Recent readings

Finally, my article about Richard Quine has gone live so you can read it now over at La Furia Umana:

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/?id=706

The two best scenes in It Happened to Jane are set in the kitchen of her home. Her house is not shown in its entirety, only the living room and the kitchen, which is below the living room, but they inhabit these spaces with a wonderful ease and spontaneity. In the first scene Jane and George have a sweet conversation, and it becomes clear that he loves her but feels intimidated by her late husband. In the second they have an unpleasant conversation, and a turning point in George’s life. Having looked after her children and cooked for them for two days, his housewife moment in the apron, while she is in New York wining and dining with an attractive journalist, he now snaps, which unfortunately leads him, because of his frustration and jealousy, to stop just one word short of calling her a slut or whore. She asks him to leave, not so much upset as sad that he has sunk so low.

The last two weeks I have read several books and articles and instead of writing something new I will restrict myself for now to recommend some things others have written.

First the essay collection Durgnat on Film (1976), which consist of selected parts of Raymond Durgnat's previous books Films and Feelings (1967) and The Crazy Mirror (1969). The topics covered are many, such as style, realism, authorship, adaptations and discussions of specific films, filmmakers and comedians. It is very good, combining intelligent writing and a wide-ranging taste, with engaging criticism of the ideas of other critics and academics.

Suppose a film ends with the camera tracking back from the lovers embracing alone on the beach. This may mean 'how tiny and unprotected they are' or 'how frail and futile their love' or 'the whole wide world is theirs' or 'this is the moment of their destiny' (for plan views can suggest a 'God's-eye-view') or 'Good-bye, good-bye,' depending on which emotions are floating about in the spectator's mind as a result of the rest of the film. Hence style is essentially a matter of intuition. There is no possibility whatsoever of an 'objective', 'scientific' analysis of film style - or of 'film' content. It is worse than useless to attempt to watch a film with one's intellect alone, trying to explain its effects in terms of one or two points of style. Few films yield any worthwhile meaning unless watched with a genuine interest in the range of feelings and meanings it suggests. (p. 27)

To over-simplify, perhaps, Ophuls' camera movements suggest a mellow 'fatalism'. Everything ends where it begins. The world is a maze of ironies, of impermanence, of nostalgias. If Ophuls' camera moves, it is à la recherche du temps perdu. But it isn't possible to separate the camera movements from the décor through which it moves, and which it shows to us, or the dramatic context in which it occurs. (p. 55)

We do not agree on Howard Hawks though, whom he do not seem to get. He says for example of "pain, or waste" that it is something "which Hawks, more sentimentally ignores" (p. 80) but I do not agree with that at all. Pain is almost always there in Hawks, sometimes acute physical pain and often equally acute psychological pain, from the death of a loved friend or from some other loss, or from having to experience the downfall of a friend.

Durgnat has written several books and I can also recommend King Vidor: American, co-written with Scott Simmon. A good recent collection is The Essential Raymond Durgnat, edited by Henry K. Miller (which to some extent overlaps with Durgnat on Film).

Jennifer Jones in Vidor's incredible Ruby Gentry (1952)

A great contemporary film writer/video essayist who is strongly influenced by Durgnat is Adrian Martin and his collected work is to be found here: http://www.filmcritic.com.au/index.html (Well, eventually it will all be there, it is updated regularly.)

The next recommendation is a long article from earlier this year in The Paris Review. It is by Noah Gallagher Shannon and about Roger Deakins:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/05/09/master-light/

A strange but beautiful thing you will hear cinematographers say is that they conceive of each frame as, at first, completely black. The creative act lies in what to light and how—where to send viewers’ eyes, using each beam like a stroke or word. And Deakins thinks about this canvas of blackness not unlike the way blues guitarists—I’m thinking of the Keith Richards quote here—do the beats between notes: “The lighting of a film makes the pauses speak as eloquently as the words.”

