Summing up Hathaway

It was watching Diplomatic Courier (1952) that started my Henry Hathaway project. I saw it in 2011 and I thought it was so good that I immediately watched another Hathaway, and then another, and then my first post about Hathaway was published here that same year. Now I have come to the end of the project.

When I wrote the first post I had only watched about half of Hathaway's oeuvre but I wanted to watch everything he had ever directed because those I had seen were almost all good (even though Prince Valiant (1954) was disappointing) and it seemed plausible that the rest would also be good. If you discount aborted projects and those films he directed only parts of, like Airport (George Seaton 1970), he made 62 films. The first ten are short B-films (around 55 minutes long) and usually Westerns made from novels by Zane Grey. Of those ten I have now managed to see five, including his very first film, Heritage of the Desert (1932), and they are all surprisingly accomplished and confident, and prove that Hathaway was a natural. He did not have to grow in to being a good director, he was one from scratch. But the dialogue can be corny and the acting rather wooden at times, but Randolph Scott, who acted in most of them, is fine. Below he is with Sally Blane in Heritage of the Desert, and she is also good. (Judging by the film it seems Hathaway was quite smitten with her.)

From Now and Forever (1934) he only made full-length features and mostly with stars and big budgets. I have seen all of them now except his last, the blaxploitation film Hangup aka Super Dude (1974) which seems impossible to find. The last I got hold of was The Last Safari (1967), which seems to never have been released on DVD but of which I managed to get a version transferred from (I think) a VHS tape to a disc. I was correct in thinking that the rest of the films would be good too, they really are. A few were disappointing, like the aforementioned Prince Valiant or The Black Rose (1950) or Woman Obsessed (1960), but even those have redeeming factors and none is a complete failure.

He is an interesting guy, Hathaway. A traveller, adventurer and artist, a self-taught historian and art collector. In 1930 he travelled through India and apparently met everyone, including Gandhi, and this had a profound effect on his life. He was hardworking and a temperamental, mean sonofabitch on set, and he made films about friendship, honour and revenge, often quests in harsh environments. The films and his characters were almost always like him: tough, rough and straightforward. Having spent so much time with him, through the films and interviews and books about him or books in which he appears, I feel like I know him now. Obviously I do not, but it does something to you, spending so much time with an artist. It becomes difficult not to watch the films without a sense of personal connection, and a sense of belonging. When watching the films of Hathaway, even the poor ones, you do feel his presence. In the framing, in the sentiments, in the dialogue (which improved after the first years), in the overall decoupage, in the issues being discussed, in the general scope and trajectory of the stories.

A key concern in many of his films is ethics. One fine scene in You're in the Navy Now (1951) shows how a high-ranking officer is visiting a navy ship and as he is angry with the ship's performance he starts criticising a sailor on board. When the ship's captain hears what is going on he confronts the higher-ranking officer and says that if he is to shout at anybody it should be at him, the captain. The men on the boat are not responsible for its performance, it is he alone who has the responsibility, so attacking a sailor is wrong. Even if the sailor did something wrong it is still the responsibility of the captain. This is a powerful lesson in the ethics of leadership, an enactment of Harry Truman's "the buck stops here" if you will, on taking on the burden of responsibility. It is easy to read this as Hathaway's own belief.

Sometimes the ethical contests are between a human and another animal. Two fine examples:

In From Hell to Texas the main character reluctantly kills a man in self-defence. When he is about to leave he notices that the dead man's horse is looking at him. He returns the look, and they stand like that for a while, facing each other. Then the man unsaddles his own horse and puts his saddle on the dead man's horse and mounts it, as if trying to atone for having killed its owner by taking the dead man's place himself. (I have discussed this at greater length in my separate article about From Hell to Texas.)

The other example is The Last Safari, which is about a "great white hunter" who is searching for the elephant who killed his friend. He wants to kill the elephant in return. (Hathaway saw it as a version of Moby-Dick.) But in the end of the film, when the hunter finds the elephant, the two just stand there, face to face, looking at each other. Finally the man fires his gun in the air, the spell is broken and man and elephant go their separate ways.

In both films the other animal has the moral authority, and is staring down the human, forcing him to do right. I find this very moving.

Steve McQueen in Nevada Smith

I have come across many stories about Hathaway, some of him being so hard on set that people ran away in tears or promised never to work with him again. But also of his generosity, work ethic and compassion. One story I particularly like is from the making of Nevada Smith (1966). It stars Steve McQueen, and he looked up to Hathaway as a father-figure. Hathaway was usually on set before anybody else but McQueen made it his mission to be there before him, as a sign of respect, and when Hathaway showed up McQueen would already be there, saying "Where have you been, sir?" I find this, too, very moving.

