than real. Sometimes the prejudices are against "old" cinema in general (and here old can mean anything from before World War Two to anything before Quentin Tarantino).

Of course sometimes things are deliberately exaggerated to simplify for argument's sake. But too often the exaggerations and simplifications distorts reality to the point that the argument becomes baseless and often it is also the case that the scholar does not know any better, partly because there are too many films that should be watched and too little time, but perhaps also due to a lack of interest in watching films. I often get the feeling that many scholars prefer to read books by other scholars instead of watching the actual films themselves, so if one person makes a mistake or says things that are not correct, then that gets repeated over and over again. The same phenomenon as when critics only quote from press releases, without acknowledging that they are quoting from a press release, and if there was a mistake in that press release it is repeated in every newspaper and magazine. This can be down to laziness or lack of time but the outcome is still the same.

In John Ford's sad and magnificent The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) the famous quote is "This is the West sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That sadly, but not magnificently, is also the unspoken truth about too much of the world of cinema studies, whether in lecture halls, books or journals.

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For those who would like to read a book which is a perfect example of all the things I have mentioned here as flawed and problematic, then this one will suffice.

There is apparently no consensus as how to write film noir in plural. Films noirs, film noirs and films noir have all been suggested.

Max Weber goes to the movies

In A History of Narrative Film, David A. Cook writes that "On-location shooting, the use of nonprofessional actors, and the improvisation of script, which have all become a part (though not always a large part) of conventional filmmaking today, were techniques almost unknown to the narrative sound film before neorealism." This is hyperbole, both the implication that neorealism was all about this, and also that these things were unknown before neorealism. I won't go into the finer details here, but Jean Renoir, John Ford and King Vidor are three directors who knew a lot about improvisations and on-location. Hawks had a lackadaisical approach to scripts, as had Leo McCarey. Casablanca (1942) is famous for having been written while it was being shot, so that the actors didn't know what would happen. A lot of British cinema was in a realist mindset, with plenty of on-location. And quite a lot of westerns are shot on-location. When the wagons are hauled down over the steep cliffs in The Big Trail (1930) it's not done in a studio, and Monument Valley, extensively used by Ford, is in Utah, not Hollywood.

But this blog post isn't about neorealism, or on-location shooting, or even David A. Cook. And it isn't really about Max Weber either, despite the title. But it is about a concept he is famous for. Weber was a German sociologist, one of the founders of the discipline, together with such luminaries as fellow Germans Georg Simmel and Karl Mannheim and the French Émile Durkheim, around the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.* The concept I'm thinking about today is Gedankenbilder, Ideal types. This concept can be understood as an abstract model of something, say a phenomenon, that we are studying, but a model which doesn't necessarily exist in reality, it is only a reference point. This is most often used when talking about economics or philosophy or, of course, sociology. But we need to acknowledge that we also use it, perhaps unknowingly, when we're talking about cinema. Art in general. Let's go back to neorealism. Everybody "knows" that neorealist films are shot on location, using nonprofessional actors, and without a strong script or a driven narrative. And yet most neorealist films are partly, sometimes even primarily, shot in studios, and they often use real actors, sometimes even stars, and some have very clear structures and a "classical" storyline. So "neorealism" becomes an ideal type, despite there being very few films that actually match this ideal type (note here that ideal doesn't mean ideal as in best, or perfect, but as in ideas, idealistic). Another example that springs to mind is German Expressionism. Last week I wrote about film noir, which is also a kind of film where people often confuse the ideal type with the actual films.

It is the same with many genres as well (maybe neorealism is a genre?). When I was marking exams recently there was one question where the students were supposed to compare Jim Jarmusch's western Dead Man (1995) with earlier westerns. Almost every student who answered compared it to some mythical, pure western (none in particular were mentioned) which had horses, cowboys and indians and where all cowboys were good and all indians were bad, and everything was black and white, and everything was shiny and pretty, whereas Dead Man was the opposite of that. And while it is true that Dead Man is the opposite of that kind of western, it is also true that very few westerners are so pure, in fact hardly any of the classic westerns are like that. No, these students compared Dead Man to an ideal type, and they didn't seem to be aware of the fact that this is what they were doing. It made Dead Man stand out as a completely new and unique kind of western, but it would only come across as such when compared to this ideal type.

This is not necessarily a problem. Using ideal types are often relevant in order to synthesise and simplify, and it can be a helpful approach. It is also, however, fraught with a lot of problems, because what often happens is that when we're not aware that we are in fact talking about an ideal type, we misunderstand, we get things wrong, and we make claims on behalf of genres, movements, filmmakers, even countries, that are not true, or at least exaggerated.

But couldn't we just say that neorealist films are films made in Italy after the second world war, that deal with the hardships facing the Italian people, most of all the workers and the farmers?That would not be as precise, and perhaps not as historically sexy, but it would be more accurate, and it would not be exaggerated. But at the same time, it will not be enough to say that, because there's something else going on here. Neorealist films were seen as doing all of these things that was being claimed for them, and they had an influence on others, filmmakers, movements and countries. So when speaking about it today, this needs to be acknowledged. (What also needs to be acknowledged is that influence is a muddled concept, but I will write more about that in a later post.)

One solution to this might be to keep two thoughts in mind at the same time. We might say that there are the actual films, and then there's the popular perception of them, and that these two things might not necessarily be the same. And the irony is that sometimes it is this ideal type that influence others, more than the actual films.

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*I had originally got the centuries mixed up but now they are correct.