Then two pieces from Bordwell and Thompson's extensive blog, both a few years old but which I read last week. One is about the style of Sidney Lumet, covering his whole career:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/04/21/endurance-survival-lessons-from-lumet/

The mid-1970s was the Great Barrier Reef of American cinema. Virtually no members of Hollywood’s accumulated older generations, from Hitchcock and Hawks through the 1940s debutantes (Wilder, Dmytryk, Fuller, Siegel) and the 1950s tough guys (Aldrich, Brooks) to the TV émigrés, made it through to 1980. Many careers just petered out. The future belonged to the youngsters, the so-called Movie Brats. In this unfriendly milieu, Lumet fared better than most. He tried a semifarcical heist film (The Anderson Tapes, 1971) that mocked the rise of the surveillance society, with everybody wiretapping and taping and videoing everybody else. He mounted a classic mystery (Murder on the Orient Express, 1974), a musical (The Wiz, 1978), and a free-love romance (Lovin’ Molly, 1974). Of the items I’ve seen from these years, the most daring is The Offence (1972). This study of a sadistic British police inspector’s vendetta against a child molester offers a sort of seedy expressionism. In another gesture toward psychodrama, long conversations with the perpetrator reveal that the copper is a bit of a perv himself.

The other piece is about journalistic reportage from film sets, whether for an article or a book, and the many problems with them. From Lillian Ross's famous tale of the making of The Red Badge of Courage (John Huston 1951) to an article about the making of Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan 2006).

http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/hearing.php

Still, you have to wonder what a book laying bare decision-making at Microsoft or Enron or the Oval Office would look and sound like. Would you meet epitomes of mature, moral, thoughtful behavior? Would you witness activity bereft of any hubris or self-regard? It’s doubtful, but anyhow we’ll never find out. No executives or politicians in their right minds would let an outsider into the suites when the deals are done. They know that uncontrolled publicity is bad publicity. By comparison, our moviemakers’ egotism seems touchingly naïve. Confronted with the opportunity to have a name journalist track a production, they must think: If people could only understand the process, they’d really appreciate what we do. Anyhow, how could the publicity hurt? (Answer: See previous paragraphs.) Insiders regularly forget that middlebrow journalism will always highlight every act of show-business venality it can find. Peter Biskind has made a career out of treating contemporary American cinema as a circus of lunacy and petty spite.

And last, a very fine article I read some time ago and now re-visited. It is by Sarah Berry and about the films of Jean Negulesco, with a particular focus on gender and women characters:

https://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/writers-at-the-movies-sarah-berry-on-jean-negulesco/

Negulesco’s characterization of marriage is interesting in three ways, however. Firstly, he retains a Depression-era sympathy for women’s economic struggles and the practical necessity of marriage in a world of very limited options. Secondly, he presents women’s desire for a companionate marriage of equals in an entirely sympathetic light. Thirdly, women’s sexual desires are never condemned or presented as whorish by contrast with a virginal ideal (one could claim that Sophia Loren’s breasts are the star of Boy on a Dolphin, but she is also a three-dimensional character fighting for her impoverished village, as she points out to her “rich American” love interest).

That should keep you occupied for quite some time!

Richard Quine detour

This week I have been working on an article about Richard Quine for another publication so there will be no new writing here today, alas. But I can provide some Quine material. See you in two weeks. [Here is a link to my now published article, in La furia umana.]

Paris When It Sizzles (1964)

The World of Suzie Wong (1960) 

The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956)

If you want to read more about some of Quine's films you can do so here:

http://www.laweekly.com/film/comedy-director-richard-quines-desperate-characters-and-lonely-hearts-2154738

http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2008/the-world-of-suzie-wong-1960/380/

And in print only: Film Comment's May/June issue of 2016 where Glenn Kenny wrote about Strangers When We Meet (1960).

Politics in the year 2016

The other day I watched the delightful It Happened to Jane (Richard Quine 1959), which is billed as a romantic comedy but is more accurately described as a perky lesson in civic participation and local democracy, set in a small town in Maine (although shot in Chester, Connecticut). It made me nostalgic for a time of civility and when people had not yet begun to go bowling alone (to use Robert Putnam's phrase). But I suppose people in the 1950s were also nostalgic about the good old days, so that is not getting me very far. However, I wonder if it was not the case that, despite the fear of nuclear war, the 1950s were a time of far greater hope for the future, and hope for the possibility of improvements. Today, well, I am not so sure. In any event, the state of the world made me want to write something about politics again, as I do on occasion.

Reporters and columnists are fond of referencing Aaron Sorkin when writing about politics and elections, not least in the US. Obviously The West Wing but also The American President (Rob Reiner 1995) and even, as Lexington did in The Economist the other week, A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner 1992). Lexington compared Nathan Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, with Donald Trump, complaining that as the film was a courtroom drama it was less likely that things would end for Trump as they did for Jessup.