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It often happens that two filmmakers are put together, to compare and contrast. The one filmmaker to which it feels natural to compare Hathaway is John Huston, and not just for both of them being cigar-smoking, temperamental adventurers. They have things in common too as filmmakers, such as subject matters and the kind of people that interested them (like gangsters, adventurers and gamblers), and they did not make comedies and very rarely domestic dramas. Historically speaking, Huston is held in much greater regard yet personally I prefer Hathaway. Judging from film to film I think Hathaway is the stronger one. This might be difficult to explain but it feels like Huston has more of an analytic interest in his characters whereas Hathaway has a personal interest in them, as if he is one with them and not just observing them. I also think that Hathaway has a more coherent visual concept whereas Huston often seems to be trying things out just to try them out. One is not better than the other here, neither with regards to character or visual style, I just mention it as two ways in which they are different. But another difference is, I believe, a flaw in Huston. Hathaway is less explicit about the themes and messages of the individual film. A character in a film by Huston is much more likely to quite literally explain to the audience what the film is about than anybody in a film by Hathaway. The latter seems to either be more relaxed in his art or more trusting of the audience. If so, that trust is, or should be, reciprocated.

Rod Steiger and Joan Collins in Seven Thieves (1960)

Here are 15 films that I think are Hathaway's best (at least as of writing):

Souls at Sea (1937)
The Real Glory (1939)
Johnny Apollo (1940)
The Shepherd of the Hills (1941)
Home in Indiana (1944)
The Dark Corner (1946)
Call Northside 777 (1948)
Down to the Sea in Ships (1949)
Rawhide (1951)
Fourteen Hours (1951)
Diplomatic Courier (1952)
Niagara (1953)
From Hell to Texas (1958)
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)
Nevada Smith (1966)

That is a good spread, year-wise, and narrowing it down to 15 means many good ones are left out. But it is a place to start for those who have seen nothing yet.


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Links to all my other articles about Hathaway:

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2011/08/henry-hathaway.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2011/08/henry-hathaway-afterthoughts.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2012/06/spawn-of-north-henry-hathaway-1938.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2013/11/souls-at-sea-henry-hathaway-1937.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2014/11/from-hell-to-texas-1958-on-hathaway-and.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2020/02/hangup-1974.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2020/05/johnny-apollo-1940.html

The story about McQueen, Hathaway and Nevada Smith has been told in several biographies, and the "Where have you been, sir"-quote is from My Husband, My Friend: A Memoir written by Neile McQueen Toffel.

Budd Boetticher

Whoever is thinking about making a film should first watch a couple of films made by Budd Boetticher. Not just because so many of them are great works of art, but because he manages to capture so much in them despite them usually being around 70 minutes long and despite them usually having a slow pace. The precise judgement behind what is shown, what is said and what is left out is about as close to perfection you might reach in cinema. Then there is the moral clarity, which is put forward with the same precision and judgement. There is no need for lengthy discussions, all it takes is two words. "Do we?" It is a recurrent response from the main character, especially when played by Randolph Scott, whenever another character says, for example "We think alike you and I." or "Then we understand one another." Behind that "Do we?" lies a whole moral system, an ethics of how to live and how to behave towards others from which the main characters never flinch. In Seven Men from Now (1956) a cavalry officer is talking about killing Indians and looks nervously at Scott's character for confirmation. What he gets instead as one of those "Do we?" and the officer understands the implicit contempt and condemnation in the words and the tone of voice.

There are many other things in Boetticher's work that is special, such as their depictions of deep friendships and the visual style. Some of my favourite shots of all time are to be found in his work, and nothing beats this one from Ride Lonesome (1959):

Their force come not just from the beauty of them but also from the emotional undercurrent that they express, or crystallise. The films are often tragedies, and the images express that too. Comanche Station (1960) is a film about a man who has spent the last ten years mourning the loss of his wife while still searching for her in the mad hope that she might still be out there, somewhere. The film ends like it begins, with him alone on his horse, still searching.

Earlier this year an edited collection called ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher was published by Edinburgh University Press and I contributed a chapter to it. What follows is a part from the introduction to my chapter. First I raise some questions about the concept of the "classical Hollywood style" of filmmaking and wondering whether there is such a thing and how it is to be defined. My suggestion is "a linear narrative, unambiguous cause and effect, an unobtrusive visual style and unironic tone" (which obviously leaves out quite a lot of Hollywood films that use other styles of filmmaking) and then I turn to Boetticher:

Where does this leave Budd Boetticher? One the one hand his films do have a linear narrative, unambiguous cause and effect, an unobtrusive visual style and they are not obviously ironic, so in that respect it could be argued that he is a director who actually do make films in the style of authentic “classical” American cinema. But at the same time he is one of the most austere filmmakers of those who worked in Hollywood. His precise, economical style is sometimes more reminiscent of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu or Robert Bresson than any of his American contemporaries. There is rarely any stylistic excess or flamboyance, the actors underplay and are often expressionless and there is nothing that could be described as showing off. To some this might be regarded as a consequence of his films’ comparatively small budgets although there is actually no obvious correlation between a small budget and an austere style. Filmmakers like Edgar G. Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis and Samuel Fuller made films on equally small, or even smaller budgets, than Boetticher yet their style of filming was very different from his, and much more expressionistic and flamboyant. So Boetticher’s style of filmmaking should be regarded as a conscious choice; that he prefers this straightforward and low key style, and it is after all a style that is congenial with the themes of his films. The thing that really matters in his best films is the behavior of the characters, their moral code and grace under pressure, and these characters do not talk much and do not try to show off, nor do they become overtly emotional. (Those that try to show off are usually punished.) With his recurring theme of stoicism and grace it should not come as a surprise that Boetticher had a keen interest in bullfighting, and that he made several films on the subject. The first of these is Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), a key development in Boetticher’s career, the first full-length A-film that he made, as well as his first film about bullfighting. This chapter will argue that Bullfighter and the Lady is an important film, and show how several of Boetticher’s themes and motifs, and his style of filmmaking, are fully formed here. It will also argue that there are links to both the transcendental style of filmmaking that Paul Schrader writes about, and to Taoism, the Chinese philosophical system, or way of life. 

While Boetticher is today remembered for his Westerns he made many other films that are also often as good and Bullfighter and the Lady is one example of that, as is the thriller The Killer is Loose (1956). Seek them out.

Seven Men from Now

The Killer is Loose

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2017-08-18 I am aware that Edgar is Ulmer's first name, not Edward, so I have corrected that now, and I added a few words in the fourth paragraph.

From Hell to Texas (1958) - on Hathaway and Levinas

"Wherever this man goes, somebody turns a hand to help him, and they don't even know him. Why?"

From Hell to Texas (Henry Hathaway 1958) begins with a man and his horse coming to a river where they rest for a while, and the man wash the legs of his horse. Suddenly they are attacked by a group of men, who force a herd of horses at them. In the ensuing chaos one of the attacking men is injured by the horses, but the lone man and his horse ride of. It turns out that the men were sent out by Boyd, a rich man who owns the land and the horses, to kill this lone man, Lohman (played by a fine Don Murray, soft-spoken and anguished.) He is to be killed because Boyd believes that Lohman killed one of Boyd's sons, and all through the film Lohman is pursued by Boyd and his men. Yet Lohman is innocent, Boyd's son fell on his own knife. Lohman is a kind and peaceful man who does not believe in killing, not even in self-defence. But his claims about his innocence does not help him.

That is the set-up for this remarkable film, which becomes an exploration of ethics and principles. Lohman does not want to stand and fight, so he keeps running, and when he meets strangers on his way they are both surprised and impatient with his reluctance to defend himself. They applaud his pacifism but they argue that sometimes that pacifism can become self-defeating. "There is a time and there is a place for such things" one of his helpers says, suggesting this is not such a time.

But it is not only those that are friendly towards Lohman who are puzzled by his behaviour. Boyd is too. It was he who asked the question quoted above. To him Lohman is nothing but a simple killer but everyone else embrace him, and help him out. Through his quest for revenge Boyd starts to feel uncomfortable and bewildered by this.

Lohman also struggles, and finally his anger makes him eager to confront Boyd and his men. What pushes Lohman over the edge is when they shoot down a friend of his, a kind older man. But even then he cannot bring himself to kill. Quite the contrary, in the conflagration that is the result of the final showdown he actually risks his own life to save the life of one of Boyd's sons. This is where Boyd resigns and the thirst for revenge is extinguished. He is a broken man, having lost two sons and almost a third, because of this senseless need for vengeance, and he has also lost his self-respect. In the very end of the film he says to Lohman:

Long after we're dead, you and me both, they'll be telling this story, they'll tell it in a thousand different kinds of ways. None of them will favour me. Maybe they shouldn't. Just one thing. I like to be remembered that I gave you your life cause you saved my last son. If you grant me that, I don't mind much going to hell for the rest of it.