The one Sorkin quote on politics that is most popular to use is from The American President, when the president's assistant Lewis says:

People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

What is less frequently mentioned is the response the president gives, namely this:

Lewis, we've had Presidents who were beloved who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand 'cause they're thirsty. They drink the sand 'cause they don't know the difference.

The reason the response is less popular than the first quote is, I would think, that the second one is darker, and partially blame the voters. That is not necessarily seen as a good thing; voters, the will of the people, must not be criticised. If things go bad it is because of the politicians, as if they were not reflecting the will of those voters but were somehow disconnected. Although how and why people vote as they do can sometimes be confusing or weird, it seems strange to assume that they do not vote for what they think they want, or for what they think is good for the country. You frequently get the politicians you deserve, at least in a democracy.

The last couple of years the world seems to have taken one nasty turn after another, with ignorance, anger and hatred, not to mention antisemitism, increasing in one country after country, and extremism of all sorts becoming more and more mainstream. Donald Trump is of course the most obvious example, but it is a global phenomenon and at the moment the arc of history seems to be bending towards injustice and intolerance. In some places it is in power, and forms the government, such as across eastern Europe, the Philippines, Venezuela. In other countries they are not yet in power but are growing, and are frequently in parliament or in local governments. We can see this in The Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. (Not to mention the steadily increasing belligerence of Russia and China, threatening their neighbours and others.) At the moment it would seem almost everything is going the wrong way; the global society is frighteningly fragile at the moment. The nonsensical Brexit is yet another example of this.

The causes for this are many. The financial crash of 2007-2008, the ongoing war in Syria, extreme weather (partially due to climate change), widespread unemployment among the young and those without a university education, severe cutbacks at newspapers and in journalism in general (which leads to people being less well-informed and politicians not held to account as much as they need to be). Among the consequences is a growing number of "politiphobes" (as Jonathan Rauch calls them in an excellent article in The Atlantic) i.e. people who basically believe that politicians are corrupt and self-interested and that all problems have easy, obvious solutions if only an outsider would come and take charge. This feeling is spread across the political spectrum, as these knights that will supposedly save us are sometimes considered left-wing and sometimes right-wing, although many are just wingnuts.

All of these things then feed on each other, contributing to making everything worse. Sure, it looks highly likely that Clinton will defeat Trump, which will in itself be a good thing, but the damage Trump has already done to the social climate and the health and well-being of democracy in the US is remarkable, with him and his base of voters whipping each other into a frenzy of toxic anger.

There has to come a point when things turn around, and people come to their senses. But when? How low will we sink first? "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" W.B. Yeats's wrote in his poem The Second Coming, reflecting on World War 1 and its aftermath, but we are not there yet, far from it, even if it sometimes feels like we are heading in that direction. It would be a good thing for starters if people calmed down, and treated each other with some basic respect and decency, including those with whom they disagree, and including on social media. There are limits, a few people are beyond the pale, but not even those should be met with scorn or hatred. We should not act or talk in a way that only makes us feel better about ourselves, that is narcissism rather than progressiveness. (Screaming "You're a fucking racist!" to somebody might feel satisfying but it will not make that person less of a racist, or encourage him to become a better person.) We should act and talk in ways that make the world a better and more decent place, and acknowledge that everything matters. A grand gesture of a prime minister or the small gesture of an individual on the bus, and everything in between, a tweet, an article, a blog post, a union meeting; everything that is going on in public contributes to the general atmosphere. And as we are all contributing to that atmosphere, we are all responsible, whether we want to or not, or whether we are aware of it or not, for that atmosphere, its tone and temperature. The trick however is to do it with proper humility. It is easy to feel as an oppressed victim and lash out accordingly, while using the sense of victimhood as a shield against criticism.

So basic civility is a starting point, beyond the more complicated questions such as how to speed up the decrease of carbon emissions, end the war in Syria, finance quality journalism, combat unemployment, safeguard pensions, successfully integrate refugees and so on and so forth. The important thing is to turn things around, before it is too late. Some people might not know the difference, but most do.



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Here is Edward Murrow as a reminder that the 1950s also had its threats against respect, democracy and decency, such as senator Joseph McCarthy.