Lohman answers "Yes, I'll grant you that."

The switch in power in that scene is very strong, how it has moved from Boyd to Lohman. But Boyd is not asking for forgiveness, what he wants is to maintain some self-respect, and only Lohman can give him that.

The last decade or so film-philosophy has become a popular subject, in which philosophers write about film, films are used to exemplify or problematise philosophical issues and there are also discussions about whether films can "do" philosophy themselves. This can be very interesting although unfortunately it is often about films in which philosophical issues are explicitly stated and dealt with, and argued about by the characters, and so it becomes a rather obvious exercise. (Films by Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Lars von Trier or Jean-Luc Godard are popular here, and individual films such as The Matrix (the Wachowskis 1999) or Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry 2004) among others.) But as I have written before in Filosofisk tidskrift (on paper and in Swedish only) it seems to me that all films have the potential for philosophical discussions and investigations, or rather, film-philosophy is especially interesting when it is open to all kinds of films and not just the self-consciously philosophical ones. A film like From Hell to Texas is excellent for discussing ethics and other important issues, and it can for example be interesting to let the film mingle with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In Totality and Infinity Levinas's suggests that "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness." and that could be an apt summing up of what happens in Hathaway's film. Lohman is a decent and gentle man who succeeds by staying true to that side of him, and not succumbing to violence, and in so doing he also changes the man who is hunting him, shames him into defeat. To quote Levinas again "Justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master."

In From Hell to Texas the discussion of ethics also involves animals. The most obvious example is after the one time Lohman actually kills a man, despite his reluctance to use violence. A gunman ambushes him among some rocks and Lohman must defend himself. Afterwards he feels guilty, despite him being within his rights, and here something interesting happens. The gunman's horse stands looking at Lohman from a distance as if judging him for the killing, and Lohman tries to scare him off. The horse refuses to budge. After a while Lohman whistles, and the horse comes towards him, and joins Lohman and his horse. Lohman then removes the saddle on the other man's horse and puts his own saddle on it, and then mounts it. It is as if he tries to take the dead man's place in the life of the horse, even though Lohman already has a fine horse, perhaps in order to make amends for the killing he has done. Lohman takes on the responsibility not only of other people, but of horses as well.

There is also another aspect to the story. Lohman is not just running away from Boyd, he is also searching for his father who left home many years ago. Lohman had taken care of his mother but when she died he set out to find his father. The town where he will face Boyd is also the town where his search for his father comes to an end. Whereas Boyd wants revenge for his dead sons, Lohman wants answers to why his father left him.

From Hell to Texas is based on a book by Charles O. Locke called The Hell-Bent Kid which I have not read. The basic story is similar, Boyd wants to kill Lohman because of the death of Boyd's son, but how this develops and how it ends I do not know so what kind of changes have been made and how much of the dialogue is new is therefore unclear, as are the contributions from Hathaway himself and the two credited scriptwriters Wendell Mayes (who has written many fine films, not least for Otto Preminger) and Robert Buckner (who had previously worked a lot with Michael Curtiz). But, as I have said earlier, revenge is a recurring theme in Hathaway's body of work, and it is dealt with in many complex ways. The Shepherd of the Hills (1941) and True Grit (1969) are two examples. The film of his that is closest to From Hell to Texas is Nevada Smith (1966), about a man who seeks revenge on those that killed his parents, a quest that takes a long time and in which he travels through several states, growing and changing along the way. So it is in From Hell to Texas as well, but in a more profound way.

Also, the forceful compositions and overall dynamic visuals are Hathaway's, and he makes great use of the landscape and the Cinemascope frame. One particularly fine shot is of Lohman lying flat on his back, arms and legs spread wide, next to a river in a canyon. Steam is coming up from a hot spring in the background and even further back is a dramatic cloud hovering over a mountain peak. A brief moment of rest and tranquillity.

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I have written several posts before about Henry Hathaway.
The first, long article about his whole career is here.
A brief follow-up to the first post is here.
A piece about Spawn of the North (1938) is here.
A piece about Souls at Sea (1937) is here.

Among the books by Emmanuel Levinas are Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Time and the Other, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and a dialogue between him and Philippe Nemo published as Ethics and Infinity. That is a good place to start, especially considering how difficult his writing can be. Five years ago the online journal Film-Philosophy had a special issue on Levinas. For those who want to read more on Levinas and cinema, Sam B. Girgus's book Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine might be of interest.

Maya Deren

Once in younger days me and a friend were making up mottos and one was "Even the avant-garde has its conventions!". That was in some kind of protest against the cult of the avant-garde we sometimes felt was running amok in the art world. This blog have been almost exclusively concerned with full-length narrative feature films, with the occasional post on music videos or TV. It just comes more natural for me. But it does not mean that I do not like avant-garde films, whatever that might be. For somebody like me, who in some ways are more interested in the style and the feel of the film than the story, avant-garde cinema is a natural ally. That might be why I could enjoy Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) so much. I saw it as a procession of short installations, or avant-garde films, instead of a functional narrative film, and thought that it was quite spectacular.

I was recently discussing avant-garde films with my friend Paul Taberham at University of Kent. He is doing research on avant-garde cinema, including the patience of spectators. I will be writing more on the subject later on but since I promised Paul a piece on Maya Deren, that is what I will post today. It is not an original piece, but a translated version of a post I wrote for my Swedish film blog back in 2008. It has been amended and updated:

Maya Deren

A woman is lying on a beach with the waves rolling back and forth. She looks at the sea gulls and then begins climbing a dead tree. Suddenly she is on a long dining table, around which well-dressed people sit, smoking, talking and laughing. She crawls along the table, but nobody takes any notice of her. At the other end of the table a man is playing chess, but when the woman reaches the chess board the pieces start moving around by themselves until one of them falls off the board and down through the dead tree and into the water. The woman follows it. Somewhat later she is in a house where the furniture is covered with white sheets. She walks around, opening one door after another, and suddenly she is no longer in the house but on a rock. She  slides down and walks around on a beach filled with stones. She picks up a stone and then another until she reaches the shoreline, where two women dressed in black are playing chess. At the end the woman runs away from everything, possibly terrified, while images we have already seen are shown again.

That, sort of, is the "plot" of Maya Deren's silent short At Land (1944), an important milestone in avant-garde cinema. Deren said that films functions on two levels, the horizontal, which is the narrative level, the story, the characters, and a vertical level, which is the poetic level, moods, tone, rhythm. She was much more interested in the vertical level, and she is, in many ways, one of the most important names within the art form she was working in.

Deren was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1917 as Elenora Derenkowsky. Partly due to the anti-Semitism in her home country the family moved to the US in 1922. There they changed their family name to (the less overtly Jewish) Deren. Her first name she herself changed from Elenora to Maya in the 1940s. (Maya is a Buddhist term meaning that reality is an illusion. It also means mother in Sanskrit.) Between 1930 and 1933 she studied in Geneva, Switzerland, and when she came back to the US she studied, among other things, English literature. By this stage she had been interested in dancing and joined forces with Catherine Dunham, choreographer and dancer. Together they toured America. Deren also met her next husband, Alexander Hammid (born Hackenschmied), and they married in 1942. This is when Deren began making films, perhaps because her husband was a filmmaker, and they worked together.

Their first film was Meshes in the Afternoon (1943). A woman returns home on a sunny day and sits down in an armchair by the window. She falls asleep and soon is dreaming strange dreams. She pulls keys out of her mouth, she runs on staircases that swings from side to side, knives appears out of nowhere and a mysterious creature dressed in black appears, with a mirror instead of a face. Everything is happening several times, although we small changes each time, and she is confronted by her own double. The film, as Deren's own later work such as At Land, problematized the self, and concepts of time and space. Hammid and Deren moved beyond conventional logic and continuity and they criticised bourgeois conventions and the "invisiblicing" of women. This was done with stylish and ambitious camera work.

Deren was very prolific. She wrote, photographed, filmed, danced, sew and initiated the Creative Film Foundation. The aim of the foundation was to support and promote art films. In her circles moved Arthur Miller, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Dylan Thomas, Shirley Clarke, John Cage and Stan Brakhage. She also did screenings of her own films, at the home of critics like James Agee and Manny Farber, and at Provincetown Playhouse. This was a very successful endeavour and led to the creation of Cinema 16, a film society which showed experimental films, as well as documentaries, and which had about 7000 members at most. (Agee was not overwhelmed by the films, but he thought that there was no one that was "paying any more attention to that great universe of movie possibilities" than Deren.)

In the late 1940s Deren had become interested in Haiti, especially the Vodou culture and ritual dancing, and this occupied a large part of her final years before she died of a brain hemorrhage in 1961, only 44 years old. In an evocative gesture worthy of her life and career her then husband, composer Teiji Ito, spread her ashes over Mount Fuji in Japan.

Besides making art, Deren was also writing and thinking about it, and its rules and obligations. She was of the opinion that film was a medium of its own and that it should use its opportunities to break open time and space. In a film a person can open a door and move from one room to a completely different space or time, and this way of going against the restrictions of reality was central in Deren's work. In her unfinished dance film A Study in Choreography (1945) a man is dancing in the woods, then through a cut he is suddenly in a studio, only to be dancing at a museum next, among statues and busts, before he is back in the woods again. Another example is the very beautiful The Very Eye of Night (1958) where students from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School have been filmed and then the negative has been superimposed over the star-clad sky, making it look like they are dancing on the Milky Way.

It is natural enough to make the connection to surrealism, but Deren did not like that connection. Surrealism for her was something narcissistic and narrow-minded. She advocated an active and all-encompassing art, where the artist and each individual were part of a larger whole. She wrote: "He becomes part of a dynamic whole which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endow its parts with a measure of its larger meaning." Deren was an active socialist, a Trotskyist, and her thoughts on the individuals place in a larger collective ties in with her socialist ideas. But she was critical of the situation in the Soviet Union, which she called a "feudal industrialism". She felt that an artist had a responsibility to act ethically, and that aesthetics and ethics are intertwined. When you express yourself aesthetically  you are also making an ethical statement, or should do so at least. It is the artist's responsibility to be aware of the larger world, its problems and conflicts, and deal with this in their art. For Deren this was a moral imperative.

In 1960 Deren wrote an essay called Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality, which can been read as her cinematic manifesto. It ends with the following words:

"If cinema is to take its place beside the others as a full-fledged art form, it must cease merely to record realities that owe nothing of their actual existence to the film instrument. Instead, it must create a total experience so much out of the very nature of the instruments as to be inseparable from its means. It must relinquish the narrative disciplines it has borrowed from literature and its timid imitation of the casual logic of narrative plots, a form which flowered as a celebration of the earthbound, step-by-step concept of time, space and relationship which was part of the primitive materialism of the nineteenth century. Instead, it must develop the vocabulary of the filmic images and evolve the syntax of filmic techniques which relate those. It must determine the disciplines inherent in the medium, discover its own structural modes, explore the new realms and dimensions accessible to it and so enrich our culture artistically as science has done in its own province."

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The quote from Deren about the "dynamic whole" is from her essay An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. The quote from Agee is from a review in The Nation in 1946 and is reprinted in Agee on Film.

The Maya Deren archives are at Boston University.

Here writings on cinema and art are collected in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film.

SCSMI conference 2011

Two weeks ago I attended the annual SCSMI (Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image) conference, which was held in Budapest this year. There have been some requests for a report and here, belatedly, are my thoughts.

This was my second SCSMI conference, and I had almost as much fun this time as last year in Roanoke, US. The reason it was more fun last year was that we all stayed in the same hotel and Roanoke is much smaller than Budapest so the communal feeling was much stronger, more like a fieldtrip than a conference. This time we were all scattered across the city, making it less intimate and cosy. But that's just the order of things. Let's focus on the papers and presentations instead. I will not dwell on all the things I went to, in some cases I have nothing in particular to say and in some cases I feel I don't know enough to engage critically, but here are the presentations I can and will say something about, presentations all of which I enjoyed. All of these ideas presented here are things I'm interested in and will come back to in later postings, and eventually in a book.

Stanley Kramer is not a filmmaker with a high standing these days, but one of his more tolerable films are The Defiant Ones (1958), a drama about racial intolerance. It is stiff and ponderous but it has one thing going for it that almost makes it great. The use of natural sound. The sounds of rain, wind, grass, mud, birds, insects, voices (and an annoying portable radio) gives the film a life and a richness which isn't in the story, the images or most of the direction. If ever the importance of sound in cinema needed to be proved, this would be a great film to start with. But the list of films to include would be a long one. Luis Rocha Antunes, in his presentation about "The Multisensory Film Experience", didn't mentioned The Defiant Ones, but he gave a lot of sound examples from other films to underline his argument that film is more than just a visual experience. He talked of many things that heightens our experience of a film besides what we see with our eyes but I felt that sound was his main point in this particular presentation, which was a good one. As you may recall from my report from last year's conference I then also applauded the many presentations that discussed sound and the importance of it.

Johannes Riis of University of Copenhagen gave a presentation on Mad Men, and the question of his talk was why we admire and look up to Don Draper even though he is not really a nice guy with his bullying, extramarital affairs and condescending attitude. Why is it that we can admire people on the screen (or in fiction in general) which we might not like at all in real life? This is a common question, that pops up now and then, sometimes with moral undertones ("these films are bad because they make us like bad people") but more often just out of curiosity. There's a lot to be said about this.

What I suggested as an explanation to audience appreciation of "bad" characters was two things. First that there might be other characters in the film that are even worse, and that their function is to say "yes, the main character is bad, but not as bad is this guy here." and so the issue becomes relative. Like the character Waingro in Heat (1995). Compared to him Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro's character) isn't so bad. Secondly, a way of making it easier for us to like characters is to not show the consequences of their actions. In Mad Men for example, if every scene of Don Draper behaving badly was followed by a scene when the person he had cheated on, or bullied, was shown quietly sobbing, or accusing Draper for behaving badly, then that might considerably lessen the warm feelings we might have for him. And in Heat; if after the opening sequence, when the security guards are shot by McCauley and his crew, we were shown a sequence of the guards grieving widows and children, then it would be tough to like them. Instead all victims are alone and without (acknowledged) friends or relatives, except the victims of Waingro's crimes.

But we needn't necessarily explain this phenomenon by narrative conventions. We like people in real life even though they might do bad things, it is just that they are not bad to us. Everybody have friends, liars, cheaters, embezzlers, perhaps even mass murderers, and if that is a possibility in real life then of course it can happen with fictional characters as well.

The University of Copenhagen is a major player in cognitive studies of the moving image, and besides Johannes Riis, Casper Tybjerg is another scholar from that school (Luis Rocha Antunes has been there too). Tybjerg's presentation was on the moral aspects of storytelling. He criticised an evolutionary psychology approach that reduces all character behaviour to the essential hunt for food and sex. Tybjerg suggested that one reason for storytelling is that it is a way to "teach" us humans about how to behave, that this is why the good guys win and the bad guys are punished, and that this is as old as storytelling itself. He quoted from William Flesch's book "Comeuppance" (a word which always makes me think of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Orson Welles's narration of it) to substantiate his theory. I suggested though that the audience sometimes prefer the bad characters (or the "immoral" ones), i.e. "rooting for the bad guy", and that what might for one spectator be seen as good behaviour might be seen as the opposite for another spectator. But the idea that storytelling, as part of human evolution, is involved with helping us understand the world and inspire us to behave ethically, is one that I subscribe to. (Here's a review of Flesch's book.)

The last Dane in this report is the man who started it all in Copenhagen, professor Torben Grodal. At the conference last year he spoke about violence and terror in Se7en (1995). Perhaps to compensate for the relentless gloom he this year spoke about comedies and laughter. He was arguing that laughter is related to anger and that it comes from playing, which most mammals do (and some non-mammals as well), as a safe way of doing things similar to what we do when we are angry or genuinely aggressive, such as when hunting. It was a lot more complex than that of course, but this'll do for now. Grodal also emphasised the social aspects of laughter, and suggested that this is a reason why comedies are more popular on a local market, whereas action films and melodramas have a more global reach.

This raises some questions for me. If laughter is a social function, on what level? Social in the sense that it binds two individuals together, or a whole group, by laughing a the "other", somebody else, or another group? Or is it social in the sense that it is a way for humans, all humans, to socialise together, like when we meet strangers we might use laughter as a way of bonding, not at the expense of somebody else but for everybody's benefit? I might for example, to break the ice, make a joke about myself. I would suggest that both uses of laughter are at play, and this might help explain why, contrary to what Grodal seemed to suggest, some comedies are in fact very much popular on a global scale, such as the slapstick humour of Chaplin and Keaton, whereas some other form of humour works only on a local market. The same is true for melodramas I would argue, and possibly action films as well.

One of the bigger stars within the field of cognitive studies is Tim Smith, presently at Birkbeck, University of London (He also also blogs (infrequently) at continuityboy.blogspot.com.) His speciality is tracking eye-movements of spectators, but in his presentation he focused on memory, on what we remember after having seen a scene or a whole film, and why it is that we remember that which we remember. He suggested that we remember the logical continuity of the story and specific plot points, and that verbal details were more important to us than visuals. He highlighted our preference for words by noting the fact that we usually watch the mouth of the person speaking, even though it doesn't make it easier to understand what the person is saying, we might as well look at the eyes (or feet for that matter) since we hear the words, we don't see them, unless we're lip-readers. (I have sometimes consciously tried to look at other parts of the face when somebody is speaking but it is harder than it sounds. The speaker's eyes are fairly easy to focus on though, if you're close to them. But sooner or later the gaze turns towards the mouth again.)

One comment I made is that we often remember things that were not actually in the film, i.e. we don't remember them at all but have made them up. My own favourite example is a scene from Thunderball (1965) that I had very strong memories of, I can even "see" it in my head, still today. Only there is no such scene in the actual film. And neither is it in Ian Fleming's novel the film is based on. My surprise when I re-watched it a couple of years ago and found out that the scene wasn't there hasn't settled yet. To this Smith said that we include scenes in our memory that wasn't there in the film because these imaginary scenes help to make logical continuity. But this was not the case with my scene. It was a whole murder sequence, which didn't have anything to do with the continuity of the film. No, in my case, and most likely in others as well, there's something else going on. The scene/sequence might for example be a composite of several scenes and images, possibly from different films, that have been created by our ever so self-sufficient brains. Or I might have dreamt it, and then in my brain the memory of the dream has merged with the memory of the real.

Another star in these circles is professor James Cutting from Cornell University. His presentations are always immensely enjoyable because he is such a natural speaker and entertainer. His thing is collecting data, data consisting of things like average shot lengths, number of shots, number of sequences, changes of luminance, movement in shots, number of cuts, and so on, in Hollywood films made from 1935 and onwards. He then present this figures to others to do with it what they see fit. There are a lot of things you can do with this figures. One thing is to compare different genres, different filmmakers and different eras. Another is to track changes over time. Another is to analyse the structures of films, and see the striking similarities between wildly different films, and ponder upon how much is intentionally done and how much is unconsciously. The mere avalanche of numbers and figures can feel a bit over-whelming, but if you dig in to them there's no telling what you will find. (The reason why Cutting and his colleagues and students begin with the year 1935 is that before this there were too much inconsistency and randomness. The language of film was still evolving so much that it is difficult to get a handle on it, but from approximately 1935 things began to settle down. This makes for an interesting nuance to the widely held idea that classical storytelling was pretty much established in 1917.)

The presentation I regarded as the best from last year was by Robert Blanchet, and this year he was at it again, but now together with a colleague from Norway, Margarethe Bruun Vaage. Their presentation was about the difference in engaging with TV-series as opposed to engaging with films, more specifically the fictional characters. In short what they argued were that due to the long-time exposure to the characters in TV-series we come to regard them, in a way, as friends, and we are hence reluctant to leave them. Blanchet and Bruun Vaage were drawing from media studies, psychology and economics in a very rich and fruitful way. A concept they used, that comes from social psychology, was the "familiarity principle", which is also called the "mere exposure effect" which means that the more familiar something is, or becomes, the more likely is it that we like it. It is true for a lot of things in life, and they argued that this too is a factor in explaining audience engagement with TV-series as being different from films, at least on part of the characters. The familiarity principle works in films as well though, with actors, filmmakers, genres or film series such as the James Bond films.

I can only vouch for the friendship aspect myself. After I had seen the last episode of The West Wing (1999-2006) I felt abandoned and sadden, the sense of loss was palpable after having spent several years with this characters, in a way akin to a feeling of saying goodbye to friends or colleagues. But the familiarity principle is more problematic. It doesn't help explain how we engage with the first episodes of the first season, it only helps to explains why we continue to watch in the fifth season even though we might not think it is as good as it once was. Also, it would seem to suggest that we would like any TV-series were we exposed to it long enough but I'm not so sure about that.

One presentation I was particularly tickled by was professor John Bateman's, especially when he talked about the need for new approaches to genre studies. As I find most of traditional genre studies deeply flawed this is something I will be coming back to in later postings, but what Bateman and his colleagues want to argue is that we need to acknowledge that discourses and genres are much more fluent and dynamic than we give them credit for. (The focus of the presentation though was on the beginnings of films, in particular so called "puzzle films".)

And that concludes my summary. As I said I went to more presentations, for example professor Carl Plantinga's on folk psychology and Monika Suckfüll's on audience participation, but although I enjoyed them I don't have anything in particular to add. I do have a lot to add though to the presentation given by professor Murray Smith of University of Kent, but so much that I will have to save it for another blog post.

My own presentation was about storytelling and prejudices (prejudices scholars and critics have when approaching films). I will eventually explaining my theories and ideas on storytelling in writing but that too will have to wait. The prejudice part might be summed up in this quote from V.F. Perkins: "Our viewpoint is not given solely by the image because what we see is so much a question of what we're looking for." (From "Film as Film").

I'll keep you dangling until August because I'm giving myself a blog vacation now. In July you'll have to settle for some clips and quotes.